Tag: Brexit

European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics Monday 2nd January 2017

Bearding Branson For Bucks

Branson was dead keen to play for Remain. To pay for Remain, though, not quite so much….

Recall how, during the EU Referendum, one of the Remain campaign’s most prominent and vocal celebrity supporters for keeping Britain in the EU was Richard Branson?

Despite laying himself open to charges of rank hypocrisy – Branson, remember, is such an ardent advocate of Britain’s EU membership that he bases himself in the (non-EU) Caribbean, and his business interests in (equally non-EU) Switzerland – Beardie was nevertheless adamant about what a sheer, unmitigated catastrophe for Britain a vote for Brexit would be.

Neither the numerous critics of his arrant hypocrisy, nor the multitude of commentators who pointed out how, er, spectacularly inaccurate a track record he had on the entire issue of the Euro and the Single Market, could deter him.

Now surely, you might imagine, such a committed pro-European wouldn’t have hesitated to back his unshakeable convictions with a sizeable chunk of his considerable fortune? Via even some kind of significant contribution to such a transparently noble cause?

Alas not.

For, as Michael Mossbacher and Oliver Wiseman recount in their book “Brexit Revolt – How The UK Voted To Leave The EU”, Beardie, although keen to be associated prominently with the case for a Remain vote, was, shall we say, rather less keen to stump up all the moolah to pay for it….

That’s right – the Remain camp had to tap up billionaire pro-Labour, pro-EU donor and peer Lord David Sainsbury to pay, in addition to this other donations to the Remain cause, part of the cost of Billionaire Branson’s Remain-supporting ads.

And now, being openly unwilling to accept the democratic verdict of 17.4 million people, Beardie’s also agitating for either a second Referendum, or in effect a Parliamentary blocking of Brexit implementation.

Presumably he’d want to play an equally prominent pro-Remain role in any second Referendum. And possibly even a third if a second once again delivers the “wrong” result.

Let’s hope for Sainsbury’s sake that he has a lock on his wallet….

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Economics, European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics Wednesday 30th November 2016Thursday 1st December 2016

The LibDems Can’t Half Pick ‘Em

The LibDem candidate for tomorrow’s Richmond Park by-election is an unconvincing combination of contradictions. She deserves to be defeated.

We’re used to the LibDems occasionally picking slightly iffy parliamentary candidates to contest either General Election or by-election seats.

The case of one Ibrahim Taguri, the alleged “fund-raiser” forced to resign as candidate in Brent Central after a “donations-in-return-for-access” scandal, comes to mind: as does the case of George Cunningham (Chair of “Brussels & Europe LibDems”, incidentally), suspended as parliamentary candidate in Thanet North after allegations of impropriety which included bringing in donations from abroad.

In the case of Sarah Olney, candidate in the Richmond Park by-election being held tomorrow, though, the LibDems appear to have picked a candidate whose problem isn’t so much one, as it were, of convictions, as of contradictions.

Firstly, on the central issue behind the by-election occurring at all, i.e., former Tory Zac Goldsmith’s resignation as an MP on principle to re-stand as an Independent on his declared opposition to Heathrow runway expansion. Olney, as one would expect, both as a Green-tinged LibDem and, to be fair, on local nuisance grounds, is also opposed to the third runway: but here’s the contradiction – her husband is a town planner who played, it appears, a key role in developing Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

That of itself is perhaps a tad awkward, but probably no more than that if fully disclosed – it’s his profession, after all, and everyone has to live – but the contradiction has been exacerbated by her decision to play down the fact almost to the extent of concealing it.

Her campaign leaflets, we learn, make a point of mentioning his “significant experience in implementing large-scale infrastructure projects”, but, er, omit that one particularly “large-scale infrastructure project” he helped to implement was the last-but-one major project at the facility whose expansion she vehemently opposes.

There’s an interesting potential conflict of interest here. If Olney wins, on an overtly anti Heathrow expansion ticket, she acquires all the pecuniary and status rewards of an MP. On the other hand, the development will probably go ahead anyway, so her husband, with his experience, also stands to gain professionally. Win/win for the Olneys?

If she loses – and bear in mind that the least she’s likely to achieve is a good second, because neither the Conservatives nor UKIP are contesting the seat, and the Labour candidate looks like a no-hoper – she’s no worse off than she is now, and the Heathrow development probably proceeding anyway still stands to benefit her husband. No-change/win for the Olneys?

The contradiction between the public position (and it’s without doubt sincerely held) and the limited potential for personal downside is intriguing.

That’s the local factor at issue in the Richmond Park by-election. The national one, of course, is the EU Referendum, Brexit, and the desire of the LibDems either to dilute it to the point of virtual impotence or preferably frustrate and overturn it entirely, whether by parliamentary or judicial manoeuvres. Which is where the second contradiction arises.

As you’d expect, and again as a fairly standard LibDem Europhile, Olney is opposed to Brexit. As their candidate in Richmond Park, where over 70% of votes cast in the EU Referendum were for Remain, she’s also an at least implied backer of the anti-democratic Unreconciled Continuity Remain cabal’s machinations – prominent in which are two of the party’s former leaders and also its current one – to delay, diminish and preferably negate it, whether by Judicial Review, parliamentary vote(s) or even by pressing for a second Referendum.

The contradiction here is this: Olney is on record as previously saying that people must accept the UK’s decision to leave the EU, and that the government should not seek to “re-run” the vote.She had even gone as far as calling for Leavers and Remainers to “come together”, and “make a success of Brexit”. But with her party leader Tim Farron already having pledged to make the contest a “Brexit by-election”, the question arose as to how Olney would handle such an embarrassing contradiction.

Very much in the same way, it turns out, as she handled the Heathrow contradiction: by concealing it. On the afternoon of 26 October, apparently, she deleted her personal website and its call for the democratic verdict of the British people to be respected. She now suggests that Theresa May should commit to a second Referendum on our EU-exit terms “to buy herself time and negotiating capacity”. That’s quite a U-turn, even for a LibDem…..

When Olney started her campaign, it was mainly, though in fairness not exclusively, a local one. Airport expansion was the key issue, she claimed, and a vote for the LibDems would “make a stand against Heathrow”.

Whether the third contradiction – the switch of primary focus from the local to the national issue – has come about from anti-Brexit conviction or from embarrassment at family connections with Heathrow expansion is a moot point, but come about it most certainly has.

Far from being a “stand against Heathrow”, a LibDem victory would now be nothing less than a “Brexit game-changer”, seemingly. [Notwithstanding the fact that it would bring the number of LibDem MPs up from only 8 to only 9, presumably, and hopefully thereby make not one whit of difference to the Government’s proceeding to implement the democratic Referendum result.]

