Tag: Leftism

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

When Football Threatens Free Speech

The Woke-Left’s and the English football authorities’ attempts to censor or silence objections to England players taking the knee now extend to impliedly threatening the dissenters’ right to free speech

Note: Extended and updated version of the article published at The Conservative Woman on Sunday 13 June 2021.

If the England football team’s manager Gareth Southgate could talk once again to the grandfather whose memory and wartime service he sententiously invoked last week, as part of his ill-judged and poorly-argued “Dear England” attempt to justify his players’ continued genuflection to the extreme-Left Black Lives Matter movement, he could be in for a shock.

I suspect the old boy might tell him that, whatever his World War 2 military service was for – whether trying to do his bit for the country and survive, or even just hoping not to let down his brothers-in-arms – what it certainly wasn’t for was the abolition of capitalism, the de-funding of the police, the destruction of the family as the primary non-State societal institution, and the overthrow of white supremacist patriarchy.           

Yet however much Southgate, his cosseted, beneficiaries-of-capitalism millionaire players, and his woke-appeasing bosses at the FA might like to delude themselves otherwise, that’s the agenda to which they’re genuflecting, whether they realise it or not. Neither their sanctimonious, weasel-worded “it’s the sentiment, not the movement” excuse, nor their egregious “fans booing the gesture are doing so solely out of racism or antipathy to black players” allegation holds up for one minute.

That’s not only because there’s an almost wholly uncontentious and arguably even more effective alternative available in the form of the FA’s own linked-arms “Kick It Out” gesture.

Neither is it because being impliedly lectured on the evils of inequality and capitalism by millionaire footballers – most of whom owe their riches and status entirely to the intensely capitalistic football industry, and would be largely unremarkable if not anonymous young men without it – is grotesque to the point of meriting only ridicule.

It’s because the Woke-Left culture-warriors’ and the football authorities’ desperately pathetic argument, that the booing reflects solely racist antipathy to black players, was demolished in under 90 minutes in one of England’s warm-up games when Bukayo Saka, a 17 year-old black kid from Arsenal, was deservedly cheered to the rafters after scoring on his international debut.

It was demolished again last night, Sunday 13th June, when the same people who allegedly boo England players taking the knee solely because they’re racist and hate black players, and for no other reason whatsoever, were filmed as far apart as Manchester and London, cheering to the echo when Raheem Sterling scored the winning goal for England against Croatia.

So, at every game where the dutiful BLM-genuflectors get booed, the ensuing 90+ minutes is now demonstrably proving wrong their endorsers’ argument that “the fans who boo do so only out of racist antipathy towards black players“. However, that false argument of the Woke-Left culture-warriors and the timid, deferential football industry can be sustained only by both doggedly maintaining their allegation that dissenting fans do indeed boo the genuflectors solely for disreputable reasons, despite the evidence to the contrary. Hence, as discussed below, the seizure of the issue by both the Woke-Left and the football authorities for use as another front in their ongoing culture-war against the masses whom they disdain and hold in undisguised contempt.

Southgate might also find an analogy from the past helpful. Had he been in the England team which infamously gave the Nazi salute in Berlin in 1938, would he have claimed that by raising his right arm in the Fascist salute for the German national anthem, he wasn’t actually endorsing Lebensraum-by-conquest and the antisemitic Nuremberg race laws, but just praising all those wonderful new autobahns?

The very idea is risible. The gesture is inseparable from the agenda, especially when the gesture itself, apart from its religious connotations, signifies submission, both historically and atavistically. To argue that it’s merely another form of the more unifying, alternative “Kick It Out” message is disingenuous. The two gestures don’t have the same meaning, at all, and to argue that they do is to display either ignorance or a contempt for the public’s intelligence.

Yet it’s the latter which the football and broader ‘liberal’ establishments have chosen to double down on, to the extent of trying to either censor critics by attributing base motives to them, or even deny them the basic right of free speech to show their disapproval or express a dissenting opinion.

Mention on social media, as several people did ( including, it must be said, yours truly), that while England continue to take the knee, you would instead be more inclined to favour teams that didn’t do so, is to attract accusations of either outright racism, lack of patriotism, or of being ‘right-wing’ – the latter two being a particularly curious combination, when patriotism is usually damned by the ‘progressive’ chattering classes as an overwhelmingly ‘right-wing’ phenomenon.

That 6 out of the 7 countries reported earlier in the week as not taking the knee, however, are countries whose recent history includes actually living under totalitarianism, and can therefore arguably better recognise it when they see it: or that revulsion with the movement being supported can displace one’s normal sporting loyalty: or that critics – whatever their view on the underlying issue – merely feel that politics should be kept out of sport altogether, appears to be a nuance too far.

Others have gone even further. As Gary Oliver described in his article of 10th June over at The Conservative Woman, elements of the Woke, virtue-signalling football punditocracy are even calling for supporters to be denied access to games unless undergoing in effect compulsory indoctrination in BLM’s core ideology of Critical Race Theory; which, given the tight timescale, is equivalent to silencing.

That the prime advocate of fans’ compulsory, North Korean-style re-education in racial ideology appears to be Gary Neville, former England defender and now pundit not unknown for opening mouth before engaging brain, is ironic, to say the least. A glance at the replay of the England vs Scotland clash at the 1996 European Championship shows, at 0:46, only one England player not singing the national anthem, and looking very sheepish about it, too. Step forward, Gary Neville, the same pundit who now says that any England fans without race-theory ‘education’ must be barred from games.

Did Our Gary not know the words to God Save The Queen? Because even Gazza (!) did. Or was Our Gary in fact, possibly as a staunch republican and anti-monarchist, making a political gesture? You know, a political gesture of the very kind he now suggests that people who object to the BLM-genuflection gesture are making? Should we not be told?

The metropolitan-based mainstream media, unsurprisingly, appears near-unanimous in its endorsement of Southgate’s and his players’ attitude, despite the obvious flaws and illogical conclusions with which their arguments are peppered; presumably, the MSM has its woke readerships and audiences uninterested in football to satisfy.

But when football becomes a medium for impliedly threatening its fans’ right to something as fundamental as free speech, we’re entitled to ask if there isn’t a deeper factor behind it. Because it seems clear this is no longer about just football per se, or even racism (or so-called ‘anti-racism’, given that anti-white racism of the BLM variety is now routinely described as ‘anti-racism’), but about free speech itself.

Never mind that The Spectator’s Rod Liddle has painstakingly explained how it’s the attendant BLM political baggage of über-woke hard-left anti-capitalism, anti-family, anti-police, and even anti-white racist cultural Marxism which the fans object to, along with the hijacking of the sport by corporations anxious to demonstrate their assumed superior moral virtue by hectoring the game’s traditional supporters out of their assumed Neanderthal wrong-think. 

