Category: Civil-Liberties

Civil-Liberties, Media, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics, US-Current Affairs, US-Politics

Prêt-à-Parler?

It’s hardly surprising that Parler is suddenly growing markedly in popularity as an alternative to Twitter in micro-blogging.  Here’s why. 

To anyone active on political social-media, the increasing frustration and anger in recent months at Big-Tech’s more and more overt censorship, in various forms, of conservative, classical-liberal and libertarian opinion should come as no surprise.

It’s been there in subtle ways ever since the 2016 votes for Brexit and Trump.  But it’s in the last three months or so that the acceleration of Twitter in particular into a cesspit of predominantly Remainer, Left and Woke grievance and vituperation seems to have exploded, especially with our own December 2019 election, COVID-19, the imminence of full and final Brexit, and the explosion of hard-Left Black Lives Matter/Antifa violent protest.

To give just a few of the more prominent examples, Twitter has taken upon itself to start what it disingenuously describes as ‘fact-checking’ Trump tweets which are political rhetoric or opinion rather than factual; but it doesn’t do the same to his political opponents.  It’s permanently banned, among others,  Father Ted creator Graham Linehan for tweeting ‘Men aren’t women’; but the militant trans agenda gets a free pass.

Earlier this year Twitter suspended Tory backbench MP Sir Bill Cash, who has been involved with David Keighley of News-Watch on a judicial review of the BBC’s adherence to the impartiality requirements of its Charter.  No reason was given for the suspension, imposed for allegedly ‘violating Twitter’s rules’, although the platform refused to say which rules had allegedly been violated or how. (The suspension has since been lifted.) 

For the record, I find some of Trump’s tweets counter-productively crass, and I’ve never been a particular fan of the Linehan who has a record of bullying people he disagrees with on Twitter anyway; so there was a fleeting touch of schadenfreude at him being hoist with his own petard when Twitter suspended him.

But whether one agrees or disagrees with the political opinions of all three is immaterial.  The real test of our belief in free speech is whether we uphold and defend it, not just for the people and speech we do agree with, but also for the people and speech we don’t agree with.  On that criterion, Twitter’s actions against Trump, Linehan and Cash were not only authoritarian and illiberal in their own right; they were moreover hypocritical and biased, in that it indulges and tolerates equally questionable speech from their opponents. 

Nor is the censorship confined to prominent people.  Small-C conservative, classical-liberal or libertarian tweeters report being subjected to straightforward follower attrition, the more insidious shadowbanning whereby Twitter seems to restrict the reach of accounts and make them hard to find, and artificial lowering of the number of Retweets or Likes on tweets popular with their followership.

Personally, Twitter relieved me of about 1,000 followers almost overnight in late 2018 for reasons that were, and remain, unclear.  Since then, my rate of follower acquisition has been a fraction of what it was before that reduction, and I’ve now lost count of the Direct Messages from people telling me that Twitter had arbitrarily unfollowed them from me so that my tweets just disappeared from their feeds, and that it had been very hard for them to find me again in order to re-follow.

Below are the monthly changes in my own followership over the past 15 months.  Notice the abrupt change in the last three months, just as concerns about Twitter’s flagrant left-bias seem to have really accelerated exponentially?

Twitter Follower Attrition Table

The fascinating metrics from the analytics, though, are that visits to the account’s profile are roughly 20% down (because it’s being made difficult to find?), while the number of engagements/impressions is substantially up.

Twitter also seems to be promoting left-viewpoint tweets up the order on subject or hashtag searches, too. Although I’m no fan of Boris Johnson or his ‘Conservative’ Party, this is especially noticeable on major set-pieces like Prime Minister’s Questions or a significant speech or intervention by a conservative politician.

Then, just in recent days, Twitter has taken its Woke speech-control to a whole new level, issuing the following edict on the forms of NewSpeak which in future it will promote (and no doubt soon police and enforce) on its platform.  Presumably our days of using “Whitehall” as convenient code and shorthand for all the Government ministries and departments in central London are numbered.

Twitter Engineering NewSpeak

Sometimes if feels as though Trump’s Executive Order modifying Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act 1996 so as to designate the social media giants as publishers rather than the mere ‘platforms’ they claim to be – the effect of which would be to bring them under the scope the First Amendment’s prohibitions on the restriction of free speech – can’t come into full legal effect fast enough.     

Anyway, sharing the increasing frustration at all this, just under two weeks ago, and like many others then and since, I joined the alternative platform Parler, with its absolute commitment to non-censorship and free speech.  Reportedly, it had 300,000 new sign-ups from UK Twitter users alone over the weekend of 21st-22nd June, growing from 1 million to 1.5 million users in only a week. 

Although the Parler user interface is still somewhat clunky, and the platform could benefit from a few improvements, it’s nevertheless perfectly functional. A big plus the 1,000-character limit, which is much better than Twitter’s 280.  That often means only one post rather than what, on Twitter, would require a two or three tweet thread. Although I know of one or two users who have junked Twitter accounts with over 25,000 followers to move across completely, most still have both running in parallel for the moment.

In contrast to Twitter’s shadowbanning and sometimes outright censoring of conservative views, not to mention steady erosion of followers, the early Parler impression is so far living up to its free speech reputation.  Although an initial surge obviously isn’t representative, acquiring 1,000 followers in only 10 days is nevertheless a satisfying contrast to the last 18 months on Twitter.  Many familiar, reciprocal-follow faces from Twitter are there; one of the pleasures of the last two weeks’ experience has been finding a new raft of them every day, including some of social media’s best ‘climate-change’-sceptics.

The more supercilious elements of the left-‘liberal’ elite Establishment’s mainstream media, conveniently ignoring the number of centre-right and even centrist MPs and journalists using the platform, are already trying falsely to portray Parler as merely a safe-space echo-chamber for ‘far-right’ ‘hate speech’, though evidently based on a highly selective and partisan representation relying on only one or two examples.  It suggests that Parler might have them worried.

You will find there, not only me, but some of my fellow-writers at The Conservative Woman:

  • TCW itself as @TheConWom
  • Co-Editor Kathy Gyngell as @KathyConWom
  • Karen Harradine as @KarenHWriter
  • Andrew Cadman as @Andrewccadman
  • and Yours Truly as @LibertarianRebel

Come and join us there on Parler.

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Civil-Liberties, Economics, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Professor Lockdown: Wholly Hubris or Partly Honey-Trap?

The circumstances of the extra-marital romantic assignations for which the architect of lockdown broke his own recommended social distancing rules are enough to prompt suspicion that initiation of the relationship might have been neither entirely his, nor entirely for purely personal reasons

Note: updated version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Monday 18 May 2020

Definition of honeytrap

When the scandal of Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson’s breach of the COVID-19 lockdown social-distancing rules for his amorous dalliances with his married mistress Antonia Staats broke, it was not only understandable but also totally justified that the main focus of public attention by far was on his own gross professional and personal hypocrisy.

After all, here was arguably the principal architect of the SAGE advisory group’s ‘expert’ ‘scientific’ advice, which prompted the Government to –

  1. restrict personal freedoms to an extent unprecedented in peacetime;
  1. in effect shut down the economy; and
  1. put half the nation’s entire workforce on the public payroll,

flagrantly doing precisely the opposite of his own recommendations.

The disastrous effects of the Government’s panicked U-turn from mitigation to suppression, so as to follow the SAGE/Ferguson recommendations slavishly, are all too familiar.  The excessively heavy-handed authoritarianism of the Police in enforcing lockdown rules.  The deliberate inducement of the worst recession for 300 years.  A level of budget deficits which will take years to recover from.  They need no more than a brief mention here.

