Quotulatiousness

January 10, 2020

Pierre Poilievre’s bid for federal Conservative leader

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

Chris Selley on the varying reactions to the notion of Pierre Poilievre as Andrew Scheer’s replacement:

Glee is spreading among Liberal partisans at the thought of Pierre Poilievre succeeding Andrew Scheer as Conservative leader. The theory is he is so pugnacious, so obnoxious, so poisonously, sneeringly partisan as to be literally unelectable.

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It is true that the man longtime Conservative cabinet minister John Baird nicknamed “Skippy,” in tribute to his enthusiastic Question Period performances, does not suffer from an excess of gravitas — though Poilievre’s reported support for his leadership bid from Baird and Jenni Byrne, a former senior adviser to Stephen Harper, lend him some within party ranks. His candidacy hasn’t made any measurable dent thus far in public opinion polls. And the opposition war rooms would certainly have fun unpacking his baggage.

Never mind Poilievre questioning the value-for-money proposition of compensating residential school victims (for which he apologized), or his use of the term “tar baby” in the House of Commons (for which he did not, and nor should he have, because it was a perfectly apt and inoffensive analogy in the context he used it), or the dreaded Green Light from the Campaign Life Coalition. Having been Harper’s parliamentary secretary, Liberals will blame him for every supposed atrocity of the Harper era.

All that said, the notion that people widely viewed as pugnacious, obnoxious and partisan-to-a-fault can’t win in Canadian politics is belied by reality. A quick glance around the federation brings Jason Kenney, Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau immediately to mind.

That’s not to say they won because of those character traits: Kenney’s and Ford’s leadership opponents would likely have fared just as well. Trudeau hoodwinked many with his Sunny Ways fraud, but he might well have won as the classic born-to-rule Liberal he turned out to be. If his government continues venting credibility at the rate it established late in its first mandate, the next Conservative leader could well become prime minister no matter who he is.

After recounting the dismal tale of Sheer’s “leadership”, Selley recounts a favourite story about Boris Johnson which contrasts strongly with the Milk Dud’s occupancy of the job.

Again, that degree of swagger and eloquence is far too much to ask of Canadian politicians. But it shouldn’t be too much to ask a party leader to have enough confidence in his party, his members, his movement and his ideas to arouse him to at least some degree of annoyance when they’re unfairly deprecated. If Conservative members aren’t excited by the prospect of a Poilievre leadership, they shouldn’t be half as mortified as Liberals think they should be.

December 14, 2019

The English Civil War Explained

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Armouries
Published 20 Dec 2017

The Royal Armouries’ English Civil War collection boasts an array of infantry and cavalry arms and armour from the 1640s. Delve into this turbulent historical period with our resident Royalist, David.

Where to find us:

⚔Website: https://royalarmouries.org/home
⚔Blog: https://blog.royalarmouries.org/
⚔Twitter: https://twitter.com/Royal_Armouries

The Royal Armouries is the United Kingdom’s national collection of arms and armour. On this channel, discover what goes on behind the scenes at the museum and to see our collection come to life. From combat demonstrations to jousting coverage to behind the scenes tours with our curators, we’ve got it covered.

Have a question about arms and armour? Feel free to leave us a comment and we’ll do our best to answer it.

December 7, 2019

Bryan Donkin, 19th century inventor, amateur public relations whiz and independent lobbyist

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

In the latest installment of Anton Howes’ Age of Invention newsletter, he recounts the story of Bryan Donkin and his efforts to save innovators from excessive government interference:

One of the major arguments of the book I’m writing is that inventors’ talent for public relations and lobbying was one of the main reasons that Britain — rather unexpectedly — was the place that experienced an unprecedented acceleration of innovation.

The greatest of these lobbyist-inventors has to be Bryan Donkin, a nineteenth-century mechanical engineer. As an inventor, Donkin improved threshing machines, dredging machinery, and a variety of other tools. He invented the steel pen, dabbled in chemistry, as well as phrenology, and was one of the key people responsible for mechanising the production of paper. He became best known for improving and commercialising tin cans for food. Mechanised paper-making and canned food, having both been invented in France, were perfected in Britain by Donkin. He was the archetypal tinkerer.

Bryan Donkin (1768-1855).
Photographer unknown via Wikimedia Commons.

But it’s as a lobbyist that I think Donkin was truly exceptional. His experience has important lessons for all would-be supporters of invention today.

