Quotulatiousness

July 11, 2024

On immigration, progressives are following Brecht’s advice to “dissolve the people and elect another”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the US, Canada, Britain, and most of western Europe the tide of immigration (legal and illegal) never seems to ebb, despite clear indications from the electorates that they’ve had enough. But perhaps progressives in each country are merely taking Bertolt Brecht’s advice for times when the people have forfeited the government’s confidence:

The problem extends far, far beyond merely glutting the labor market and lowering our wage scale, however. See, I’ve explained above why many Republicans go along with the Amnesty Express. But what about the Democrats? What’s in it for them, especially since Big Labor – whose members stand to lose a great deal because of the depression of wage levels – makes up such a prominent part of the Democrat coalition?

What the Democrats stand to win is permanent political power.

See, unlike previous waves of immigration, we are making no effort whatsoever to assimilate current immigrants to our culture and society. Instead, immigrants tend to cluster in indigestible lumps, maintaining their own cultures, languages, and ways from “the old country”. This is doubly true of illegal immigrants, who have managed to turn large swathes of many of our cities into small-scale replicas of Mexico and Morocco. This is even more troublesome because practically all of these immigrants come from places whose histories and traditions are grossly incompatible with our own. These folks don’t know about the idea of protecting life, liberty, and property through a rule of law system, so consequently they don’t CARE about such a system. They’re just here to get jobs or get welfare, for the most part.

In essence, when you import millions of people from socialistic and/or primitive Global South countries, you will end up with a socialistic, primitive Global South country of your own. And that’s what the Democrats are counting on. This is essentially what has been happening with the millions of people coming across our southern border from all over the world.

If the Democrats can get all of the 30-60 million illegals in America amnestied so that they can stay here and start their “path to citizenship”, and can bring in millions more through the various visa processes, then the Democrats are setting themselves up to be able to gain total control in about two decades – which is how long it will take for the children of all these immigrants to join the pool of voters with their parents. Further, they don’t seem to even want to have to wait that long, considering how they are opposing a bill currently before the Congress that would crack down on voting by illegal immigrants. Essentially, the Democrats – who have been unable to convince the current set of American voters to consistently elect them – want to replace us with a new set of voters, one which will vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats every election, up until we reach the point where there aren’t any more elections.

This is why I say that immigration is more important even than abortion or these other issues that people on the Right are so concerned about. Think about it. With 100 million newly-minted Democrat voters, the Democrats will be able to gain permanent control of all branches of government, at all levels, in nearly all of the states. What that means is that they will get to push through their policies at will. That means no more pro-life restrictions on infanticide. No more gun rights. No more religious liberty. No more rollback of the gay agenda. No more tax cuts or spending rollbacks. No more economic liberty. Kiss private property goodbye. THAT’S what the Democrats want – and the only way for them to get it to convince enough idiots in this country to give it to them via immigration, both legal and illegal.

So while conservatives are clawing each other’s eyes out because one candidate or the other isn’t as pro-life as they want them to be, the Democrats are setting up the playing field to replace the current American electorate with a new one from the Third World, complete with all the third world values of corruption and socialism that come with them.

Of course, for “Democrats”, read “Liberals” in Canada, “Labour” in the UK, and so on. The party labels change, but the basic beliefs are remarkably consistent across the western world (and Rishi Sunak’s just-ousted Conservatives were just as committed to open borders and mass immigration as Keir Starmer’s new Labour government).

July 7, 2024

More on the British general election results

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter has some further thoughts on the Sunak implosion on the 4th of July:

Sir Keir Starmer speaking to the media outside Number 10 Downing Street, 5 July, 2024.
Picture by Kirsty O’Connor/ No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.

The Conservative wipeout was disappointingly not the annihilation that early polls predicted. The Tories were successful in scaring a critical mass of boomers in a last minute get-out-the-vote effort. At the same time, I suspect that some incidents late in the election that were used to paint Reform as raving Nazis were successful in driving down the Reform vote. One such incident involved a marginal Reform candidate caught on microphone being extraordinarily vulgar, who later turned out to be an actor that specialized in playing precisely the sort of character he was portraying for the media, which is of course all rather suspicious.

As a result, Reform only got 4 seats. This was less than the 13 that were predicted by the BBC based on exit polling, which prediction was revised to the 4 that Reform in fact won partway through counting, as the models’ Bayesian priors were updated accordingly, no doubt. That said, among those 4 seats is Nigel Farage, who is now a sitting member of Parliament.

That Parliament is now, in all likelihood, in the hands of the weakest massive majority government in its history, and if that’s not true (British history in its entirety being rather extensive), certainly close to it.

Keir Starmer’s Labour has 412 seats of Parliament’s total 650, giving it an unassailable majority. This is not because of a sudden surge in their popularity: their share of the popular vote didn’t budge, from around a third of the population. Turnout was moreover unenthusiastic, about 59% of the population I think, which while not as wince-inducing as the nearly 50% participation that the BBC was claiming throughout most of the counting period, is still nothing to write home about. The total number of people who voted for Labour decreased by 600,000. Labour cannot claim any sort of popular mandate, and they know it.

Not that Labour — or any western political party elected under these circumstances — could be expected to take it into consideration. From their point of view, all that matters is the seats in the House of Commons, and they’ve got them in spades.

Reform and the Lib Dems were not the only beneficiaries of the Conservative collapse. This can be seen immediately in the crazy quilt of the electoral map, which despite Labour’s two-thirds majority, is planted with the flags of all sorts of weird political tribes.

My favourite part is Northern Ireland, where Sinn Fein held its 7 seats (making it the fifth-largest party after the SNP), and the rest of it is split up in an impenetrable jumble of splinter parties vaguely associated with different reasons for remaining part of the UK and/or the EU. Wales has been painted bright green by Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, who doubled their presence in parliament to 4. This is the same number of seats as Reform got, despite Plaid Cymru having gotten just under 200,000 votes, as compared to Reform’s 4.1 million, yet another perversity of first-past-the-post.

