Quotulatiousness

November 3, 2024

Kemi Badenoch replaces Rishi Sunak as UK Conservative leader

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

In the National Post, Michael Murphy discusses the new British Tory leader and why she could be a viable challenger to Two-tier Keir’s Labour government:

… in July, the Tories were ousted by Labour after 14 years in power, limping on with only 121 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons. But the honeymoon period for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government ended almost immediately, as its popularity plummeted faster than that of any administration in recent memory. This has made the Tories interesting once again at precisely the moment when they’ve chosen a new leader: Kemi Badenoch.

The Nigerian-raised mother of three, elected today to lead the Conservative party, threatens to be kryptonite for a Labour party wedded to identity politics. A black, female immigrant at the dispatch box is apt to leave Labour frontbenchers — particularly Sir Keir, a one-time BLM kneeler — somewhat stumped. To make matters worse, Badenoch is a persuasive speaker, commanding a charisma and eloquence that Sir Keir — a dull, po-faced lawyer — does not possess.

These qualities have given Badenoch cross-party appeal within the Tories, rallying endorsements from both the left and right. By endorsing her, however, the party has effectively signed a blank cheque, as Badenoch, unlike her opponents, has made few specific pledges. She has chosen instead to reflect on the election loss and the party’s ideological roots; she is prepared to play the long game, hoping this will allow the Tories to “earn back trust”.

On some issues, though, Badenoch is clear. “The government is doing far too much and it is not doing any of it well — and it is growing and growing,” she declared recently. “The state is too big; we need to make sure there is more personal responsibility.” These ideas are common fare among Conservatives, especially in bloated welfare states like Britain — but her zeal for them evokes, for many, memories of Margaret Thatcher. As the political commentator Simon Heffer wrote, “Mrs Badenoch is the politician who most reminds me of Mrs Thatcher since I last saw Mrs Thatcher”. He noted both women’s hard-mindedness, “deep principles”, and grasp of the “art of the possible”.

Badenoch’s Conservatism can be traced, as the writer Tom Mctague has argued elsewhere, to her beginnings in Africa. Having fled Nigeria during a 1996 military coup, she has a keen, outsider’s appreciation for Britain’s core ideals — not least the rule of law and policing by consent. She is therefore a champion of Britain, of both “the good” and “bad” of its former empire, at a time when it is fashionable to denigrate it, precisely because of her first hand experience that these norms are rare and fragile.

Like Thatcher, Badenoch studied a hard science (computing), marking them out in a Parliament filled with lawyers and humanities graduates. And the swift rise of both women, from modest beginnings through the ranks of the Conservative party, suggests that the “art of the possible” is indeed etched into their stars.

The Armchair General has a few suggestions for Badenoch’s agenda to turn the British economy around:

The new leader of the Conservative Party (image: www.kemibadenoch.org.uk)

My one reservation [about Badenoch] was that, being a software engineer, instead of espousing liberty or slashing laws and regulations, Kemi might reach for more tinkering technocratic solutions — and your humble General is surely not alone in his opinion that we have had quite enough, thank you, of technocratic governments.

However, the more that I consider the severe problems that afflict this country, the more I believe that a process-driven leader, who can focus on the details, might make the biggest difference in the short to medium term.

The immigration issue

As we know, uncontrolled immigration has seized the public imagination greatly — and, indeed, Jenrick centred his campaign around leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). We should almost certainly do this anyway — simply because, like the Americans, we should refuse to sign any treaties that raises foreign courts above our own Parliament.

But leaving that aside, the stated problems with mass immigration can largely be divided into two halves:

  • cultural differences — these are not insignificant, and it is claimed that they lead to an increase in crime (especially sexual crimes) and an undermining of our high-trust society;
  • economic issues — the evidence shows that a massive net influx of low-skilled immigrants depresses wages at the lower end, puts a strain on public services (which cannot expand swiftly enough to accommodate the increase in demand), raises the demand for houses (of which there is a shortage) and thus pushes up prices, and, ultimately, only increases nominal GDP whilst per capita GDP has barely shifted in a decade and a half.

For the purposes of this post, I shall address only the latter issue; given where we are right now, the former is a much thornier problem — at least politically — and probably cannot be solved without radical (and some might say “authoritarian”) action.

The second problem is easier to solve because it is caused, essentially, by the single biggest drag on our economy — our planning system.

[…]

Planning: the Conservatives’ political agenda

The core of the new Conservative manifesto must be a growth agenda; it needs to set out the following core principles:

  1. if we carry on the current trajectory, the British government will be effectively bankrupt in the next 50 years — so something needs to change;
  2. therefore, in order to pay for all the goodies that we have promised ourselves (now and in the future), we need to massively accelerate economic growth;
  3. unless we can build the roads, railways, power stations, research labs, data centres, and homes that we need, then our economy will not grow at the required rate — and spending will need to be cut to the bone;
  4. given the above, the only way to grow is to reform planning laws;
  5. removing the barriers to building will lead to greater investment, lower energy prices (leading to even greater investment), greater social mobility, regeneration of all the regions (so-called “levelling up”), and vast increases in per capita GDP;
  6. where the state invests in infrastructure, then it will cost considerably less than it does currently — meaning that not only will those projects undertaken provide more value for money, but also that many more projects will be viable;
  7. this prosperity and increased mobility will remove even the perceived need for immigrants to perform low-wage jobs (including in our public services), and remove the economic pressures of those that we have already taken in;1
  8. if we do it right, then we will also be able to cut taxes without drastically cutting the size of the state.2

The argument needs to be as stark and inevitable as that.

What this means is that the Conservatives need not stand on a platform of slashing state spending — thus addressing the huge numbers of people in this country who, incredibly, still believe in the benevolent state.

Except for one caveat, there really is no downside to adopting Foundations [discussed here], in full, as the core of the next Conservative manifesto (although it should not be the full extent of said manifesto — there are many other areas that need to be addressed, which I shall write about later).