Facilitated and fuelled by the absence of crowds during Covid lockdown – and Rod Liddle is surely right to say that, were it not for crowds being barred from stadiums, this nonsense wouldn’t have lasted beyond its first week – the attempted colonisation of football by divisive political identitarianism has provided merely the latest excuse for the ‘tolerant’, ‘liberal’, progressive-cosmopolitan chattering classes to express their contempt for the masses while pretending to be high-minded about it.

It has become the latest weapon in the oikophobic woke elites’ culture war against the uneducated, unenlightened plebs whom they cannot forgive for bringing about Brexit and installing the bien-pensants’ bogeyman Boris Johnson in Downing Street. Viewed through that prism, the attempted censorship becomes at least explicable, albeit in no way excusable.

It’s quite remarkable that so few seem to have noticed how football clubs, players, pundits and authorities are assiduously trashing and abandoning the game’s traditional supporters in almost precisely the same way as the Labour Party did theirs. Well, we know how unsuccessful that’s been so far; and it hasn’t run its entire course yet.

Finally, football’s 2022 World Cup is to be based in that bastion of human rights, Qatar: where women are second-class citizens who are lashed for committing adultery, where South Asian construction workers are treated in conditions almost as close to modern slavery as it’s possible to get, and where homosexuality is illegal, and punishable by imprisonment or even death.

No doubt our newly socially-conscienced international footballers, their coach and their governing body will register their abhorrence by respectively ruling themselves out for selection, or even by boycotting the tournament altogether? Don’t hold your breath.

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Are we heading inexorably towards a Great Boris Betrayal?

Misgivings that Boris Johnson, across several policy areas, is in the process of betraying many of the promises he made or implied in both his party leadership and general election campaigns, are growing

Note: longer and updated version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Friday 16th October 2020

Straws in the wind?  Maybe.  An overdeveloped sense of cynicism and scepticism on my part, laced with premonition?  Perhaps.  But the past few months have given enough indications to justify misgivings that, on several pressing issues of contemporary policy, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is progressively abandoning the positions on which his General Election campaign was based, less than a year ago.

On immigration, both legal and illegal, election pledges are going significantly unfulfilled. Johnson has failed to withdraw Britain from the UN Global Migration Compact signed up to by Theresa May – a withdrawal which would surely have given us considerable leverage in our negotiations with the EU over our future relationship – and which I suggested in July 2019 should be one of the eight key tests by which we could judge whether as PM, Johnson would delight or disappoint us.

The promised ‘control’ of illegal cross-Channel migration and people-smuggling has not only not materialised, but numerically has worsened. Operationally, it has descended into farce; if deploying an Airbus Atlas A-300M transport to conduct low-level Channel surveillance patrols wasn’t a desperate enough ploy to try and convince a sceptical population that action was being taken, how about the idea of deploying nets to catch boats ferrying illegal migrants? [Applications from unemployed lepidopterists welcome, presumably.]

The points-based assessment system following the Australian model looks reasonably robust – if and when it ever goes into practice – but the legislation faces defeat in the overwhelmingly pro-Remain House of Lords. Meanwhile, attempts to deport illegal migrants and asylum-seekers whose claims have been rejected are regularly being thwarted by ‘liberal’-left open-borders activist human rights lawyers. Yet, in the EU negotiations, possible concessions over free movement and/or the continuing jurisdiction in Britain of the European Courts frequently pop up on the radar.      

If pre-election Boris was suspiciously susceptible to the blandishments of the eco-lobby, then post-election Boris appears in total thrall to the Green Blob. Scarcely a speech passes without some hyperbolic reference from Johnson to how Britain’s economic recovery from Covid19 will be built on a ‘Green’ energy investment and production bonanza, despite its so far unmitigated expense, its continuing reliance on fossil-fuel powered back-up to cope with the intermittency problem, and its still relatively low contribution to the total energy output.

Consider for one moment the Britain in prospect under the rolling Covid-19 lockdowns to which Johnson appears irrevocably committed, despite the increasingly powerful and widespread arguments for a different approach, less damaging to our economy and society.

Whole areas under virtual house arrest. Travel, especially aviation, severely restricted. Rising energy prices. An increasing role for the State in the economy, needing to be financed of course by higher taxes, especially enviro-taxes. Unemployment growing, and business collapsing.

Johnson and Hancock’s policy response to Covid, imposing serial lockdowns in slavish deference almost exclusively to the doom-merchants among the medico-scientific advice available to them – despite a growing body evidence favouring a different, less economically and societally damaging approach – is certainly killing ‘Business As Usual’ for many firms, and their employees.

Tell me how this doesn’t go a fair way towards meeting many of the strident demands of the hard Green-Left, anti-capitalist, eco-totalitarian Extinction Rebellion? And if so, why? Undue influence from the distaff side, perhaps, or……what?      

Johnson’s condescending assurance to newly Tory-voting electors in the Midlands and North, worried about losing their jobs in the developing economic fallout from lockdown, and apprehensive about whether they’ll be allowed to set their relatives at Christmas, that they’ll eventually be able to boil a kettle from ‘renewable’ energy – provided, of course, the wind is blowing hard enough (but NB, not too hard) at the time –  is unlikely to retain their loyalty. And who can blame them?            

The allegedly ‘libertarian’ Boris Johnson has not been much in evidence during 2020’s explosion of leftist Wokery at not only street, but also at political, institutional, media, cultural and academic, levels. He has been reticent, to say the least, in robustly defending free speech, and has largely refrained from unduly criticising egregious instances of corporate Wokeness.

Particularly unedifying was the image of him, bunkered and mute in Number Ten, while hard-Left Black Lives Matter / Antifa protestors violently trashed the Parliament Square statue of his supposed hero Churchill, Johnson finally emerging to comment only after the statue had had to be boarded up for its own protection. We appear to have elected a Prime Minister reluctant to defend our history and heritage when both are under (literally) physical assault.

On Brexit, in recent weeks my colleagues Adrian Hill and Tim Bradshaw over at The Conservative Woman  have done a sterling job of chronicling in detail the twists and turns of the tortuous negotiations with Brussels over Britain’s future relationship with the EU. To repeat many of their arguments would be superfluous, so that here I merely need to summarise and comment.

Despite Boris’ tough talk for public consumption, it’s been possible to detect potential harbingers of compromise and concession. While the EU’s, and Barnier’s, intransigence continues virtually unabated, there has been talk of the deadline being extended to ensure Britain doesn’t leave without a trade deal, within which it would be surprising if some concessions were not made.

Pressure for compromise and concession to ensure No-Deal continues to come from parts of the financial markets,  business sectors,  and lobby groups. Some of the direst security warnings of Project Fear are being dusted off and regurgitated. Meanwhile, the EU still insists on retaining enforcement powers in any UK trade deal, while rumours circulate that an accommodation will be reached on the continued jurisdiction, after the end of the Termination Period, of the ECJ on business regulation.