To everyone’s disappointment, first-past-the-post did not deliver a seat into the hands of the Monster Raving Loony Party, who received only 5,814 votes, a dismal 0.02% of the total 28.4 million votes cast. I do not know what kind of person votes for the Monster Raving Loony Party, but I bet they are absolutely fascinating. They should consider moving to one of Britain’s remote underpopulated islands, the Orkneys perhaps, where they might just be able to take over a seat. Having a strong, concentrated regional presence seems to be the best way to get members into Parliament in a first-past-the-post system, and having a sitting member for the Monster Raving Loonies would be even funnier than having Nigel in there.

First-past-the-post gets a lot of hate, and I’ve been ripping on it here, but it actually seems well-suited to an island which is shared by a bunch of squabbling ancient tribes. While it tends to produce majorities quite easily due to the winner-take-all nature of the contest within each riding, this also allows areas with strong regional identities to assert a disproportionate presence in parliament, despite getting a measly percentage of the vote. Not that that especially matters, given the aforementioned tendency for the system to hand out crushing jackpot majorities to the dominant players, as it has indeed done once again.

With the sole exception of Reform, there has not been any wave of enthusiasm for any of the parties in parliament. Large numbers of voters simply stayed home, whether tuning it all out or punishing their home parties while failing to see anything they wanted to vote for. It is as though the tide has gone out, exposing the sand and rocks of the sea shore. Whether this is a regular tide, which will gently slosh back in again in time, or a tsunami, remains to be seen. Certainly it feels that the water has receded very far indeed, exposing more of the seafloor’s surface than one normally sees. Say, is that Doggerland over there?

July 6, 2024

Labour’s “landslide”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I put the scare quotes around the word “landslide” because Labour’s eye-popping total of seats in Parliament was won on a remarkably narrow share of the actual votes cast in the British general election on Thursday (less than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party won in 2019). Fratricide on the right allowed a lot of Labour candidates to squeak in the win as the combined Tory/Reform votes would have been more than enough to top Labour.

Labour has won a landslide and the largest swing in British history without even increasing its vote share in England, and winning perhaps only 35% nationally. Its only significant gains in proportional terms were in Scotland, largely at the expense of the SNP, who have suffered catastrophic losses, meaning they are only 1 seat ahead of Sinn Fein, now the largest party in Northern Ireland — who are in turn 3 seats ahead of Reform, the third largest party in Britain by vote.

But these Reform MPs are — as I write — outnumbered by the five pro-Gaza independents, who won seats in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and London in reaction to Keir Starmer’s position on Israel. Labour are down an average of 18 points in seats where the Muslim population is 20%, and in seats where that figure is above 25%, they are down 23 percentage points. While Labour lost a huge share of the Muslim vote, what is more worrying is the atmosphere in which this has taken place.

In Birmingham Yardley Jess Phillips held on by 700 votes, and in a remarkably unpleasant – I might even say upsetting, although I’ve only had three hours’ sleep — count she lamented that “This election has been the worst election I have ever stood in”, as she was booed.

“I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence”, she told her antagonists, and described how opponents had filmed a Labour activist in the streets and slashed her tyres, while another was screamed at by a man. She told how Jo Cox’s family had wanted to come and campaign but she couldn’t let them endure it. “Can you throw them out?” she asked the authorities of her hecklers.

There were similar scenes in Birmingham Ladywood as Shabana Mahmood was heckled as she gave her speech, the returning officer pleading with the supporters of independent Ahkmed Yakoob to stop.

Yakoob was described by the Sunday Times‘s Will Lloyd as “the one man in Britain who embodies the way our politics have changed”. He described “a 36-year-old defence solicitor who wears black Prada trainers, a glittering diamond watch, tinted gold-framed sunglasses and Gareth Southgate-like waistcoats. He has 195,000 followers on TikTok, a platform he understands more intuitively than 99 per cent of the politicians in this country. He speaks in clipped, brutal epigrams that sound like they are only ever a few” and “The word ‘genocide’ is never far from his mouth with ‘For Gaza’ printed on his leaflets.”

Labour hung on in Ladywood, a historic constituency in England’s second city where in 1924 Neville Chamberlain very narrowly beat a rising star of the Labour Party called Oswald Mosley.

Gaza independents also narrowly lost Birmingham Hodge Hill by just 1000 votes, and Ilford North, the constituency of Wes Streeting by just 528 votes.

While the media focus was largely engaged in catching out the musing of some of Reform’s less intellectually capable candidates, this other populist revolt has been carried out in an atmosphere of anger and intimidation perhaps not seen in English elections since the days of Rotten Boroughs.

There was police intervention in Oldham last month, Naz Shah MP was abused as a “dirty, dirty Zionist … paid by Friends of Israel”.

Fellow Canadian observer Damian Penny refuses to apologize for his headline “The Sunak Sets over the British Empire” (and I don’t blame him in the slightest):

Canadian readers, stop me if you’ve heard this before: an historically unpopular center-right Tory government heads into an election under a hapless leader running a catastrophically poor campaign and finds that even its traditional support is being badly eroded by an upstart right-wing populist party called Reform.

What happened in Britain on July 4 (weirdly symbolic, that) is not exactly what we experienced in Canada in 1993 – the Tories suffered the worst election result in their history, but they’re left with 119 more seats than the venerable Progressive Conservative party under Twitter-troll-in-waiting Kim Campbell, and at least the outgoing PM managed to hold on to his own seat — but it’s kind of nice to see the Mother Country adopting our traditions for once.