    1. As I say, the cultural issues are for another time.

    2. Obviously, as a classical liberal, I believe that the size of the state should be drastically cut — but this is not a popular argument in a country that has been raised and educated on socialist doctrine for decades.

October 2, 2024

Poilievre should learn from “Two Tier” Keir’s political stumbles

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

Sir Keir Starmer swept into office just four months ago, but if you tracked the unforced errors, gaffes, stumbles and bumbles it might as well have been four years instead. Most politicians winning nearly 2/3rds of the seats in Parliament can expect a lengthy “honeymoon” period, but “Two Tier” Keir is far from a typical politician … he’s terrible at his new job. In The Line, Andrew MacDougall charts some of the worst self-inflicted wounds Starmer’s government has suffered and indicates how Pierre Poilievre can avoid them:

Prime Ministers Starmer and Trudeau at the NATO summit in Washington.
Image from Justin Trudeau’s X account.

If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre thinks he’s halfway home to a happy life in power, he should look across the pond to see the misery now engulfing Sir Keir Starmer and his new Labour government.

Where to start? Sadly for Starmer, there is a smorgasbord of bad political choice.

[…]

And while Starmer did his level best to stay vague during the election campaign about his planned solutions, as all good opposition leaders do in order to minimize incoming attacks, he was meant to have a plan to sort it all out once he got into the building. But there’s no plan. And that’s according to sources inside 10 Downing Street. That’s right: we’re just three months into a majority parliament and a government with a virtually unopposable mandate and the calls are already coming from inside the building saying it’s all gone to shit.

As I was saying, it’s all very late-stage Trudeau.

Fortunately for Canadians who are desperate for a diversion from Trudeau’s path, Pierre Poilievre is a better politician than Keir Starmer. A vastly better politician. And while that might sound like a pejorative in an era where no politician is trusted, the pile of public policy muck heaps facing Western governments won’t be cleared without someone who understands — deeply and intuitively — the politics of the current time.

Starmer understands none of the current dynamic. He defeated the U.K. Conservatives because the U.K. Conservatives defeated themselves. The country would have taken anyone to stop the Tory psychodrama, even a boring North London lawyer who wouldn’t know politics if it smacked him on his newly-tailored arse. People are angry that nothing appears to be working as it should. Not the hospitals. Not the borders. Not the economy. And not their culture. Everything feels different and/or worse to what they’ve come to expect and they blame the (waves arms frantically) “establishment” for their ills. There’s a reason Nigel Farage’s Reform party won its first seats and came second in nearly a hundred more.

People who are already feeling stretched don’t want to hear, as they’ve heard from Starmer, that their taxes are going up. They want to hear they’re going to go down. “Axe the tax”, anyone? They don’t want to hear that things suck; they want to hear how things will get better. They don’t want to be sung hymns about the benefits of immigration. They want to see someone spot the problem that’s gotten out of control and assure them that it’s not racist to do something about it. They want someone who looks and sounds like them, not another politician in a suit saying things politicians in suits always say. They want radical change, not minor dial adjusting on the dashboards of power. Anything else is more of the discredited same.

Canada’s late-stage Trudeau inheritance is daunting. It cannot be avoided. But it must first be acknowledged, not by simply pointing at the last guy and saying “It’s all his fault” (i.e. the classic politician move), but by mirroring the real distress being felt by the many who’ve lost out where and as the traditional power brokers have won. This is where the room to manoeuvre comes from. Something has gone wrong and it’s going to take something different to produce a different result.

September 27, 2024

Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet as “the Errol Flynn of Canadian politics”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the National Post, John Ivison suggests to Justin Trudeau’s Liberals that the Bloc’s price for supporting the government are just going to keep on rising every time they’re asked to save them from a confidence vote in the Commons:

Yves-François Blanchet Portrait Officiel / Official Portrait a Ottawa, ONTARIO, Canada le 1 December, 2021.
© HOC-CDC
Credit: Bernard Thibodeau, House of Commons Photo Services

It is an indication of how desperate the Liberals are to cling to power that they are even considering a deal with Yves-François Blanchet, the Errol Flynn of Canadian politics.

As was said of the hell-raising movie star by his friend David Niven: “You always knew precisely where you stood with Errol because he always let you down.”

The Bloc Québécois leader will leave the Liberals in the lurch as soon as they refuse his extortionate demands, so best to tell him from the outset to go forth and multiply.

Blanchet has imposed an Oct. 29 deadline before his party pulls support for the government on future House of Commons confidence motions.

The Liberals must back two Bloc private member’s bills, Blanchet said, or the mood will become impossible. “And as soon as it becomes impossible, we will know what to do,” he added, ominously.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said conversations are ongoing, though Blanchet said he has had no discussions with the Trudeau government.

Good, because both Bloc bills are policy madness.

Blanchet has presented them as “good for everybody”, but the truth is they benefit very narrow sections of society — older voters and some farmers — and are bad news for everyone else.

One of the bills, Bill C-319, calls on the government to extend the 10-per-cent increase in Old Age Security payments the Liberals made in 2022 for those over 75 to include the 65–74-year-old age group. The bill is at third reading in the House of Commons but requires the government’s blessing to pass because it commits Freeland to spend money. Lots of money.

The other, Bill C-282, requires the government to exempt the supply-managed farm sector (i.e., eggs, chicken and dairy) from future trade negotiations. It is mired in the Senate’s foreign affairs and international trade committee, where one hopes it will be amended beyond recognition.

September 7, 2024

What is Jagmeet Singh’s actual plan here?

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson outlines the NDP leader’s options now that the Confidence and Supply Agreement has been “ripped up”:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announces the end of the Confidence and Supply Agreement.
Screencap from the NDP official video via The Line,

… I’m starting to consider the possibility that Jagmeet Singh is bad at politics.

I mean, think about this.

