Month: January 2019

European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

The Gaffe and the Gift that will Just go on Giving

The Chairman of the so-called “People’s Vote” campaign for a second EU referendum has unwittingly provided us with what could be any such referendum’s Geldof Moment 

If there was one image that defined the 2016 EU Referendum campaign – one which almost encapsulated whom, and not just what – we Leave-ers were having to fight against, it was this one. Remember it? “Sir” Bob Geldof, and a gaggle of his well-heeled and well-refreshed Remainer friends, mocking the Thames flotilla of pro-Leave fishermen from the comfort of their luxury yacht, provided and funded by the similarly arch-Remainer global banking giant Goldman Sachs. 

geldoff champagne socialist mocking fishermen

The image worked so well for the Leave campaign, and on several levels.

The contrast between the Geldof gin-palace packed with evidently-affluent, designer-clad, champagne-quaffing, pro-EU cool London metropolitans, and the modest working craft of the fishermen hailing from such glamorous places as Hull, Cleethorpes, Lowestoft and Fleetwood, desperately concerned about their livelihoods in the ongoing decimation of their industry by the depredations of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy – but at whom the Remainer bubbly-guzzlers swore, shouted, jeered and V-signed in response.

The hypocrisy of Geldof himself, who hinted that his disgust at a vote for Brexit would make him leave the country – though omitting, curiously, to confirm that his disgust would be so intense as to make him call in at Windsor Castle en route to Heathrow, to drop off his by then surely newly-relinquished honorary knighthood.

osborne & geldoffThe struggle of the fishermen to get their views and concerns heard and reported by a largely unsympathetic national media, while Geldof’s celebrity gave him privileged access to opinion-formers, decision-makers, and invitations to hector attendees at elitist, crony-corporatist boondoggles like the World Economic Forum, despite unresolved questions surrounding his own use of imaginative tax avoidance schemes, and his sometimes foul-mouthed reluctance to answer them.

For many people, it epitomised all that they loathed about the Remain campaign. Suggestions were even made that, given the level of revulsion it generated among voters who up till then were uncommitted, it may have been worth about half a million votes for Leave. If so, then as a stunt, it backfired spectacularly, and very satisfyingly so, too. 

But as we know, in the two-and-a-half years since the Referendum result, the losing side, which has refused to acknowledge, much less accept, the largest democratic mandate ever delivered for one specific policy in British political history, has never stopped campaigning to for it to be diluted, ignored, or preferably reversed.

In its various guises, Continuity-Remain has continually sought to de-legitimise the vote and disparage the voters. Its leading political lights, superannuated Blairite, Liberal-Democrat, or soft-‘Conservative’ political has-beens like Major, Heseltine, Clarke, Clegg, Adonis, and of course Blair himself, have regularly trooped to Brussels and European capitals, alternating between begging the EU to impose harsh, even punitive, terms on Britain for deciding democratically to leave the anti-democratic supranationalist project, and begging it to be lenient so as not to alienate the regretful millions of voters allegedly distraught at what they have done and desperate to correct their historic mistake.

clegg, adonis, heseltine etc etc lobbying eu

When, that is, those same leading lights have not been otherwise occupied in flooding the airwaves with ever more lurid predictions of economic disaster and societal breakdown, despite all their and their acolytes’ similar predictions in the run-up to the 2016 referendum having either failed to materialise or been shown to be 180° wrong.

In recent months, as the majority of MPs, equally horrified at the prospect of actually having to implement the instruction which, by 544 votes to 53, they voted to request the electorate to give them, have stepped up their own efforts to secure a second Referendum blatantly aimed at reversing it, Continuity-Remain’s risibly mis-named but extremely well-funded People’s Vote campaign, and its offshoots, have been ramped up. 

Despite attempts by Continuity-Remain to present the People’s Vote campaign as a mass popular movement, it is, notwithstanding its name, essentially a metropolitan, elitist project. Its Chairman, and assumed conduit for much of the funding with which it appears remarkably well endowed, is none other than arch-Remainer and City PR shill Roland Rudd.

Rudd has a background which could hardly be more at variance with the People’s Vote campaign’s pretence to be a mass popular movement. He is, essentially a well-connected corporate lobbyist and Europhile who has, since the early 2000s, been a reliably-obliging provider of apocalyptic warnings of how much Big-Business and The City needs and depends on Britain’s EU membership, and of what disasters would inevitably ensue should we leave.

bne rudd mythsRudd has been the main mover behind pro EU membership and pro Euro adoption lobby groups, and has long-standing connections to former European Commissioner and principal architect of Blair’s New Labour, Peter Mandelson. As has been recounted before, he worked with Mandelson to further the New Labour project, canvassed for Mandelson in the 2001 election, and Mandeslon is even godfather to one of Rudd’s children.

Rudd has previously been linked with the procurement from overseas governments of expressions of desire for Britain to remain in the EU which previous pro-EU occupants of No 10 Downing Street have no doubt found extremely helpful. He campaigned hard in the early 2000s for the movement agitating for Britain to join the euro, and with much the same apocalyptic warnings about what would happen if we didn’t as are coming now about what would happen if we exited the EU altogether.

Incredibly, he was still at it as late as 2008 and 2009, arguing that the slump in sterling justified a re-visiting of the alleged benefits of Euro membership and extolling its signal success. 

euro by rudd 3

This, then, is the chairman of the People’s Vote campaign. As Establishment-Elite Europhile a figure as you could hope to find. No wonder the most frequent criticism of the campaign is that it is a movement primarily for the rich losers in the 2016 Referendum who can’t believe they lost and want another go.      