Honestly, 121 seats for Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is much better than I’d expected at the start of this campaign. And had it not been for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, they might have managed a much less embarrassing defeat, because this kind of thing happened many times over last night:

Not everyone who voted Reform defected from the Conservatives – had Farage’s protest party not been on the ballot, many of its supporters would have stayed home or cast their votes for fringe parties and independent candidates — but it might have made the difference between a bad night for the Tories and the worst election in the Tories’ history.

Reform won four seats outright – less than a hyperbolic exit poll predicted, but four more than most observers expected at the start of the campaign. They can’t really affect much at the national level, especially with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party holding an absolutely massive majority of seats in Parliament, but they will make things very difficult for the Conservatives.

Helen Dale summarized the British general election result in a modified Gary Larson image:

Andrew Doyle points at the disproportional share of the vote won by Nigel Farage’s new Reform UK party compared to the tiny number of seats as a condemnation of the first-past-the-post system (also used here in Canada):

Keir Starmer surely cannot believe his luck. He has achieved a landslide victory by doing very little. He received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and yet has ended up with a whopping 412 seats in parliament. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has split the right-wing vote and ushered the Conservatives along to their worst ever election result, plunging them to even greater depths than the disastrous election of 1906 under Arthur Balfour.

This was very much a Conservative loss rather than a Labour victory. There is no great enthusiasm for Starmer, and his majority is an indictment of the “First Past The Post” system which, as I have argued previously, should be abandoned in favour of Proportional Representation. It is unsurprising that upon his victory in Clacton-on-Sea, one of Farage’s first public statements has been a commitment to campaign for electoral reform. His party received over 4 million votes and has returned only 5 seats. So that’s 1% of the seats for 14% of the votes. Compare that with the Liberal Democrats, who have 11% of the seats for only 12% of the votes. Most of us will see that there is a problem here, irrespective of our political affiliations.

Worse still, Labour’s victory will empower the culture warriors, those identity-obsessed activists who have accrued so much power already in our major institutions. While the Tory party claimed to be fighting a “war on woke”, all the while enabling the ideology of Critical Social Justice to flourish, leading Labour politicians have cheered on the culture warriors while pretending that they were nothing more than a right-wing fantasy. We have seen some pushback over the past two years in regards to the worst excesses of this movement, but all of this may soon be undone. Now that the identitarians have their political wing in power, we should expect a few years of regression.

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill thinks the real lesson to be learned from this election is that populism is here to stay:

To see the true quake, you need to look beyond Labour’s mirage-like landslide. As is now becoming clear, Labour has not been swept to power on anything like a wave of public enthusiasm. On the contrary, it won its 412 seats on the second lowest electoral turnout since 1885, and more as a result of people’s exhaustion with the Tories than their love for Sir Keir. No, it is those who refused to vote Labour who have brilliantly unsettled British politics. It is those who took a punt on Nigel Farage’s Reform party who have planted a bomb in the political landscape that will not be easily defused.

For me, the most fascinating stat of the election is the share of the vote received by Labour and the Tories. Labour won around 34 per cent of vote, the Tories around 24 per cent. Let’s leave to one side what a lame landslide it is if only 34 per cent of the people who could be bothered to vote put an X in your box. More striking is the fact that the combined vote share of Labour and the Tories, the parties that have dominated British politics for a century, was 58 per cent. That is staggeringly – and, if you will allow me, hilariously – low.

To put it in historical context: at the last General Election, in 2019, their combined vote share was 75.8 per cent. In 2017 it was even higher: 82.4 per cent. In the elections of the 2000s it hovered around 70 per cent. Why has it now dropped to less than 60 per cent, giving rise to the possibility that in the next few years the two parties that have run this country for decades might see their combined vote drop to less than half of all votes cast? Largely, because of Reform. And a few independents, too. Reform’s vote share is around 14 per cent, enough to shatter the Labour / Tory duopoly and to unravel the two big parties’ arrogant belief that they and they alone have a right to rule.

The speedy turnaround of the Reform revolt was extraordinary. It was only a few weeks ago that Farage ditched his plans to go to America to assist the Trump campaign and instead decided to become leader of Reform. He has now been elected MP for Clacton. Reform has won four seats in total. What’s shocking is that the Liberal Democrats won 71 seats despite getting fewer votes than Reform. The Lib Dems got around 12 per cent of the vote, to Reform’s 14 per cent. That the democratically less popular party of the two will wield far greater power in the Commons is a testament to how busted our first-past-the-post electoral system is. This is unsustainable. It is outright undemocratic.

And yet, even without the parliamentary representation their vote share deserves, Reform has struck a blow for democracy. Their voters, in thinking for themselves and rejecting both the Labour and Tory variety of technocracy, have forcefully created a new opening in political life. They have burst a few of the buckles on the political straitjacket that is our two-party system. The last time this happened was with Farage’s UK Independence Party, in the 2015 General Election, when it won 12.6 per cent of the vote, reducing the Tory / Labour vote share to 67.3 per cent. But where UKIP was mostly a one-issue party, dedicated to getting Britain out of the EU, Reform has broader policy goals. The millions of working-class people who voted for it are saying something very clear indeed: “We want something different”.

June 25, 2024

The ebbing tide of Corbynism

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill finds the humour in the staggering collapse of the Corbynist wing of the British Labour Party, from being tantalizingly close to forming a government to today’s political knife-fight for a single seat in North London:

Jeremy Corbyn, then-leader of the Labour Party speaking at a rally in Hayfield, Peak District, in 2018.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.

Schadenfreude is an unbecoming emotion, I know. But if you think I am not going to derive at least fleeting pleasure from the fact that the Corbynista movement went from being on the cusp of government to fighting tooth and nail to hold on to one poxy constituency in north London, then you are off your rocker. We must all find mirth wherever we can in this drabbest of elections. And I find mine in the staggering contraction of Corbynism, the almost total collapse of this cause that was once so beloved of every trustafarian Trot, Glasto wanker and they / them fruitloop.