That was on 23 November. In the space of a mere week, however, it has mutated into something even more momentous. No longer a mere “Brexit game-changer”, the Richmond Park by-election tomorrow is now, we are told, “the most powerful vote you ever cast”.

Wrong, Sarah. The most powerful vote any of us alive have ever and will ever cast was the vote of 23 June 2016, when no fewer that 17,410,742 of us voted to defy the imprecations and exhortations of the globalist-utopian political, economic, financial and cultural ‘liberal’-elite, and recover our political and economic sovereignty to our own shores and our own ballot-boxes, to be determined democratically by us and us alone.

For that reason above all, it’s important that the LibDems don’t win this by-election.

I’m frankly ambivalent about Zac Goldsmith. His Mayoral campaign was abysmal: his languid environmentalism is a turn-off: his susceptibility to, and collaboration with, Exaro’s rightly now-disgraced “Westminster Paedo Ring” campaign was misguided or worse: and I believe his opposition to Heathrow expansion is strategically wrong.

But I admire his principled decision to abide by his commitment to his constituents over Heathrow, even at political risk to himself: his advocacy of more direct democracy via a proper MPs’ Recall Mechanism: and above all, his unswerving devotion to the Brexit cause. For those reasons alone, I hope he wins.

But there is another. If Goldsmith does manage to win, it will mean that the Europhile, anti-Brexit LibDems, for this by-election allied with the Greens instead of competing with them for the same voter demographic, and in possibly one of the most LibDem-friendly, Remain-supporting, anti-Brexit constituencies in the country, will have failed.

That would send a powerful message to the egregious Farron, Clegg, Ashdown and all their motley crew of embittered, anti-democratic Remainer plotters, intent on ignoring or overturning the expressed will of the people.

And that will be a very fine contradiction indeed.

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Civil-Liberties, European-Union, Media, Political-Philosophy, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics, US-Politics Wednesday 16th November 2016Friday 18th November 2016

Oikophobia Unleashed

Brexit then Trump has caused hitherto-muted ‘Liberal’ contempt for the masses to erupt unconstrained

A week may be a long time in politics: but the 4½-month period between late-June and mid-November seems to have gone by in a flash.

Because, between the aftermaths of the two political earthquakes represented by the UK electorate’s vote for Brexit on 23rd June and the US electorate’s vote for Trump on 8th November, the chorus of Left-‘Liberal’ anger, objection, complaint and condemnation has been both continuous in frequency and unchanging in content.

A word on semantics. I habitually use “Left-‘Liberal'” for two reasons: the “Left” to distinguish it from the Classical-Liberalism to which it now bears hardly any relation, and the quotes around ‘Liberal’ to convey that its truly ‘liberal’ components are harder to detect. In US, and increasingly now in UK, usage, ‘Liberal’ actually means Left-‘Liberal’: so the remainder of this piece will use it as such.

‘Liberal’ opinion would always have been anti-Brexit. It prefers unaccountable, democracy-bypassing supranational institutions to the democratic sovereign nation-state: it favours unfettered immigration rather than even mildly-controlled borders: it supports elites-benefiting crony-corporatism over genuinely competitive markets: and it would rather single-regulatory-area trading blocs than free trade.

‘Liberal’-elite received-opinion, anti nation-state and globalist, overwhelmingly informed the anti-Brexit argument. It was all-pervasive, from Government through the plethora of acronymed organisations to the Remain campaign itself, and all echoed faithfully by their largely equally-‘Liberal’ media amen-corner. So its palpably-traumatic shock when 52% of Referendum voters ignored or rejected its pro-EU exhortations, scaremongering and pressure, and voted instead to Leave, was at least predictable.

Less predictable, however – although, as we’ll see, perhaps not entirely – was the volume and tenor of the vilification heaped on the 52% who had shown the temerity to ignore the instructions of their self-assumed intellectual and cultural superiors, and vote instead for economic and political self-determination.

They were not merely wrong, ran the ‘Liberal’ narrative, disseminated via innumerable furious and vitriolic denunciations in the visual, print and online media. They, especially the swathes of working and middle-class voters outside the M25 who voted Leave in droves, had voted the way they had because they were perverse, racist (pick any “-ist” you like, really), ignorant, xenophobic, and – favourite of all – “uneducated”. The Referendum, they argued, should be ignored, and the question re-put.

Moving from the particular to the general, democracy itself was soon identified and duly arraigned as the alternative culprit. The Referendum wasn’t even about EU membership at all, it was claimed, but about something else entirely. So Cameron, went this theme, had been wrong to concede something so unpredictable as a referendum at all: the arguments were too complex for the great majority of the voting public to understand, let alone decide on: why, perhaps even mass democracy itself was a flawed concept, seeing that at least half of the voters were plainly cerebrally-challenged, and manifestly too ill-equipped intellectually to participate in it.

Many were surprised by the unabashedly-articulated virulence. But not all – more astute commentators noted that the reaction was more a case of the mask slipping. The reflex was new, not in substance, but only in the extent to which ‘Liberal’ opinion no longer felt any constraint or reluctance about expressing it so clearly and openly.

Among the affluent, mainly-metropolitan, upper-middle-class, educated, intellectual and cultural Left, a faux-solicitude for the masses going hand-in-hand with a visceral revulsion for them has a long and unattractive history. One could perhaps cite as examples the early Fabians, or that epitome of Bloomsbury disdain Virginia Woolf: but suffice it to refer to that George Orwell quote from The Lion And The Unicorn with which so many are so familiar:

“In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanised.  They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the  general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident  thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals  are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always  felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman  and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse  racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably  true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of  standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a  poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping  away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes  squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always  anti-British.”

The philosopher Roger Scruton deploys what I still consider by far the most descriptive term for the phenomenon of mainly metropolitan ‘Liberals’ consumed by contempt for the nation & its white working and middle classes. He calls it Oikophobia, from the Greek oikos, meaning home: a repudiation and irrational fear of, even hatred of, one’s own nation, heritage, traditional culture and people.

He went on to amplify it in his magisterial speech entitled “Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Need to Defend the Nation-State”, delivered – with a prescience that in retrospect one can only marvel at – on 23rd June 2006, exactly 10 years to the day before our own Referendum Day. This is the passage that stands out:

That rampant ‘Liberal’ oikophobia, aimed at the Brexit-voting classes, whatever their socio-economic status and irrespective of their reasons, has scarcely diminished since its post-23/6 eruption.