Neither is this the place to debate either the merits or demerits of Lockdown per se, which have been impressively covered elsewhere, or Ferguson’s private morals, which are of no intrinsic concern to us.

However, given the sheer hypocrisy of his personal conduct compared to his professional scientific advice, and the baleful consequences of the Government’s following the latter, it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether there are any underlying political factors which influenced Ferguson’s specific choice of paramour?  Or, possibly, which influenced his paramour’s particular selection of him as the object of her attention and beneficiary of her favours?

Primarily on Ferguson’s ‘expert advice’, a formerly-‘Conservative’ Party government has created a weaker, static, travel-shunning society cowed into acquiescent submission by lurid pandemic scaremongering, and a weaker economy dependent on massive State intervention. It’s pursuing policies which wouldn’t be at all out of place in an election manifesto produced jointly by Momentum and Extinction Rebellion.  No wonder the State-Socialists and the Green anti-capitalism eco-totalitarians are crowing that Lockdown has become the new normal.  So what part, if any, might his inamorata have played in influencing that advice?

It didn’t take very long for the Guido Fawkes website to uncover ‘left-wing campaigner’ Ms Staats’ political affiliations, which turned out, with a wearisome predictability, to be eco-socialist, anti-Brexit, and anti-capitalist.  As to Ms Staats’ other links, including to the US-based online globalist-activism Avaaz, these were set out very succinctly by Janice Davis in the penultimate paragraph of her own The Conservative Woman article of Wednesday 13th May; it needs no repetition or elaboration from me, except perhaps to note the allegations of funding connections with the Moveon.org organization funded by George Soros. 

Antonia Staats 1, 5, & 6

To those of us disinclined to believe in fairies and unicorns, this all started to ring warning bells, and still does.  A hard Green-Left anti-Brexit, globalist, eco-activist, who just happens to have been bedding the very man on whose ‘expert advice’ coincidentally the Government has been inveigled into trying to re-make the economy and society in ways very similar to what the anti-Brexiteers, the far-Left, and extreme-Greens demand?  Can we totally exclude the possibility that Ferguson and Ms Staats connected by some process other than pure chance?

How long has the relationship been going?  Does the apparent willingness to breach the lockdown rules for the amorous assignations – in Ferguson’s case hypocritically so – suggest that it might still be in its first flush of ardour and therefore of comparatively recent origin?  The pair are reported to have hooked up via the match website OkCupid, but which of the two actually initiated it?  Is Ferguson subject to the Official Secrets Act in relation to divulging via post-coital pillow-talk any confidential information to which he might be privy by virtue of his official role?

Now, it must be said that, from Ferguson’s track record, it’s entirely possible to conclude that his recommendations to the Government via SAGE were formed without any external influences.

Professionally, his history of wrong predictions with disastrous consequences has been mercilessly dissected.  The coding on which his modelling is based has been shredded.  With only small adjustments to inputs on his model, very different outputs emerge. 

In his personal capacity, he has not been notably reticent about his political views, either.  In 2016, he co-authored a paper on the allegedly terrible consequences of leaving the EU.  Immediately after the 2017 General Election, he greeted effusively the capture of the Oxford West and Abingdon constituency by the spectacularly misnamed ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrats’ who, ever since the 2016 EU Referendum, have consistently campaigned on a pledge just to ignore its result and unilaterally overturn it.

Ferguson - Moran

It’s worth reading in detail this article on Ferguson for The Critic by journalist and founder of Lockdown Sceptics, Toby Young.  It’s worth, too, listening to this James Delingpole/Toby Young ‘London Calling’ podcast of 6th May for the Young’s excellent monologue summary (from 06:36) of how Ferguson so egregiously epitomises the dangerous serial failings of the ‘liberal’-left, authoritarian-statist, fiscally incontinent, groupthink-conformist quangocracy.  His apparent assumption that lockdown rules on social distancing were for the little people to follow, but not necessarily himself, could well stem from an elitist hubris that’s entirely self-generated.

So it’s entirely feasible that little, if any, external influence was actually necessary for him to make up his mind in the direction he did.  After all, his recommendations were hardly inconsistent with his previous positions; it was not as if he’d reversed policy direction by 180 degrees.

But perhaps any influence, if influence there was, was of the more subtle kind, in the form of flattery, or validation, which might just have prompted him to strengthen them in a particular direction?  Would it have been akin to gently pushing on an already open door?

Both in reality and fiction, the honey-trap has a long and chequered history.  Betty Pack, as MI6 agent ‘Cynthia’, used her feminine allure to help Britain covertly abstract from the Poles the key to the German Enigma codes.  In Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, a young female OAS agent deliberately becomes the mistress of de Gaulle’s much older security adviser, to inform the would-be assassin of the action being taken in the hunt for him.  Former LibDem MP Mike Hancock employed as his parliamentary researcher, with access to sensitive Defence papers, the Russian spy Katia Zatuliveter, 40 years his junior, with whom he was also having an affair.

We have no reason to assume the practice doesn’t continue.  And in a world populated by many more non-state actors, there is equally no reason to suppose that sexual entrapment, not undertaken for criminal blackmail purposes but with the aim of either obtaining intelligence or exerting influence in a particular policy direction, doesn’t occur outside government agencies, and is never used by either supranational bodies or well-funded NGOs.  Or, indeed, online activist organisations?

It was intriguing how much the initial reaction to the Daily Telegraph‘s exposure of Ferguson’s liaison almost bordered on the incredulous; based on the first, and most glamorous, photograph of Ms Staats which it published to illustrate it, comment along the lines of ‘What on earth did she see in him? She’s a bit out of his league, isn’t she?‘ was frequent.  At the risk of being un-gallant, subsequent pictures may now have, ahem, modified this impression somewhat; but was he possibly, because of his position & influence, selected as a target for some kind of subtle honey-trap operation?

Antonia Staats 2, 3, & 4 comp

One of the few certainties about the whole COVID-19 imbroglio is that there will eventually have to be a mammoth public enquiry.  Are there not sufficient grounds for a full security enquiry to be held within its ambit?  To investigate whether there exist, not merely ‘questions to be asked’ or even ‘reasonable grounds for suspicion’, but actually something more than either of those?  Were Ferguson’s lockdown recommendations and his own subsequent flouting of them based entirely on scientific certitude and elitist personal hubris?  Or something more?

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Civil-Liberties, Public-Health, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Waitrose or Wuhan?

Note: Longer and updated version of article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Wednesday 25 March 2020

As mainstream and social media reports of selfishly excessive panic buying and empty shelves in anticipation of government restrictions to control the spread of Coronavirus exploded into a major issue in itself last week, the public relations departments of major UK supermarkets were eager to reassure the public about continuity of supply and ease of access for elderly or otherwise vulnerable customers.

However, as stories proliferated of hoarders failing to respect so-called ‘elderly hours’, or clearing the shelves in advance of them unimpeded by supermarket staff, it was hard to avoid the impression that some supermarket chains were making ‘caring’ announcements for publicity purposes, but then doing little either to enforce them or even notify their staff of them.  That certainly appeared to be the case with one alleged ‘elderly and vulnerable only’ queue in Leamington Spa.

'Elderly & vulnerable' queue Leamington Spa

Less obvious was any great detail about the extra precautions they intended to take to prevent the spread of infection on their premises, although Aldi promised to instal clear screens at checkouts to protect employees and customers, and Tesco pledged to introduce distancing methods at checkouts to reduce customers’ infection risk.