It’s nearly too funny for words. Five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn and his crew were eyeing up Downing Street. They were in the running to run the country. Now they’re entirely concentrated in Islington North. Corbyn once commanded vast crowds of affluent youths at Glastonbury, basking in their posh chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!”. He had whole armies of time-rich tweeters who put their expensive education to good use by barking at us “gammon” about how “Jez” was “the absolute boy”. Now he can just about rustle up a few score political anoraks to go canvassing for him in a little bit of north London. It would require a heart of stone not to laugh.

Much has changed for “Jez” in the past five years. He was leader of the Labour Party back then. Now he isn’t even a member of the Labour Party. He was suspended in 2020 after he said the scale of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem under his leadership from 2015 to 2020 had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons“. Then he was officially expelled this year after he announced his intention to stand as an independent in Islington North, the constituency he represented for Labour since 1983. The man who wanted to be PM is now fighting for his life to remain an MP. We’ve gone from “socialism in one country” to “socialism in one constituency”.

Die-hard Corbynistas are flocking to Islington North as if it were the Paris Commune under attack from Versailles. They’re beating the streets to plead with constituents to return the absolute boy to parliament in order that socialism might yet live. The list of starry names Corbyn has dragooned to his door-knocking cause reads like a Sky News producer’s rolodex of wankers. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, anyone? Yes, I’m sure her post-truth bollocks about “all white people [having] white privilege” will go down a treat among the white working classes on the council estates of Archway.

There’s Grace Blakeley, too, a privately educated flapper-girl socialist who thinks flouncing out of a book festival is “collective action“. That’s how she described her decision to withdraw from the Hay Festival over its receipt of funds from the investment management firm, Baillie Gifford. Tweeting “I’ve decided not to go to Hay” is the well-heeled millennial’s Battle of Orgreave. Perhaps Ms Blakeley will compare her class-war wounds with those of some old Irish fella she meets in a pub in Holloway when she’s out electioneering for the boy.

June 23, 2024

The amazing range of things Britain’s Ofcom gets its tentacles into

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this week, Mark Steyn discussed the British government’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) and the way it rigs regulates who can say what during British election campaigns:

Why do I think the UK state censor Ofcom should be put out of business? Because there are very few areas of British life that this strange, secretive body does not “regulate”. Take, for example, this current UK election campaign, which the media are keen to keep as a torpid Potemkin struggle between TweedleLeft and TweedleRight. So, on Thursday night, BBC bigshot Fiona Bruce will host a debate between the four party leaders – that’s to say, the head honchos of the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

Wait a minute: what about Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform party? Since the beginning of the year, Reform has been third-placed in the polls, ahead of the LibDems and Greens, and last week they rose to second place ahead of the unlovely Tories.

So why wouldn’t the second-place party get a spot in the leaders’ telly debate?

Ah, well, you’re looking at it all wrong, you hick. Here’s how the Beeb explain it:

    The Ofcom guidance gives “greater weight on the actual performance of a political party in elections over opinion poll data” taking into account the “greater uncertainty associated with support in opinion polls”.

The “actual performance of a political party” refers to their results in the two previous elections — 2019 and 2015 — when Reform didn’t exist. A lot of other things didn’t exist in 2015: Brexit, Covid, lockdown, the Ukraine war, legions of vaccine victims, the massed ranks of Albanian males occupying English country-house hotels …

But, per “Ofcom guidance”, Campaign 2024 has to be conducted on the basis of how things stood a decade ago.
You know who would also be ineligible to participate under Ofcom’s rules? Everyone’s favourite Lana Turner sweater-girl in Kiev, Volodymyr Zelenskyyyyy. He only formed his Servant of the People party in late 2017, so no election debates for you, sweater-girl. And don’t try blaming it on Putin, because it’s “Ofcom guidance” so we all know it’s on the up-and-up.

Because, as their barrister assured the High Court, Ofcom are “expert regulators”. Lord Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes probably did a module in regulation at Rotherham Polytechnic or whatever.

I can see why the likes of Naomi Wolf’s creepy stalker-boy Matthew Sweet like this system: it’s a club and they get to decide who’s admitted. It’s less obvious why the generality of the citizenry put up with it. At any rate, get set for another thrilling BBC election debate in which all four “opponents” agree on Covid, climate, Ukraine, the joys of mass Muslim immigration and the inviolability of the NHS … but ever more furiously denounce each other for not tossing enough money that doesn’t exist into the sinkhole.

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like that pixie Green leader who describes herself as a “pansexual vegan”, and I certainly don’t have the personal baggage with her that I have with Nige. But under what rational conception of media “regulation” does the six per cent basement-dweller get guaranteed a seat at the table but not Reform?

And you wonder why nothing changes?

June 12, 2024

England “is a parochial country doomed to nostalgia and irrelevance by its unwavering belief in a series of grandiose historical myths”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Fred Skulthorp reviews England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country and How to Set Them Straight by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears:

Should Keir Starmer find himself in Downing Street after the next election, he will have little to play with in terms of zeitgeist. Unlike Blair, there is no Cool Britannia to tap into. There are few unifying cultural figures and despair seems the only discernible national mood. Starmer has only the recent success of the Lionesses and an oft-quoted anecdote about his dad being a toolmaker to inspire the nation.

But there is one nation-renewing narrative on the centre-left that has emerged since 2016. England, unlike the rest of Europe, is a parochial country doomed to nostalgia and irrelevance by its unwavering belief in a series of grandiose historical myths. The real 21st century England is being held back by people singing “Rule Britannia” at the Last Night of the Proms and the fantasies of Daniel Hannan.