We at The Line have long pointed out that CASA was a bad deal for the NDP. It earned the party only a few piecemeal spending concessions like two-treatment Pharmacare and a half-baked dental program. It’s the Liberals who will, and have, taken full credit for both.

Meanwhile, Singh has lost all credibility as a government critic. What blows he can level at the Liberals are fatally undermined by the fact that he’s supported them for years. If the Liberals are complacent in enabling corporate greed, then Singh is demonstrably an enabler of a government that is “too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interest to fight for people”?

I realize that nobody in Liberal-land is going to take this advice seriously, but I’m going to offer it anyway. On its current trajectory, Canada is heading toward a two-party system. Either the Liberals are going to eat the NDP, or the NDP is going to eat the Liberals. Until Wednesday, I put my money on the latter. Now, I’m not so sure.

If the Liberals maintain any existential instinct at all, they’d call Singh’s bluff. Drop the writ on a party that’s demonstrably unprepared to fight the battle it’s proclaimed. Eat the left, and survive to fight on another day. The meal is right there for the taking.

Singh’s big announcement about “ripping up” CASA — meep meep — gains him absolutely nothing. What additional leverage can he expect to acquire in a post-CASA parliament that he didn’t already possess?

Perhaps Wednesday’s announcement was merely a gambit to soothe internal problems, or distance himself from the Liberals. Okay, fine. This might be a viable strategy if it buys Singh a few months to trash Trudeau and raise funds off the effort while frantically trying to wash off the stinky stain of hypocrisy.

But what’s going to happen when the Liberals face their next confidence motion, presumably as soon as the Conservatives can arrange one? What happens at the next one, and the next one after that?

What credibility can Singh possibly hope to maintain if he votes for the Liberals, again? How in the world is the NDP seriously going to claim to have ripped up CASA while effectively acting as if it is in a CASA? The NDP cannot credibly distance itself from the sitting government while spending the next year propping up said government again and again and again in successive confidence motions. Especially after such a brazen display of pulling out of the deal.

No. They’re going to have to pull the trigger, and soon. Obviously. Clearly.

Singh sees this.

Right?

September 5, 2024

CASA doloroso, or Jagmeet finally locates a pair

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

Ding, dong! The long-running deal between the New Democrats and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has finally been terminated. It was Jagmeet Singh’s support that kept Trudeau in power and had been intended to run until next summer, but Singh announced he was no longer going to provide confidence and supply votes in Parliament. The editors at The Line warn us that this doesn’t automatically mean we can start heating up the tar and ripping open the feather pillows quite yet:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh in happier days at a 2017 Pride parade.
Photo via Wikimedia.

On Wednesday, Jagmeet Singh finally took longstanding criticism to heart, and announced he would be tearing up the Confidence and Supply Agreement, the deal that allows the Liberals to hold the confidence of the house.

That said, don’t expect an election just yet.

CASA has been an unmitigated disaster for the little sister of the non-alliance alliance between the two parties. As we’ve previously noted here at The Line, Singh proved to be a weak negotiator, agreeing to support Justin Trudeau with nary a cabinet seat nor a concrete spending promise. To date, the only real concessions the NDP have landed amount to, essentially, half-baked Pharmacare and dental programs that are little more than targeted subsidies to the poor. The merits of these programs in and of themselves is a debate for another day; however, what benefits they do bring have not benefited the NDP one whit.

That’s because the Liberals will — and have — taken full credit for these programs, while Singh has been left in the unenviable position of having to criticize a sitting government that he continues to buttress through the CASA. In other words, for virtually no spending concessions, the NDP has fatally undermined its position as a credible critic of the government.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party — still strong in the polls — can lean on the NDP’s hypocrisy in order to gather up traditional blue collar and even union workers into the bosom of its culturally cozy embrace.

Obviously, this position is untenable. However, we at The Line admit to being surprised that Singh is actually ripping it up ahead of the deal’s natural expiry in June of 2025. Rather, we expected the Liberals to rag the puck on this government for as long as constitutionally possible — and, to be honest, we thought the NDP would stay in step because the party is, at its heart, weak.

Lo! We were surprised.

By ending CASA, the party has time to restore some of its spent credibility, bashing Trudeau hard to drum up fundraising ahead of the next election. Without the NDP’s support, the Liberals can carry on only until they are required to pass a confidence motion — likely the Spring budget. This gives the NDP a few months to generate support. Of course Singh won’t win that election, but he can now leave his party in a stronger position to live to fight another day.

That is … unless Trudeau decides to respond to the collapse of CASA by simply dropping the writ now, catching his opponents on the left off guard and unprepared to run a full election campaign.

August 27, 2024

Was 1974 the worst year in British politics or just the worst year so far?

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

I wasn’t in the UK in 1974 (although I did spend a couple of dystopian weeks there in January 1979), so I don’t know from personal experience just how bad things were, but as Ed West considers Dominic Sandbrook’s very informative social history Seasons in the Sun, he certainly helps make a strong case for it:

One of my favourite moments from reading Fever Pitch as a teenager was the passage where Nick Hornby and a friend bunk off school to watch Arsenal play West Ham, a game which was being held on a weekday afternoon because there wasn’t enough electricity for the floodlights. Britain was enduring a three-day week due to the energy crisis, and assuming the ground would be empty, Hornby is stunned to find it packed with 60,000 people, all skiving off work, and he recalls his hypocritical juvenile disgust at the idleness of the British public.

The scene encapsulates the comic crapness of that period, one that many of us have enjoyed laughing at with the recent Rest is History series on 1974. I began reading Sandbrook’s book Seasons in the Sun afterwards, from where the material for the series was drawn; the early chapters comprise a highly entertaining account of what he described on the podcast as “the worst year in British politics”. Reassuring, perhaps, for those of us inclined towards pessimism, although to paraphrase Homer Simpson, perhaps it was only the worst year so far.