The narrow, largely metropolitan pro-EU elitist background of the leadership of the People’s Vote campaign, ameliorated only when it descends into left-wing culture-war identity politics, has not stopped it trying some classic astro-turfing, such as grossly exaggerating the size of demonstrations calling for a second vote, and over-reporting the extent of support for one. And if it is really a ground-up, popular movement, where, exactly, is the money coming from? Because its recent spending belies that claim.                facebook spending by pro-eu groups oct 2018-jan 2019

This past week, however, it has all started to unravel. Following earlier rumours that all was not sweetness and light within the camp, followed by BuzzFeed‘s Alex Wickham’s revelations of splits and infighting within the movement over tactics between MPs coalescing around Chuka Umunna and senior campaign officials reportedly including Rudd himself, on Wednesday 3rd January, the Left’s poster-boy Owen Jones broke cover.

The official People’s Vote campaign, he said, was “an absolute disaster“, undermining the case for another vote. The New Statesman‘s George Eaton weighed in to report the damning verdict of a “Labour insider”: 

“The Peoples Vote campaign has a worst of all worlds strategy. It’s fronted in the media by Blairites who are deeply unpopular with voters but knew how to win stuff. Its back room is run by Milibandites who are less elitist but don’t know how to win stuff.”

Ouch! “Conservative” MP and ardent anti-Brexiteer Sarah Wollaston detected a left-wing conspiracy to derail a second vote, while Labour ardent anti-Brexiteer Steven Doughty detected a right-wing conspiracy to derail it. Involving largely the same people.

And all ignoring the latest indications suggesting that considerable numbers, possibly even a majority, of Labour MPs, including the front bench, will oppose a second vote, and that there isn’t a majority for a second referendum in the country.  Finally, the cross-party clutch of Remainer MPs lined up in sombre climbdown formation to announce that there would be no amendment calling for a second referendum tabled by them in the Commons’ debates and motions this coming week. 

The real nadir for the People’s Vote movement’s shambolic week, though, had already happened. On the morning of Tuesday last, 22nd January, came this absolute gem, and courtesy of the BBC, no less: as unlikely a source of embarrassment for any anti-Brexit, pro-EU campaign as anyone could possibly imagine.

2019.01.22 isaby davos peoples vote

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The optics, to use the current politico-media vernacular, could hardly have been be worse. For the chairman of the so-called “People’s Vote” movement, Establishment-Elite Europhile Roland Rudd, was at Davos.

Davos, that annual schmooze-fest of the globalist crony-corporatist oligarchy: where the great and the (mainly) not-so-good of internationalist (or preferably supranationalist – avoids so much of that tiresome nation-state level “democracy” stuff, you see) “Liberal”-“Progressivism” meet to decry the growth of “populism” as they network furiously over Caesar Salads at £43.50 a pop.

Davos, where as the Telegraph‘s Jeremy Warner put it, “the high priests of multinational-corporatism are now so strongly identified with Remain as to make the two virtually indistinguishable“.

Davos, into which descended 1,500 private jets discharging the global elite to lecture us on the importance of “stopping catastrophic climate-change”, aka enriching Big-Green crony-corporatism with eco-subsidies paid by environmental taxes and levies on energy consumers.

Davos, which no fewer than seven of Theresa May’s Cabinet clearly had to attend, despite Britain needing to replicate 30+ trade deals with countries around the world, with the clock ticking down to 29th March.

Davos, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, as Douglas Carswell put it, voters have come to realise that Davos-style technocratic “liberalism” is part of the problem. 

Davos, which, as explained by Tim Worstall, gives Oxfam the chance for its annual whinge about global inequality to CEOs paying themselves increasingly stratospheric multiples of their employees’ lowest salaries, while completely misreading the research that forms the basis of its argument.

Davos, where your schedule will most likely include, suggested Reaction‘s Iain Martin, “vegan cocktails with that hedge fund guy who wants to build an ark in Central Park to save all the animals from climate change“

Davos, so aptly described by the Institute of Economic Affairs’ Philip Booth as “the gathering that perpetuates the myth that economic welfare is promoted by ‘experts‘“, and “the perfect environment for ‘crony capitalism’ to flourish. . .a huge magnet for politicians to work alongside leaders of largest businesses and other vested interests to devise yet more regulations, interventions, and barriers to entry that will undermine competition“.

Davos, whose ethos was brilliantly captured here by Andrew Neil:

That Davos. That’s where the “People’s Vote” chairman, Roland Rudd, joined us from. As Spiked‘s Tom Slater summed it up: “the grassroots campaign for a ‘final say’ on Brexit, brought to you by the global economic elite”.

It didn’t take very long for journalists and prominent Continuity-Remainers (frequently the same thing) along with supporters of the “People’s” Vote – (who was it who participated in 2016’s genuine EU Referendum? Martians? Lizards?) – to recognise the implications of Chairman Rudd’s gaffe. 

2019.01.22 brand, maguire, green anguish ar rudd davos comp

As well they might. Because, should it come to a 2nd EU Referendum, those 11 words  of a BBC presenter could possibly the greatest PR gift that could have been handed to a Re-Leave “Tell Them Again!” campaign.

“The Chairman of the People’s Vote campaign joins us from Davos” could be its equivalent of Geldof and his rich Remain pals sneering and jeering from their luxury gin-palace on the Thames at working-class fishermen legitimately concerned for their livelihoods. It might even be worth another half-million votes.

Feel free to take a copy of the image below. Something tells me it might just be worth keeping. How does that old saying attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte go? Oh yes. . . .