On fishing rights, if arguably not the most economically significant issue, then certainly the most politically totemic, can we be sure that a government seemingly powerless to stop rubber dinghies full of illegal migrants crossing the Channel has the determination to resist, whatever it takes, the threatened ongoing predation on our sovereign fishing grounds? The likelihood of compromise to avoid confrontation surely can’t be ruled out.

For a PM who prioritises being liked over being feared and respected, his record of resiling from previous commitments since last December’s election, and his evident susceptibility to pressure, cannot but produce apprehension that potentially damaging last-minute concessions will be made, purely to avoid No Deal.   

On relationships with our natural Anglosphere allies, Johnson has, according to The Times, ordered the No 10 team and key government departments to establish links with the Biden campaign team, citing private polling telling him that Trump is unlikely to be re-elected.

It isn’t hard to see where this could be going. Are they hoping to use the anti-Brexit and EU-favouring Biden’s hostility to a good US-UK trade deal as an excuse to make last-minute concessions to Brussels, and thus be ‘forced’ to concede a BRINO 2.0 that separates us much less from the EU?

On the other hand, if Trump does win, he’s unlikely to thank Johnson for cosying up to Biden in mid-campaign, and will be less inclined to give us a good US-UK trade deal. This, of course, can be also be used as the excuse for making last-minute concessions to Brussels and thus retaining a BRINO 2.0 that separates us much less from the EU.

All this will inevitably have electoral consequences. I warned about it on 7th October, but mainstream media commentators are now cottoning on to the prospect of Johnson’s Red Wall crumbling fast.

As Rachel Sylvester points out in The Times, backbench pressure from Tory MPs worried about retaining their seats is starting to crystallise. Johnson’s apparently cavalier attitude towards the travails his lockdowns risk inflicting on the North can only revive the tropes about the ‘Conservatives’ being solely a party for the affluent South, predicts Nick Cohen at The Spectator.

Seldom in modern political history can such a newly acquired electoral advantage have been so recklessly and needlessly squandered in so short a time. Whether it’s deliberate, accidental, or, as Mary Harrington argues persuasively over at UnHerd, Boris hasn’t recovered from Covid and, notwithstanding his colourful ‘I’m as fit as a butcher’s dog‘ metaphor, is actually suffering from Long-Covid, leaving us effectively leaderless, is a moot point.  

However,  I don’t believe Johnson cares overmuch about the potential electoral impact of all this on his party.  I suspect he’s discovered that,  in contrast to becoming PM, he doesn’t very much like actually being PM, because the job is too much like hard work, often involving having to choose that which he must judge is the least bad from several equally unpalatable and unpopular options.  

Boris, on the other hand, as the only just released new biography of him by Tom Bower reveals, is not so much fundamentally lazy as chronically ill-disciplined and temperamentally disinclined to immerse himself in details. It’s easy to conclude that his innate desire to be popular rather than respected makes him find the stimulus and hyperbole of campaigning in purple poetry infinitely more agreeable than the more humdrum yet far more complicated business of governing in grey prose.

Moreover, he’s allegedly already complaining to friends about money: that becoming PM has left him significantly short of the income he needs to meet his ongoing financial liabilities which are the consequences of his louche, priapic, chaotic personal life. He knows he can make considerably more money as an ex-PM and journalist than as an incumbent PM. Presumably, he’ll claim ‘family reasons’ or something similar at the opportune moment.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong. But I fear we are about to be royally shafted on Brexit, just as Johnson is currently doing on Covid, immigration, Woke-ery and Green-ery. Messing up Brexit could even be his crowning excuse, and his chosen route out.

UPDATE: On Friday morning, in a development as surprising as it was welcome, Johnson announced that, unless the EU fundamentally changed its previously intransigent and uncooperative negotiating approach, Britain would conclude there was no prospect of an acceptable deal being agreed, and would therefore trade on WTO terms with effect from 1st January 2021.

If he means it, and sees it through, then I’ll be happy to admit I was wrong on this point.

However, the worry is that, despite it undoubtedly being the right thing to do, it might not be a statement of irrevocable intent by Johnson, but merely another negotiating tactic by a PM who has already allowed three deadlines he set to over-run without consequence, to be eventually diluted or discarded if it persuaded Brussels to return to the negotiating table in a more amenable frame of mind.

However, the likelihood of that diminished somewhat on Friday evening, when it was reported that our chief negotiator David Frost had told the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier not to even bother coming to London for more talks next week.

Former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith asserted, in The Sun on Sunday 18th November, that ‘Boris isn’t bluffing‘; that he really will go through with his threat to abandon negotiations and go for WTO on 1st January 2021 unless the EU grants Britain the same comprehensive free trade deal that it granted Canada.

Well, we shall see; after all, Johnson has bluffed for much of his life. Let’s hope this time he isn’t, and really means it.

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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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The Speech Boris Ought To Deliver Today

(but which he almost certainly won’t)

Note: this article was originally published at The Conservative Woman earlier today, Tuesday 2nd October 2018

Forget about Theresa May’s set-piece Prime Minister’s speech to the Conservative Party Conference tomorrow. No-one, not even normally loyal supporters, expects anything much of it, or of her. Given the utter disaster that her Conference speech was last year, and so low is the bar she consequently has to clear, that just getting to the end of it without major mishap will be success of a kind.

No: today’s the day. The day when Boris supposedly comes clean, sets out his stall, and unashamedly makes his pitch to be both Party Leader and Prime Minister. The day when, in a Conservative Home event scheduled to last from 1.00 pm until 2.00 pm, he makes a speech clearly calculated to be the big event and talking-point of the conference, and upstage May’s predictably pedestrian by comparison effort tomorrow into the bargain.

But the runes aren’t necessarily overwhelmingly favourable. Out in front of the pack with Party members and activists he may be: but in the event that May is deposed, whenever and for whatever reason, he has to surmount the obstacle of a Parliamentary vote by Tory MPs to decide which two leadership candidates are placed before the membership.

And a majority of those 315 Tory MPs are determined that he won’t be one of them. Many purely because they are either closet or overt Remainers, who form a majority of Tory MPs anyway and would oppose any Brexiteer becoming Prime Minister, and others who, irrespective of their Brexit stance, harbour personal antipathy towards Boris for a variety of reasons, some arguably justified, but others less so.

So rather than tilting at an immovable windmill, a shrewd Boris should box clever, and confound both expectations – and his enemies – by doing the completely unexpected.

He should start by repeating the essence of his resignation speech, namely its forensic, entirely policy-focused, criticisms of May’s Chequers Plan approach to Brexit and which were careful not to attack May personally, and its plea that it was not too late for a different, more robust approach more in tune with the desire expressed by British voters via the Referendum result for clear economic, judicial and political separation from the EU’s institutions.