Nineteen-seventy-four saw two elections, the first of which ended in a hung parliament, with Labour as the largest party, and the second with Harold Wilson winning with a majority of 3. These were fought between parties led by exhausted leaders who had run out of ideas, with a third, the Liberals headed by Jeremy Thorpe, soon to be notorious as a dog killer. Britain had declined from the richest country on the continent to one of the poorest in western Europe, and its economy seemed to be falling apart.

During his troubled four years in office Edward Heath had called a state of emergency several times, culminating in ration cards for petrol and power restrictions. In 1973 Heath had “told his Chancellor, Anthony Barber, to go for broke”, Sandbrook writes: “It was one of the greatest economic gambles in modern history: while credit soared and the money supply boomed, Heath hoped to keep inflation down through an elaborate system of wage and price controls”. By October that year, “his hopes were unravelling at terrifying speed”.

The “Barber boom” led to “house prices surging by 25 per cent in just six months, the cost of imports rocketing and Britain’s trade balance plunging deep into the red”. Yet just a week after Heath had published details of his “Stage Three” incomes policy, “the Arab oil exporters in the OPEC cartel announced a stunning 70 per cent increase in the posted price of oil, punishing the West for its support for Israel. It was a devastating blow to the world economy, but nowhere was its impact greater than in Britain.”

The stock market lost a quarter of its value in just a month, while by January 1974 share prices had fallen by almost half in under two years. Just before Christmas, the government cut spending by 4 per cent, and Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Denis Healey, “warned his colleagues that Britain stood on the brink of an ‘economic holocaust'”. Nine out of ten people told a Harris poll that “things are going very badly for Britain” and nearly as many foresaw no improvement in the coming year. They turned out to be correct.

Amid trouble with the National Union of Mineworkers, in November 1973 “Heath announced his fifth state of emergency in barely four years. Floodlighting and electric advertising were banned; behind the scenes, the government began printing petrol ration cards. As the railwaymen voted to join the miners in pursuit of higher pay, it seemed that Britain was sliding into darkness. Offices were ordered to turn down their thermostats, while the BBC and ITV were banned from broadcasting after 10.30 at night. On New Year’s Day, with fuel supplies running dangerously low, the entire nation went on a three-day working week.” Happy days.

August 2, 2024

Trudeau won’t – can’t – go voluntarily

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Michael Den Tandt explains why the Biden option isn’t a viable one for Justin Trudeau at this stage of the Canadian electoral cycle:

US President Joe Biden talks to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, March 2023.

It’s a tough time to be a backbench Liberal MP in Canada, yes? The tone, emerging in anonymous leaks to reporters, is grumpy, surly, unhappy. This is unsurprising. We’re in year ten of a ten-year political cycle that feels stretched and road-beaten, by any standard.

Plus, to our south, there’s this shining model now of the transformative power of change. One day President Joe Biden is clinging by his fingernails to his party’s nomination, with the convicted felon Donald Trump seemingly headed for a big win in November. The next, Biden’s out, new hope Kamala Harris is raising tens of millions in campaign donations, and reporters are lasering in on Trump’s highly quotable running mate, J.D. Vance.

All in a week. So, couldn’t something similar happen in Ottawa? Couldn’t Prime Minister Justin Trudeau take a step back, hit the beach or the lecture circuit, make way for fresh blood, and at least give the Liberals a shot at survival in 2025? What’s he waiting for?

Anything is possible. But this scenario is unlikely. That’s because Justin Trudeau isn’t Joe Biden; Chrystia Freeland isn’t Kamala Harris, and Canada isn’t the United States.

Most obviously, the cycle: The cycle is everything. Individuals are all but powerless in its clutches. As it nears a decade it adds lead weights, like those a deep-sea diver might wear, to the feet of Canadian incumbents. Even the most promising of change agents — former prime minister and justice minister Kim Campbell is Exhibit A — will be brought low by its power.

The argument can be made made that the Progressive Conservative party’s obliteration in 1993 (reduced from majority status to two seats) was not just due to late-cycle fatigue, that Campbell herself had run a wobbly campaign. Some will note the deep weariness with the constitutional wrangling that dominated Canadian discourse during the Brian Mulroney years, or the hangover of Mulroney’s, at the time, keen personal unpopularity. Fair points.

But underlying those events was still the implacable cycle — as in 2006, when prime minister Paul Martin, having seen that Liberal government reduced to a minority in 2004 (despite his personal popularity at the time), lost power to a rising Stephen Harper. In the throes of the federal sponsorship scandal (I will spare you the details, but you can find them here if you’re interested in the arcana), Martin was described by gifted wordsmith Scott Reid, then his communications director, as “the wire brush” who would scrape away the stain of sponsorship. It was a bold attempt to rhetorically seize the change wave. But the wave was strong and Martin lost.

July 25, 2024

QotD: Why devolution has not worked in the United Kingdom

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

Reading this Samizdata quote of the day got me thinking about why devolution in the UK has been a general disappointment and source of endless annoyance.

I remember when arguments were originally made for devolution, commentators would claim that devolution would work in the same way that the federal structure of the US works, or, for that matter, how the cantonal system works in Switzerland. By which they meant that if a state such as Zug in Switzerland or Wisconsin in the US tried a specific policy (encouraging cryptos, or enacting Workfare, to take two actual examples), that the perceived success or failure of these policies would be studied by other cantons and states. Hence the idea that devolution allows a sort of “laboratory experiment” of policy to take place. It creates a virtuous kind of competition. That’s the theory.

What seems to have happened is that since devolution in the UK, Scotland, Wales and to some extent, Northern Ireland, have competed with England in who can be the most statist, authoritarian and in general, be the biggest set of fools. Whether it is 20 mph speed limits spreading to many places and harsh lockdowns (Wales) or minimum pricing on booze and “snitching” on your own family for views about gender (Scotland), the Celtic fringe appears to be more interested in being more oppressive, rather than less. I cannot think of a single issue in which the devolved governments of the UK have been more liberal, and more respectful, of liberty under the rule of law. (Feel free to suggest where I am mistaken.)