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”

roland rudd with davos caption

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Political-Philosophy, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Representative Democracy has now run its course

From Burke, to Bercow: its decline and fall shows how, as a philosophy, representative democracy has run its course and needs to be replaced 

Note: Amended, longer and updated version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Thursday 24th January 2019

It’s the justification MPs habitually use when ignoring or defying the clearly-expressed wishes of their constituents, and also their perennial fallback when challenged on it. Our Parliamentary system, they assert, follows the Burkean principle. We are here, they insist, not as delegates, but as representatives: not to follow your instructions, but to exercise our judgement on your behalf.

edmund burkeThe principle derives from the political theorist and MP Edmund Burke’s Address to the Electors of Bristol in 1774, and in particular the paragraph cited below.

An elected MP was not, Burke reminded them, a mere delegate who should blindly obey the instructions of his voters: but their representative, empowered by them through the very act of their sending him to Parliament, to exercise his – not their – judgement, using his brain and his conscience,  of what was in the best interests of the country.

“But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Yet only 20 years or so later, in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, Burke was criticising those who deferred to technocratic experts, or who looked abroad for inspiration from regarding everything in the constitution and government at home as illegitimate or usurped. Extolling the inherent virtue in common-sense values, he said of them: 

“they despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men”          

MPs have deployed Burke’s initial, 1774, argument ever since. But does it remain valid in early 2019? Or has it run its course and become effectively redundant, sustained cynically now by a cohort of MPs increasingly distant from, and contemptuous of, their voters, as a self-affirming expedient?

When Burke delivered his address, Bristol had an electorate of roughly 5,000 out of a population of about 80,000. This small electorate was based on a very restricted franchise. Very few working men and non-owners of property were able to vote, and women were not allowed to vote at all. There were no political parties as we know them, and no manifestos. Politics was, in the words of constitutional historian Dr David Starkey “a matter for gentlemen and their immensely rich aristocratic patrons”.

estimated illiteracy, england, 1500-1900Illiteracy remained at approximately 40 per cent for males and approximately 60 per cent for females (remarkably, illiteracy actually increased in the last quarter of the 18th century), and education levels were relatively poor, compulsory mass education being still several decades into the future. Even for those with both the franchise, plus sufficient education and literacy to convey their views to their MP, communications were poor. The main rail line between Bristol and London was opened only between 1838 and 1841. Before that, the mail coach between Bristol and London took around 38 hours.

How, then, would it have been possible, practically, for there to be regular communication between Edmund Burke MP and even his very restricted electorate? Arguably, Burke’s philosophy of the relationship between an MP and his electors was the only one which was feasible in the circumstances of his time.

Contrast the situation now. The median constituency size is about 72,400 in England (albeit slightly smaller in the devolved nations) but with a universal adult franchise. We have mass education, plus an adult functional literacy rate of approximately 85 per cent, but whose definition excludes people who “can understand short straightforward texts on familiar topics accurately and independently, and obtain information from everyday sources”. The proportion of people able to communicate with their MP is therefore probably over 90 per cent.

We have multiple sources of information, and multiple platforms of  mass communication. Nine in every ten people had internet access in the home in 2018. There is, I would contend, no bar to being informed about what our MPs are doing, and equally no bar to their communicating with us. Indeed, many are assiduous users of e-communication in all its forms to do precisely that.

Any structural justification for the continued applicability of the Burkean principle of representation has therefore vanished.

Our political parties, although more organised, are also more centralised. More than ever before – though admittedly with some variation between parties – election candidates are chosen, not by local associations, but by Party HQs either giving them a limited “choice” between two or three centrally-approved ones on a centrally-controlled candidates’ list, or imposing them directly.

Party policy boards, by whichever name called, decide the policies, which the candidate is pretty much required to endorse. Dissent and independence of mind are not encouraged, and seldom rewarded. Patronage is ruthlessly exploited and the whipping system ruthlessly deployed to keep most members in line.

The resultant submission to conformity is compounded by too many of our representatives being virtually professional career politicians, devoid of any significant formative outside grounding. In relatively recent times, MPs who were not wholly or mainly reliant on their Parliamentary income, and who, to decide their beliefs, could draw on real-world experience – rather than an immediate post PPE degree stint as a party assistant, researcher and unsuccessful candidate prior to acquiring a safe seat, were less inclined to undue deference to the Party hierarchy.

Hand in hand with that has gone an increasing tendency to outsource more policy-making which would once have been MPs’ responsibility to debate and democratically determine, not merely to Civil Service officials and QUANGOs, but to unelected and unaccountable international or supranational bodies like the UN, EU, NGOs and other elements of the International Liberal Order.

the liberal international orderThe consequence is that we now have a cadre of politicians whose role, rather than representing their electorates to the Government and the Executive, has morphed more into one of representing the Government and the Executive to their electorates. Far from becoming representatives and not delegates, they have become spokesmen and not representatives.

The Parliamentary chicanery which has occurred since the 2016 EU Referendum was not the proximate cause of this – it had been building for many years – but it has both exacerbated it dramatically and exposed it to public awareness like never before. It’s worth reciting some of the basic facts.

At the May 2015 General Election, it’s now widely assumed, having promised to hold an EU referendum if elected, but confident the promise would have to be junked as the price of their preferred option of a second coalition with the Liberal-Democrats, Cameron’s ‘Conservatives’ won an absolute majority which they were not anticipating.

In June 2015, MPs voted by 544 votes to 53 to hold that referendum.

In the 2016 EU Referendum, and on best estimates, Britain voted to leave the European Union by 406 parliamentary constituencies to 242. It voted to leave the European Union by 263 voting areas to 119.  Conservative-held constituencies in 2016 voted to leave by 247 to 80. Labour-held constituencies in 2016 voted to leave by 148 to 84.

In contrast, among 2016 MPs, Remain was the preferred option by 400 to 248. Charting 2016 MPs’ declared voting intentions against the actual voting results emphasises the relative chasm between MPs and the voters they claim to be “representing”, which persists to this day.mps votes vs public votes eu ref 2016In February 2017, MPs voted by 498 votes to 114 to trigger Article 50.