Not before time, either: as one writer of a Letter to the Editor of a national newspaper put it, ‘Precisely how can we keep our distance while needing to shop for food?‘  

Costco Thurrock, queues distancing

In addition to that, reports had already been circulating on social media from disgruntled employees about businesses being cavalier, to say the least, about protecting even their own staff.  The example below is graphic, but by no means untypical. Read the entire thread.

So it was not without slight trepidation that, early last Saturday morning, I found myself contemplating a potentially hazardous expedition into dangerous territory, aka the local branch of Waitrose.

Now, as soon as the seriousness of the COVID-19 epidemic first became apparent, a local wine merchants not far from my home had been quick to react.  They emailed their entire customer base to say that, with immediate effect, they would provide mandatory-use hand-sanitiser and hand-washing facilities at the entrance to the store, have all trolley handles disinfected after each use, move temporarily to exclusively non-cash transactions, and hygienically wipe credit card machines after every sale.

Surely, I thought, I could expect similar precautions to be in place at a busy branch of a national, and generally regarded as up-market, supermarket chain?

Nope.  Despite my arriving within 15 minutes of opening time, the Waitrose Head Office-announced ‘The first hour of business is now dedicated to elderly and vulnerable shoppers‘ policy was nowhere to be seen.  Neither were any hand-sanitising facilities, nor even requests for customers to use the adjacent washrooms for that purpose, in evidence.  As for trolley handles being sanitiser-cleaned before re-use, forget it.

Notwithstanding all the reassuring corporate PR from Head Office, anti-coronavirus precautions within the store looked almost non-existent – although, in fairness, apart from pasta and rice, the shelves were reasonably well-stocked, and anti-excess-buying measures were visibly being enforced.

But not much else.  At one stage, standing no further than one to one-and-a-half metres away from me and half-blocking the aisle, was a young woman staring vacantly at her phone (and not at a shopping list on it either, because she had a written one) while treating everyone in her immediate vicinity, including her two- or three-year-old daughter perched on her shopping-trolley child-seat, to the sound of her rasping dry cough.

At that point I began to feel seriously relieved at my decision to wear nitrile surgical gloves because of the potential for infection from trolley handles, tins, credit-card machines and the like. Apparently, the virus can linger for up to 72 hours on a hard surface.  OTT, maybe, but why take the risk when it’s there but easily avoided?  Some other customers were wearing surgical gloves too, but we must have been in a minority of 5 per cent at the most.

Which minority, remarkably, evidently did not include the servers at the in-store bakery, delicatessen, butcher and fishmonger.  The server on the cheese counter went to cut me a wedge of whatever cheese it was, unwrapping it with his bare hands, and not wearing gloves at all.  I told him to keep it.

Neither did I see any of the checkout operators using gloves, although the Saturday-job youth on the one which I used looked a touch guiltily at my own, then sheepishly produced a pair of latex surgical gloves from beneath his till and put them on.  Had they, I wondered, been issued to till operators, but no-one was verifying that they were actually being worn?  No problem either, with any cash-and-change transactions there if you wanted, and not a hint of credit-card terminals being hygiene-wiped afterwards.

On reaching home, my outer clothes made it straight into the washing machine.  I made it straight into the shower, despite having already showered before leaving.  The nitrile gloves didn’t even make it as far as home.  On the way from the trolley-deposit bay back towards my car in the car park, they went straight into a (closed) rubbish-bin.  And some answers to questions about how the virus had managed to wreak so much devastation so quickly as it spread outwards from Wuhan, China, were much clearer.

UPDATE: This article was written on the afternoon of Monday 23rd March. On Tuesday (24th), a friend visited a different Waitrose branch in my locality.  In the period from Saturday (21st), they had obviously started to get more organised. There was a one-in, one-out policy in operation to limit the numbers shopping at any one time, free disposable gloves were available, and 2-metre distance-markers had been placed at checkouts, and enforced.  Better late than never, perhaps. 

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Civil-Liberties, European-Union, Law-&-Justice, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Was this the week UK Democracy died?

Note: This article was originally published at The Conservative Woman on Saturday 28th September 2019

From the instant Remainer reaction of knee-jerk outrage when last Tuesday’s Supreme Court Judgment, ruling that the prorogation of Parliament had been unlawful, was criticised as a “constitutional coup d’état”, one always suspected that there was actually something in that criticism.

SCoUK delivers ruling on Prorogation

That the Supreme Court’s Judgment reversed the earlier verdict of the High Court that prorogation was essentially political and thus not justiciable – a verdict reached by a panel comprising no less than the Lord Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls, and the Chairman of the Queen’s Bench Division, all of whom rank superior to Supreme Court Judges in the Judiciary – did nothing to ameliorate it.

As the week has gone on, that suspicion has grown. As one of the better analytical commentaries showed, the Judges took it upon themselves to rectify an absence relating to prorogation in the body of Parliament-made Statute Law by first arrogating to themselves the law-making power vested in the elected legislature, and then making it themselves in effect under Common Law. Previously, all constraints on the Executive’s prerogative power of prorogation were statutory.

Moreover, by effectively substituting its own judgment (of what constituted ‘good political reasons’ for prorogation) for that made by the Executive, and then evaluating the actual prorogation against its own criteria, the Supreme Court inserted itself into the political process. But as Lawyers for Britain’s Martin Howe QC pointed out, for a court to determine whether an issue of high government policy is good reason or not presents it with an insuperable difficulty. How can it know what was or was not in the government mind?

SCoUK judges constitutional coupThe  implications for the Constitution, already creaking from a Remainer Parliament’s tangible unwillingness to accept and implement the outcome of the 2016 EU Referendum, and democracy itself, are momentous.

As Spiked’s Jon Holbrook says, there is now no political issue on which the judges are not prepared to rule: if an exercise of the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament can be set aside by judges, then almost any political decision can be. The effect of which is, as Gerald Warner so trenchantly explained at Reaction, is, to all intents and purposes, to deprive Britain of a functioning government under a constitutional monarchy. In the words of the Daily Telegraph’s Philip Johnstone, Britain has become a republic with Bercow at its head.

2017 Remainer ParliamentWhich brings us back to our dysfunctional current Parliament. Having passed the Benn-initiated Surrender Act which, by requiring an Article 50 extension request be submitted should no deal be agreed with the EU Council meeting on 17-18 October, was effectively both an open invitation to the EU not to agree any deal, and a total shackling of both of the Prime Minister’s negotiating hands behind his back, what will it do next?

Self-aggrandising BercowI suspect Parliament’s Remainer-Leftist so-called Rebel Alliance will, with Speaker Bercow’s enthusiastic collusion, seize control of the Parliamentary agenda via Standing Order 24 and then, again using an accelerated procedure to ensure all three Readings in one day, amend the Benn Surrender Act (or Appeasement Act, if you prefer).

The amendment would be to bring forward, to a date before the EU Council meeting on 17-18 October, the date by which Boris has to come back to Parliament with a deal the Commons would approve. The effect of this, of course, would be to tie his hands even more.

The additional baleful consequence which is starting to be dimly discernible in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling is this: if (as I personally believe they have) its Judges have indeed carried out a constitutional coup d’état by arrogating more political power to themselves – by in effect inventing a convention that Prorogation is justiciable, even though Parliament has passed no Statute limiting or restricting Prorogation – then one wonders whether even Royal Assent to bring a Bill into law, or more crucially perhaps, Royal Assent to a dissolution of Parliament, might itself be justiciable.