In April 1817, Donkin read in his newspaper that there had been a disaster in Norwich: the boiler aboard the steamboat Telegraph had exploded. Of the boat’s twenty-two passengers, eight had died immediately in the blast, and another six had eventually succumbed to their wounds. It was a shocking tragedy. And for Donkin, doubly so: in addition to the human death toll, the explosion threatened to kill off one of the era’s newest and most exciting inventions.

Although some of the first trials of steamboats had taken place in the 1780s, it wasn’t until the turn of the century that they began to be practical. By 1817, the first commercially successful steamboat service in Britain, Henry Bell’s Comet, had been chugging its way up the River Clyde between Glasgow and Greenock for only five years. And Londoners like Donkin had only just seen their first steamboat, Margery, when she puffed her way into the Thames in 1815 (the following year, after becoming the first steamboat to cross the Channel, she reinvented herself in Paris as Elise). Thus, by the time of Telegraph‘s explosion, the passenger steamboat had only just been born. There was a very real risk that it would be banned.

Fortunately, however, the steamboat had Donkin in its corner. His immediate reaction upon reading about the explosion was to gather some of his engineer friends — Timothy Bramah and John Collinge — and set off for Norwich to view the explosion site for themselves. As the first expert engineers on the scene, they then took control of the narrative about the explosion. Donkin and his friends went straight to Norwich’s MP to ask him to set up a parliamentary select committee to look into the disaster. And while they waited for the politicians to be assembled for the committee, they held a series of public meetings about the disaster at the Crown & Anchor Tavern — a favourite haunt of London’s engineers. There, they had a chance to rally the rest of the profession and get their story straight about what must have caused the explosion.

October 29, 2019

Parallels between the current Brexit mess and the 1906 general election

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Sean Gabb writes in the Libertarian Enterprise on the clusterfail in Parliament and an interesting historical parallel from the beginning of the 20th century:

… the Brexit debate that only began with the counting of the Referendum votes has been a valuable education. So far as it blurs the lines of accountability, membership of the European Union has been a useful entrenchment of our ruling class. It has also helped provide a mildly liberal and cosmopolitan gloss to a domestic project that has been anything but liberal. Its refusal to honour the Referendum has torn aside what remained of the democratic veil behind which power is exercised. These people are not our servants. They are a hostile elite. Their interests are not ours. They despise us. They fear us. They are determined not to give us even the shadow of what we were – perhaps unwisely – promised.

I have given a quotation from Chesterton. I am increasingly minded of parallels between his day and ours. In 1906, the Liberals won a large and unexpected majority in the House of Commons. They set about transforming the country on the lines they had been discussing since the end of their last majority government in 1885. In doing this, they faced a wall of resistance from the old ruling class. The Conservatives controlled the Law and education and most of the administration. They possessed the greatest mass of the national wealth. Above all, they dominated the House of Lords. They used their majority here to block the Liberal Government until such time as the people could be persuaded at the next election to bring back a Conservative Government.

Now, in that contest, I would have sided with the ruling class. I think England had a better future under the Conservatives than under the Liberals. I think most of the Liberal changes were bad. Moreover, the Conservative strategy showed some evidence of working. The Liberals lost a steady stream of by-elections — most notably Peckham in 1908. Then the Conservatives went too far. In 1909, the Liberals brought in a deliberately populist budget. The Conservatives broke more than two centuries of convention by voting this down in the Lords. This gave the Liberals their excuse. With the cry of “The People against the Peers,” they attacked the Conservatives in their most powerful stronghold. After two general elections in 1910, the Lords were stripped of their blocking veto. Of course, the Great War then changed everything. But it is reasonable to suppose that, had the Liberals won another election in 1915, most of the domestic changes that we blame on the War would have come about, if more slowly.

The lesson is that ruling classes often make strategic mistakes. Had the Conservatives before the Great War taken a more selective approach in their opposition, they might have won an election in 1911, and carried on with their own vision of the national future. As it is, they only lost the 1910 elections because the Liberals were able to rely on Labour and Irish support in the Commons. Because they overreached themselves, they eventually lost everything.

It may be the same now. Had our own ruling class pulled sad faces in 2016 and delivered a minimal Brexit — something like continued EEA membership and a Norwegian relationship — they might have put the issue to bed and continued riding us all to certain ruin. Instead, they went into a three-year filibuster, every so often drawing breath to suggest another referendum. The strategy appears to have failed. We may now have a more substantial Brexit than was intended. More to the point, the democratic veil has been torn aside. The continuing argument over Mr Johnson’s new Withdrawal Agreement is largely now unfinished business. The Agreement needs to be passed — but so we can go into a general election where the main issues will not be a new relationship with the European Union. These issues will be the nature and personnel of the country’s domestic government. I do not imagine that we shall become more “democratic.” But I can imagine that we shall find ourselves with a new ruling class that holds the mass of ordinary people in less vicious contempt.