At the 2017 General Election, approximately 85 per cent of the votes cast went to the two main parties both of whom pledged in their manifestos fully to implement the Referendum result.

Yet something like a 70 per cent majority of MPs is clearly now intent on either diluting Brexit to meaninglessness, reversing it by spuriously demanding another referendum or extending Article 50, or preferably just cancelling it altogether in flagrant disregard of the largest mandate ever delivered for one specific policy in British political history.

The current anti-democratic and constitution-threatening procedural subterfuges being assiduously prosecuted by the cross-party Parliamentary anti-Brexit Movement are too many and too current to recount in detail here and most readers will be familiar with them anyway.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to see how our MPs as a body can any longer plausibly claim to be “representing” either their individual electorates or the nation collectively, even on the most generous interpretation of the principles Burke enunciated. Whatever takes their place must reverse the trend of the last thirty years or so and return to more truly “representational” methods of public political engagement. That means, in my view, much more direct democracy, and in several forms.

Reform of candidate selection should be high on the list. The Tories’ notorious A-List of Metro-Cameroon Cuties to be imposed on unwilling constituencies has thankfully gone, and Labour’s dominance by hard-left Momentum seem to have done for All-Wimmin shortlists: but with the occasional exception, neither main party appears at all keen to open up their candidacy processes to a wider selection and thus make them, not only more transparent, but more representative of their local members’ views and concerns.

So the case for constituency Open Primaries, by which all the members or even the registered supporters of a party in it can choose their candidate, is strong. There have been too many instances, in all parties, of either centrally-favoured “rising stars”, or ministers dumped out of a marginal and desperately in need of a safe seat, being foisted on to constituencies against their will, to the detriment of a sound local candidate who knows the constituency and its concerns far better.

A proper Recall Mechanism, by which a minimum percentage of constituents can “recall” a MP to face re-election, is a priority. Momentum for one, unsurprisingly, accelerated after the 2009 expenses scandal, and intensified when several MPs were caught out having voted in debates on legislation, in the outcome of which they had a direct financial interest.

One of whom, co-incidentally, was one Richard Drax, who made several protesting interventions when a Recall Bill was finally debated, to the effect that MPs were all honourable men whose reputations might suffer were their constituents to read in the Press that they were the subject of a Recall Petition. Which, you might think, was precisely the point.

But it’s not only to deal with misconduct that a Recall Mechanism is required. Since the 2016 EU Referendum was held and even more so recently, in several Parliamentary constituencies, the anger of majority Leave voters with their, not only Remain-voting, but actively Brexit-blocking, MP is fuelling attempts at de-selection, which, under the present rules, is almost impossible.

That exacerbates the need for proper Recall. In both main parties, how many Remainer MPs allegedly “representing” solidly Leave-voting constituencies would persist in obstructing Brexit in defiance of their electorates, if a mere 5 or 10 per cent of their voters could trigger a Recall and force them to re-stand for election and possibly lose their seat?

MPs, of course, are dead against it. Tory MP Zac Goldsmith’s Bill presented in the 2010-2015 Parliament, to allow constituents to recall an errant MP to face re-election, was watered-down almost to the point of ineffectiveness. MPs decreed instead that only a committee made up of themselves was fit to decide whether one of their fellow-MPs had misbehaved sufficiently to have to account to his electorate. So far, astonishingly, none has been so judged.

More referenda are needed, both to counter the tendency of the elected to ignore the views of their electorates once elected, and to sustain and/or enhance voter engagement in politics. For national-level democratic participation, we must rely on a once-in-5-years cross-marking exercise, based on manifesto commitments and campaign promises which, in the present Parliament, approximately 70 per cent of MPs are ostentatiously refusing to honour. But when we can book a holiday, arrange life-insurance, or apply for a university course with a few mouse-clicks or screen-touches, why should this be?

That the Swiss, who via decentralistion, localisation & frequent referendums have the most say in their government, routinely come out as the nation having the most trust and confidence in their government, is no accident. We should learn from them.confidence in govt switz topRepresentative democracy, as a philosophy, has run its course – effectively killed off by the very MPs who cynically use it as justification or excuse for their blatantly anti-representational conduct.

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Civil-Liberties, European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Theresa May gives the green light for Betrayal of the Brexit Vote

Theresa May has in effect signalled an intention to allow MPs to hijack our democracy by opening up a route for the EU Referendum result to be overridden and reversed 

Note: Amended, longer and updated version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Thursday 17th January 2019

Only 36 hours after last Tuesday 15th January’s unprecedented, humiliating, crushing House of Commons defeat for Theresa May and her cynically-misnamed EU “Withdrawal” Agreement, which would lock the UK into a permanent Brussels vassalage even more oppressive than membership, her intended direction of travel in response was already evident. It was, and it, towards further concession, capitulation, and finally, surrender.

In her immediate post-defeat statement, and both during Wednesday 16th January’s Prime Minister’s Questions and again in her contribution to the subsequent debate on Labour’s unsuccessful Vote of No Confidence, May repeated the same automaton-like bromides which have characterised her conduct of the Brexit negotiations since inception. She had, she purported to assert, no intention of revoking Article 50: she has, she professed to insist, no plans for a second referendum.

But, as so often, her words come hedged about with caveats which make her pledges ring hollow to the point of being meaningless. She did rule out revoking Article 50, but she did not do the same when quizzed about the prospect of asking the EU for extra time to negotiate beyond 29th March: and then later talked about it being conditional on EU agreement, thus impliedly acknowledging the possibility of it.

tgraph headline 16-jan-2019 confidence vote

She ostensibly ruled out a second referendum, but committed herself to “establishing what would secure the consent of this House”. Given the overt support among the Commons’ anti-Brexit majority for the speciously named “People’s Vote”, that isn’t especially hard to divine.