The terrible spectre of, in extremis, a Remainer Parliament legislating to amend or repeal the Fixed Term Parliament Act so as to perpetuate its own existence, followed by the refusal on the advice of the Prime Minister of Royal Assent to it, being itself justiciable and liable to be overturned by a politicised Supreme Court, is no longer unthinkable. At that point, democracy is dead.

With this week’s Supreme Court ruling, mass-participation democracy has in effect ceased to be the foundation of our political society: it has become, instead, merely an obstacle to be circumvented by the anti-democratic, either those in Parliament or those with the deepest pockets and most influential connections, whenever they are defeated in a popular vote.

SCoUK Lady Brenda Brooch-SpiderThat the central political issue of our time is now that of The People versus The Establishment has become starker than ever. By its ruling, the Supreme Court has ensured that the next general election will be about one thing and one thing only: The People against Parliament and The Establishment.

A self-respecting Labour Party would be up in arms about this. Keir Hardie and Tony Benn must be spinning in their graves. The purported party of the working-class, cheering on the well-connected and the monied as they overturn the biggest democratic mandate in UK political history.

There has been much lofty comment this week, mainly from the ‘Liberal’-Intellegentsia, about a proper re-setting of the delicate balance of power between the Monarchy, the Government and Parliament which the Supreme Court’s Judgment presages. There has been much also, from the same sources, about the reinforcement of Parliamentary sovereignty.

Less mentioned, curiously, has been the awkward fourth element in our political settlement. The People, in whose name the aforementioned triumvirate of powers professes, unconvincingly, to govern, but from whom Parliament derives its sovereignty in the first place.

Earlier this week, Brexit Party MEP John Longworth wrote lucidly about how the conflict between two competing philosophies of government and society, a conflict dormant but still unresolved since the Civil War, has been revived by by the Brexit vote and its aftermath. It is worth reading.

It’s worth recalling, too, that full universal adult franchise was not achieved until 1928, despite the Great Reform Act being dated 1832, such is successive generations of the Establishment-Elite’s determination not to yield its political power to the demos it considers unworthy to exercise it. That Democracy lasted under 100 years before we reverted to oligarchical rule is no longer inconceivable.

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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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After Brexit, Reform Our UK Democracy

Neither our current democracy, nor our present Parliament, are institutions fit to be entrusted once again with the powers of self-government we will have succeeded in retrieving from Brussels

Note: this is the longer (and updated) version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Tuesday 28th August 2018 

Over two years after Britain voted, narrowly but still decisively, to leave the European Union, that it remains necessary to say “if Brexit happens”, is not only a shameful indictment of the ruling class’ contempt for mass democracy, but also a warning of what must follow if it does happen.

52 per cent of those who voted in the EU Referendum, no fewer than 17.4 million people, voted Leave – the largest vote for a single policy in British political history. On the best academic psephologists’ estimates, approximately 63 per cent of Parliamentary constituencies voted Leave. Approximately 85 per cent of votes cast in the 2017 General Election went to the two main parties whose manifestos and candidates both pledged to respect and implement the Referendum result.

Yet about 70 per cent of the 650 MPs who purport to represent us were opposed to Brexit, and still are. Even before the Referendum, a significant number voted against one being held at all.

Many of those 2017 election pledges were self-evidently made dishonestly. Over the past two years, we have seen repeated Parliamentary obstruction – from both the elected Commons and, even worse, the unelected and unaccountable Lords, and often going down to knife-edge votes – to almost every Brexit-progressing measure introduced by a government that is clearly reluctant to implement the electorate’s decision.

This experience has surely, therefore, made one thing abundantly clear: that, if Brexit does happen, we cannot retrieve from Brussels our powers of governing and legislating ourselves, only to vest them once more in the very same Westminster Parliament which not only spent the last 45 years eagerly giving them away in the first place, but which still vehemently opposes their repatriation and our recovery of democratic self-government.

So Brexit must, in my view, be followed very quickly by significant Parliamentary and electoral reform, to strengthen democracy & the power of the electorate over the legislature, and to curb its ability to ignore or negate the expressed majority-view of the voters – to make legislature, government and executive work, not in the interests of the New-Class Establishment-Elite’s cartel, but in the interests of the people.

We must start with abolition of the unelected, unaccountable, House of Lords, which has become largely a refuge for superannuated politicians after their rejection by the electorate, a bauble with which to reward donors, or a safe harbour for otherwise unelectable placemen. It has been teetering on the edge of democratic legitimacy for years, but its conduct during the passage of Brexit-related legislation has surely signed its death warrant.

Many of the intemperate, anti-democratic speeches made by unelected Peers during the Lords’ passage of the EU Withdrawal Bill, outraged that the great unwashed masses of the British electorate had been allowed to determine their own constitutional future, and that their decision dared to diverge from that of their betters, will rightly be forgotten and consigned to the dustbin of history.

Two, however, should be preserved for posterity, to remind us at some future date of what we needed to rid ourselves of. In the first, Lord (Chris) Patten, pillar of the Europhile ‘Liberal’-Elitist Establishment, on the, to him, intolerable folly of removing such decisions from him and his ilk exclusively:


In the second, Lord Hailsham, better known to politics watchers as former Conservative MP Douglas Hogg, who acquired during the 2009 Parliamentary expenses scandal a justly permanent notoriety, for charging to the long-suffering taxpayer such items essential to the performance of his Parliamentary duties as the costs of cleaning his moat, tuning his piano, and fixing the stable lights at his Lincolnshire manor-house. 

That Britain needs a bi-cameral legislature is undeniable: but that the House of Lords as presently constituted should under no circumstances comprise its upper, revising, Chamber, is surely equally so. Whatever format we eventually settle on is debatable: but that it must be on the basis of selection by universal franchise, not favours and cronyism, is a sine qua non.

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 neither main party, with the occasional exception, 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, one of the main talking points of its aftermath has been the huge disparity, in so many Parliamentary constituencies, between MPs and their voters on the issue of Britain’s EU membership.

That has exacerbated 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 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. That must now change.

More Direct Democracy is 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 relatively few expect their parties to honour. But in an age 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?

The Swiss manage to hold between 7 and 9 referendums each year, and on issues other than major constitutional questions like the voting system or EU membership, and are hardly the divided society that the anti-referendum campaigners claim. In fact, that the Swiss are also regularly the people expressing the highest confidence in their system of government is no coincidence.

confidence-in-govt-switz-top

The potential abuse of postal voting through over-generous qualification, and the related issue of voter ID-fraud, urgently need addressing. The requirement for voter-ID at the polling station in a democratic election ought to be axiomatic and a subject beyond debate, while postal voting needs once again to be restricted to those verified as genuinely too ill or infirm, of overseas on military service.

Objections to some of the above will no doubt be raised on the grounds that they contravene the Burkean principle that the elected MP is his electors’ representative, not their delegate. My contention however, and which I intend to explore further in future articles, is that so many elected MPs themselves, by so manifestly disregarding the majority wishes of their individual electorates and the country as a whole, have now stretched this principle to breaking point.

Without significant Parliamentary reform to make the legislature more responsive to the electorate, extra-Parliamentary action starts to acquire a legitimacy of its own. That prospect should be welcomed by nobody: but a Parliament constituted on its present basis is not a fitting repository of powers hard-won back from Brussels.