Boris resignation speech 18 July 2018

He ought then to go on to note regretfully how this hasn’t happened, with not only the eminently foreseeable result of the EU’s peremptory rejection of Chequers despite even more concessions, but its accompaniment by the intransigent Eurocrats’ contemptuous and malevolent humiliation of May personally.

And then continue by expressing his sorrow at how, despite other and better Brexit plans being available, the Prime Minister has inexplicably persisted in sticking to her Chequers  Plan, despite its manifest flaws and unpopularity.

He should then turn to the Conservative’s non-Brexit difficulties. It’s deeply disturbing, he should say, that extreme-Left Corbyn socialism appears to have been allowed to somehow gain such a foothold among the electorate, despite the abundance of evidence from everywhere it’s been tried that it doesn’t work: that the Tories are out-polling Labour by barely the statistical margin of error in polling: that the business presence at a hard-Left Labour Party conference was notable for its extent: and that anticipation of a Corbyn government is as high as it is.

UK voting intentions 30Sep2018

He ought then to follow this up by noting ruefully the present leadership’s seeming inability to come up with any significant counter to Corbyn’s apparent appeal by forcefully making the arguments for a smaller, less-activist state and freer markets, and by devising innovative supply-side solutions to the housing and elderly-care crises, but resorting too readily either to negative scaremongering or watered-down versions of Corbyn’s own policies.

And then conclude, with infinite regret, that he’d come to the inescapable conclusion that the current leadership was unlikely to reverse this trend, so that however reluctantly, he could see no other option than a change of helmsman.

This is the point at which Boris should drop the bombshell that no-one’s expecting.

He should say that he’s aware of his own shortcomings: that he accepts that his colourful and occasionally chaotic, even louche, private life is a turn-off for many people: that he acknowledges he’s almost certainly temperamentally unsuited to the mundane attention to detail that the highest office demands, even of those once thought capable of handling it: that he recognises his limited appeal among his MP colleagues: and that, consequently, while convinced with regret that a change of leadership is inevitable both for Brexit and domestic political reasons, he personally would not be a candidate.

But follow this immediately by a declaration that he pledges himself to exploit such popularity as he does enjoys with the Party’s grassroots and activists, and the wider public, to campaign up and down the country for a committed Brexiteer putative, and hopefully actual Prime Minister.

Tory Leader poll Mon 01Oct 2018

And subsequently support him or her, in the capacity of Party Chairman, to lead the campaigns both for a proper, not ersatz, Brexit and the defeat of Corbyn. Because if May falls, the hapless Brandon Lewis will fall with her, and there will be a vacancy.

With this strategy, Boris would at a stroke destroy the main objection to a change of Party Leader and Prime Minister: that he seeks that change only as a vehicle for his own vaulting ambition. He would eliminate the obstacle of Tory MPs who, though they might be open to May’s replacement with a Brexiteer PM, wouldn’t support it if it meant Boris in Number Ten.

He would negate the disadvantage of his own mercurial temperament by deploying it in a role for which it’s far more suited. He would in effect have loaded the rifle, aimed and cocked it, but invited a more popular and accurate marksman to pull the trigger and fire it.  

This strategy and that speech would throw May and her soft-Brexit acolytes, anticipating a straight-out leadership challenge from Boris, right off balance. And it would provide a Conference talking-point like no other. It might even make Boris go down in history, as the statesman who secured Brexit by sacrificing his own ambition for the sake of the cause.

If only.

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

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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Civil-Liberties, Climate-Change, Economics, Education, European-Union, Islamism, Media, Political-Philosophy, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Bring on a General Election: and yes, even a hard-Left, Corbyn-led Government

A General Election would provide the opportunity, both for the Conservative defeat needed for it to lance the boil of its own Left-‘Liberalism’, and for the experience of a hard-Left, Corbyn-led Government necessary to lance the boil of Socialism.

Note: this is the long (and updated) version of the article first published at The Conservative Woman on Friday 22 June 2018. 

That Theresa May, on Wednesday 20 June 2018, survived that afternoon’s vote on Tory arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve’s amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill, which sought to give the House of Commons power in effect to halt Brexit in the event of no deal being agreed with the EU, was no victory, but yet another fudge, kicking the can down the road.

It was preceded by a Prime Minister’s Questions of quite staggering awfulness, not only from her, but from almost the entire House, with both sides first fawning over an Imam whose public utterances at the very least imply he wants any criticism of Islam banned, then competing furiously to virtue-signal their achingly politically-correct Left-’Liberal’ credentials at every possible opportunity.

That, plus the long-evident reluctance of most of its overwhelmingly pro-Remain membership to accept and implement the EU Referendum result, finally convinced me. The present Chamber is moribund, even rotten, led by a Prime Minister who is Dead May Walking, and another election is needed.

Why am I so keen on a General Election now? Or, if not keen, nevertheless reluctantly convinced of the necessity for one, despite the potential baleful adverse consequences? For three reasons.

Firstly, with both political attention-span and memory being relatively brief among the vast majority of the public who wisely don’t pay much day-to-day attention to politics, by the time 2022 comes round, many people will have largely forgotten the 2017-18 attempted, if not actual, betrayal of the 2016 EU Referendum result.

Not to mention, also, being bleakly realistic, that some of those now most angry about that betrayal and thirsting for the chance to wreak electoral revenge may, by then, no longer be around to vent that anger at the ballot-box. An early election would mean that voter frustration with both parties has an outlet before it subsides.

Next, the current Vichy-‘Conservative’ Party needs to suffer a heavy defeat, along the lines of the 1906, 1945, and 1997 landslides, to bring about either a split with, or a purge of, its Cameroon-Blairite Left-‘Liberal’ wing, whose current ascendancy is driving the Party Left-wards, both economically and culturally, with dire results.

Remember, in the last year alone, Theresa May has proposed having the State fix the price at which energy suppliers can sell their product: signalled an intent to intervene in the price/demand side of the housing market instead of liberalising planning controls to incentivise supply: threatened to crack down more on ‘hate-crime’ and ‘Islamophobia’, aka free speech: promised to control and police the internet: approved lifestyle and behaviour-nudging taxes: resiled from tackling mass uncontrolled immigration: and proposed throwing another £20 billion at an unreformed NHS while praising it fulsomely in ever more reverential terms.

And that’s before we consider the Miliband-Lite Tories’ eager appeasement of the Green Climate-Change lobby, the racial and religious grievance industries, an increasingly corrupt and partisan United Nations, and, above all, a vengeful and intransigent European Union over Brexit.

This resolute Leftwards march is no temporary expedient, but merely the latest phase in a process which has been going on for years, even decades. The great failings of the ‘Conservative’ party since the end of World War II, with the exception of the 1980s which sadly must now be viewed as an aberration, have been its reluctance to counter the Left intellectually, and its consequent willingness to accept the Left’s policies, especially when attractively packaged, for the sake of occupying office.