May’s promissory notes are issued in devalued currency. She pledged not to call an unnecessary election, and then did. She declared after both her Lancaster House and Mansion House speeches that no deal was better than a bad deal, only to conclude now that any deal, however bad, is better than no deal.

She laid down numerous “non-negotiable” Red Lines for Brexit discussions, only to abandon and retreat from them. Her robotic insistence that her Remain-by-Stealth, Brexit-in-Name-Only, “Withdrawal” Agreement, “delivers on the Referendum result by bringing back control of our borders, our laws and our money” has been shown to be grossly mendacious so frequently and comprehensively that hearing it intoned yet again becomes almost embarrassing rather than irritating. Little she says can be believed.

The signals of upcoming surrender came fast. “Sturgeon is expecting a phone from Theresa May later this evening as she starts reaching out to other parties”, reported the BBC’s Scotland editor, Sarah Smith, not long after the Government defeat. The outcome of that isn’t hard to guess, either.

2019.01.15 sarah smith re may-sturgeon

“The Government is incapable of winning support in this House for her deal on its own”, observed Corbyn, (for once) accurately, and “must consider ideas that are negotiable and that have the sufficient support in this House”. In reaction, May has quickly committed herself to “listening to the views of the House so that we could ascertain what it is that would command its support”.

Well, we know what those are. They are, in order of preference, ruling out a no-deal WTO-Brexit, an ultra-soft Brexit, a Brexit-In-Name-Only, and ideally no Brexit at all.

One doesn’t need clairvoyant skills to see where May is going, particularly recalling that she has always been a Remainer in mind and spirit, a hesitant at best Brexiteer in office, and a Prime Minister unable even to say that she believes in the very policy which she sought the Seals of Office of First Lord of the Treasury to implement.

May in my view will almost certainly agree to take a no-deal WTO-Brexit off the table, then concede both an extension, if not outright revocation, of Article 50, and a second referendum. She will feign reluctance, but actually be delighted.

In conceding both, she will be considerably assisted by the procedural amendments to the way House of Commons business is arranged. I described the initial stages of that process, facilitated by apparent pre-arrangement, in secret, between the now stridently anti-Brexit arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve and a blatantly-biased Speaker Bercow, in the footnote update to my blogpost here of 3 or 4 days ago.

That, it turned out, was indeed merely the enabler. With subsequent developments it became clear that the Grieve-Bercow agreement of Wednesday 9th January to bring about the alteration to Parliament’s rules was not a one-off, but the precursor to, in effect, a constitutional coup d’état by anti-democracy Remainer MPs to reverse Brexit, ideally via a second referendum with the choice to all intents and purposes between Ultra-Remain and Remain-By-Another-Name.

To understand the full import of this, it’s worth reading this exposition of it by Number Ten Downing Street’s former Director of Legislative Affairs.

The effect of Grieve’s and his like-minded colleagues’ aims would be to make elections based on party manifestos meaningless, because backbenchers would be able, not merely to oppose but to legislate: and, via just a few rebels from the party in government combining with the Opposition, to enact laws directly contradictory to the mandate on which the Government in office was elected. A recipe in other words, for legislative mayhem, democratic deficit, and constitutional chaos.

By this means, in the specifically Brexit context, the caucus of about 20-30 resolutely anti-Brexit ‘Conservative’ MPs clustered around Grieve, Morgan and Soubry would be able, in conjunction with the Opposition parties, to legislate for a second referendum, the deferment or cancellation of Article 50, and even the postponement if not reversal of Brexit itself.

As Dominic Lawson stated in last weekend’s The Sunday Times, the claims by the anti-Brexit MPs to be “taking control of Brexit, just as Leave-ers voted” are knowingly specious, self-serving and anti-democratic, and Speaker Bercow has aided them in attempting a constitutional coup.  Lawson went on to say:  

“So the effort of many in parliament now to revoke article 50 is nothing less than the use (or rather abuse) of parliamentary sovereignty as a weapon against the people who elected it: MPs are to “take back control” from those who give parliament its sole claim to legitimacy, or indeed, moral authority.”

At the conclusion of Wednesday 16th January’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Grieve introduced into the Commons a Bill to give effect to these changes. First and Second Readings were both set for next Monday, 21st January. The Remainer coup is under way. The fix is in.

hoc order paper grieve bills to stop brexit

May ruling out a no-deal WTO-Brexit is now sadly a certainty, and her conceding on both Article 50 and a second referendum before then can’t, I suspect, be ruled out. She will not want to risk another humiliating defeat. Parliament will have wrested control from the people it asked for an instruction, in order to disregard and overturn it, because the people’s instruction was not to its liking.

Why are we in this mess? For two reasons, the first of which is Theresa May herself. She has misread the EU, misread her Party, and misread Parliament. She did so because, more important than all three, and yet the proximate cause of them, she misread the voters, mistakenly convinced that reducing immigration was the principal reason for the Brexit vote, when the main driver all along was regaining the sovereignty and democracy which her deal so signally fails to do. Misread is what she always does. And that, in turn, is because she relies on others to tell her what she believes.  

The second reason is our legislature itself. On best estimates, by parliamentary constituency, Britain voted to leave the European Union by 406 to 242. By voting area, it voted to leave the European Union by 263 to 119.  Conservative-held constituencies in 2016 voted to leave by 247 to 80. Labour-held constituencies in 2016 voted to leave by 148 to 84. In contrast, among 2016 MPs, Remain was the preferred option by 400 to 248.