In England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country, Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin and former Labour Party speechwriter Mike Stears embark on a journey to set us free from such falsehoods. In Hull we find that William Wilberforce has given the nation an unqualified moral superiority. In Plymouth we discover that Sir Francis Drake is the inspiration for “the aggressively macho nationalist idea” that Brexit can “restore the country’s global reach”. In Runnymede we find that Magna Carta has given rise to the idea of an “Anglo-Saxon birthright sealed with the blood of dead kings”.

Whether anyone actually believes these things is beside the point. These national myths, the authors insist, can account for everything from the popularity of Michael Portillo’s railway documentaries to the 2016 vote to leave the European Union.

Journeys in search of England tend to lend themselves more to projection than discovery. This book presents the worst of that sin. Reading Seven Myths is a bit like being stuck on a very long car journey and regretting having asked the driver: “Whatever happened to the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics?”

Unsurprisingly, much of what follows spouts repackaged Blairite clichés about football, curry and the NHS. Lingering behind their polemic is the tedious psychodrama of the Corbyn years and Labour infighting about how the party should allow itself to feel patriotic. This book is as much about two middle-aged Starmerites trying to work out what it is acceptable to like between their party, the electorate and the limited scope of their inquiry into the England of the 2020s.

And the scope is indeed limited. Reportage and interview, where the book is allowed to breathe away from the grating polemic, is cramped, incomplete and tokenistic. The most memorable soundbite is from Nigel Farage, who tells them — perhaps half-mockingly — that his favourite place in England is London: “It gets faster and more trendy every year that comes”.

Interactions with the public are even more painful. “What do you think of Enoch Powell?” one “brown-skinned man” is asked in Wolverhampton. A refugee from Hong Kong is asked “Does Magna Carta mean anything to you?” Unsurprisingly these conversations don’t return much, but they pave the way for the eye-rollingly mundane conclusion that when it comes to English identity there is “complexity everywhere” (as if anyone’s sense of national identity were ever simple).

Still from the 1964 movie Zulu with Michael Caine as Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, 24th Regiment of Foot.

For a book that spends nearly 400 pages debunking myths and trying to correct the course of English history, its sources require a lot of reading between the lines. Many can be narrowed down to soundbites from a few politicians and forgotten op-eds in the Telegraph (one quoted is dated as far back as 2004).

All this generates endless false dichotomies, strawmen and reductive statements to account for a grander myth loosely referred to as “English exceptionalism”. At times, attempts to source these myths in the body politic come across as comically desperate. Zulu (1964) becomes a film which kept alive the “British Empire myth” and which “the current generation of politicians would have watched growing up”.

Ironically, the writing itself is laced with the sins of myth-making: boring, trite, incoherent, lazy and unfunny. At times it veers into self-parody. In Runnymede, the “high iron gates” of a housing development near the Magna Carta memorial serve to remind us that national identity myths can “make others feel excluded”. In Plymouth, Greta Thunberg is placed in a pantheon alongside Darwin and Drake who both set sail from the Devon port: “None of these dead Englishmen have as much relevance right now as [the voyage] undertaken from the same city by a Swedish Girl”.

June 7, 2024

Nigel Farage’s challenge to the Conservatives

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West perhaps goes a bit far in comparing Nigel Farage and his Reform UK to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, but he’s not wrong about what the rise of Farage’s party might mean to the already dim re-election hopes of Rishi Sunak’s bedraggled clown posse:

“Nigel Farage” by Michael Vadon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I imagine that the last remaining serotonin emptied from the bodies of the Tory election team when they heard that Nigel Farage was to return as leader of the Reform Party and stand at Clacton.

The likelihood is that Farage will win that seat, and the reception he received was certainly electric. And Clacton is not even among Reform’s top 20 targets, according to Matt Goodwin.

It’s possible that the party could overtake the Tories in some polls, although I doubt that they will beat them on election day. That is certainly Farage’s aim, and as he said on Monday: “I genuinely believe we can get more votes in this election than the Conservative Party. They are on the verge of total collapse … I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again. I will surprise everybody.”

Contrary to the jokes about Farage failing to get elected, or the criticism that he is a “serial loser“, he is arguably the most successful politician of the past decade. He built up a minuscule party of ‘fruitcakes and gadflies’ to win two successive European elections. He made Brexit happen, and then stood his candidates down in a number of seats to ensure the Leave alliance remained united in 2019, securing Boris Johnson a victory.

For which he didn’t get the thanks he felt was due, something he alluded to at Monday’s press conference. From what I understand the Tory establishment treated him with a snooty disdain which many an outsider has experienced with the British upper class. And for those making the old point that Farage’s private school background bars him from being a true outsider, that’s not how high society works. Populist movements claiming to represent the downtrodden or disenfranchised have invariably been led by people from highly educated or privileged backgrounds, whether of the Left or Right.

Farage’s targeted constituency certainly fits that bill. Clacton is the town that Matthew Parris called “Britain on crutches” in a piece warning the Tories not to desert their traditional middle-class voters. But the problem for the party is that, through a combination of authoritarian vibes and very liberal policies, they have managed to lose both. Rather than making moderate, soothing sounds while using the British executive’s immense power to shape the country around their will, they have done the exact opposite.

The Government’s disastrous polling figures are not some great mystery. Conservatives don’t tend to have the same emotional attachment to their party as the Labour family does. They vote Tory because they want them to do three things: cut immigration, put more criminals away, and lower taxes. It’s nothing more complicated than that, and they’ve failed on all three.

It is obviously the former that has provoked the most bitterness towards the party. I’m a great believer in Stephen Davies’s analysis of alignment in politics, and the central issue in British politics is immigration, multiculturalism and diversity. Labour are unquestionably on one side of this issue; the Tories are broadly pro-multiculturalism and, while issuing soundbites critical of high immigration, have raised it to record levels. If both main parties are seen to be on one side, something else will fill that gap in the market. Political parties are amoral bodies seeking voting coalitions, and the side which is most united in aligning its core groups around primary and secondary issues will win.