One possible problem is that because the UK’s overall government holds considerable budgetary power, the devolved bits of the UK don’t face the consequences of feckless policy to the extent necessary to improve behaviour.

Even so, I don’t entirely know why the Scots and Welsh have taken this turn and I resist the temptation to engage in armchair culture guessing about why they tend to be more collectivist at present. It was not always thus. Wales has been a bastion of a kind of liberalism, fused to a certain degree with non-conformity in religion, and Scotland had both the non-conformist thing, and the whole “enlightment” (Smith, Hume, Ferguson, etc) element. At some point, however, that appears to have stopped. Wales became a hotbed of socialism in the 20th century, in part due to the rise of organised labour in heavy industry, and then the whole folklore – much of it sentimental bullshit – about the great achievements in healthcare of Nye Bevan. Scotland had its version of this, plus the resentments about Mrs Thatcher and the decline of Scotland as a manufacturing power.

[…]

Maybe the “test lab” force of devolution will play a part in demonstrating that, as and when we get a Labour government for the whole of the UK, it will be a shitshow on a scale to put what has happened in the Celtic parts of the UK in the shade.

Johnathan Pearce, “Why has devolution not worked in a liberal direction?”, Samizdata, 2024-04-23.

July 22, 2024

“Lovable loser” is not a good look for a political leader, even a British one

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

In The Critic, Andy Mayer points out that former British PM Rishi Sunak does not deserve the post facto praise he’s been getting from the media and should not be “rehabilitated” by them:

Rishi Sunak was a “wet” even before his farcical aquatic ceremony to kick off the 2024 general election.

We love a loser in Britain. From Eddie the Eagle to Gareth Southgate, our default reaction to a lack of success is warm appreciation. Parliament in that regard could not have been kinder to Rishi Sunak on his return as Leader of the Opposition. Never mind that the Conservative Party now looks more like the garrison of Rourke’s Drift than a campaign army. Never mind that the majority lies speared in the dust from their July 4th Isandlwana. Never mind that on the horizon General Farage is stirring the nativists for a future Bore War. The Lord Chelmsford of Prime Ministers marches on.

Less allegorically, Sunak, having made a couple of good speeches, is as one commentator put it “precisely the leader the Conservative Party needs right now”. On a personal level he is clearly a lovely guy, smart, capable, talented and has a very bright Clegg-like future ahead of him, whether in the valley or teaming up with Tony Blair to hawk AI to dictators. He is being feted by all the usual suspects who regard Parliament as a jolly club for centrist dads. Little thought however has been put into how this comes across to the poor bloody Tory infantry still pulling the bodies out of the metaphorical Buffalo River, wondering whether the inexperienced lieutenants rowing in the redoubts have what it takes to hold the line.

So let us be blunt, as a leader Sunak was hopeless. He had no coherent ideology or vision. He treated consensus building as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. Even then he was better at building coalitions against rather than for him and was advised by people who used polls to tell them what to think, rather than as tools to move the public their way. He was neither a campaigner nor a political strategist.

As a result, he demonstrated cataclysmic judgement on the timing of the election. Whether this was through arrogance, naivety, or ignorance, he amplified the losses. He did so in the teeth of ample public commentary praising an assumed wise decision to delay until winter. Catching his own side by surprise, benefitting only morally vacuous apparatchiks boosting their betting accounts, and a far better prepared Opposition.

In office he was addicted to fad policies like generational bans, the Rwanda scheme, and the triple lock. He ducked hard choices on growth like building homes and cutting red tape, both things his deeply buried Thatcherite instincts should have told him were fights worth having. He was useless at implementation. Note, for example, the failure of his own borders policy or thinking through how to reform Ed Miliband’s ideological Net Zero architecture into something pragmatic.

He was right about one big thing — the importance of fiscal prudence and sound money. But he was also the Chancellor who undermined that prudence with wasteful lockdown splurges that destroyed growth and pushed the national debt over 100 per cent. He loved the sugar rush of popularity that came with being a spender in a crisis, but afterwards reformed nothing, preferring instead to raise taxes, generally by copying Labour’s madder talking points. For example, putting up corporation (company profits) tax to 25 per cent, freezing personal allowances, and hitting the North Sea with a 75 per cent “temporary” windfall tax, that has already outlasted the short period of high prices that inspired it. The latter has mortally wounded domestic investment, ripe for the Labour administration to finish it off. An error made despite his predecessor Osborne making exactly the same mistake with the same disastrous consequences only a few years earlier.

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”.

July 1, 2024

Fifty ways to leave your leader

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

Okay, I exaggerate in the headline … Mitch Heimpel only offers a list of eight factors that matter when it’s time for a political party to take their leader out behind the barn, so to speak:

Caucus revolts have gotten more common in Canadian politics of late.

They’ve always been commonplace in Westminster politics. In recent years, they’ve dethroned three prime ministers in the U.K. They’re almost as common as general elections for removing prime ministers in Australia. They’re a sign of a healthy parliamentary system … sort of. Our system runs on confidence. Prime ministers are supposed to be responsive to pressure from the backbench.

Canada has been something of an exception to this, and not always to our national benefit. Though less so lately. We’ve seen sitting governments in revolt (Jason Kenney in Alberta, 2022) We’ve also seen opposition leaders taken out by frustrated caucus (Erin O’Toole federally in 2022, Patrick Brown as Ontario Progressive Conservative leader, 2018.) The Chrétien-Martin feud was more of a civil war than a revolt.

Still, despite the examples above, these events remain relatively rare in Canada, compared to many of our Westminster peers, because of how centralized power has become in leaders’ offices (especially in the PMO). Our normal, as described in Jeffrey Simpson’s The Friendly Dictatorship, is how our system evolved, not how it was meant to be.