In June 2015, MPs voted by 544 to 53 to hold the Referendum. In February 2017, MPs voted by 498 to 114 to trigger Article 50. At the 2017 General Election, approximately 85 per cent of votes were cast for parties pledging in their manifestos fully to implement the Referendum result. Yet despite this, a majority of MPs would clearly now wish either to dilute Brexit to meaninglessness, or reverse it altogether.

Do MPs really think they can neutralise and reverse Brexit without also doing huge, possibly terminal, collateral damage to Britain’s entire political settlement? Their message would be starkly simple: ‘Your vote counts only if you vote for something which we would agree with. If we don’t, then it doesn’t count for anything’.

Where whatever’s left of democracy would go after this is anyone’s guess. The fall-out would be profound. Why would anyone ever bother to vote again? Theresa May will have seized our democracy, and run away with it.

may the burglar makes off with british democracy 

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Just Very Auspicious Coincidences? Or Something More?

Note: Amended, longer and updated version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Saturday 12th January 2019

Both the Cock-Up and the Coincidence theories of history – especially where the history, even the very recent one, of politics is concerned – are usually more persuasive than the Conspiracy theory of it. But you’d surely have to be very phlegmatic about it indeed not to wonder if the astonishing convenience, for the Remainer Establishment-Elite’s anti-Brexit cause, of this week’s events in and around Parliament can be put down entirely to coincidence.

First, the largely synthetic outrage at last Monday, 7th January’s, “far-right Brexiteer attack” on Anna Soubry. Now, she’s on record, while being interviewed by Sky News’ Kay Burley on an earlier occasion, as calling even mildly protesting Brexiteers outside Parliament “racists and fascists”. . . 

. . .but that, of course, was forgotten by Britain’s overwhelmingly anti-Brexit media in its orgy of confected indignation.

There were some very odd aspects about this “attack”. The perpetrators were in fact a minuscule bunch of merely obnoxious rather than menacing name-callers, naturally reviled by Remainers, but also disavowed by many Leavers as embarrassing to the overall Brexit cause: and from the videos I’ve watched, there’s precious little, if any, evidence to support in any way whatsoever Soubry’s implied allegations that she was physically assaulted, or even that she was impeded.

Yet if the demonstrators’’ action was spontaneous, as they claimed, isn’t it a quite remarkable coincidence that both EU shill and pro-Remain social-media darling Femi Olewole and hard-Left street-agitator cum occasional journalist Owen Jones just happened to be on hand to witness and report the proceedings?

Just who – or what – was the man in the black jacket appearing to take quite a prominent role, but also captured on smartphone video filming speakers and hecklers at Speaker’s Corner just a day or so earlier? And then filmed slipping something into the pocket of Soubry’s minder, who was just in front of Soubry, as he appeared to accost him but then drew back in what (at 00:48) looked like a classic Le Carré brush-pass?

No such questions of course troubled the media, which, with the BBC as usual in the vanguard, seized the opportunity provided by the incident to run an anti-Brexit slant at the top of virtually every news and current affairs programme for the next 24 hours. The tenor of it escalated rapidly to imply that every single one of the 17.4 million people who voted to leave the EU was a dangerous and potentially violent street-thug, prevented from visiting physical harm upon our impeccably-democratic legislators only by distance, the public-spirited consciences of aforementioned Olweole and Jones, and the fearless vigilance of the impartial media like themselves.

Anti-Brexit MPs (and that’s most of them, remember) soon joined in. Dozens of MPs demanded better police protection – protection, that is, from people for whom hurling a few intemperate epithets at manifesto-overturning politicians is about the last option they still have left, now that their democratic vote, which, they were assured would be implemented, is being blatantly ignored and even overturned.

Unsurprisingly, most of the MPs condemning the protesters for yelling “Nazi” and “Liar!” at Soubry have themselves uttered hardly a word of condemnation as 17.4 million Leave voters have been called that and much more for 2½ years. Where were those dozens of MPs now demanding that the Police provide better protection for them when Jacob Rees-Mogg’s and his young family were similarly insulted, threatened and intimidated by thuggish hard-Left protesters?

They have found it quite acceptable for Brexit voters to be dismissed as racist, fascist and xenophobic by Remain-backing, left-‘liberal’ metropolitan middle-class journalists in elegantly-crafted columns in The Guardian: yet when uncomplimentary labels are aimed at them by gruff working-class types in rough-sounding speech, they deem that to be a threat to their own security. The hypocrisy and double-standards there were, and are, nauseating.how political class insulates itself from dissent

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UPDATE: After first publication of this blogpost at The Conservative Woman, the alleged leader of the anti-Soubry protest, James Goddard, was arrested on suspicion of a public order offence. Some aspects of this are disturbing.

Firstly, Soubry was clearly neither assaulted nor even impeded. Secondly, Goddard may not be either an elegant or eloquent orator, but if calling politicians liars, or the same things with which Soubry herself regularly damns her political opponents and her critics, are public order offences, then we are all at risk.

Thirdly, though possibly wrong, I was under the impression that an arrest under the Public Order Act must take place immediately a possible breach of the Act is apprehended: not 5 days later after political pressure has been exerted. And fourthly, as was pointed out by Spiked‘s Brendan O’Neill:

“What kind of country criminalises the insulting of politicians? An un-free one. Speech should never be a police matter. Including heated speech, angry speech, protesting speech. . . .however unpleasant it might have been”.  

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Fast forward now to Wednesday 9th January’s Parliamentary shenanigans, which revolved around the Business Of The House motion tabled by the Government covering the procedure for – not the substance of – the second stage of the Commons debate on Theresa May’s misnamed “Withdrawal” Agreement. Business Of The House motions are not amendable, although some MPs do try it on, and a significant body of Parliamentary precedent exists to support the convention.