May 26, 2024

Will Rishi Sunak be the British Kim Campbell?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The British election is now underway and if the polls are accurate, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are in for one heck of a thrashing. If he’s particularly unlucky, he could come close to former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell’s electoral shipwreck in 1993 (losing a Parliamentary majority and being reduced to two seats in the Commons), but perhaps Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer isn’t quite the <sarc>charismatic juggernaut</sarc> that Canada’s Jean Chrétien was:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

I’m old enough to remember the sense of optimism, hope and promise felt when Tony Blair was elected back in 1997; not by me, obviously, but I could at least appreciate that other people felt that ‘things can only get better’.

Whether you think they did or not, Blair transformed the country in his own image, just as his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had done during her similarly long reign. No one could say the same of the recent fourteen years of Tory-led governments, a period that has been marked by a continual drift away from conservatism both within civil society and in many ways driven by the administration itself.

As I have said one or two times before, you could have woken up from a long coma and had no idea who had been in charge the whole time. It’s an indication of how far the Overton Window has shifted that proposals to limit student-led immigration are considered way out there despite being mainstream only a decade ago – proposals which the Prime Minister backed out of. One of the benefits of being in government should be the ability to shift the terms of debate, but whereas the rest of Europe is mostly turning Right, Britain under the Tories has gone the other way.

In retrospect, and I have definitely said this more than once or twice, the post-Brexit immigration policy was their biggest mistake. It meant the worst of both worlds for the country and for Tory coalition building, alienating both a large section of cautious voters over leaving the EU, and the many cultural conservatives they picked up in 2019 who saw the referendum as a vote on immigration.

In a parallel universe where the government reduced net migration to five figures, there may well have been immediate pain: struggles to fill vacancies, inflationary pressure caused by rising wages, and universities which now cannot survive without using the immigration system as a funding mechanism. But the Tories would have been on 30% rather than 20%; that they aren’t aware enough to understand this is strange, but then they aren’t an ideological party.

Rishi Sunak’s decision to hold the election early is very curious. Perhaps he was worried that enough letters would be handed in triggering a leadership contest; perhaps he feared that Nigel Farage would reappear and make the Reform Party even more of a problem. Perhaps he’s just impetuous and has had enough, but the announcement itself, in pouring rain and drowned out by a New Labour anthem played by a public nuisance, was fitting.

The prime minister is very unpopular, and the Tories are currently polling at catastrophic levels, but there is little enthusiasm for Labour and more people think the country will get worse than better after they are elected.

March 14, 2024

The insane pursuit of a “zero waste economy”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall explains why it does not make economic sense to pursue a truly “zero waste” solution in the vast majority of cases:

It’s entirely possible to think that waste minimisation is a good idea. It’s also possible to think that waste minimisation is insane. The difference is in what definition of the word “waste” we’re using here. If by waste we mean things we save money by using instead of not using then it’s great. If by waste we mean just detritus then it’s insane.

Modern green politics has — to be very polite about it indeed — got itself confused in this definitional battle. Which is why we get nonsense like this being propounded as potential political policy:

    A Labour government would aim for a zero-waste economy by 2050, the shadow environment secretary has said.

    Steve Reed said the measure would save billions of pounds and also protect the environment from mining and other negative actions. He was speaking at the Restitch conference in Coventry, held by the thinktank Create Streets.

    Labour is finalising its agenda for green renewal and Reed indicated a zero-waste economy would be part of this.

    This would mean the amount of waste going to landfill would be drastically reduced and valuable raw materials including plastic, glass and minerals reused, which would save money for businesses who would not have to buy, import or create raw materials.

The horror here does depend upon that definition of waste. Or, if we want to delve deeper, the definition of resource that is being saved.

[…]

OK. So, we’ve two possible models here. One is homes sort into 17 bins or whatever the latest demand is. Or, alternatively, we have big factories where all unsorted rubbish goes to. To be mechanically sorted. Right — so our choice between the two should be based upon total resource use. But when we make those comparisons we do not include that household time. 25 million households, 30 minutes a week, 450 million hours a year. At, what, minimum wage? £10 an hour (just to keep my maths simple) is £4.5 billion a year. That household sorting is cheaper — sorry, less resource using — than the factory model is it?

And that little slip — cheaper, less resource using — is not really a slip. For we are in a market economic system. Resources have prices attached to them. So, we can measure resource use — imperfectly to be sure but usefully — by the price of different ways of doing things. Cool!

At which point, recycling everything, moving to a zero waste economy, is more expensive than the current system. Therefore it uses more resources. We know this because we always do have to provide a subsidy to these recycling systems. None of them do make a profit. Or, rather, when they do make a profit we don’t even call them recycling, we call them scrap processing.

Which all does lead us to a very interesting even if countercultural conclusion. The usual support for recycling is taken to be an anti-price, anti-market, even anti-capitalist idea. Supported by the usual soap dodging hippies. But, as actually happens out in the real world, recycling is one of those things that should be — even if it isn’t — entirely dominated by the price system and markets. Even, dread thought, capitalism. We should only recycle those things we can make a profit by recycling. Because that’s now prices inform us about which systems actually save resources.

March 28, 2023

QotD: In praise of aristocracy and monarchy

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Mr. McDonnell, deputy leader of the British Labour Party, which for the time being is in opposition, recently objected to the presence of hereditary peers in the “upper” house of Britain’s Parliament, using the crude and vulgar language typical of populist politicians anxious to demonstrate their identity with the people or the masses. (It is strange, by the way, how rarely leftists who are in favor of confiscatory economic policies are condemned as populist, when they appeal mainly to envy, spite, and resentment, those most delightful of all human emotions.)