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Blueprint for a Peaceful, Legal, and Non-Violent Civic Resistance

How the Continuity-Remain Government’s and political class’ anti-democratic determination not to deliver the Brexit which 17.4 million voted for could be resisted and defeated

Note: this is the longer (and updated) version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Saturday 11th August 2018 

Just after the 2016 EU Referendum, I speculated on Twitter that, despite the clear majority vote to leave, the overwhelmingly anti-Brexit ‘Liberal’-Elite, New-Class Establishment would not willingly respect and implement the electorate’s democratic decision without a fight, so that we might have to take to the streets, preferably non-violently, to achieve it.

In hindsight, even that pessimistic prediction was an under-estimation, but the revelations from Theresa May’s now infamous Chequers Summit, and developments since, serve only to exacerbate fears of an impending massive sell-out and a soft-Remain, Brexit-In-Name-Only, at the very least. In my view, even May conceding a second referendum, as the price of the EU’s agreeing a limited or even indefinite extension of Article 50, can’t be ruled out.

Assuming that supposedly Brexiteer Tory MPs continue to sit on their hands, and that the burgeoning grassroots revolt doesn’t grow sufficiently large or irresistible to force her resignation and replacement with a committed Brexiteer, the question arises: what next?

I don’t believe that May and her sycophantic majority-Remain government should be allowed just to ride roughshod over democracy itself. I hope there’d be huge outrage across the country, particularly among the 17.4 million who voted for Brexit, not least on the Government’s promise to implement their decision. But: to be effective, what tangible form should it take?

The ‘Liberal’-Elite Remainer Establishment would undoubtedly love us to take to the streets, so that we could, with the willing assistance of its similarly-inclined compliant media, be painted as ‘violent far-right’. Something more subtle would be required. To quote Sun Tzu in ‘The Art of War’ – ‘the wise general never fights a battle on ground of the enemy’s choosing’.

My provisional blueprint for a rolling programme of peaceful, non-violent, civic-resistance has as its inspiration the fuel price protests of 2000. A maximum of a mere 3,000 people, by cleverly strategically blockading the main fuel refineries and distribution facilities, and skilfully eliciting public support, not only credibly threatened to, but very nearly did, bring the country to a halt, but also, crucially, and as was admitted only later, very nearly brought Blair’s first government down.

Fuel Protests 2000 v2

We’ve become accustomed to believing that, between elections, we’re comparatively powerless. I’m not so sure. True, we may not have direct political power. But what 17.4 million of us in aggregate do potentially have is economic power, and in spades. There are several ways we can exert substantial unconventional political influence, and by wholly peaceful, legal means.

Mass, rent and council-tax strikes can adversely affect local authority finances very quickly. The key is in numbers. They can’t possibly sue and/or prosecute everyone, because that would overwhelm most local authorities’ meagre legal resources, as well as clogging up the Courts; moreover the cash-flow problems it would cause most councils would be damaging on their own. Imagine if council staff couldn’t be paid because of a mass rent and council tax strike.

The next option is for a mass boycott of the corporates who’ve joined in anti-Brexit scaremongering, whether of their own volition or at the Government’s request. 17.4 million is a lot of customers. . . .

Alternative supermarket chains to, for example, Morrison’s, or Sainsbury’s whose Blair-ennobled Lord (David) Sainsbury donated £4.2 million to the Remain campaign, are available. Watch their share prices start to tank if costs rise from un-sold or perishing stock, as sales slump and profits start to slide.

We don’t need to choose, or continue to use anti-Brexit Branson’s Virgin-branded trains, banking services, or satellite TV. Not only are there alternative online retailers to Amazon available, but can we not do without most of what we buy from Amazon for three months?

Because it could take as short as that. Remember, the modern mass retailing business model is predicated on just-in-time delivery for high-volume sales, thus minimising stock-holding and warehousing costs. A significant interruption to the constant flow of high-volume sales, via a mass customer boycott, has the potential for major logistical problems, a build-up of non-shifting stock, and with all the attendant cost ramifications and effect on profit.

And that has the additional possible effect of reducing the State’s tax take, both from VAT on sales and from corporation tax on company profits further down the line.

You can probably think of many more:  but this final one might, I suspect, be a potential clincher. It exploits the old adage that if you owe the bank £50,000 and can’t repay it, then you have a problem: but if you owe the bank £50,000,000 and can’t repay it, then it’s the bank which has a problem. Because a mass withholding of mortgage payments can affect the entire banking system faster than you might think.

This is where it gets a bit technical, but please bear with me.

It’s all to do with the extra capital which, under international banking standards, a bank must retain, once a mortgage goes into non-performing mode for two or three months. Not only that, but banks then also have to increase the provisions they set aside against default and losses too, so it can be a double-whammy. Provisions are a charge against profits, so it means lower profits, no new lending permitted, & in extremis, restrictions on withdrawals, because liquid deposits can form part of the (greater) capital that suddenly has to be retained.

When a bank lends money, it creates an asset of its own –its right to receive repayment, or the indebtedness of the borrower to the bank. But under those same international banking standards, the bank must assign that asset a risk-weighting, which in turn dictates the amount of capital the bank has to retain against it, and which therefore cannot also be lent.

Lending to sovereign governments, particularly those with good credit ratings, can typically be risk-weighted low. Governments, after all, have the power to tax their citizens, backed by the threat of State coercion, to stump up the money to meet their debts, and so are considered a good risk.

Likewise, lending to good-quality corporates, especially those with a high Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, or Fitch credit-rating, can be risk-weighted only slightly higher than medium-quality sovereign debt.

Basel II Risk Weights

Residential mortgages are typically risk-weighted at 35 per cent to 40 per cent: which means that, for a residential mortgage portfolio totalling, say, £500 billion, the bank must retain, and therefore not lend, a capital base of between £175 billion and £200 billion to support it.

But if a residential mortgage goes into default through non-payment, its risk-weighting has to rise substantially, and can double, to at least 70 per cent to 80 per cent. If a whole £500 billion residential mortgage portfolio went into payment arrears, then the bank would immediately have to set aside between £350 billion and £400 billion against it, not between £175 billion and £200 billion. That’s between £175 billion and £200 million which, suddenly, is no longer available for lending on other, new borrowing, and at a profitable interest-rate margin.

I used to be involved in ‘What If?’ modelling for this kind of contingency: the planning assumed increased mortgage defaults from a major economic crash, but the effects from a mass withholding of mortgage payments aren’t dissimilar.

Clearing banks & building societies, as prime retail lenders, especially, are more vulnerable than often assumed. The shock of a significant part of an entire residential property-mortgage lending book suddenly needing double the previous capital base just to support it is a potential nightmare scenario, particularly for primarily-retail lenders.

And if that newly-doubled capital base is comprised partly of liquid deposits, whose withdrawal has to be restricted, then depositors may start to worry that they may not be able to get their money out. And then you have all the ingredients in place for a bank run. Remember Northern Rock?

It doesn’t stop there. Say the bank decides to foreclose on a mortgage and sell the asset which comprises its security. But banks aren’t in the residential property management business, and don’t want bricks and mortar assets sitting on the books, so they will typically go for a quick sale, even at well below market value, to recover their debt quickly.

Now imagine a small residential close of 20 houses, average market value, say £300,000, but including two whose owners are in default on their £200,000 mortgages, and which the bank as mortgagee is therefore threatening to re-possess and sell.

Residential close

The bank wouldn’t be bothered about market value: it would merely want to recover its debt as fast as possible. So suddenly, two allegedly £300,000 houses are potentially coming up for sale at only £220,000 each. What happens to the market value of the other eighteen? And how do their owners feel about that? Translate that on to a national scale, and suddenly you’re looking at a potential house-price crisis as well.

But, and as Sun Tzu himself might have said, you don’t actually have to create a bank run and/or a house-price crisis – you just have to create the plausible prospect of a bank run and/or a house-price crisis.