Out of several attempted amendments to Wednesday’s Business Of The House motion, Speaker Bercow, quite properly therefore rejected three. He then chose, however, to accept one – that tabled by resolute anti-Brexiteer ‘Conservative’ Dominic Grieve, the effect of which was to require the Government, in the event of Theresa May’s “Withdrawal” Agreement being defeated – as it almost certainly will be  – when it comes to a vote in the House next Tuesday, 14th January, to table an alternative Brexit plan within just three Commons sitting days, and the intention of which was to eliminate any possibility of a No-Deal Brexit by the Government simply running down the clock until 29th March.

Bercow accepted the Grieve amendment against not only both Parliamentary precedent and the sound arguments put forward in numerous Points of Order, but also against the legal/constitutional advice of his own Parliamentary Clerks, whose expertise on this subject is acknowledged by all sides of the House.

It was as if Bercow, whose has scarcely bothered to conceal his contempt for the Brexit vote even when sitting in the supposedly-impartial Speaker’s Chair, had been waiting for his big chance to scupper any possibility of a WTO/No-Deal Brexit, and, courtesy of Grieve, seized it.

What another remarkable coincidence. One of the normally-rejected amendments to a Business Of The House motion just happens to be put forward by arch-Remainer Grieve, and subsequently just happens to be allowed and not rejected by Remainer Bercow.

Just three weeks previously, Bercow had summoned the Government to the House to demand that it make its highly-adverse legal advice on May’s BRINO-Deal public. On Wednesday he refused to make his own Clerks’ legal advice on procedure public, and moreover physically made off with it. Despite stiff competition in the current Parliament, it’s hard to imagine any greater, more blatant, hypocrisy than Bercow’s.

The Grieve amendment was passed with the help of 17 of the usual ‘Conservative’ Party suspects who persistently parade with pride their Continuity-Remain credentials, and who find no problem in voting against the manifesto on which they were content to stand for Parliament and get elected.

And who, in addition, eagerly participated in arguably the most nauseating spectacle of a nauseating week – the blatantly anti-democratic diehard Remainers on both sides of the Commons aisle gloating how, courtesy of Bercow and Grieve, they have taken back control of Brexit for Parliament from the Executive, and boasting disingenuously that, after all, they’re only doing what Leave-voters claim to want.

Which is arguably the foulest lie of the lot. We voted for Brexit in order to leave the EU and thereafter have our affairs decided by Parliament as a consequence of having left: not to give control to Parliament to let it override the Referendum decision and not leave at all.

What would be the statistical probability of a minor, almost artificial-looking, outside-Parliament scuffle and name-calling just happening to be witnessed by two prominent anti-Brexiteers with media access, allowing a 24-hour anti-Brexit media narrative just happening to be run for the specific 24 hours preceding an unconstitutional anti-Brexit Parliamentary amendment by an anti-Brexit MP just happening to be improperly accepted by an anti-Brexit Speaker, leading to an anti-Brexit measure being voted by an anti-Brexit Parliament?

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UPDATE: It emerged on Sunday 13th January that the remarkably-convenient coincidence, for the Continuity-Remainers’ anti-Brexit cause, of Speaker Bercow just happening to select Grieve’s No-Deal Brexit wrecking amendment as the one with which, against the professional advice of his Parliamentary Clerks, to break long-standing Commons precedent via procedural chicanery, was in fact no coincidence at all, but pre-arranged collusion. Grieve and Bercow, it was revealed, had met in secret just hours before the Speaker allowed his wrecking amendment.

Grieve also emerged as the instigator and ringleader of a Remainer backbenchers’ plot to seize control of the Brexit Parliamentary and legislative processes, via changing the Commons debating rules so that motions proposed by backbenchers would take precedence over government business. That would enable MPs to suspend article 50, put Brexit on hold, and could even lead to the referendum result being overturned. Once again a prior meeting between Bercow and Grieve figured in the revelations. 

If both stories are true – and there seems no reason to believe that they aren’t – then Bercow’s action, taken against the advice of his professional Parliamentary Clerks, in overthrowing Commons precedent to allow Grieve’s anti No-Deal Brexit wrecking amendment to the Government’s Business of the House motion, was merely just the enabler, the facilitator, the device by which the route to ensure the killing-off of Brexit by Remainer-majority backbenchers was prised open. Not so much a procedural innovation as a constitutional coup d’état.            

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Far from merely wondering whether this past week’s events were had been pre-scripted, to contemplate otherwise now looks impossible.

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Sorry, Establishment-Elites: Populism isn’t going to just fade and go away

Holiday reading: “National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy”, by Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell (Pelican Books, 2008) 

Note: longer and updated version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman earlier on Friday 4th January 2019

Until comparatively recently – say, the last ten years or so – “populism” was a relatively neutral descriptive label, confined mainly to textbooks and dictionaries of political science.

Even my own well-thumbed copy of Roger Scruton’s Dictionary of Political Thought (3rd edition, 2007) discusses it primarily in the context of the Russian Narodnik movement and the late 19th century US Populist Party. In the 1950s, it was applied most frequently to the French Poujadistes, the union of small shopkeepers and artisans which campaigned against most forms of large-scale development and industrial modernisation. Even in 2007, Scruton alluded only briefly to the early stages of its current pejorative usage.

Since about 2013-2014, though, it’s been resurrected, to be deployed in a different way by the ruling – not only political but also media, corporatist, academic and cultural – Establishment-Elites who see their continued hegemony threatened by it, especially when, as with Brexit, Trump, and growing success by anti-EU parties in Europe, it produces electoral outcomes not to their liking.