In vain do its targets point out that, far from being a vote by the allegedly prejudiced, hatred-filled, “xenophobic”, “uneducated” mob, 53% of those voting Leave gave as their reasons the fundamental issue of sovereignty and democracy: the principle – clearly anathema to sophisticated ‘Liberals’ – that decisions about the UK should be taken by, and in, the UK.

As a usually very non-political friend put it to me: “I voted Leave because I want my kids to grow up and live in a society where the taxes they have to pay, and the laws they have to obey, are decided by, and only by, politicians who they can elect and throw out, and by no-one else“.

It’s hard to better this as a simple summary of the Brexit case, and I’ve unashamedly borrowed it: but apparently it establishes beyond doubt millions’ racism, xenophobia, hatred, lack of sophistication, stupidity, and every other conceivable moral failing sufficient to consign them in ‘Liberal’ opinion to beyond the Pale of respectable society.

Then, just one week ago, a second cruise missile tore into the ‘Liberal’ citadel and detonated. Confounding the instructions, predictions (and, let’s face it, the heartfelt desires) of virtually every TV outlet, pollster, psephologist, media-pundit and cultural-commentariat apparatchik in the USA and beyond, the American voting system spurned the robotic, compromised, shop-soiled doyenne of the politically-corrrect, globalist ‘Liberal’ Establishment in favour of its ultimate ogre, Donald Trump. ‘Liberal’ opinion reeled in shock, denial, anger, and then exploded in incandescent almost hysterical, fury.

To borrow a metaphor from volcanology: if Brexit 23/6 was the 20 March 1980 earthquake that created the bulge of sub-surface magma, visibly growing daily, on the north side of Washington State’s Mount St Helens, then Trump 8/11 was the 18 May 1980 rapid-succession earthquake, landslide and lateral blast that blew it apart and triggered the volcano’s eruption. The ensuing pyroclastic flow of ‘Liberal’ rage, frustration, hatred, bile, vituperation and contempt for the voters who delivered the dual earthquakes has both intensified and continued ever since, and it shows no sign of abating.

Just as in its post-Brexit phase, disparagement, firstly of the electorate and then secondly of democracy itself, are ‘Liberal’ opinion’s both default reactions and predominant responses.

Voters went for Trump, ‘Liberals’ insist, because they share his alleged misogyny (overlooking that 53% of white women voters and 43% of all women voters voted for him, and that among women without a college degree, he was 20% ahead).

The vote for Trump was an outpouring of latent white racism and xenophobia, they declare (ignoring that Trump garnered only 1% more of the white vote, but 2% more of the Hispanic vote, than Romney in 2012: that he attracted more Afro-American votes than Romney in 2012: and that whites voted for Obama in record numbers in both 2008 and 2012).

The traditionally Democratic-voting working class in the battleground Rustbelt states broke for Trump, ‘Liberals’ informed us, because they were, above all, “low-information” (currently the en-vogue euphemism de choix for “thick”). Whatever happened to ‘Liberal’ concern for the economically-disadvantaged and the mission to improve their educational opportunities?

Trump won because Obama is black, suggested a Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton. Entertaining this proposition requires you to make the prodigious leap of logic to infer that not liking the fact that Obama is a black man made usually-Democratic voters not vote for a white woman. Right……

61 million Americans voted for Trump, The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland implied, because they share his complete abrogation of any moral values. That a working-class man in Michigan or Wisconsin, job constantly at risk, no pay raise in 6 years and family home just re-possessed, might not regard transgender bathrooms as a first priority, seems not to have occurred to him. Perhaps it really was about the economy, stupid.

Predictably, perhaps, in view of his meltdown on BBC Question Time earlier this year, the historian Simon Schama positively dripped with metropolitan-‘Liberal’ condescension & contempt. Those with a different view to his, let us note, are not merely political opponents, but “sweaty agitation”, inclined to “nativist populism”, and, worst of all, are “people who don’t read broadsheets”. The horror.

So what conclusions can we draw from this near-visceral outpouring of ‘Liberal’ bile directed at those impudent enough to hold a contrary view? Spiked!’s Brendan O’Neill, again, put it well in a Facebook post yesterday, and the next three paragraphs draw from it.

We’ve learned that many ‘Liberal’, Democratic-voting “feminists” actively dislike to the point of vilification any women who hold an opinion different to their own, and think moreover that the 43% of them who voted for Trump must by definition be stupid and selfish, without even bothering to consider what their reasons might be.

We’ve learned that the ‘Liberal’ media-commentariat doesn’t after all have a high regard for the working and middle classes, but instead positively reviles them as backward, unsophisticated, “low-information” disrupters of its own preferred model of an anodyne, “civilised” consensus-politics, deracinated of any substantive ideological difference.

We’ve learned that even democracy itself is something that ‘Liberals’ don’t value highly when it delivers verdicts outside their acceptable range of outcomes: so much so that some are openly discussing the presumed necessity of political-IQ tests for voting, or if not, reserving big decisions exclusively for “experts”.

And finally, as Melanie Phillips put it so aptly in The Times yesterday, we’re seeing the grotesque spectacle of ‘Liberals’ weeping over the supposed demise of democracy from its inherent deficiencies, even as they simultaneously dismiss half the population as too stupid and unfit to participate in it, and speculate on ways of excluding them.

For the ‘Liberal’ globalist order, Trump after Brexit presages an existential crisis. After the Brexit vote, its repudiation by 17.4 million UK voters might have been dismissed as a one-off: but not after Trump. The rebellion against ‘Liberalism’s 30-year hegemony is growing. Next year sees elections in France, Germany and The Netherlands, with parties opposed to the ‘Liberal’ globalist order poised to make substantial gains. ‘Liberals’ therefore have to fight back, and the current deluge of Oikophobia is just the start.

Where we are with this is quite bad enough: but where we could be headed is chilling. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy”, condemns the assumed inseparability of mass democracy and voter ignorance. There is, he says, “no real solution to the problem of political ignorance, unless we are willing to break with democratic politics”, arguing instead for an epistocracy, a kind of “aristocracy of the wise”, where experts can determine political policy for those of us who are too “low-information” to have a say in them ourselves.

This too, like Oikophobia itself, has an unlovely provenance: taking us back, by inference, towards the eugenics whose possibilities fascinated Wells, Shaw, the Webbs, and the early Fabians, concerned to address the adverse societal implications of “feeble-minded” people, but this time transferred from the restricted area of welfare-entitlement to nothing less than the political-participatory process itself.

‘Liberal’ Oikophobia in isolation is unpleasant, and illiberal, but rarely more. Unleashed, and combined with a resentment at the outcomes of mass democracy whose perceived solution is mass democracy’s delegitimisation, however, it constitutes a far greater threat than does any consequence of a Trump presidency or an EU-exiting Britain. It has to be countered.