To my mind, the ironic beauty of this kind of overall strategy is that, instead of challenging the Remainer Establishment-Elite directly, on the streets, as it would prefer, it instead targets, and in its key aspects – rampant retail consumerism, fractional reserve banking, cheap credit, and a property bubble – the very system which the crony-corporatist globalist oligarchy has created and encouraged at least partially to enrich and empower itself, and then uses it as a weapon against its own creators. Sun Tzu, I suspect, would approve.

These are merely the economic measures. There are others. For example, it needs only six vehicles travelling sedately, but perfectly legally, at 40-50 mph in a horizontal line across all six lanes, to induce motorway gridlock.

In 2000, we saw what just 3,000 people – a mere 0.02 per cent of 17.4 million – so nearly achieved by boxing clever. Just like Sun Tzu favoured, they targeted their opponent where he least expected it, at a point where he was weak, and would have preferred not to fight.Fuel Protests 2000 v1

Imagine what pressure could be brought to bear on a Brexit-denying government and political class by a concerted, concentrated mass participation in a rolling programme of peaceful, non-violent, civic resistance on the same basis.

It feels increasingly unlikely that we’ll succeed in getting our democracy-disdaining political class to implement the democratic result they promised to respect and honour by appealing to their principles, or to their hearts and minds.

But then, as a shrewd, if cynical, man reportedly once said: ‘If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will soon follow’. 

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Visit by The President of the USA? Protest! Visit by The Emir of Qatar? Tumbleweed..

How the reaction of the ‘feminist’ Women’s March and Women’s Equality Movements to the Emir of Qatar’s London visit contrasted somewhat with their reaction to Trump’s London visit of barely a fortnight earlier        

During the week of 23rd to 27th July, the Emir of Qatar, HH Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani,  was visiting London, ostensibly to ‘strengthen bilateral relations between both countries‘, but also to seek international support in the face of the ongoing blockade, now over a year old, imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. 

Included in his schedule, as well as meetings with a delegation of MPs and Peers from both houses of Parliament, was a meeting with Theresa May and also one with Jeremy Corbyn, (who, despite having ostentatiously declined to meet President Trump, the elected Head of State of a democratic republic, evidently had no qualms about meeting HH The Emir, the unelected Head of State of a hereditary absolute monarchy). 

Anti-Qatar protest LON 23-27 JUL 2018The visit was not uncontroversial. Protests were expected, and duly materialised, not only against Qatar’s alleged role as a promoter and funder of Wahhabism-inspired international Islamist-Jihadist terrorism, but also its involvement in both the Syrian and Yemen conflicts. 

Nor are those its only failings. Were I a woman, Qatar would not be high on my list of desirable places to live. As a society where Shari’a Law is the main source of legislation, women can be flogged for ‘illicit’ sexual relations, by up to 100 lashes for adultery, but punished by death where those ‘illicit’ sexual relations were between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man.

Although never, apparently, used, stoning remains a legal punishment. Apostasy is similarly punishable by death, blasphemy by 7 years’ imprisonment, and proselytising any religion other than Islam by 10 years’ imprisonment. A woman’s testimony remains worth only half that of a man’s. LBGT rights are minimal, if any: ‘sodomy’ is punishable by 1-3 years in prison.        

The ‘Women’s Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity’ section of Human Rights Watch’s 2017 report on Qatar noted that Qatari law on family and personal status ‘continues to discriminate against women‘. A wife’s responsibility to ‘look after the household and obey her husband‘ is enshrined in law, which criminalises neither domestic violence or marital rape.

So, bearing in mind both the Women’s March and Women’ Equality Movements’ calls to arms for vociferous protests against Trump’s visit a mere two weeks earlier. . .    

Womens March Womens Equality notifys re Trump visit. . . and particularly their forthright condemnation of his self-evident misogyny. . .

WEP Trump misogyny comp. . . there would surely, I thought, be ‘feminist’ Twitter outrage, condemnation, and protest from them, against the visit of an unelected Head of State of a country as infamous as Qatar for such egregious maltreatment of women, and on a scale at least double or triple that manifested against Trump? 

Alas not. Here, as far as I can discover by back-searching both their timelines, are all the tweets of protest issued by both groups against the Emir’s visit:

WEPUK & WML tweets protest Emir Qatar

Nor, it seems, was I the only one to notice. I fear a potential recruit to the cause may have been lost. . . 2018.07.22 Eva Bradbury WML Emir Qatar

In my earlier ‘Faux-“Feminism” on the March‘, published as recently as 13th July, I suggested that both these movements, despite their names, aren’t political movements about women, but political movements for women, and specifically for women of a certain political persuasion, exhibiting virtually the predictably-standard package of Left-‘Liberal’, fashionably politically-correct, attitudes.

I suggested that both movements present as metropolitan middle-class left-wing movements, principally for metropolitan middle-class left-wing women favouring an aggressive cultural-marxist third-wave iteration of feminism which is viscerally and stridently anti-Western generally and anti-American especially. And, outside what can be included within those parameters, one not much concerned about the rights of other oppressed women at all.

No further questions, M’Lud.

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The Overpowering Stench of Treachery

The sheer scale and level, exposed by the past week’s revelations, of Theresa May’s deceit and double-dealing on Brexit have created an overwhelming miasma of perfidy that now envelops her, her Government, and her Party

Note: this is the longer (and updated) version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Wednesday 18th July 2018.

If there was already a whiff of treachery surrounding Theresa May’s Machiavellian double-dealing revealed in her Soft-Remain (non)-‘Brexit’ plan sprung on her Cabinet at Chequers on Friday 6th July, then the past week has transformed it into nothing short of an overwhelming stench.

On Thursday 12th July, it emerged that May had not, as she claimed, merely ‘shown’ her plan to German Chancellor Angela Merkel: as many had suspected, correctly as it turned out, it had actually been submitted for approval. At the Chequers ‘summit’, the now-resigned former Brexit Secretary David Davis was, reportedly, told by May that her plan could not be changed, because ‘I have already cleared it with Angela Merkel’.

What an admission. Britain’s head of government requesting approval of her plan for Brexit, (if the ‘Brexit’ label can any longer be accurately applied to it all) before its disclosure even to her own Cabinet, from a foreign leader who, if not an enemy, must certainly be regarded as an adversary.

2018.07.12 Me Theresa Chamberlain Betrayal in our timeWas May really so naïve as to imagine that its content would not immediately be relayed to Michel Barnier and the EU’s negotiating team? If so, that surely beggars belief. Several less than flattering comparisons with Chamberlain’s 1938-1939 undue deference to Hitler inevitably followed, but were hardly excessive. May’s No. 10 Downing Street team reacted by issuing an (unconvincing) denial of the words allegedly used to Davis, but, tellingly, not of their substance.

Then, late on Saturday 14th July, came the bombshell. Former (and also-resigned) Minister of State at the Brexit Department, Steve Baker, revealed the covert, cloak-and-dagger operation, mounted by 10 Downing Street and presided over by May, not only deliberately to foil a Brexit which would fulfil the pledges of May’s 2017 General Election Manifesto and her Lancaster House and Florence speeches, so as to engineer as a substitute for it the Soft-Remain plan presented to the Chequers ‘summit’ as an unalterable fait-accompli, but also secretly to use the Brexit Department’s functions and output as deception and camouflage to fool Ministers, MPs and the public into believing that a genuine Brexit was being pursued.