October 26, 2019

A look into yet another dystopian future

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

This time, it’s Tom Slater looking at the parliamentary situation well into the future:

The year is 2051. An 87-year-old Boris Johnson is still prime minister, commanding a majority of minus 200 in the House of Commons.

The taxidermied remains of Jeremy Corbyn looks lairily at him each day from across the chamber.

The Liberal Independent Group for Anti-Democratic Change, formed by breakaway elements of the other parties in the great merger of 2020, is by far the largest bloc.

For some reason it has never found the “right time” to assert control of the Commons. But by some convoluted means it has successfully delayed some 187 attempts to hold a General Election.

The UK is still a member of the European Union. But no one else is. Long since collapsed, it is now just a portacabin outside the Mini-Europe miniature park in Brussels.

It employs one man, whose job it is to sweep up, sort the post, and respond to the United Kingdom’s periodic requests for an extension to Article 50.

Somehow, his expenses are exorbitant.

They say making predictions these days is a mug’s game. But I’m pretty sure that’s where we’re headed. Or rather, given the Kafkaesque turn British politics has taken, nothing could surprise me now.

PM Boris Johnson has offered the opposition the election they claim to have been craving, again, and they appear set to reject it, again.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has indicated he will back a General Election once the European Union grants an extension to Article 50. But the EU is holding off on making that decision until MPs vote on the election.

You can see the problem here. But at least it will keep half of Corbyn’s parliamentary party happy, who are apparently dead-set against an election and would rather we go for a second Brexit referendum first.

October 14, 2019

QotD: Parliament and the Palace of Westminster

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

My nastier, more vindictive side rather hopes that it will take so long to renovate the British Houses of Parliament, and the unmistakable clock tower of Big Ben, that MPs have to move out of the building for good, and are rehoused in a hideous modern shed in the suburbs. This may seem spiteful. It is spiteful. Even so, there is a good case for it.

It is a real issue. For many years the experts have known that the Palace of Westminster, which looks so good in the background of TV news reports, is close to falling down. It was not very well built in the first place. It was quite severely bombed by Herr Hitler in 1941, and rebuilt on the cheap in the lean years after the war. A very expensive attempt to restore it in the 1980s has not held off the ravages of the years. A subway line which runs beneath it is suspected of making things worse. And now they are having to silence the great bell of Big Ben to allow unavoidable repairs to be done. Experts would like to shut the whole building down for several years and send both Houses of Parliament somewhere else. The members themselves don’t want to go. Who knows where they might end up? Worse, seen against a more ordinary background, would they look as dull and undistinguished as they truly are?

Peter Hitchens, “An Empty Parliament”, First Things, 2017-10-03.

September 27, 2019

England’s constitution before the shiny new Supreme Court was created

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Peter Hitchins provides a thumbnail sketch of the state of play before the Supreme Court was added to British constitutional arrangements:

Why did we never even have such a body until ten years ago? As we shall see, it would have been, and still is, a contradiction in terms. But in interesting times such as these, elephants fly, fishes walk, figs grow on thorns, and oxymorons inherit the earth.

The most powerful law court in the land was, by a curious paradox, not in the land at all, but based in tiny Luxembourg, across the Narrow Seas which have kept invaders from our door but are useless against bureaucratic takeovers by the European Union. There sits the European Court of Justice, which as long ago as 1990 established that it could tell British courts to overrule British Acts of Parliament when they conflict with E.U. law. It can carry on doing this until we eventually do leave the E.U., if we ever do.

These various messes came about because we are so old, and rely so much on convention and manners, that it is all too easy for unconventional and ill-mannered busybodies to come storming in with new ideas. England’s constitution was not planned and built, like America’s. Instead, it grew during a thousand years of freedom from invasion. Both are beautiful in their way. America’s fundamental law has the cold, orderly beauty of a classical temple. England’s has the warmer, more chaotic loveliness of an ancient forest. It seems to be wholly natural but, when examined closely, it shows many signs of careful cultivation and pruning. Our powers are not as separated as America’s, but slightly tangled. Still, it has worked well enough for us over time.