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Civil-Liberties, European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics Thursday 23rd June 2016Thursday 23rd June 2016

A Matter of Law and Liberty

The EU Referendum debate has not paid enough attention to the risk to our liberty-based legal traditions implicit in a Remain vote

Post-Brexit trade deals of varying merit. Immigration. The effect of a Brexit on the UK economy. These are the matters that have dominated the EU Referendum debate.

But the list contains one glaring omission. Almost nowhere has there been discussed the risk that a Remain vote, and its near-certain consequence of deeper integration into the EU, poses to the individual-liberty based English legal tradition.

Because part of the EU’s overall aim is explicitly to create a specifically EU corpus juris and what it openly calls a “common legal space”: an expanding both geographical jurisdiction and body of law applicable within it, made by, and administered by, the EU at supranational level.

As ever with the democracy-averse EU, though, the project proceeds both by increments and by stealth, with its ultimate objective not disclosed, because it knows that, were it to be openly proposed in one fell swoop, the voters of member-states would reject it out of hand. But its aim is nothing less than a body of pan-EU law will eventually supplant that of nation-states.

This poses an especially enormous problem for the UK, because of our fundamentally hugely-different legal tradition. Our common law grew from the ground up: it developed through individual judges adjudicating on the individual real-life cases brought before them, weighing the facts on the ground, and making decisions which became precedents over time. Indeed, much of our statute law enacted via the legislature, rather than by judicial decision, has traceable common-law roots.

The common law, based on individual liberty, enforcement of property rights, freedom of contract, separation of legislature and judiciary, and protection of the individual from the arbitrary caprices of state and government, is arguably our greatest-ever export. That the Anglosphere countries whose legal systems are based on it have consistently formed some of the freest and most prosperous societies on the planet isn’t an accident, but a discernible consequence of it.

Continental countries, in contrast, have to a much greater extent opted for an entirely different legal tradition of codified law, more often originating in the rarified air of abstract political philosophy, rather than grounded in the gritty, often untidy, reality of peoples’ actual lives, interactions and contracts.

The Continental legal tradition reflects a vision of law, liberty, personal rights, and crucially the relationship between state and individual, that is elementally inimical to our common-law and liberty-based tradition: a conflict summed up in the most frequently observed distinction that in the English tradition you may generally do anything which is not specifically prohibited, as opposed to the Continental tradition, where you may generally do nothing that is not specifically permitted.

Yet it’s that Continental tradition that informs the legal systems of the vast majority of EU member-states and which the EU’s corpus juris will overwhelmingly reflect. That shouldn’t be surprising: the EU is, after all, nothing if not a deliberately statist, top-down, technocratic, democracy-circumventing project, and for its legal system not also to conform to that philosophy would be an astonishing inconsistency.

But it’s into that illiberal tradition that a vote to Remain in the EU will consign us. Or, more likely, condemn us. In prospect are the subsumption of some the most cherished institutions and protections of our English common-law liberty – habeas corpus: the right to know the charges arraigned against you: the right to expeditious justice: the right to face your accusers in public court: the right to be tried by a jury of your peers, not by state-appointed judges – into the Continental legal tradition where these are either absent, muted, or susceptible to being set aside on the grounds of State expediency.

The law of the jurisdiction of England and Wales, whether common law or statute, doesn’t belong to MPs, much less to Ministers or Government. It belongs to us, the people. When we send MPs to Westminster, we don’t transfer ownership or possession of our law to them: we merely delegate them temporary custody of it and political responsibilty for its administration – nothing more. The law of England and Wales is not the exclusive property of transient Government or MPs to jettison, abandon or give away to another polity, without our specific consent.

We aren’t “European”. Our core values, beliefs & legal traditions give us far more in common with our Anglosphere first cousins. The Continental tradition of codified law & centralised statism is fundamentally inimical to Anglosphere ideas of freedom & liberty. Throughout our history, we’ve chosen different solutions to these fundamental questions than have our European neighbours: solutions developed ground-up, rooted in individual liberty & lived experience, not derived from abstract theory of political philosophy.

It’s that rich heritage that we still have a couple of hours to retrieve and re-energise.

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European-Union, Media, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics Tuesday 21st June 2016

I Wasn’t Wrong. I Just Underestimated.

In my March 2015 prediction of the tenor and conduct of the EU Referendum, if anything, I underestimated just how dirty it would be.

Back in March 2015, I wrote an article for fellow-Brexiteer Ben Kelly over at The Sceptic Isle, on how the EU Referendum, whenever it came, would play out. (Ben has archived it, so I can’t link to it, but fortunately I kept a Word copy of it).

The first part of the piece was a prediction of how the referendum would be conducted. Here it is:

“Whenever it comes, the EU Referendum campaign will undoubtedly be the dirtiest and most deceitful plebiscite ever seen in Britain. For the EU-enthusiasts disproportionately represented in opinion-influencing circles, there is simply too much at stake for it not to be.

For them, an OUT vote means a popular re-affirmation of the democratic, sovereign nation-statehood they have spent almost their entire adult lives repudiating. It means a national rejection of the centre-leftish, universalist, democracy-bypassing supranationalism of unelected elites, which they believe is the necessary civilising antidote to the unpredictable caprices of robust, accountable one-country pluralism.

The overwhelmingly EU-phile politico-media establishment, including the three main legacy parties, will exaggerate the supposed benefits and advantages of EU membership, and simultaneously downplay or suppress its drawbacks. There will be massive scaremongering to overstate, in wildly dramatic fashion, the alleged risks of exit, whether to UK jobs, economic growth, ease of travel, or even our much-vaunted but much less evident “influence”.

Even in the 2014 EU Parliament elections, we saw the readiness of the EU-phile movement to retail the risible “3m jobs at risk” meme, and the media’s willingness to boost it, despite its evident falsehood. The personal smearing of advocates for withdrawal will be constant, and vicious. It will be a media negative-propaganda campaign such as we have never before seen.

Hand-in-glove with the media will be what will be trailed as “the voice of business” – more accurately, the voice of big business and its representative organisations like the CBI, which benefits most from the crony-corporatism that the EU exemplifies. Big business values the EU for the competitive advantage it brings: large firms have sufficient size and economies of scale to absorb the mountains of EU regulation and attendant compliance costs that both deter new entrants and cripple their smaller, nimbler competitors. They will do everything to maintain that advantage.

Meanwhile, pro-EU campaign groups and third-sector “charities” and quangos will be vocal in support of EU membership and its alleged benefits as never before. Our emotions will be assaulted by heart-rending warnings of hardship and unfairness to recipients of charity if EU regulations cease to apply on exit.