Indeed, the writer Peter Hitchens recounts remarks by YouGov’s Peter Kellner, man of Labour and the soft-Left through and through, to the effect that from time to time a Conservative government must be allowed to occupy office, so as to maintain for the electorate an illusion of pluralism and choice, but provided that it does nothing to unravel previous Labour administrations’ policies. Wittingly or unwittingly, the ‘Conservative’ Party has been happy to comply.

The Party therefore needs an unequivocal electoral defeat and period in opposition, to force it to re-think from first principles what it stands for, then devise a portfolio of policies that aren’t merely politically-promising, but intellectually-consistent, in order to be able to capitalise on it when the Corbynite-Labour bubble bursts.

Finally, the boil of Socialism now seemingly infecting so much of the electorate needs to be lanced. But with the increasingly soft Left-‘Liberal’ ‘Conservative’ Party having totally abandoned making a robust case for low-tax, small-State, civil-libertarian, free-market conservatism as the engine of prosperity, freedom and growth, in favour of timidly apeing Socialist-Labour in the vague hope of a few Corbyn-Lite policies enticing voters back, I  cannot see that happening without a new generation of voters experiencing for themselves the malign reality of a hard-Left government.

Psephologically, before the 2017 General Election, the Labour-to-Conservative crossover point – the age at which people switch to voting Conservative rather than Labour – was assumed  to be roughly 34. 

Age predictor UK politics

But the 2017 General Election, the first with Corbyn as Labour leader, changed all that. The post-election analyses moved that crossover point back by an entire decade or more, to somewhere between 44 and 49 . . . . . 

UK GE2017 voting by age groups comp

. . . . . and Labour now enjoys majority support in all voter age groups between 18 and 45, including the highest-ever ratings among under-30s since 1964.

Hist under-30s support Labour & Sep 17 vote intent by age comp

This shouldn’t be altogether surprising. It’s now nearly 40 years since Britain last had an economically-Left Labour Government (in contrast to the culturally-Left governments of all parties which we’ve had for about 35 years), so that almost no-one under the age of, possibly, 55 at least, has any memory or experience of actually living under one.

Add to that two more factors: firstly, the predominantly Left-leaning sympathies of the UK mainstream media, which means Corbyn’s socialist policies are seldom subjected to the critical examination and questioning directed towards their smaller-state, lower-taxes, and free-market leaning equivalents: and, secondly, the left-wing bias of the Education profession by which two generations have been indoctrinated . . . . . .

Teachers voting intentions 2015 & 2017 GEs comp. . . . . . . . and it’s arguably astonishing that Corbyn’s socialist prescriptions, superficially so enticing to those who’ve never suffered them in practice, aren’t even more popular. 

This is why reminders of hard-Left Labour’s insalubrious history of either supporting or at least excusing tyrannical Communist dictatorships – even while it simultaneously condemned the West of human rights, free speech and the rule of law as fascist – cut no ice. The past is truly another country.           

Corbyn does support some bombingThis is why pointing out Corbyn’s uncritical support for the IRA throughout the 1970s and 1980s, even as it was blowing up British women and children on the streets of the United Kingdom, doesn’t resonate. To today’s devotees of the Corbyn Cult, this is ancient history. It’s 30 years since the end of the Cold War, isn’t it? It’s 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement, isn’t it?

This is why warnings of strikes, power-shortages, punitively-high taxes, and fiscal mismanagement from Labour runaway spending and borrowing, have so little political cut-through with voters, from Generation X-ers through Millennials to Generation Z-ers. They’ve never actually seen it in Britain, so they just don’t believe it: and in my view, nothing short of experiencing for themselves the horrors of living under a left-wing Labour government will dispel their illusions.

In short, we’ve arrived at one of those points which seem to occur every 40 years or so, where a major political upheaval is needed to generate political resuscitation and renewal.

Yes, of course there are risks, and very serious ones, from a hard-Left Labour government, and as someone who abhors every manifestation of Leftism, I’m the first to acknowledge them. The Corbyn-McDonnell Terror won’t be pleasant. But capital markets, via demanding higher borrowing rates, and threatened or actual capital flight, via reduced tax receipts, have a habit of curbing the worst excesses of economcally-Left Labour governments.

In any case, is that really so worse than the alternative? Of years of a Continuity-May ‘Conservative’ Party, ever more in thrall to mushy Left-‘Liberalism’, governing hesitantly and ineffectively while the hard-Left poses self-righteously as Salvation Denied?

Just as, to cure a malignant cancer, painful chemotherapy has to be endured, so rejuvenating conservatism and defeating Socialism may require some temporary hurt. But the sooner the treatment starts, the less painful it is, and the sooner comes the cure.

Fortune favours the brave. Bring on that election.

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Civil-Liberties, Islamism, Political-Philosophy, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics, US-Current Affairs, US-Politics

Faux-“Feminism” On The March

The Women’s movements protesting Trump’s London visit aren’t about genuine feminism, but about left-wing faux-minism 

The London protests of Friday 13th July against Trump’s visit to the UK have given a chance to see in action, more visibly than hitherto, a phenomenon until recently largely confined to America. 

Springing to media prominence in the aftermath of Trump’s November 2016 election and January 2017 Inauguration, the Women’s March Movement got known principally for marching around in pussy-hats or dressed as vaginas, not to protest the oppression of women regardless of perpetrators or victims, but chiefly to protest, from the Left, the outcome of democratic elections which it disliked. 

For their UK counterparts / equivalents / imitators, the opportunity presented by Trump’s visit was irresistible. To give a flavour. . . . 

Womens March Womens Equality notifys re Trump visit

. . .although the “day of joy and love” and “the thank-you he deserves” were perhaps not what most of us would have interpreted from those innocuous phrases.

Both the WML and WEP vociferously condemn Trump’s alleged misogyny and white-supremacist racism, indisputably evidenced by the shockingly-egregious appointments, made entirely on merit, of Indian-Sikh heritage Nikki Haley, née Nimrata Randhawa, as UN Ambassador, and Betsy De Vos, a former donor to his rivals, as Education Secretary.

Curiously, however they seem reluctant to condemn, except by a no-doubt heartfelt and eloquent silence: Female Genital Mutilation, which despite being statutorily illegal in the UK for almost two decades, has resulted in few, if any, convictions: Marital Rape: Religio-cultural so-called “honour”-based violence against women: the genocide, murder, rape and sexual enslavement of thousands of Yezidi women and girls by ISIS: and the systematic grooming, rape and trafficking of untold thousands of young or even under-age, vulnerable white working-class girls, predominantly by organised gangs of Pakistani-Muslim men. 