Speaking for myself — the only person for whom I am fully entitled to speak — I would rather be ruled (at least in the modern world) by the Duke of Northumberland than by Mr. McDonnell; and this is for perfectly rational reasons and not, as might be supposed, from any feeling of nostalgia for a world we have lost.

Unlike Mr. McDonnell, the Duke of Northumberland does not feel that he has to make the world anew, all within his lifetime — or rather within his political lifetime, a period that is even shorter. He knows that the world did not begin with him and will not end with him. As the latest scion of an ancient dynasty going back centuries, he is but the temporary guardian of what he has inherited, which he has a duty to pass on. Moreover, as someone whose privileges are inherited, he knows that his power (such as it is) is fragile in the modern world. He must exercise it with care, discretion, and consideration.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Appeal of Inherited Power”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-07-29.

December 11, 2022

Winter of Discontent 2, non-electric boogaloo?

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Goodwin sets the stage for Britain’s potential re-run of the “Winter of Discontent”. By chance, I happened to be in England for a few weeks smack-dab in the middle of the worst of that winter, so although I was not following the news at the time, the physical and emotional state of the country struck me very deeply. There certainly are strong similarities between late 1970s Britain and post-pandemic Britain:

Conservative Party election poster, 1979.

Britain is entering a Winter of Discontent. If you are in the country and plan to take a train, a bus, a flight, a driving test, travel on the highway, send a letter, have a beer, go to school or university, need an ambulance to take you to hospital, need a nurse to look after you while you are in hospital or want to buy a coffin in case things do not go so well while you are in hospital then there is more than a good chance you will be caught up in a wave of strikes that are sweeping across the country.

More than one million working days are about to be lost due to strike action, the largest number since 1989. This is nowhere near the twelve million days that were lost in the original Winter of Discontent, in 1978-9, or the 126 million days lost during the general strike in 1926. But it is more than enough to cause yet another problem for Rishi Sunak and the faltering Conservative Party he is struggling to turn around.

As I pointed out in the Sunday Times last week, while Sunak has stabilised his party it remains deeply unpopular in the country. Even before this winter, voters blame the Tories far more than global events for Britain’s deteriorating economy. One legacy of Partygate and the disastrous experiment with Trussonomics is that Sunak has inherited a party that is now seen by much of the electorate as untrustworthy, serving its own interests, in the hands of a narrow elite and out of touch. Today, not even one in ten voters think the Conservatives “care about ordinary people”.

What options does Sunak have? While he and his team will be tempted to recycle the Thatcher playbook from the original Winter of Discontent, blaming the unions for the strikes and trying to appeal to national unity, this time things are more complicated. For a start, large numbers of voters actually support the strikes, which reduces Sunak’s room for manoeuvre. Second, this time it is the Conservatives not Labour who are in power, and are being blamed just as much as the unions for the unfolding chaos. Every train that is missed, every flight that is cancelled, every hospital patient that is not looked after will entrench the party’s negative image. And, third, as I said during an after dinner talk to clients of a major law firm this week, irrespective of what happens in the weeks ahead research on the impact of major strikes tells a consistent story: they hurt incumbent governments, lowering their support at the next election.

In fact, this might explain why the Rishi recovery already appears to be running out of steam. As I pointed out on Twitter this week, since taking over Sunak has certainly managed to increase his party’s average share of the vote from 23 to 27 per cent while Labour’s average lead in the polls has dropped from thirty to twenty points. And when voters are asked who would make the “best prime minister”, Sunak is much closer to Starmer, trailing him by only 5-points, than Liz Truss ever was, who trailed him by 29-points. But the Conservatives remain a long, long way behind. Just how far behind was underlined by a by-election in Chester this week which saw the party’s vote crash by sixteen points. The last time this happened at a by-election in a Labour-held seat was in the 1990s, shortly before the Blair asteroid almost rendered the Tories extinct.

At a deeper level, however, this winter also looks set to entrench a much deeper mood among the British people which will also undermine the government. The strikes, the chaos, the mounting sense of crisis are all feeding a palpable feeling among voters that nothing really works in Britain anymore, that contrary to the populist mantra of the last decade nobody is in control.

October 5, 2022

“The centre ground on domestic policy and public services is Corbynism with a union flag on it and the word ‘British'”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the decidedly conservative cast of many British voters’ core beliefs:

Jeremy Corbyn, then-Leader of the Labour Party speaking at a Rally in Hayfield, Peak District, UK on 25th July 2018 in support of Ruth George MP.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.

It wasn’t until I was a fairly grown up that I learned just how conservative many Labour voters were. My parents’ Labour-supporting friends had mostly belonged to what Ken Livingstone called ‘the party of the metropolitan pervert’, London types who worked in creative industries or the public sector and held ultra-liberal views (at least for the 90s). But out there in the real world there were all these Labour supporters who were even more Right-wing than my dad, whether on crime, immigration, Europe, sexual relations or pretty much any social issue. They just wanted, in Blackadder’s words, a few less fat bastards eating all the pie.

That is pretty much where the public are now. As Aaron Bastani put it: “The centre ground on domestic policy and public services is Corbynism with a union flag on it and the word ‘British'”.

Although Jeremy Corbyn lost decisively in 2019, many have forgotten the political lesson of the Corbyn era — that it wasn’t his economic policies that put people off, but his lack of patriotism. He came from that long line of Quaker-Unitarian radicals who have always been seen as too sympathetic to Britain’s enemies, whether it was Robespierre, Napoleon, the USSR, Irish republicans or Islamic radicals.

Corbynomics is certainly more popular than what the current Tory Party is offering, especially that served up in the recent mini-budget, after which it could be said that things are developing not necessarily to the Government’s advantage.

I don’t have strong opinions on the aborted 45% tax cut; it didn’t seem very wise, or fair, but I’m not sure how drastic it was; Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times suggests that the proposal was not as bold as people make out. Yet it seems to be hugely unpopular, except with the Institute for Economic Affairs.