The anti-exit movement will be backed by massive financial support, not least from the EU itself. For the EU, the stakes in a UK exit referendum being held at all are huge – remember, the entire European super-state project is predicated philosophically on the historical inevitability of ever-closer union – but the risks to the EU from that referendum delivering a UK exit are incalculable.

Britain would be the first major country, and economy, to resile from the project. Not only would it take its contributions with it, but it would almost certainly tempt others to follow. The possibility of it being the thin edge of the wedge, and the first step in the breakup of the entire edifice, could not be discounted.

The extent of EU funding which has been funnelled to the BBC and the CBI is well-known.

But the EU has also been quietly suborning civic society, and even local government, with EU funding, for many years. The recipients cannot be expected to do other than campaign vociferously for its continuation. The EU will pour money into the pro-EU, anti-exit campaign – because its own very survival could be at stake.

History shows, too, that the status quo exerts a strong voter pull in referenda, and that voting intention in favour of the status quo actually hardens as polling date approaches. Dangling before the electorate the idea that the intended change represents a risky leap into the unknown unfortunately works.”

The purpose behind this quick post isn’t to gloat, or to say “See, I told you so!” I’d much rather I’d been completely wrong, and that after a robust but more-or-less civilised campaign on the substantive issues, Britain was now irreversibly on course for a Brexit vote.

It’s just to record ruefully, not that I was right, but that I underestimated the depths to which the Government, the mainstream political parties (albeit with some honourable exceptions within them) and the Remain Campaign would sink – or perhaps that should be dive.

But the cynical, shameless exploitation, by all, of the MP Jo Cox’s murder, culminating in what Conservative Woman‘s Laura Perrins rightly calls something that should go down in the political handbook of infamy, plumbs depths of ethical depravity and turpitude even I could not have imagined.

That Britain now seems about to commit what will arguably the greatest act of national self-destruction of the Modern Era is bad enough. That it should do so as a result of being susceptible to baseness of this magnitude is profoundly depressing.

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European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics Wednesday 27th April 2016Wednesday 27th April 2016

Stronger IN …. Specious Misrepresentation

Analysis of just one tweet from the Stronger IN campaign shows both its cavalier disregard for factual accuracy and the dishonesty of its overall message

Even with two months of an acrimonious EU Referendum contest still to go, the scaremongering of Stronger IN, the Remain Campaign’s principal vehicle, has already acquired semi-legendary status. Except not, possibly, in the way it anticipated and intended.

Because, with its campaign blatantly mirroring closely the EU-phile Cameroon Government’s Project Fear, every instance of Stronger IN disingenuousness, selective interpretation and outright misrepresentation is rightly attracting immediate and widespread challenge and derision, followed almost every time by a swift and effective rebuttal.

Today has been no exception: but it’s perhaps worth deconstructing one such instance in detail, to show the extent of the deception which is, increasingly, the Remain campaign’s principal (if not its only) tactic.

At 0920 this morning, Lucy Thomas (@lucycthomas ) Stronger IN’s Deputy Director, tweeted thus:

The implication that Thomas’ tweet clearly intends to convey – that the UK’s specifically leaving the EU would adversely affect, “potentially catastrophically”, not only individual cancer patients’ survival chances but even the future of cancer research itself, instantly looks suspicious. Because, as most people with more than a passing interest in UK current affairs know, the UK’s cancer survival rates, compared to those of other advanced countries, aren’t actually particularly good, even while we’re in the EU.

As the chart below shows, in a grouping of 24 countries, we rate pretty badly – 20th overall, in fact. On relative 5-year mortality rates for cancer patients, over the five-year period 2007-2012, not only are we much, much worse than our Anglosphere cousins the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand: significantly, we’re also worse than European, but non-EU, Norway and Iceland.

At a more detailed, and solely European level, the same outcomes continue. For, as the chart on the right shows, just compared with Germany and The Netherlands, our 5-year survival rates, over the period 2007-2012 for breast, cervical and colorectal cancer were the worst of all three.

A quick Google search then establishes (in The Guardian, no less) that UK cancer survival rates trail 10 years behind other European countries. It’s worth quoting a two or three sentences in full:

“Five other European countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway) also recorded better survival rates for lung cancer in the 1990s than Britain in the 2000s.”

“For colon cancer six European countries (Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden) had better survival rates in the 1990s than Britain achieved 10 years later.”

“In the 2000s 19% of British patients diagnosed with stomach cancer survived. Better survival rates were recorded a decade earlier in Austria, Germany, Italy, Norway and Sweden.”

Norway again. Better cancer survival rates than the UK, and 10 years before. Evidently, not being in the EU isn’t a factor holding back Norway’s progress in tackling the scourge of cancer.

A further quick search yields Cancer Research’s data on worldwide cancer mortality rates, and the chart below:

It’s immediately obvious that non-EU Switzerland, non-EU Iceland, and non-EU Norway all have lower cancer mortality rates than the UK. In fact, non-EU Switzerland and non-EU Iceland have lower mortality rates than all the rest of the EU, bar Sweden and Finland. Clearly, cancer survival prospects seem, if anything, to be inversely-correlated with EU membership, rather than the opposite.

The empirical data therefore directly contradicts the impression Thomas’ tweet seems to want to convey.

Next, the content of that link in the actual The Lancet tweet, of which Thomas’ is a Retweet-With-Comment, bears closer examination.

Perhaps by now unsurprisingly, the article turns out to be inherently speculative, tentative, non-specific, certainly non-medical, and primarily an expression of political viewpoint. Again, it’s worth quoting one or two sentences:

“Part of the inherent difficulty with this debate is that the repercussions of leaving can only be speculated on”

“These unknowns mean that points of argument are often semantic, and emotionally led.”

The article attempts to make two main points. First, it implies that the specific act of withdrawing from membership of the EU political union would be the determinant of worse prognoses and outcomes for UK cancer patients. But, as we’ve seen above, from the better survival rates achieved in non-EU countries, even in Europe, that’s a viewpoint which seems wholly unsupportable.

Second, it argues that ceasing to be in the EU’s political structures presages a diminished level of medical-science co-operation. But, apart from offering no convincing argument why this should be so – why do we need to be in political union with, eg Canada, to co-operate mutually on medical science? – the assumption on which The Lancet’s assertion is based itself appears to be at variance with reality.

The chart below, taken from the UK Medical Research Council’s 2014/15 report, shows the policy influence on UK medical science by originating location:

In fact, a mere 7% of policy influence on UK medical science originates from within the EU. The equivalent UK figure is 56%: and it’s evident, moreover, that the residual 37% far outstrips the EU’s contribution of 7% to UK medical science policy origination.