“Populism” is now the anti-democratic, globalist, ‘Liberal’-‘Progressive’ Oligarchy’s preferred term of disparagement for the growing politics of pluralist mass democracy based on self-governing nation-statehood, one that rejects rule by unelected and unaccountable supranational technocracy.

gilets jaunes comp dec 2018

It’s about this movement that political scientists and academics Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell have written in their new (late October 2018) book “National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy”, trying to explain its origins, its central tenets, and its prospects. It’s worth recalling, in passing, that Goodwin especially has elsewhere made a persuasive argument that Britain’s EU Referendum result, which so shocked the overwhelmingly pro-EU Establishment-Elite, had been “baked-in” for several years previously.     

Contrary to the assumptions of its contemptuously-dismissive opponents, the movement isn’t new. Goodwin and Eatwell show how its genesis pre-dates the 2007-08 financial crisis and the subsequent recession. However, they also argue convincingly that both events, and especially the globalist ‘Liberal’-‘Progressive’ Oligarchy’s policy-responses to them – hardship for those on low and middle incomes via austerity and greater job insecurity, but asset-value protection or even enhancement for the already wealthy via ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing – generated an increase in inequality and sense that the economic system was skewed in the Oligarchy’s favour, both of which significantly enlarged the political space for the movement to fill.

Nor is it, as its detractors lazily claim, a movement composed solely of old, white, men. In the USA 2016 Presidential election, not only did 53 per cent of white women voters vote for Trump, but 43 per cent of all women voters opted for Trump. Between 1988 and 2017, the percentage of French female first-time voters who voted for one or other Le Pen nearly quadrupled from 9 per cent to 32 per cent. Greece’s anti-EU Golden Dawn party drew significant support from the young who felt their prospects were deteriorating. Clearly, something other than the Liberal’-‘Progressive’ oligarchy’s lazy, clichéd, prejudices was, and is, at work.

Goodwin and Eatwell identify what they call The Four D’s – the historic shifts, the long-term trends which are a growing cause of concern for millions and which are driving the movement: and which, being structural, are unlikely to fade or dissipate, or be assuaged, in the near future.

First, Distrust – the way in which the elitist nature of ‘Liberal’-‘Progressive’ democracy, forever seeking to minimise the opportunities for meaningful participation in it by the masses, has promoted distrust of politicians and institutions on the part of millions who feel they no longer have a voice in the national discussion.

Second, Destruction – particularly the perception that culturally-‘liberal’ politicians, unaccountable supranational bureaucracies and global corporates are eroding, not only traditional communities, but also national identity and societal cohesion, especially via encouraging historically unprecedented rates of mass immigration, while politically-correct agendas strive to silence any expression of opposition.

Yet this isn’t channelled into racism or xenophobia, but into demands that immigration be controlled by democratic consent, that the pace of immigration be slowed, and crucially, that it be accompanied, not by non-judgemental, relativist, divisive, separatist multiculturalism, but by assimilation and integration. Notable in the chart below is how, on both sides of the Atlantic, people say that immigrants adopting the national language and sharing the national customs, values and traditions are far more important factors than their birth-nationality or ethnicity.   

imp of speaking national language

Third, Deprivation – the growing conviction of many, fuelled by rising inequalities of income and wealth, as well as the perception of cultural discrimination consciously practised against them by the ‘Liberal’-Elites, that they are losing out relative to others, and that the future for themselves and their children is not only diminished, but actually bleak.

future prospects for kids

Fourth, De-Alignment – the burgeoning gap, and therefore weakening bond, between rulers and ruled, between the traditional mainstream political parties and the people they purport (or even no longer bother even to pretend) to represent: manifesting itself in a much more fragmented, volatile and unpredictable politics.

Goodwin and Eatwell also show that, again giving the lie to the dismissive prejudices of its critics, the Populism movement is not anti-democratic. Its preference for properly representative democracy remains strong.percent believing in popular democracy

Rather, it opposes aspects of ‘Liberal’-‘Progressive’ democracy as it has evolved to date, and actually wants more democracy: more direct-democracy referendums and more-listening politicians who will devolve power to the people to exercise it democratically, instead of vesting it in what too often are unelected and unaccountable, bureaucratic and technocratic, economic and political elites.

Goodwin and Eatwell demonstrate, too, that neither is Populism “fascist”, as its belittlers and defamers claim, most notably near-hysterically in the aftermath of the Brexit and Trump victories and the strengthening electoral performance of anti-Establishment parties in Europe. The movement by and large does not seek to tear down failed institutions which turned anti-democratic and replace them with autocratic ones: but to repair them so that they once again serve the interests of those they are supposed to serve.populism vs fascism core themes

The authors argue, in my view correctly, that unless elitist ‘Liberal’-‘Progressivism’ acknowledges its shortcomings, it will fail to come to terms with the new Populism, and so will struggle to contain it. The omens are not good. That bastion of ‘Liberal’-Elitism, The Sunday Times, for example, has described it as one of most dangerous developments of modern times. Set against Nazi Fascism, Marxist-Leninist Communism and Islamist-Jihadism, that seems a curious way to describe a pleading by the denigrated and forgotten for the democratic settlement to recognise and accommodate their legitimate concerns more. 

Conversely, however, if can bring itself to dilute its self-exalting smugness and intolerance, and broaden its appeal by meeting the legitimate concerns of voters who do want radical action to roll back elite-driven agendas in areas like welfare-universalism, mass immigration, rising inequality and civil liberties, it may yet accommodate itself to it.

The former will mean Populism remaining outside the mainstream, but becoming ever more widespread while the ‘Liberal’-‘Progressive’ centrism shrinks. The latter will mean Populism becoming the mainstream as more of the present mainstream adapts to meet it, signs of which are already visible. Either way, it’s here to stay, and isn’t going away any time soon.

I bought Goodwin and Eatwell’s book immediately on publication, but only over the holiday period has it been possible to go through it more slowly, in depth. I’d have no hesitation in recommending that you do, too.

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