But I’m not convinced that makes it bad.

The IEA’s Kristian Niemietz has repeatedly pointed out that free-market economics is generally quite unpopular, and during the depths of the Brexit dispute he wrote a piece opposing what he called “Bregalitarianism”:

    The Bregalitarian loves to wallow in faux-indignation every time an opponent – which can be a Remainer, but it can also just be a more cautious, less enthusiastic Brexiteer – mentions the possibility that not everyone who cast a vote on 23 June 2016 was fully aware of all the possible ramifications. “How DARE you suggest that 17.4 million voters are stupid!”, cries the Bregalitarian. “How DARE you be so patronising and insulting!”

    I find this Bregalitarian rhetoric deeply disingenuous – and never more so than when free-marketeers engage in it … Here’s a little home truth: if you are a free-marketeer in Britain in 2018, you are part of a small and unpopular minority. The vast majority of the British public disagree with you on virtually everything. There is majority support for a (re-) nationalisation of energy companies, the railways, water and bus companies. There is majority support for rent controls and various price controls.

    As a free-marketeer, you probably want, if not fully privatised, then at least mixed systems of healthcare and education, with much greater private sector involvement. If so, you are almost alone in Britain with that view. There is also majority support for a lot more government regulation, a lot more government interference with private business decisions, higher taxes and a larger state.

Indeed, public opinion on economic issues is quite eye-watering: a full 28 per cent of British adults want banks to be run by the state, and 30 per cent even want internet providers nationalised. A quarter want travel agents nationalised.

January 18, 2022

A Labour Party attempt to count coup against Boris Johnson may have backfired by showing the NHS in a terrible light

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brendan O’Neill explains why he found the Labour social media post to be a very bad idea:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

This week, in response to the latest drinks-during-lockdown scandal engulfing Downing Street, the Labour Party tweeted something so extraordinary, so tone deaf, so inhumane, that it managed to make Boris and his coterie of rule-breaking hypocrites look almost principled in comparison.

It was a comment from an NHS nurse named only as Jenny (thank God for the absence of Jenny’s surname, for I shudder to think of the abuse she would receive if her full identity were revealed). This is what Jenny, according to Labour, had to say about the government’s boozy get-togethers on 20 May 2020 and other occasions when the rest of us were locked down:

    I remember 20 May 2020 vividly, I spent hours on the phone to a man who was in the hospital car park, utterly desperate to see his wife. He begged, wept, shouted to be let in, but we said no – for the greater good of everyone else. She died unexpectedly and alone, as the government had a party.

This is a genuinely extraordinary statement. It is astonishing that no one in the Labour social-media team thought twice about posting it. The aim of this tweet is clearly to make us shake our heads and say “I can’t believe the government had a party while the NHS was making such tough decisions”, but in truth it has the exact opposite effect. It made me, at least, think to myself: “I can’t believe we let people die alone. I can’t believe the howling grief of a desperate man was ignored. I can’t believe there was such a complete and catastrophic collapse in everyday humanity during the lockdown.”

Labour clearly wants us to sympathise with “Jenny” against the government. But I find myself far more disgusted, far more outraged, by Jenny’s behaviour than by Boris Johnson’s. To have a sneaky party during lockdown is one thing. To ignore the pleas of a begging, weeping man and to watch as his wife subsequently died alone is something else entirely. It is in an utterly different moral ballpark. It is an unconscionable act. It is an obscenity against the human family that makes Boris and Carrie’s 25-minute visit to a garden party look saintly in comparison.

June 1, 2021

What Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier applies just as well to the modern Labour Party

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

David Starkey points out that while the best contemporary analysis of the collapse of the Labour vote may come from Rod Liddle, he is in many ways just echoing the words of George Orwell in The Road To Wigan Pier:

“The first thing that must strike any outside observer,” Orwell’s analysis begins, “is that Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes.” “The typical Socialist is not”, he explains, “a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik … or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job … [and] a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.”

He — and even more it must be said she — is also likely to be odd. Here Orwell is unsparing. And spot on. “There is,” Orwell declares, “the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together.” “One sometimes get the impression,” he continues, “that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

Oh and vegetarians. And beards. And “high-minded women”. And homosexuals, like the two “dreadful-looking old men”, clad “in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple”, whom Orwell encountered on a bus in Letchworth. And so — effortlessly out-Liddling Liddle — on.

Above all, Orwell identified the same disdain for the working class. “Are these mingy little beasts,” he reflected after attending one Socialist conventicle, “the champions of the working class?”

“For every person there”, he recalled, “bore the worst stigmata of snobbish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses”.

“The truth is,” Orwell concludes, “that to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders.”

But Orwell was writing in 1937. Not 2021. So how on earth did the Labour party, with even then such a freakish, repellent cadre at its core, survive and thrive as the great mass movement that, for a time, it became and whose passing Liddle laments?

November 12, 2020

QotD: It’s impossible to plan the economy

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

So, government is this all knowing, all seeing, entity which can plan, in detail, what should be produced, by whom, where, at what price. That’s what we need to be true if we are to have an interventionist government which tries to plan the economy.

Government is so ill-equipped to judge the future that it sold €6 billion’s worth of property off for £1.6 billion – that’s what we need to be true for that £4.5 billion loss, no? This is not a world in which we can trust government to plan our economy, is it?

And which government exists in reality? Well, the complaint is that second. And the people complaining are largely those who insist that we should act as if we’ve government of the first type. No, they don’t note the discord in that logic either. Governments aren’t very good at economic decisions therefore governments must make more economic decisions for us all. If you can manage to believe that you too can join the Labour Party.

Tim Worstall, “That Ministry Of Defence Housing Deal Proves It’s Impossible To Plan The Economy”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-07-13.

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