Quite how Brexit would therefore so “potentially catastrophically” affect both UK cancer patient outcomes and UK cancer research is, to say the least, unclear.

This micro-checking exercise on just one tweet from the Stronger In campaign probably took no more than 10-15 minutes, including the time spent tweeting the findings as they became apparent. But what it reveals is a reality totally at variance with the impression its Deputy Director is disingenuously trying to impart.

Lucy Thomas’ narrative is factually inaccurate, specious and dishonest – a perfect metaphor, perhaps, for an entire Remain campaign that’s Stronger In misrepresentation than it is in anything else.

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European-Union, Political-Philosophy, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics, US-Politics Thursday 21st April 2016Thursday 21st April 2016

Your Advice Is Not Required, Mr President

An open letter to President Obama on British sovereignty, democracy, and the EU Referendum

Dear Mr President

Welcome to the United Kingdom: we hope you enjoy your last official visit to our shores as Head of State. But we also strongly recommend that, while renewing your acquaintance with our own Head of State, you reflect on the immeasurable historical importance, to both our countries, of independent nation-state sovereign democracy: and then conclude that for you to intervene politically in our forthcoming EU Referendum would traduce both our countries’ past histories, not to mention our own current hospitality, and in a way we find entirely unacceptable.

You’re going to try and browbeat us, Mr President, into voting to remain in the EU: in a democratically deficient, supranational political union that you would never even dare recommend to your own fellow-Americans as a political institution into which they should subjugate themselves.

We’ll return to the specifics of that particular piece of hypocrisy later: but you also evidently propose to compound the hypocrisy by pretending that your intervention has our own best interests at heart.

We’re not fooled. We’re well aware that, in governmental, political and diplomatic circles, the so-called Special Relationship is often a platitude thrown by the unscrupulous to the masses to conceal that the United States resolutely and sometimes ruthlessly acts in what it perceives as its own interests, even to the detriment of its own allies’.

We accept that, however, as being no less than how a major power should defend what it sees as its interests – but what we do not and will not accept is your pretence that a grossly-disadvantageous political arrangement for us is somehow in our interest, because it primarily serves your own.

We have a long institutional memory, Mr President. We know how, in the aftermath of World War II, America took advantage of our precarious financial state to insist on the return to convertibility of sterling, thus allowing the dollar to supplant it as the primary currency in large parts of the world.

We know how, to help promote your predecessors’ then already-incipient preference for a pan-European political union, US Marshall Plan funds were lavished on the fascist and collaborationist states whom we had sacrificed so much blood and treasure to help defeat, while we in Britain struggled to rebuild our own infrastructure and society via loans extended by America on unfavourable terms.

We know how the US threatened to destroy sterling by selling all its sterling reserves during the Suez Crisis of 1956, in order to supplant British influence in the Middle East with its own via a strategy of supporting Arab nationalism.

We know how the 1960s débacle over the aborted Skybolt nuclear weapons delivery system revealed your State Department’s making it an arm of US foreign policy that Britain must be in the (then) EEC, whatever the cost to it economically or democratically, because that was key to US interests.

More recently, Mr President, we’re well aware you have been, not merely the most Britain-unfriendly POTUS in modern history, but also arguably one of those most antipathetic to wider Western interests.

We know you have near-humiliated yourself and your country in making obsequious obeisance to the autocratic Wahhabist-Salafist rulers of a Saudi Arabia that funds Jihadism, executes apostates and jails dissenters. Indeed, you arrive in Britain fresh from abasing yourself to a Saudi Arabia that now threatens to inflict enormous damage on your economy if currently classified material exposing its complicity in 9/11 is revealed.

We know you have sanctioned a path to the development of nuclear weapons by an Iran that makes no attempt to conceal what it sees as its theocratically-mandated destiny to eliminate a democratic nation-state from the face of the earth and extirpate its people, while in the interim hanging young men from cranes in public for being gay.

We’re also aware that, as recently as last month, even as people fought for their lives and Brussels reeled in shock from violent terrorism – perpetrated by the supremacist religio-totalitarian Islamist ideology that you apparently cannot even bring yourself to name – you were tango-ing the night away in Buenos Aires, canoodling up to an Argentinian regime that still maintains its egregiously-tenuous claim to a British sovereign territory, over 90% of whose British inhabitants declare, via self-determination referendum, their overwhelming wish to remain British. The satirical cartoons captured it so perfectly, didn’t they?

So please don’t insult our intelligence, Mr President, by pretending your impending “advice”, that it’s essential for Britain’s interests for it to remain in the EU, is merely the counsel of a friend who has only our own best interests at heart. We know full well that that is not the case: only 4% of us think it even might be, as opposed to 51% who are under no illusions that US wishes, not British interests, are uppermost in your motivations. You are, in short, no friend of Britain.

Now consider the European Union you are assuring us that it would disastrous for us to leave, were it to be translated into the American sphere.

Are you prepared to tell Americans they’d have a safer and more secure future, if only they’d agree to give up their independence, sovereignty and representative democracy to submerge themselves in a new supranational political union including Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Guatemala and Paraguay, which was determined to arrogate ever-increasing powers to itself from the democratically-elected national governments of its component nation-states, as an inexorable process of creating one single pan-American superstate?

Are you prepared to tell Americans they’d be far better off in such a pan-American political union whose highest judicial authority was a court in Bolivia, consisting mainly of academic lawyers unfamiliar with American common-law traditions, but which would nevertheless be superior to, and override, your own Supreme Court?

Are you prepared to tell Americans it would be much more to their advantage to immerse themselves in a political union of which one of the cornerstones was the totally free movement of people between the 30+ states from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, with entitlements to generous welfare in their destination country, despite massive economic disparities between them?

Are you prepared to tell Americans it would be so much better for them, in such a political union, for 70% of their laws to be made by an unelected, bureaucratic, corrupt, unaccountable, viscerally anti-democratic Pan-American Commission in Bogota, whose commissioners they weren’t allowed to elect and certainly not vote out, but to which they nonetheless had to send $80 million a day for the privilege?

Actually, Mr President, we already know the answer to these questions: you would never suggest to Americans any such thing, because they have already indicated that no more than a third, at most, would support anything remotely like the political settlement to which you insist disingenuously it is in our own best interests to remain shackled. So until you are prepared to recommend Americans to give up their sovereign democracy to the kind of polity you wish to see continued to be imposed on us, we respectfully suggest that you butt out of our Referendum. Interestingly, over 100 of our own elected lawmakers seem to agree.