But let no-one doubt their commitment to calling out misogyny wherever they see it, even if they’re, ahem, somewhat selective about where they choose to see it. Or not.

WEP Trump misogyny compAt this point, it might be instructive to examine the so-called “Women’s Equality” Party and its co-founder, Sophie Walker, a bit more closely. Psephologically, the electoral potential of a party whose very name could by implication be read as specifically excluding half the electorate is debatable, but ignore that.

Walker has an undistinguished electoral record. In London’s 2016 mayoral election, she received just 0.6% more of the vote than the odious George Galloway. Then, in the 2017 General Election, she decided to contest the Shipley, Yorkshire, seat of Tory MP Philip Davies.

Now you might think that the natural Yorkshire seat for a “Women’s Equality” Party Leader to contest would be Rotherham, where some 1400, mainly under-age, vulnerable, disadvantaged, white working-class girls were groomed, raped and trafficked by gangs of mostly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men. However, some women are obviously deemed less deserving of equality than others.

For Walker, Davies’ (far worse) crime was to impede the Parliamentary progress of measures to tackle male domestic violence against women, because they excluded any measures also to tackle female domestic violence against men. His arguing for true, not selective, gender-equality, claimed Walker, was “sexist” and “regressive”. So it was against him, and not for the Rotherham victims, that she stood. She polled 1.9% compared with Davies’ 51.3%. 

On BBC Sunday Politics London in early December 2017, she asserted, without offering any evidence: “gender-inequality is the main cause of domestic violence”. She continued: “the vast majority of men who experience domestic violence are in gay relationships”. Thus seamlessly blending a belittling of male-victim domestic-abuse with homophobia.

Walker regularly retails the stock Leftist narrative on the alleged gender pay gap. Yet this has been comprehensively debunked by economists who’ve shown that, once you control for factors like type of job, number of hours worked and lifestyle choices, the “gap” virtually disappears, or even favours women.

Reverting to the WML, potential clues about its own apparent insouciance about the religio-cultural abuse of young indigenous women aren’t that hard to find. The movement makes no particular secret of its advocacy of uncontrolled mass immigration, and a willingness, even eagerness, to excuse or even indirectly promote radical militant Islam, not least by readily deploying the Left’s specious “hate-crime” narrative to protect it from criticism, even in the immediate aftermath of an Islamism-inspired terrorist atrocity that killed 22 people attending something as clearly “Islamophobic” as an Ariana Grande concert.    

Womens March Islam open borders comp Womens March London Muslims comp

Where, then, does that leave their protests as “feminists” against the Trump whose alleged misogyny towers above all others?

Despite their names, these aren’t political movements about women, and especially not about securing for women even freedom from oppression, never mind true equality. If they were, they wouldn’t be so selectively myopic about the abuse of women from sources, and on motivations, to which they appear content, even keen, to turn a blind eye.

They are instead political movements for women, and specifically for women of a certain political persuasion, striking pretty much the standard package of Left-‘Liberal’, fashionably politically-correct attitudes and shibboleths.

Womens March London invite re Trump

Believe “women should have control over their own bodies”? Except victims of FGM, marital rape, and “honour”-based violence, presumably.

“Believe our planet is worth protecting”? But not the African woman cooking over a dung fire because Green-Left NGOs decree that giving her cheap, reliable energy would cause “catastrophic climate change”?          

“Believe racism should be fought every step of the way”? Victims of religo-cultural anti-white CSA need not apply.

Both movements come across as metropolitan middle-class left-wing movements, principally for metropolitan middle-class left-wing women favouring the aggressive cultural-marxist third-wave iteration of feminism which is viscerally anti-Western generally and anti-American especially.

One might ask, finally, where they were when Erdogan, appeaser of misogynist Islam and jailer of journalists (including women), was in London recently? Or where they were for the visit of Xi Jinping, fan of media censorship, show trials, torture of dissidents and summary executions, (including of women)?

Tumbleweed. Wrong kind of victims. The faux-“feminist” Leftists don’t march for them.

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UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

The Paddington Bear of UK Politics

Pity a Labour politician who, like Paddington, has been abandoned, unwanted, on the station platform as the Socialism Train departs 

Blairite-Labour Champagne-Socialist smoothie Chuka Umunna appears to have a bit of an obsession. He seems to have convinced himself that the Vote Leave campaign’s battle-bus during the 2016 EU Referendum, with its “Take Back Control” message, was a binding promise to spend an additional £350 million on the NHS in the event of a Leave vote, and he can’t let it go.

Boris Johnson and the Vote Leave bus

It’s a meme he returns to time and time again on his own Twitter feed, like a dog worrying a bone long since chewed beyond nutrition. A quick look through his recent timeline shows tweets about it on 19th September (twice), 20th September (twice)….

…then again on 21st September, 24th September, and 8th October…..   

…or in the intervening periods, and just for a change, via re-tweets on 3rd October and 9th October off Vote Leave Watch, which is very much a Chuka creation.

In vain have people tried to explain to Chuka (and I even tried myself once or twice on Twitter) that:

  1. it clearly wasn’t remotely a promise, but a campaigning proposition;
  2. it could hardly have been a promise when made by what was a cross-party campaign group in a binary-question referendum;
  3. the only organisation which was in a position to make any such kind of “promise” (but didn’t) was the Government, which was, er, pro-Remain, 

but all to no avail.

There’s a plausible possible explanation for this. In the era of Hard-Left Corbynite-Labour, Chuka has an acute irrelevance problem.

Once touted – not least by himself – as the Blairite Leader-in-Waiting, despite a mysterious and flattering “UK’s Barack Obama” update to his Wikipedia page from a computer in his own law firm’s office, an, ahem, unfortunate slip-up about EU geography, a £20,000 donation from a gambling tycoon despite campaigning against betting shops in his own constituency, and superciliously describing London as “full of trash” and lacking suitably-exclusive hangouts for cool dudes like himself, until Labour’s 2015 General Election defeat, Chuka was considered a serious future contender for the leadership. 

The advent of Corbyn changed all that. Remember, Chuka stood for the leadership, and was even at one time the bookies’ favourite: but then suddenly withdrew from the contest just 3 days later, in circumstances which have never been satisfactorily fully explained, citing “the level of pressure and scrutiny that comes with being a candidate”.

On Corbyn’s election, he was one of those who declined to serve in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, and was replaced as Shadow Business Secretary on Corbyn’s first appointments.

Since then, the growth of a new aggressively left-wing membership, plus the consolidation of hard-Left Momentum’s control of the Party, have left him, politically, in the wilderness. His brand of metropolitan-centrist left-liberal Blairism is totally out of tune, and out of favour, in a party turning to full-blown socialism.