Baker’s quotes were, and are, political dynamite, and almost defy belief:

‘An establishment elite, who never accepted the fundamental right of the public to choose democratically their institutions, are working towards overturning them.’

‘The Brexit Department was effectively a Potemkin structure designed to distract from what the Cabinet Office Europe Unit was doing for the Prime Minister’

May had willingly deceived not just us, the voting public, but even her own Ministers and MPs. She mobilised them to defeat the Lords’ Brexit-wrecking amendments in the House of Commons over the past few weeks, so as to preserve the façade of a plausible-sounding Brexit. At the same time, she was presiding over a secret plot cynically to deceive and exploit her own Brexit Department as a camouflage to conceal her Cabinet Office Europe Unit’s backstairs operation to procure her preferred Soft-Remain (non)-Brexit, in collusion with the EU negotiators.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why the Eurocrats refused to negotiate with us on the basis of May’s fabled ‘Red Lines’, if they were at the same time being privately sounded out on what became the Chequers Deal. The ineradicable suspicion is that Brussels was being secretly assured all the time that our ‘official’ negotiating stance was mere theatre for the consumption of the gullible masses, and that the UK would accept whatever crumbs were chosen to be dropped from the Brussels table, at whatever cost.

Almost simultaneously, from sources close to Airbus, came allegations that May’s arch-Remainer inner circle had manipulated it into issuing, in the week preceding the Chequers ‘summit’, its much-publicised dire warnings about the dangers for jobs and exports of a No-Deal Brexit.

However, this commentary, by someone with the technical knowledge to know, suggests that the reality is rather more prosaic and long-term, and that subordinating the commercial imperatives of aircraft manufacturing to fulfilling the short-term expediencies of politicians with an agenda isn’t always the wisest course.

Whatever its effect, Airbus’ ‘welcome’ anti-Brexit contribution had, it was said, been agreed after discussions with the Government – presumably signifying Business Secretary and arch-Remainer Greg Clark having been not merely the willing mouthpiece of pro-Brussels, crony-corporatist big-business, but also its helpful script-writer too.

That, in the midst of all this, both Business Minister Andrew Griffiths’ forced resignation after sending over 2,000 ‘lewd’ texts to two female constituents, and the Government awarding a £2billion RAF contract, not to its compliant partner-in-deception Airbus, but to Boeing, passed almost without comment, spoke volumes.

Political observers were still trying to digest the Baker revelations when May herself appeared on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday 15th July: though not before claiming, somewhat incredibly in The Mail On Sunday that she was ‘fighting for the Brexit that the British people voted for’, but later contradicting herself by issuing her ‘Back my Brexit, or I’ll abandon any Brexit’ threat.  How the latter was meant to assist the former was unclear.

Predictably, May’s interview with Andrew Marr did not go well. It culminated in what May obviously intended to be the takeaway soundbite, but which backfired spectacularly. Her “People may have voted with their hearts, but I have to be hard-headed” remark successfully managed to disparage 17.4 million Leave voters by condescendingly portraying them as merely un-thinking and emotion-driven.

It emerged later that day that, as if No 10 threatening dissenting Ministers with a walk home from Chequers on Friday 6th July wasn’t petty enough,  Conservative Central Office was now apparently contemplating threatening to withhold centrally-disbursed funds from Brexiteer Tory MPs.

2018.07.16 Strafford Tory threats de-fund Brexiteer MPsAlthough, if true, its enthusiasm for this may be tempered by the prospect of some of the £4million loans extended to it from constituency associations being recalled and used locally to support Brexiteer MPs, it did tend to show May’s claque behaving more like the henchmen of a paranoid Mafia boss than the office of the Prime Minister in a democracy.

The morning of Monday 16th July brought what is arguably the next phase of the Remainer-Elite’s Project Overturn Referendum, Justine Greening’s proposal for a second vote on  Brexit. Which is curious, to say the least, given her January 2017 assertion that, although she was a pro-Remain campaigner and voter, nevertheless ‘we have to respect the overall democratic result.’

Greening re 2nd Ref via Change Britain

If incredulous initial observations, that this was less likely to be an original idea conceived by Ms Greening, hitherto most noted for proposing that individuals be empowered to change their gender merely by ticking a box on an official government form, than a pre-planned, scripted, intervention using her as the designated mouthpiece, may have been merely churlish, the subsequent trenchant criticism and the  widespread derision heaped on her suggested Referendum question – two Leave options to split the Leave vote, but only one option for Remain – was more than justified.

Justine Greening's 2nd referendum planThe afternoon of Monday 16th July saw May make a statement to the House of Commons on the previous weekend’s NATO summit. Standing at the Despatch Box, and with a completely straight face, she criticised Russian President Vladimir Putin for ‘undermining democracy’. Not for the first time, she gave the impression that her brain simply does not connect her mouth with her memory.

The House then debated the Taxation (Cross-Border Trade) Bill. After (rightly, but, predictably, for the wrong reasons) May had accepted four amendments tabled by Brexiteers of the backbench European Research Group, the consequences of which would be effectively to render May’s Soft-Remain (non)-Brexit Plan unacceptable to the EU, the most die-hard Tory-Remainer MPs retaliated by actually voting with Labour, the Liberal-Democrats and the SNP, against the Government trying to pursue the Ultra-Soft Brexit they claim to want.

We thus saw alleged ‘Conservatives’, plotting with Leftists to prevent the Government honouring the very Manifesto commitment on which those same ‘Conservatives’ had been content to stand for election and be elected, a mere 13 months ago.

On the morning of Tuesday 17th July, those same die-hard Tory-Remainer MPs were reported to again be aiming to defeat their own Remainer-dominated Government in further debate on the Cross-Border trade Bill that evening. Despite knowing full well that, should they succeed in defeating the Government, that could precipitate a General  Election whose outcome was likely to be a Corbyn-led Government, no fewer than 12 of them voted with Labour and other Leftist parties in a way that reflected starkly their anti-Brexit recalcitrance and desire to see it halted it in its tracks, whatever the cost to their Party.

The 12 Remainer rebels

They failed. Thanks to 5 brave Labour-Brexiteers defying their Party and voting with the Government, not to ‘support the Tories’ but to uphold democracy, the Government won the vote by 307 votes to 301. This almost certainly means that the May-Robbins Soft-Remain (non)-Brexit Plan will be dead on arrival in Brussels, containing provisions that the EU could probably never accept.

However whether a Prime Minister, who by now evidently lacked the authority even to persuade MPs to award themselves five extra days’ paid holiday by bringing Parliament’s Summer Recess forward, would have even noticed is in itself debatable.

To an extent, the Greening proposal and the Parliamentary antics of the die-hard Tory-Remainer MPs are peripheral to the reek of deliberate betrayal now pervading the May Administration and the upper reaches of the Conservative Party. But they are nevertheless an integral part of it.

With the possible, and even then disputable, exception of Blair on Iraq, I personally cannot recall in recent political history an example of a Prime Minister practising sheer anti-democratic duplicity and deception on a level and scale equivalent to what has been revealed about May in the past week.

While pretending to be implementing the democratically-expressed wishes of the British electorate, she has in fact been systematically deceiving her own Cabinet, Ministers, MPs, activists, voters, and the public, in order to manifest the wishes of a small coterie which clearly regards both the demos and the institution of democracy with undisguised contempt, and as something to be ignored, if not covertly circumvented, if it delivers an outcome uncongenial to them.

Moreover, the Party that she nominally – and I use the word advisedly – leads cannot escape the charge of complicity in her perfidy. Which other Ministers were in on the plot? Who knew what, and when? At the very least, that the majority of its MPs, even now, support her desire to mute if not negate the largest mandate for one specific policy in British political history leave them open to that charge.