At the core of our EU Referendum, standing way above all issues of economics, trade or migration, is one very simple principle, but one whose incontestable, absolute necessity for government by democratic consent it is impossible to over-state: that the laws governing the citizens of a discrete-demos polity can legitimately be those, and only those, made by, and only by, the representatives directly elected by the citizens of that polity, and whom they can remove from office via the ballot-box at the next election.

The founding fathers of the great nation whose elected leader you, Mr President, will thankfully soon no longer be, considered these principles to be of such paramount importance that they and thousands of their fellow-patriots in the Thirteen Colonies were prepared to sacrifice their own lives to secure them for themselves and their future descendants. So much so that, in a few weeks’ time, on the Fourth Of July, you will celebrate the 240th anniversary of their final success in gaining their independence from a distant imperial power determined to keep its subjects in subjugation.

That you now come to us, to seek for your own interests to persuade us not to take this opportunity to recover self-government on these immutable principles for ourselves, from the 21st century equivalent of that distant imperial power determined to keep its subjects in subjugation, we find nothing short of grotesque.

We respectfully suggest, Mr President, that you abandon your plans to intervene in our democratic referendum. Perhaps you could profitably use the time to make a second and final visit to your new apparently ideological near-soulmate Fidel Castro, before the old tyrant is summoned to account by the Grim Reaper. Or possibly to work on your golf technique, which looks as though it could use some improvement.

Your advice on our vote to decide our future EU destiny is not needed.

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European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics Friday 11th March 2016Monday 18th April 2016

The Incredible Shrinking Chancellor

Formerly seen – not least by himself – as a master strategist and astute political operator, George Osborne’s authority is eroding before our eyes

“Events, dear boy, events”, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is reputed to have replied when asked to predict the factor most likely to derail his political plans. He meant “the unexpected”: in modern political parlance, the “unknown unknowns” that can, and almost always do, erupt, unforeseen, seemingly out of nowhere, to blow the most carefully-crafted plans off course.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne could be forgiven for spending more time than usual ruefully recalling Macmillan’s remarks at the moment. Because, since the start of 2016, his plans for his own political advancement have been derailed spectacularly, to an extent which, on 1st January, he can surely scarcely have imagined. Yes, partly by some of those unknown unknowns: but, ironically, also by his own blunders. His stature and authority are crumbling astonishingly, virtually on a daily basis.

Yet, contemplated from Osborne’s New Year’s Day breakfast table, 2016 must have looked satisfyingly promising. First, Budget Day on 16 March would give him the opportunity to continue the centre-leftwards tack started in his 2015 Autumn Statement, designed to capitalise politically on Corbynite Labour’s charge towards hard-Leftism, by hoovering up disaffected Blairites and Labour moderates into the Cameroon social-democracy-leaning Big Tent.

Second, David Cameron would round off his tour of European capitals pressing for EU reforms at the Brussels EU Heads of Government Summit over the weekend of 19-21 February. True, he’d return with only trifling and essentially cosmetic reforms. But, accompanied by some lurid Brexit-alarmism, a Cabinet united in campaigning for Remain, and a “helpful” media narrative, they should be just enough to persuade a risk-averse British electorate to vote to stay in the EU. Clearing the way for Cameron to resign in triumph as Prime Minister and Party Leader some time in 2017 or 2018, and leaving Osborne in pole position to see off any challenge and ascend to No 10.

Except it hasn’t quite worked out like that. In fact, it’s rapidly going pear-shaped. “Events, dear boy, events”.

Take the EU “re-negotiation”. Yes, Cameron did indeed return from Brussels with a “reform” deal: but one of such abject and transparent paucity, ineffectiveness and unenforceability, that it had unravelled, and been both rightly exposed and excoriated for it, within 72 hours. And to such an extent that the Government’s official Remain campaign strategy adopted, almost from Day 1, what had been hoped would be the back-up strategy of Project Fear. Any plausible pretence that there is a “reformed” EU at all has been dropped. Brexit-scaremongering Project Fear, to all intents and purposes, is the Remain campaign.

Then, from Osborne’s point of view, came the bombshell. He must surely have reckoned that both Boris Johnson and Michael Gove would be reliably on side, fully signed up to the Government’s official position, as fellow-advocates for Britain staying in even the risibly non-“reformed” EU that was on offer: Boris because of his general pro-EU and internationalist outlook, including a desire to see Turkey in the EU, and Gove because of his personal loyalty to Cameron. Before the Brussels summit of 19-21 February, even this political cartoon was circulating: the Party heavy-hitters, including Boris and Gove, lined up, Dad’s Army style, in Captain Camwaring’s pro-EU Home Guard platoon.

Not any more. Because in fact, the opposite happened. Boris, after much public and private agonising, declared for Leave, and Gove, with what must be one of the finest personal statements to grace British politics for a very long time, did the same.

Those two “defections”, I suspect, rocked Osborne back on his heels: not just on account of their unexpectedness, but also because of their implications, both for the EU Referendum itself, and consequentially, for Osborne’s own political future. On the Leave campaign, to Boris’ public appeal is added Gove’s principled integrity and intellectual heft. They make the outcome of the Referendum far closer and far less predictable: that the Government and Remain could actually lose it, and that Leave could triumph in a vote for Brexit, really isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility.

If that happens, despite his bluster, Cameron would, politically, be Dead Man Walking: and given that their political ideologies and fortunes have been so inextricably linked for 25 years, that means Osborne would too. Even with a wafer-thin Remain win, Cameron’s credibility, and thus Osborne’s, will be seriously damaged: the latter’s, possibly fatally, with intra-Party talk already being that the next leader will almost certainly have to come from the Party’s pro-Brexit wing.

No wonder Osborne has suddenly seemed such diminished figure, thrown off balance, ever since. His prospects of following his planned and mapped-out route of a smooth ascent to No 10 in the wake of a benignly-departing David Cameron have suffered a severe blow: they may even be receding, a victim of Boris’ burgeoning popularity with Party members and activists since his ostentatious and publicity-maximising conversion to the Brexit cause.

And it gets worse. Because, intriguingly, in only the barely three weeks that have elapsed since the denouement of these events, a gaffe-prone Osborne has been either been caught out and had to retract hubristic claims, or forced to execute a sharp policy U-turn in an humiliating climb-down, or experienced an open challenge to his authority and rebellion from his own backbenchers, on no fewer than seven separate issues.