Chuka Umunna is the Paddington Bear of UK politics. As the hard-Left Labour train departs the station on its Journey Of Destiny to True-Socialist Utopia, he’s been left behind on the station platform, clutching his suitcase (probably a Gucci one – champagne-socialists like Chuka don’t settle for anything less) with a label stuck on it.

Only in his case, and unlike Paddington’s, this label says “NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE”.

 

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

The Academics and Socialism

Indoctrination of the university student and graduate population with the predominantly left-wing political attitudes prevailing in higher education has a growing effect on British elections

Note: this is the longer version of an article first published at The Conservative Woman on 2nd October 2017.

Why”, asked Laura Perrins, Co-Editor of The Conservative Woman on 22 August, “should you risk sending your children to university for a full three years of left-wing propaganda?”

For the parents of any young adult raised in a household even moderately inclined towards social conservatism, EU-withdrawal, a smaller state, lower taxes and free-market economics, this is an increasingly pertinent, even worrying, question.

Because, as Laura pointed out, after three years at an educational establishment which institutionally not merely disagrees with your views, but positively hates them and thinks they (and consequently you) are evil, your children will more than likely emerge from it thoroughly marinaded in left-wing thinking (and hating you in their turn).

The young’s voting patterns in recent election results certainly seem to bear this out. The YouGov analysis of voting by age group in the 2017 General Election shows that, in all three age-groups spanning the ages from 18 to 29, the Labour vote was over 60%.

Higher Education and Academe as a bastion of left-wing indoctrination is an impression that’s widely held. But to what extent is it true?

Fortunately, we have some empirical data from within the last two years. The chart below shows the results of a poll taken shortly before the 2015 General Election, asking for the voting intentions of UK University academics.

The responses leave little room for doubt. In no discipline did the intention to vote Labour drop below 40%, while you have to go as low as 20% in every academic discipline before encountering a voting intention other than Labour or Green.

Overall, the academics’ voting intention went 83% to the four main parties of the Left (Labour, LibDems, SNP and Green), while in the General Election proper, their vote share was only 47%. In other words, university-tenured academics inclined towards parties of the Left at a frequency nearly double that of the electorate as a whole.

A similar poll of UK academics’ voting intentions was conducted in the run-up to the 2016 EU Referendum, by The Times Higher Education Supplement. Here, the results were even starker.

In no discipline was the intention to vote Remain below 80%, while in only one discipline, Engineering and Technology, did the intention to vote Leave break through the 15% threshold. As everyone now knows, the result was 52%-48% for Leave. Once again the academics leaned Remain-wards at a rate more than 1½ times that of the voting population.

So, on the face of it at least, the perception of the University experience as being an academic indoctrination process in Europhilia and Leftism has some evidential support. If you have the impression that your child has emerged from University brainwashed into an ardently-Europhile Leftist who hates you and everything you stand for, you’re probably right.

But what seems explored much more rarely is: why this should be so? Why should the supposedly academic and intellectual elite overwhelmingly incline towards leftist and statist parties and policies that concentrate decision-making power in bureaucracy rather than democracy, and reject those which favour liberal-individualism and free-market competition? And do so, moreover, at a incidence nearly double that found in the adult population as a whole?

Well, the first thing to remember is that this phenomenon isn’t new. Hayek analysed and excoriated it decades ago in his “The Intellectuals and Socialism”, famously referring to “the professional second-hand dealers in ideas”.

Politically, the Academic and Intellectual Elite has an aversion to capitalism and free-market competition because, being a system based on voluntary exchange reflecting consumer preferences, it doesn’t confer on them either the superior societal status or the monetary rewards to which they consider themselves entitled because of their (assumed) far superior intellect.

Arguably, Robert Nozick put it even better in his 1998 essay “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?“

“Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit.”

This is especially marked when they compare themselves with people successful in what, to them, is the rather grubby business of designing, producing and marketing products that people will voluntarily part with their hard-earned, post-tax cash to own. Think, for example, how much more popular in the public mind James Dyson is than A C Grayling. The old disdain for “trade” has crossed over from the Aristocratic Landed Elite to the Intellectual Academic Elite.

Consequently, the academics and intellectuals incline, politically, away from free-markets democracy towards the more collectivist politics of markets-averse, leftist-statist bureaucracy. Not only does it value them more than competitive free-market capitalism does: but it can also use the coercive power of the State, manifested via the taxation system, to enforce on wider society at least a financial recognition of their assumed superior intellect and desired superior status.

This also explains their near-homogeneous support for remaining in the European Union. Yes, academics and intellectuals do favour the EU as an additional source of funding. But because the EU is an essentially socialistic, authoritarian, top-down bureaucracy, they also view it as a means to impose on the UK the kind of Leftist policies which they themselves are attracted to, and without the necessity and inconvenience of obtaining popular democratic consent. Remember, as we saw in the aftermath of the EU Referendum, their opinion of the demos borders on contempt.

This leads to the next question. For how long do the academics’ and intellectuals’ pro-Left, pro-EU biases continue to influence their recipients’ voting behaviours after inculcation?

Conventional psephology held that most had grown out of their youthful flirtation with socialism by about 30, by which time advancing careers, along with marriage, family and mortgage responsibilities, had altered their perspective. Indeed, as late as April this year, a YouGov poll suggested that the Left-Right crossover point comes roughly at age 34.

However, the results of the 2017 General Election have forced a re-evaluation of that hypothesis. It seems that the Labour/Left voting tendency now persists for at least a decade beyond that. As the Ipsos MORI chart below shows, the phenomenon now extends well into the 40s, and that it’s only after 45 that a Conservative-leaning tendency starts to prevail.  

This seems to bear out what Iain Martin has recently written on “the widespread assumption among those aged below 45 that Tories or pro-market people are an inherently bad bunch with motives that are inherently evil”.

Perhaps, though, it could have been better predicted. Because the age distribution of voting patterns in the 2016 EU Referendum shows a similar pattern. Once again, it’s only at the 45-54 age group does Leave start to prevail over Remain.

Neither does this look to be a temporary aberration, attributable to the more fractious political atmosphere before, during and since the EU Referendum. The pattern seems to be persisting, and hardening. The Remain=Labour and Leave=Conservative assumptions are by definition somewhat crude proxies, but it does appear that an overall shift in age-related voting patterns may be taking root for the short-to-medium term at least.

As far as countering it is concerned, the first thing to remember is that this may not, after all, be so historically unprecedented, and so in the end be so permanent, as excitable media comment suggests.

Albeit not of the same magnitude, there have been similar trends observed before, as the chart below of under-30s percentage voting patterns in General Elections since 1964 shows. The under-30s Labour vote almost halved between 1964 and 1983, and again between 1997 and 2010.       

Under 30s support Lab & Con since 1964

However, that might be where the optimism ends, at least for the time being.