Any thinking person must admire both the American and the English constitutions as serious efforts in a world of chaos, despotism, and stupidity to apply human intelligence to the task of giving people ordered, peaceful, and free lives. They have a common origin in the miraculous Magna Carta, which Americans often revere more than modern Englishmen do. We in England have grown complacent about our liberty, and have become inclined to forget our great founding documents.

But the two constitutions are not the same, and in my view they are not compatible. For my whole life, until a few years ago, the very idea that England should have a Supreme Court was an absurdity. The Highest Court in England is the Crown in Parliament which, as I was once taught, had the power to do everything except turn a man into a woman. In these more gender-fluid times, that expression is not much used. But it contains the truth. Parliament can make any law and overturn any law, made by itself or by the courts.

That is why England (often to my regret) lacks a First Amendment and cannot have one unless we undergo a revolution. No law in England could possibly open with the words “Parliament shall make no law.” Our 1689 Bill of Rights, the model for the U.S. Bill of Rights a century later, tells the king what he cannot do and the courts what they cannot do. It grants me (as a Protestant) the right to have weapons for my defense. But while it draws its sword against arbitrary power, it puts a protective arm round Parliament.

September 19, 2019

QotD: Parliament and democracy

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

In legal theory, the members of the Commons are representatives and they have the role that was enunciated in the famous letter to the electors of Bristol by Edmund Burke. “I owe you my discretion; I don’t merely owe you my vote.” That was nearly 250 years ago when there was no democracy and politics was run by a handful of families like the Marquess of Rockingham to whom he was the paid lackey (and by the way the electors of Bristol threw him out). There is a very vague relationship between Parliament and democracy. We have had Parliament for 800 years. We’ve had democracy for less than a century. And the great issue was: how do you reconcile the previous tradition of representative in a non-democratic Parliament with the position of delegate in a democratic Parliament. And the way it was dealt with — this is what all the fuss, all the things that we are talking about: Erskine May, A V Dicey, they all appear at a particular moment of time. They appear in the middle of the 1880s because it’s the 1884 reform act that introduces something like democracy.

But you see we’ve never worked out the relationship between the fact that we’ve got two sovereigns. There is the legal sovereign which is the Crown in Parliament and there is the real, political sovereign which is the sovereign people behind them. But what we did, and this is why Bercow’s behaviour is so disastrous; it’s why Theresa May’s behaviour has been so catastrophic: what we developed thanks to Erskine May and the Parliamentary Handbook and endorsed by Dicey, we developed a whole series of devices. They were conventions that turned MPs from more or less representatives into more or less delegates. And what are these things? They’re party affiliation. They are manifestos. They’re standing on a ticket and they’re being whipped when they’re in the house. That is the thing that binds them to the popular vote. No MP; Dominic Grieve was not elected in a personal capacity. He was elected because he stood as a Tory on a Tory manifesto which promised Brexit. That man did not dissent at the time. His claims to dignity, his claims to acting honourably, are totally false.

There are other rules in Erskine May about the procedures of Commons business which gives the government the basic control of the parliamentary timetable. Otherwise what happens is the house just dissolves into a talking shop. Becuase MPs have refused to vote for any deal: they’re strong in the negative but they’re hopelessly weak in the positive. They can’t agree on anything. We developed a series of conventions in the 1880s that turn MPs into something like the representatives of the people and what has systematically happened in this Parliament: we have broken those conventions.

Theresa May’s loss of the election and her absurd notion that you can keep people with completely contradictory opinions on a main platform of government policy in the same party broke down the whipping system. Bercow broke down the government’s control of legislation. And you’re left with this chaotic mess.

David Starkey talking to Brendan O’Neill on the Brendan O’Neill Show, 2019-09-15. (Transcription from The Great Realignment)

September 13, 2019

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh gets his tax plans vetted by the Parliamentary Budget Office

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

A recent innovation for political campaigns is that they can ask the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide an estimate for the impact of any taxation proposals, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was the first out of the gate to have his “super-wealth tax” evaluated. The PBO estimates that the levy would net out some $6 billion in the first full year of implementation. Sounds like a lot of money! Colby Cosh explains why it’s not quite what it might seem:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

Alas, the bean-counters always swoop in to spoil things. Singh’s wealth-tax scheme is instructive not only because he availed himself of PBO costing, but because it usefully reveals the limits of what the PBO or any other economic modeller can do. Look, in other words, at the fine print.