First, the Google tax deal. A clearly pleased-with-himself Osborne made extravagant claims for the £130 million agreement he had reached with Google, presumably on the calculation of reaping political capital from the vocal lobby opposed to any (entirely legal) tax-avoidance by multinationals. That soon unravelled, however, with the revelation that it covered a full 10 years of back taxes and amounted to an effective tax rate of only 3%, against the UK standard corporation tax rate of 20%. It concluded with scathing criticism of Osborne from his own backbenchers, both the Commons Public Accounts and Treasury Committees launching separate inquiries, and both Google and HMRC being asked to re-appear before them. Google, meanwhile, are reportedly furious with Osborne for making self-aggrandising claims which have given them additional poor publicity.

Second, the claims of extra tax revenue from the lower top rate. Osborne boasted that an additional £8 billion in tax revenue had been generated from the reduction in the top rate of tax from 50% to 45%, attributing the entire amount to the rate change. Unfortunately for him, that was quickly challenged as “precarious” by none other than the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on the grounds that it ignored any deferment factor and was more a one-off gain than a systemically-permanent windfall. We have heard no more about it.

Third, the planned tax-raid on pensions. Osborne had been planning a very Gordon-Brownian stealth-tax: to abolish higher-rate tax relief on pensions, and lower the threshold at which money invested in a pension pot starts to attract high, almost penal, rates of tax. The entirely predictable backbench uproar duly ensued, with Osborne’s plans being rightly denounced as simultaneously both economically-incompetent – disincentivizing prudent retirement saving – and politically-inept – targeting a natural Tory electoral constituency. They have been dropped.

Fourth, Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station. This was announced with much fanfare by Osborne on his September 2015 trade visit to China. The deal, was, though, subject to a £2 billion taxpayer guarantee to EDF, without which they would have struggled to secure project finance, and immediately attracted informed criticism because of its capital intensiveness and cost per MWh of output. It’s now emerged that the building cost has roughly trebled, the strike-price per MWh for its output has doubled, and the start date has been put back 8 years: all within 6 months. The calls for it to be scrapped as an expensive and uneconomic white elephant are growing.

Fifth, the G20 warning against Brexit. At Osborne’s initiative, the plan was for the G20 group of advanced economies to warn Britain against exit from the EU. That quickly collapsed, to widespread derision, when commentators pointed out the inconvenient fact that 16 of the 20 G20 countries are actually outside the EU, yet self-evidently still manage to be in the top 20 economies globally. Prompting the question: how could they then credibly warn Britain, the 5th largest, that it must be inside the EU to ensure its very survival? Silence.

Sixth, this week’s Sunday Trading liberalisation débacle. Despite being warned of the likelihood of both the SNP yet again ignoring their pledge not to vote in Westminster on what are devolved matters in Scotland, and an incipient Tory backbench rebellion, Osborne nevertheless determined to push the Bill through the Commons. When it became apparent that the SNP and Osborne’s own backbenchers would indeed carry out their threats, there was a ham-fisted attempt to water down the Bill’s provisions, culminating in an humiliating rebuff from the Speaker who refused to accept a related Motion. SNP MPs duly supported Labour, the Tory rebels duly rebelled, and an embarrassing defeat for the Government, plus the loss of the liberalisation measures, was the outcome.

Seventh, another Tory backbench revolt, against another Osborne tax rise, this time on motor fuel duty. Despite 74% of the pump cost of a litre of diesel or petrol now comprising tax, Osborne, it appears, had planned to use next Wednesday’s Budget to increase the duty even further. Cue the now normal resistance movement, by up to 150 MPs, and the plans for a hike in the duty are reportedly being shelved.

These kinds of setbacks aren’t unprecedented: Osborne has had wobbles before. Think of the Pasty Tax in the 2012 Omnishambles Budget: a previous attempt to raise fuel duty with effect from January 2013 which similarly had to be abandoned on backbench pressure: and the tax-credits imbroglio of 2015, when an Osborne converted, we were told, to “listening mode” was equally forced into an embarrassing retreat.

But Osborne’s present troubles look and feel different, quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, because they’ve been coming thick and fast – no fewer than seven, and in just three weeks, which, I’d venture to suggest, is unprecedented. Qualitatively, because they contain an element which hasn’t been present in earlier iterations – a ready willingness, particularly among Tory backbenchers, not merely to voice misgivings, but vocally and robustly to resist, rebel, criticise and take to the media to denounce the Chancellor’s proposals in no uncertain terms, both as economically-disadvantageous and politically-inept.

The latter charge being especially ironic, and wounding. Because Osborne is, above all else, a Political Chancellor, far too prone to seeing virtually every aspect of economic and fiscal stewardship through the prism of partisan political triangulation. The shameless stealing of Blairite clothing in the form of a National Living Wage (aka, arbitrarily raising the floor price of labour to employers by State diktat) is but the latest example.

Osborne has long been lauded – not least by himself – as a political master-strategist. But, in truth, his excessive concentration on it, to the detriment of his economic and fiscal stewardship, has had decidedly mixed results. He’s been allowed to get away with increasing the National Debt by more in five years than even that preposterous antithesis of fiscal rectitude, Gordon Brown, managed in thirteen, largely because, when only 6% of the population know the difference between deficit and debt, few votes were risked by it.

Yet being master-strategist for two elections, 2010’s not won, even against Brown, and 2015’s, not expected to be won, but won mainly out of voters’ fear of a Labour-SNP government, tell a different story. As does the prevalence of the “austerity” narrative, despite the lamentable pace of deficit reduction. During the 2010-2015 Coalition, the overall rate of public spending reduction was a miserable 0.4% pa in real terms: supposed political master-strategist Osborne, however, succeeded in being portrayed as the heartless architect of Victorian-workhouse austerity, for the macro-fiscal equivalent of reducing a weekly £200 shopping bill by 80p.

So the last month’s acceleration in the decline of Osborne’s standing is partly an overdue reckoning: but its litany of serial hubris, politico-economic miscalculation, U-turn and climb-down, in just 20-odd days since the shock of Boris’ & Gove’s defection to the Brexit cause, have notably exacerbated its visibility. The wider appreciation of his Brown-like inveterate political-meddling and fiscal neo-Keynesianism, stealth-taxes and all, mean that the “Osbrowneomics” and “Osbrowne” memes are gaining wider currency.

As each successive Tory backbench anti-Osborne rebellion yields results, his critics are becoming more emboldened. They’re getting a taste for it, scenting blood. Osborne suddenly looks at bay, haunted, error-prone, wan, vulnerable, yesterday’s future, a fast-diminishing figure, in a way few can have predicted on 1st January.

He really is The Incredible Shrinking Chancellor, his stature and authority crumbling daily before our eyes.

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Minimal-state, low-tax, free-markets minarchist-libertarianism. Opposing all manifestations of Leftism. Lockdown sceptic.