In 1983, the Conservative Party, though faced with a Labour opposition similar to Corbyn’s in its socialist programme, was itself ideologically committed to a smaller state, free markets and capitalism, and unafraid to take on its opponents publicly in the battle of ideas. In 2010, it benefited from a widespread disillusionment with the dysfunctional Brown government after 13 years of increasingly tawdry New Labour.

Today’s circumstances, however, are nowhere near so propitious. First, no-one under 50 has much, if any, memory of what life in Britain was like under the last real even semi-socialist government: and given the prevalence of left-wing attitudes in higher education, they may well not have been taught an accurate history of it. To under 50s who lean Left-wards, therefore, Corbynism, however flawed, can seem fresh and exciting. 

Far worse, though, is that, as has been so starkly shown this past week, the Conservative Party is mired in intellectual atrophy, apparently completely incapable of unashamedly making the case against state-socialism and for a lower-taxed, less-regulated and more entrepreneurial economy, capitalism and free markets. So ideologically-sapped, and so devoid of confidence, does it appear, that it is reduced to offering, almost apologetically, diluted versions of previous flagship Labour policies.

Unless the Conservative Party is jolted from its torpor by the prospect of impending ejection from office and replacement by the most disastrously socialist government since the Labour Party’s formation, then the left-wing ideological indoctrination of the young via higher education – and Laura was surely right in her original 22nd August article to suggest that one of Blair’s motives in greatly expanding university access was to expose more to it – will yield results, with dire consequences, not least for those welcoming it.

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

The Tories Don’t Deserve To Win – Labour Deserves To Lose

Neither the Tories, with their statist, triangulating Manifesto, nor Labour, with its destructive socialist vision, deserve victory in this General Election

In a few hours, this General Election will be all over bar the results and their consequences.  Yet the usual anticipation of Election Night is muted by an almost palpable sense of relief at the approaching end of a campaign offering such a lacklustre, uninspiring choice.

For Theresa May and the Tories  it was supposed to be the Brexit Election: where, wanting both a bigger Parliamentary majority and her own popular mandate to implement it, she would offer a vision of a Britain mitigating the risks but also exploiting the advantages from recovering political and economic sovereignty.

Both, paradoxically, dictate some loosening of State and regulatory shackles on the economy, a facilitation of innovation and entrepreneurship: especially as the economy inevitably goes through a period of uncertainty and flux as powers are repatriated and trading relationships either reset or forged from new. But that isn’t what we’ve got.

The first intimations were reasonably heartening, But then came the Manifesto.

2017 Manifesto on Core Beliefs

Disparaging talk of “untrammeled free markets”, belief in “the good that government can do”, and abhorrence of “inequality”. The context leaves little room for doubt that the offer to voters is one of an interventionist State, concerned not so much with opportunities, but with outcomes.  

Further on, we are promised an Industrial Policy, a National Productivity Investment Fund, worker representation on boards, and a commitment to continue spending 0.7% of GDP on virtue-signalling foreign aid.

Finally, we get to this Greenery-gullible horror. Yet it accompanies a pledge to give British voters “the lowest energy costs in Europe”, notwithstanding that those two aims are mutually incompatible.

Worse still, it’s to be achieved, not by slashing Green taxes and encouraging more competition among energy providers via supply-side measures, but by capping prices: the same policy that, as recently as 2015, the Tories rightly damned as economically-illiterate when included in Labour’s election manifesto by Green-Left Red Ed Miliband.

So, in aggregate, a largely social-democratic policy programme, advocating a version of active-state Rhenish corporatism that would not look out of place in the manifesto of any milquetoast European Christian-Democratic party.

One can speculate endlessly on the reasons why. Possibly they lie in the fact that May is an instinctive paternalist (should that be “maternalist”, I wonder?) technocrat who’s unconvinced of, as Martin Durkin puts it, the potential of free markets to liberate and enrich.

Perhaps, because Labour has gone so far Left, she was persuaded that a Clinton-Blair style triangulation, with the Tories parking their tanks on “moderate” Labour’s lawn, would work electorally. Maybe she was afraid of frightening off the 2 or 3 million Labour voters who voted for Brexit and want to see it happen, and also the One-Nation tendency in her own party still looking for any excuse to derail Brexit. Who knows?

Then there’s been the campaign itself. May  – and it has been almost exclusively May, from battle-bus, through campaign literature, to media, and all points in between – has come across as by turns either robotically evasive, or uncomfortable and unconvincing when pressed on detail.

The forced U-turn on Social Care brought her campaigning deficiencies into sharp focus, but combine that with her natural somewhat leaden, flat-footed demeanour, plus a requirement to face an inquisitorial public & press far more often than she’s ever had to do before, and the result has been, not failure, but certainly sub-par performance.

Both she and her Party, have emerged from the campaign diminished, and not just in opinion-poll ratings, either. “Strong and Stable” has become something of a stick to beat her with. The whole thing has been rather insipid, disappointing, and very far from enthusing.

Consideration of Corbynite-Labour’s hard-Left manifesto need not take us as long. “Insipid” isn’t a description that could remotely be applied to it: “terrifying” or “economically-catastrophic” hardly begins to cover it, such is the red-in-tooth-and-claw programme that unrepentant socialist Jeremy Corbyn has in mind for the country.

The appalling consequences of a Corbyn-led Labour government have comprehensively dissected, with this by Andrew Lilico being merely one of the latest.   

As Lilico points out, fiscally and economically Labour would impose on Britain the highest level of taxation since World War II: the nationalisation, almost certainly without compensation, of the most important industries: a return to widespread (and excess) unionisation: deliberately punitive taxes on financial services designed specifically to deter private capital: and the effective collectivisation of private business property through imposing public interest duties inimical to both private property rights and commercial interest.

Moving from the general to the particular, just one example can suffice to show hard-Left Corbynism’s economic wrong-headedness. Despite favouring continued uncontrolled mass immigration, Labour proposes to deal with the housing shortage by a price-cap on new houses.  

All that that is likely to achieve is a shortage of new houses. If Labour really wanted to boost the supply of low-cost new houses, it would pledge to ease planning restrictions, not threaten to impose State price and even purchaser – priority to State employees, naturally – controls on builders. 

Non-economically, a Corbyn-led Labour government would see restrictions on the police, the reduction of the Army to a notional force only, and the withdrawal of Britain from its role in international security.

And this before even considering the implications of Corbyn’s 30+-year record of not only sympathy but vocal backing for all manner of anti-British, anti-Western groups, including those engaged in active terrorism, even on British soil.

And thus we come to the end of a singularly uninspiring campaign on what should have been the most important election in Britain for decades. The great issue for which it was ostensibly called to reinforce has been barely discussed beyond trite soundbites and banal generalities.

Hard-Left Labour certainly deserves to lose this election, and lose it heavily: but the Conservatives, on their manifesto and especially on their stuttering and lacklustre campaign, really don’t deserve to win it, either.

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