Now, since there are signs (see here and here and here) that at least some Liberals are musing about taking a shot at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it’s perhaps a good time to set some ground rules for caucus revolts. This is what we’ve learned not just from recent Canadian experience, but also from what our British and Australian cousins have learned over the years.

[…]

If things are going so badly that the caucus wants to revolt, you probably do need to make changes. Showing you’re listening, demonstrating accountability at the senior levels and demonstrating change can take the wind out of a caucus revolt before it gets out of hand.

The above are general rules — exceptions can obviously apply. And as noted at the beginning, Canada doesn’t have much experience with these situations. That’s why Australia and the U.K. are so instructive. But things do seem to be changing in Canada, and certainly, things seem to be changing in the Liberal caucus. The above rules are offered free of charge to mutineers and loyalists alike. Good luck!

June 26, 2024

Lord Balfour

Filed under: Britain, History, Middle East, Religion, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Arthur Lord Balfour, Conservative Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, is perhaps best known for the Balfour Declaration issued during World War 1 that established the formal goal of an independent homeland for the Jews in the Holy Land. Who was he? Barbara Kay’s essay originally published in the Dorchester Review was recently reposted at Woke Watch Canada:

“Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC, Prime Minister and Philosopher” portrait in oil by Philip de László, 1914.
From the Trinity College collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Why was the aristocrat Lord Balfour, the social antithesis of this humble Jew from the Pale of Russia, so taken with Weizmann’s vision that he was willing to expend political capital and exert so much effort to see it realized? Who was Balfour? What was he?

Arthur James Balfour was born at his family seat, Whittingehame, in East Lothian, the “granary of Scotland”. A forebear had made a fortune in India in military materials, so he was financially secure for life, and socially connected at the highest levels.

Having lost his father when he was 7, Balfour was lucky in his mother, a strong-willed and educated woman who, according to Mrs Dugdale, inculcated the idea of duty as “the uncompromising foundation of his character”. He attended Eton and Cambridge, where he was described by a friend as “a man of unusual philosophy and metaphysics”, who could hold his own with the Dons (professors), “some of them men of undoubted genius”. He was devoted to his extended family, and much beloved by his nieces and nephews.

In his essay “Arthur Balfour: a Fatal Charm”1 cultural critic Ferdinand Mount cites “nonchalance” as Balfour’s defining trait. Legendarily indolent, he rarely rose before 11 a.m., claimed never to read newspapers, and disdained the ritual schmoozing of fellow backbenchers expected by his peers in the Members’ Smoking Room. Mount says he was “indifferent to what his colleagues, the public or posterity thought of him or his policies”.

This loftiness — echoed in his unusual physical height — was perceived as admirable or maddening according to the observer and circumstances. Churchill said of him: “He was quite fearless. When they took him to the Front to see the war, he admired the bursting shells blandly through his pince-nez. There was in fact no way of getting to him.”

His self-sufficiency was no act. Sports-mad, he skipped lunch with the Kaiser to watch the Eton and Harrow cricket match, and when in Scotland might play two full rounds of golf a day (his handicap of 10 was better than P. G. Wodehouse and about the same as thriller writer Ian Fleming’s).

Balfour sounds from my description so far as if he was something of a playboy, but that is a very partial portrait. He was also known as “Bloody Balfour” for his readiness to endorse police action and his apparent indifference to their cost.

The Irish loathed him. In 1887 he became personal secretary for Ireland under his uncle, Lord Salisbury, just in time to enforce the Coercion Act against the volatile Irish Land League. Indeed, Balfour’s parliamentary critic William O’Brien saw him as a man who harboured a “lust for slaughter with a eunuchized imagination” who took “a strange pleasure in mere purposeless human suffering, which imparted a delicious excitement to his languid life”.

One hopes this accusation of actual sadism is an exaggeration of Balfour’s indubitable detachment. Yet indifference to human life is certainly not an uncommon charge laid against intellectuals for whom ideas loom larger in their claims to attention than the fate of those beyond their particular tribes.

For balance, we have Barbara Tuchman’s assessment:

    Balfour had a capacious and philosophical mind. Words to describe him by contemporaries are often “charm” and “cynicism”. He had a profound and philosophic mind, he was lazy, imperturbable in any fracas, shunned detail, left facts to subordinates, played tennis whenever possible, but pursued his principles of statecraft with every art of politics under the command of a superb intelligence.

Fortunately for his temperament, Balfour’s life circumstances had landed him at the centre of a genuinely intellectual circle. His brothers in-law, for example, were Lord Rayleigh, who became head of the Cambridge Laboratory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher who with his wife Elaine Balfour founded Newnham College.

Politically, Balfour enjoyed both dramatic success and dramatic failure. He led the Unionist Party longer than anyone before him since Pitt the Younger. And he was a minister longer than anyone else in the 20th century, including Winston Churchill. Balfour was the only Unionist who was invited to join Asquith’s first war cabinet, and continued as foreign secretary after the coup that brought Lloyd George to power.

As Churchill put it: “He passed from one cabinet to the other, from the prime minister who was his champion to the prime minister who had been his most severe critic, like a powerful, graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled across a rather muddy street”.

One of Balfour’s teachers at Eton described him as “fearless, resolved and negligently great”. On the other hand, Mount tells us, “indecisiveness” was his bane. He would stand paralyzed in the mezzanine of his London home agonizing over which of the matching staircases to descend by. He could love — the great love of his life died after an unreasonably long engagement — but, allegedly too staggered by the loss of his almost-fiancée, he never married.2 He could not be pinned down politically on many issues, a matter of great frustration to his colleagues, and this cost him dearly. As Mount notes, his charm was indisputable, “but more than charm he would not give” and “in the end, the charm is all that remains.”