Were her chicanery and double-dealing, and their own charlatanry, restricted to matters of domestic politics, they might, though still egregious, evade the ultimate accusation of treachery. But they are not. They prejudice and endanger, not only the enduring public consent for our constitutional settlement and the continuing validity of our democracy, but also the nature of our relationship with a foreign power who, though it may not be an enemy, is arguably an adversary and certainly not, in this matter, a friend. It is this latter element which surely makes the accusation of treachery tenable.

The present ‘Conservative’ Party, at least in its higher echelons of command, has been exposed this past week as a morally-bankrupt cesspit of political putrefaction, a rotting, decaying husk. In another, perhaps better, time, a Prime Minister accused of what Theresa May now, with justification, stands accused of, would have been defenestrated within days, if not hours. That she is allowed to cling insecurely to office, incompetent and ineffective in everything she does except calculated betrayal, is the visible manifestation of the overpowering stench of treachery that envelops her and her Party.

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

This Just Got A Lot Bigger Than Brexit

The May Government’s apparent determination to pursue only the softest of Soft-Brexits, by whatever means and at whatever cost, has produced a quasi-constitutional crisis of democracy that is far bigger than Brexit itself

Note: this is the long (and updated) version of the article first published at The Conservative Woman on Tuesday 10th July 2018.

A dramatic and febrile three days in the wake of the virtual imposition, including via the use of threats almost comical in their puerile pettiness, by an embattled but stubbornly-authoritarian Theresa May of her Brexit proposals at the Cabinet’s Chequers so-called Brexit “summit” on Friday 6th July, culminated on the afternoon of Monday 9th July in the resignation of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, following those of Brexit Department Secretary David Davis and Minister of State Steve Baker respectively, late on the evening of Sunday 8th July.

May has no right to feel aggrieved, or even surprised. First, her proposed negotiating position, about as far removed from her 2017 manifesto promises and previous negotiating pledges as chalk from cheese, were rightly labelled ‘Remain-By-Any-Other-Name’ and ‘Brexit-In-Name-Only’, and lacerated by multiple commentators for their disingenuousness and lack of ambition, their undue deference to Remainer intransigence and Brussels diktats alike, and even their downright mendacity. 

Foremost among these, though, was a devastating memorandum from Lawyers For Britain’s Martin Howe QC, exposing how, in contrast to the claims advanced implausibly by her sycophantic Remainer colleagues, May’s proposals would lead directly to a worst-of-all-worlds Black-Hole Brexit with Britain stuck permanently as a rule-taking vassal-state in the enduring grip of the EU’s legal and regulatory maw. 

On Sunday 8th July’s BBC Sunday Politics, presenter Sarah Smith extracted from Conservative Party Deputy Chairman James Cleverly an admission that, in contrast to what had hitherto been spun, the UK would automatically adopt any new EU rules, despite having no say over devising them, unless a (Remainer-dominated, remember) Parliament actually decided not to. Hardly the claimed “taking back control of our laws”.

Then it all got much worse. It emerged that May had  “shown” (or submitted for approval?) her Brexit proposals to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, before their disclosure even to Cabinet, ignoring every convention of collective Cabinet government. She was duly excoriated, both for a grave breach of constitutional protocol, as well as a characteristically appalling lack of judgement.

This was then followed by the additional revelation that her No. 10 Chief of Staff, Gavin Barwell and her staunchly anti-Brexit, pro-EU, éminence-grise Olly Robbins had seemingly been working on her ultra-soft Brexit plan, in secret, not even confiding in the Cabinet, apparently for months.

Fuel was added to the fire which by now was well beyond merely smouldering, by both the unequivocally-critical terms of David Davis’ utterly-damning resignation letter – 

“. .the inevitable consequence of the proposed policies will be to make the supposed control by Parliament illusory rather than real. . “

“The ‘common rule book’ policy hands large swathes of our economy to the EU”

and the blatant lie in May’s point 2 – “[we are] ending free movement” – of her reply. 

One type of free movement may be being cosmetically “ended”, but only to be replaced by a different kind of free movement: and May refuses even to guarantee not to discriminate against non-EU nationals in its application.

Speculation was rife on the morning of Monday 9th July that May would use the opportunity presented by the Davis and Baker resignations to abolish the Brexit department completely, and fold it into the Cabinet Office, to be oversighted by none other than Robbins. This truly alarming prospect turned out not so far to be true: but that it was regarded as a strong possibility at all surely speaks volumes.

Next on that same Monday morning came the news that May’s Chief of Staff, the former Tory MP Gavin Barwell noted chiefly for his labelling Brexit ‘the politics of hate’, was to brief Labour, Liberal-Democrat and SNP MPs on her (Non)-Brexit ‘Brexit’ plans. Although subsequently shelved, the implication of this was momentous, and clear: uber-reluctant Brexiteer May, prepared to solicit the votes of the pro-Remain Opposition parties in order to get her (Non)-Brexit plans through Parliament, against both her own backbenchers trying to hold her to her manifesto commitments, and the votes of 17.4 million people.

In my opinion, the scaremongering by the likes of Airbus and BMW of the previous week, with Business Secretary and arch-Remainer Greg Clark acting as the willing mouthpiece of pro-Brussels, crony-corporatist big-business, is indelibly linked to this. Who knows what donations have been threatened to be withheld unless Brexit is effectively killed off, or promised if it is?  

It’s now abundantly clear that we have a political class that is resolutely determined, almost at any price, not to enact the instruction given to it by the British electorate, and is led by a Prime Minister evidently prepared to destroy her own party & even democracy itself, in order to perpetuate Britain’s subservience to the anti-democratic supranational EU. Always more Miliband-ite than even Blairite, May’s mask has finally slipped.

This means that the quasi-constitutional crisis we now face is greater than the extant issue. This just got a lot bigger than Brexit. It’s about nothing less than whether we’re a functioning citizens’ democracy at all, or unwilling subjects of an unaccountable apparatchik-elite pursuing its own agenda in defiance of, if not actually against, the people.

We just have to win this fight, and now in a much wider sense than merely holding a reluctant or even intransigently-defiant government to the referendum verdict it promised to implement, or the manifesto pledge on which it stood for election.

It’s now about so much more than Brexit. We can’t afford to lose. Because if we do, a triumphalist and overwhelmingly Remainer Left-‘Liberal’ Elite Oligarchy, who dominate Britain’s political, media, academic and cultural classes and thus control virtually every institution of public life, are likely to try and wreak a terrible revenge on the ordinary people of this country.

We saw a taste of it in their furious reaction to the Referendum result, and about which I’ve previously written at TCW. I suspect it would intensify. So nearly thwarted, via the near-loss of what they revere as axiomatic, and moreover to what they contemptuously regard as a backward, racist, xenophobic, unsophisticated, uneducated, politically-illegitimate rabble, they would probably redouble their efforts to foist EU rules, uncontrolled mass immigration, progressive loss of civil liberties, multiculturalism and divisive identity-politics on us in greater measure for having had the temerity to rebel.

I can recall tweeting, just after 2016 EU Referendum, that pro-EU, ‘Liberal’-Elite, New-Class Establishment Oligarchy would not accept without a fight its defeat by the Demos, and especially on an issue as fundamental to its entire world-view as EU membership, and that we might well have to take to the streets, preferably and hopefully non-violently, to enforce the implementation of the Referendum result.

That prospect now feels closer than ever, and we may have no choice. To quote Thomas Paine: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace”.

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