The PBO’s job was to estimate what you can extract from “an annual net wealth tax on Canadian resident economic families equal to one per cent of net wealth above $20 million.” In the PBO model this is a simple multiplication, but the roughly $6 billion take is arrived at only by reducing the revenue by 35 per cent to correct for “behavioural response” — that is, lawful (and unlawful) tricks employed to avoid the new tax by the rich targets. The net revenue is what’s left after you deduct another two per cent to cover administrative costs.

And, as the PBO immediately insists, “the estimate has high uncertainty” on both counts. This means they’re educated guesses. Jennifer Robson, a social policy prof at Carleton University’s Arthur Kroeger College, pointed out on Twitter that right now we don’t tax economic families per se and we don’t report assets and debts routinely to Revenue Canada. Ideas for pure wealth taxation (which is rare in practice) are predicated on the creation of, essentially, a new tax system — one which would have to detect and perpetually update how much, for example, the furniture in your house costs. The 35 per cent loss from behavioural response is at the high end of historic estimates from real-world examples. Even within our current tax system, Robson observes, we only get two extra dollars for every one we spend on expanding collections and compliance against the existing tax base.

As a practical matter, a wealth tax would mostly be, or would act most efficiently as, a tax on bank balances and investment accounts. Of course, there is always real estate. The super-rich seem to have a lot of that, and it is relatively easy to tax, and the resentment of Torontonians and Vancouverites who don’t own some is, for better or worse, a major reason the NDP is trying to weaponize envy.

But this reminds us that property taxes and taxes on property transfers perform a similar function, although they are not used primarily for income redistribution as such here — and in Canada ours are relatively high. The OECD does a little league table of tax structures, and compared with other industrialized countries Canada’s take from property taxes is about double the average. In a 36-country list we are near the bottom (33rd) in our dependence on taxing goods and services, and about average (12th) in dependence on corporate taxation, but fifth highest in dependence on personal taxation — and third in dependence on property taxes.

September 8, 2019

Boris may have a viable escape hatch after all

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

It could not only untangle the current mess in Parliament but have the almost equally attractive feature of sending his opponents into paroxysms of rage:

The consensus is that the Government is trapped in an iron vice that will now be tightened till it cracks. The truth, however, is that this vice is less of iron than of hot air.

The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 is a constitutional outrage. It allows a government to declare an emergency, and then to rule by decree. It should never have been made. But it was made; and it can now be used as an instrument of liberation.

The Act defines “emergency” as just about anything the authorities may dislike. One possible definition is “an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom.” (s.1(1)) This sounds a promising excuse. It seems to cover what the Opposition claims would be the effect of a No-Deal Brexit.

Triggering the Act requires no more than “a senior Minister of the Crown” – that is, Boris Johnson – to announce an Emergency. This done, he can make, alter or suspend almost any law he likes. (s.22) He can do this for a period of thirty days. (s.26) All he has to do is preface his decree with a statement that he “is satisfied that the regulations contain only provision which is appropriate for the purpose of preventing, controlling or mitigating an aspect or effect of the emergency in respect of which the regulations are made.” (s.20(5)(b)(ii))

He cannot change the Act itself, or the Human Rights Act. He cannot set up concentration camps for his opponents, or put them before a firing squad. But the Fixed Term Parliament Act is fair game. He could suspend that. Then he could dissolve Parliament in the traditional way.

He must, “as soon as is reasonably practicable,” lay his decrees before Parliament. (s.27(1)(a)) No doubt, the Parliament we have would punish him with an Act of Attainder. But this Parliament would no sooner reassemble after the prorogation than it would be dissolved. The Speaker would barely have time to open his mouth. Assuming the general election went as hoped, the next Parliament would not be inclined to dispute the circumstances of its birth.

All the opposition parties would go screaming mad. But, as said, we are not talking about concentration camps and firing squads. The only use of the Emergency would be to give a voice to the people. Who could legitimately deny that? As for sharp practice in general, the opposition parties have spent this year turning the Constitution upside down. Who could complain if the Government now joined in the fun?