Balfour fought three general elections as party leader and lost them all. His premiership lasted less than four years and ended in a Liberal landslide in 2006, a great electoral humiliation in making him the only prime minister in the 20th century to lose his own seat. He did not seem greatly to repine at the rejection, though, and it is thanks to the loss that he had time to further his education on the Zionist movement.

    1. Mount, Ferdinand, English Voices (2016), pp 358 ff.

    2. One suspects that even if May Lyttleton had lived, Balfour would have avoided marrying her on some pretext or other. There is no evidence that Balfour was a closeted homosexual, but he may have been asexual. He enjoyed an “amitié amoureuse” with (married) Mary Elcho for 30 years involving little or nothing in the way of sex, after which she wrote to him, “I’ll give you this much, tho, for although you have only loved me little, yet I must admit you have loved me long”.

June 17, 2024

For want of a security clearance, the (potential) traitors escaped scot-free

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates section of this week’s Dispatch from The Line, we get a summary of the state of brain-freeze in Parliament over the NSICOP (National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians) report, that in a functioning state would have triggered much more action than it has in the dysfunctional Dominion:

The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF – https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf )

The lead story this week, clearly, was the continuing fallout from the NSICOP report last week. Because of this report, even though there is much that we do not know, there are absolutely some things that are clearly established. Let’s run through some of the key points that are uncontested and draw some very modest and safe conclusions from them.

Here are facts.

  • There are multiple parliamentarians, meaning members of the House of Commons and the Senate, who have been deemed by eight of their colleagues to be engaged in activities with hostile foreign powers on either a witting or semi-witting basis.
  • The prime minister and the PMO have been aware of who these individuals are for at least a month, if not longer. That is when NSICOP filed its unredacted report to them for review, as required.

The above facts are unchallenged. Now let’s draw a few conclusions.

The phrasing of the NSICOP report, as well as both Elizabeth May’s and Jagmeet Singh’s press conferences this week, led us to believe some of these individuals are still sitting in both the House of Commons and the Senate. We acknowledge that Elizabeth May and Jagmeet Singh differ considerably on the severity of what these individuals are alleged to have done, but both seem to agree that the relevant parties, in at least some cases, remain in Parliament.

The prime minister, as the person responsible for the administrative and legal apparatus of government, could call the Clerk of the Privy Council, the Director of CSIS, the minister of public safety and others as necessary into his office today, and inform them that he would be making the names public, and that it would be the responsibility of those individuals to figure out how that could be accomplished while protecting intelligence sources and methods. At this time, there is no indication that he has done so, or has any interest in doing so.

So we got the grotesque theatre that was the House of Commons this week. The government has spent the last week and change challenging various opposition leaders to obtain security clearances so that they could view information that the prime minister has had for at least a month, and perhaps longer, even though both the Security of Information Act and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act (depending on the auspices under which their security clearances were issued) prevents them from disclosing what they read.

And, therefore, doing anything about it. Because to remove a caucus member would be to reveal it, and if a leader has no caucus members that are implicated, there is no urgency to their reading the report.

Protecting the national security of Canada, and the democratic institution of parliament itself, is the prime minister’s job before it is anyone else’s. And the prime minister has had this information for at least a month.

It’s worth repeating that because we want you to envision something. Imagine there are three U.S. Senators accused of aiding and abetting a foreign power, and Joe Biden knew about it for a month.

When do you think impeachment proceedings would start?

Boris Johnson was unceremoniously dumped by his party for lying about throwing a party during COVID lockdowns (and we have no problem with that). Our prime minister has known that there are people currently sitting in parliament that have turned themselves into intelligence assets for hostile foreign powers for a month, and …

… the government would like you to know that it thinks Pierre Poilievre should get a security clearance so that he can read the documents.

We think Poilievre should, too. Because here’s the thing. The Security of Information Act says right there in Section 24 “No prosecution shall be commenced for an offence against this Act without the consent of the Attorney General”.

That reads to us like so: Pierre Poilievre can read those documents, release the names, and then dare Justin Trudeau to prosecute him. Indeed, anyone with the names could.

Your Line editors have raised this before on the podcast, but it bears repeating. Canada’s international reputation has taken a lot of hits lately. So imagine if you would, gentle reader, a situation where Justin Trudeau’s Attorney General signs off on having his political opponent arrested for revealing that hostile foreign powers have coerced sitting MPs into becoming intelligence assets … especially if one or more of those MPs is revealed to be a Liberal.

That’s a front page international news story. We’d look like a banana republic. Our international reputation would take decades to recover.

Spoiler: we already do look like a banana republic and our international reputation is lower than it has ever been. Trudeau isn’t a dummy: he figures that our reputation literally can’t get much worse no matter what he does, so he’s choosing to protect … someone … and what’s Poilievre going to do? He proved during the lockdowns that he’s not willing to get arrested on a matter of principle (unlike Maxime Bernier), so he’s likely to just posture endlessly until something new pops up in the silly season news rotation.

June 13, 2024

Fun new family game – Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?

Filed under: Cancon, Gaming, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper presents the rulebook for an exciting new family game literally “ripped from the headlines” – Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?

“To simulate what it’s like to go to work in a national parliament secretly housing foreign agents, the National Post presents a tongue-in-cheek instruction manual to play this group game: Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?
Photo by Brice Hall”

WHAT YOU NEED TO PLAY:

  • One large writing surface, such as a chalkboard, whiteboard or flip chart (THE ORDER PAPER)
  • 20-70 note cards
  • A timer

SETTING UP PLAY:
Gather at least five of your closest friends and have them sit in a line facing the ORDER PAPER. They will be divided into two categories: The WITTING AGENTS and the CREDULOUS NAIFS.

To choose who among them will be the WITTING AGENTS, prepare a stack of IDENTITY CARDS equal to the number of players. On every fifth card, mark the symbol for the Chinese yuan (¥). In the case of five players, mark a single card, for 10 players, mark two, etc.

Shuffle the IDENTITY CARDS and distribute them among the players. Anyone receiving a “¥” is now a WITTING AGENT.

Set aside another stack of note cards to serve as MANDATE LETTERS. The text for each card is below. Shuffle the MANDATE LETTERS and place them face down.

RULES OF THE GAME:
Each round begins with a CANADA IS NOT BROKEN phase in which all players close their eyes, put their thumbs in their ears and bury their face for two minutes (the elapsed time to be marked with a timer). During this phase, the WITTING AGENTS open their eyes, stride over to the ORDER PAPER and write down a piece of binding public policy that damages Canada to the advantage of a hostile government (suggestions below).

Once this act of treachery is done, the WITTING AGENTS return to their seats will pretend to wake up alongside them as if nothing happened.

Now begins the CONCERNED FOLLOW-UP phase. First, players must pull a MANDATE LETTER card that will determine conditions of discussion. Now, the parliamentarians must decide who among them is the foreign cat’s paw who has defaced their ORDER PAPER with disloyal policy. Uncomfortable questions are asked, accusations are made, and at the end of the round the players vote on who among them will be ejected as a traitor.

Only after the accused traitor is exiled will they show their IDENTITY CARD, revealing whether the accusations have been true, or whether they have been unjustly maligned.

Ejected players are then exiled to THE SENATE, a separated area of chairs where they are served port, ginger ale and black liquorice. They continue to participate in the CANADA IS NOT BROKEN and the CONCERNED FOLLOW-UP phases, but they no longer have a vote.

June 12, 2024

“Treason never prospers” … except in Canadian politics, apparently

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

Justin Trudeau and his unindicted co-conspirators in Canada’s federal parliament don’t think the names of Members of Parliament who have been acting as enablers or actual agents of foreign powers — that is, possible traitors — should be made public. The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) Even the least cynical may be forgiven for thinking that this isn’t what a mature country would do in similar circumstances:

The cover of the NSICOP special report on foreign interference (PDF here)

… MPs have an obligation to protect the institution that is the House of Commons. Every MP is required as a condition of taking their seats, to swear the following oath: “I, [name], do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles the Third, King of Canada, his heirs and successors. So help me God.”

The violation of that oath, or the suspected violation of that oath, is absolutely arguably contempt against the House of Commons. We don’t have a ton of precedent for that, because MPs who have been alleged to have collaborated, even unwittingly, with a foreign power in the past usually have the good sense to resign. But MPs should absolutely be allowed to pass judgment on the actions of their colleagues, with the express intent of expelling from the House any members who have transgressed against their oath to King and Country. This isn’t just their duty, it is a duty that they are uniquely positioned and obligated to perform. Until we know exactly which parliamentarians we’re talking about, a spectre hangs over all 400-plus of them. That very much compromises the public’s opinion of Parliament and has a demonstrable impact on their ability to do their jobs as parliamentarians.

Once upon a time, children, ministers of the Crown would offer their resignations for mistakes made by members of the civil service in the ministry for which he or she held responsibility, never mind mistakes of their own. In modern times, of course, it’s rare to find a minister resigning voluntarily until the RCMP is literally knocking on the door, and sometimes not even then.

Second, we are a large and multicultural country. MPs are expected to represent members of any diaspora community which may exist in their constituency. If you’re a Tibetan or Uyghur activist, how can you be represented by an MP who’s demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with the government of the People’s Republic of China? If you’re an Iranian democracy and reform activist, how can you be represented by an MP who has close ties to Iran’s diplomatic and intelligence operation?

The answer, of course, is that you can’t be. The government has a greater responsibility to the democratic rights of those Canadians than it does to protecting the identity of any single unscrupulous or otherwise compromised parliamentarian. With every day that passes, Ottawa looks more like it has an interest in partisan butt-covering than it does in maintaining the long-term faith that democracy requires for our institutions to survive.

A good Member of Parliament recognizes the responsibility to the constituents — whether they voted for that particular MP or not — and would keep that responsibility as faithfully as possible. On that reckoning, we have fewer good MPs than we should have … and if the intelligence turns out to be fully supported upon full investigation, there should be a lot of open seats to run by-elections for (even if no formal charges of treason are ever laid).

Finally, I accept that intelligence is not evidence. I also accept, as noted in the Globe by Philippe Lagassé and Stephanie Carvin, that we must be cautious to not compromise intelligence sources and methods, or compromise ongoing investigations. Parliamentarians should not replace the criminal justice system or undercut our defence, but they what they are capable of doing, and indeed are required to do because no one else can do it for them, is broadly defining what the acceptable behaviour for parliamentarians should be. If an MP or a senator has engaged with a foreign power’s diplomatic or security services and they do not believe they have crossed the line for what we deem to be acceptable behaviour, they will be more than welcome to go on Power and Politics, or take to social media, or show up at what I’m sure will be many committee hearings, and make their case.

It is not a hardship to ask them do so. They are not being hard done by. The question here is not whether what they’ve done is criminal. It wasn’t criminal when Bev Oda billed the taxpayers for her juice. It wasn’t criminal when Bill Morneau forgot to leave a cabinet meeting where a decision was made that was a perceived conflict of interest. But both of those parliamentarians were forced to accept that their behaviour had failed the people they were sworn to represent. They resigned.

And the idea that orange juice crosses the line, but aiding a foreign intelligence service — even “semi-wittingly” — does not, will fail to pass the smell test with a very large number of Canadians. And that is entirely correct. The public is well ahead of the politicians on understanding this.

Public trust in politicians has been ebbing for quite some time and was fading even before the pandemic exposed so many of them as would-be dictators, poltroons, and idiots. There is no deep reservoir of respect for politicians that can be drawn on at this point. Swift action is the only thing that Parliament can do and by “swift”, I don’t mean setting up a Royal Commission with a multi-year remit to bury the issue until after the next federal election.

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