September 7, 2019

Mark Steyn – “So the Remainer leaves, putting a question mark over whether the Leaver can remain”

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

Despite the lovely scenery outside his cabin window … I guess that should be “porthole” … Mark Steyn still finds time to comment on the circus at Westminster:

Greetings from the Mark Steyn Cruise, currently sailing the beautiful Inside Passage of Alaska. Across the continent and an ocean, Westminster continues to be roiled by Brexiteers and Remoaners locked, like the latter seasons of Dynasty, locked in ever more demented plot twists. Today Her Majesty’s Government suffered its first resignation since Boris Johnson took over as Prime Minister. The Minister for Universities and Science quit, and is leaving Parliament. His name is Jo Johnson. Any relation? Why, yes. He’s Boris’ brother. In the normal course of events, no normal person knows who the Minister for Universities is, or indeed that such a post exists, or, if aware of this grand office, what the chap who holds it does all day long: He ain’t a heavy, he’s his brother — that’s all. But the junior Johnson, a Remainer, has walked out on the senior Johnson, a Leaver, so it’s the biggest thing since Cain fired his Secretary of State for Sheep-Herding. Boris was his brother’s keeper, but he couldn’t keep him. So the Remainer leaves, putting a question mark over whether the Leaver can remain.

~All sides are throwing around media accusations of “constitutional outrage”, ever since Boris got the Queen to prorogue Parliament and was instantly ungraded from PM to Caudillo of the new dictatorship. I am more sympathetic to the charges against his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, has been claiming for months to want a general election. Indeed, there is no reason not to have one. On Tuesday the Prime Minister formally lost his majority, when some Tory nobody I’d never heard of crossed the floor and became a Liberal. So Boris and his team cannot govern. Indeed, even their minority is shrinking by the hour, as he removes the whip, expels and deselects those who vote against him on Brexit.

And yet Corbyn voted down Boris’ motion for a general election — because the Opposition Leader is determined to force the Government to enact not its own but the Opposition’s policy, by making Boris go to Brussels, grovel, and beg for another extension of Britain’s zombie membership in the European Union. To put it in American terms, the legislative branch wants to maintain the executive branch in power purely as its dead-eyed sock puppet. That is certainly a constitutional abomination, and, cautious as she is in such matters, I have no doubt the Queen regards it as such.

~Why is Corbyn doing this? Isn’t an Opposition Leader supposed to bring down the Prime Minister so he can force an election and replace the bloke? Yes, but Corbyn would lose that election, and Boris would likely win. The guff about the will of Parliament and the people’s representatives obscures the reality — that this situation exists because of the ever wider chasm between the people and their representatives, between a citizenry that voted to leave the European Union and the fanatically Remainer Liberal Democrats, openly Remainer Celtic nationalists, covertly Remainer Labour Opposition, and semi-Remainer Tory backbench all determined to subvert the will of the people. You can dress that up in all kinds of parliamentary flimflam, but, when politicians who’ve been bleating about a “people’s vote” for over a year refuse to let the people vote, you know these tribunes of the masses have gone rogue and left the masses far behind.

September 5, 2019

The “Stop the Coup” movement and the chances for a British general election

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

Brendan O’Neill on the recent political upheavals in the Mother of Parliaments as Boris Johnson lost his parliamentary majority and the “Stop the Coup” activists celebrate by backing away from the election they claimed they wanted all along:

The ridiculousness of the “Stop the Coup” movement is now starkly exposed. For the past week a few thousand members of the obsessively anti-Brexit urban elites have taken to the streets to accuse Boris Johnson of behaving like a dictator by suspending parliament for a few more days than is normal. “It’s a coup d’état!”, they hysterically cry. And yet now our supposed dictator, the author of this foul, anti-democratic coup, is offering people a General Election, and how have the “Stop the Coup” saps responded? By saying they don’t want one.

What a momentous self-own. They have literally traipsed through the streets saying “Britain is a dictatorship” and “Boris has stolen our democracy”. Now, Boris hasn’t only disproven this claptrap (dictators don’t usually suggest holding an election). He has also helped to expose the fact that if anyone is agitated and even disgusted by the idea of democracy right now, it isn’t the imaginary jackbooted generals of Downing Street – it’s the pseudo-democratic Remainer elite.

All of them are running scared from the idea of a General Election. Labour has made clear that it will not be backing the call for an election, at least not until No Deal Brexit has been legally taken off the table. “We are not going to dance to Boris Johnson’s tune”, said Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer this morning when asked if the party would back Boris’s General Election proposal in parliament later today. An election on Boris’s terms would be a “trap” for Labour, he said.

Jo Swinson, leader of the Lib Dems, is against an election too. And her justification is very revealing indeed. In the Commons she said “It is vital that this House acts with responsibility and does not tip our country into an election at a point when there is any risk that we will crash out of the European Union during that election campaign or immediately after.” With added emphasis she declared: “We must act responsibly.”

… but not democratically. After all, elected MPs know far better what’s good for the country than the majority of Britons who voted in favour of Brexit.

August 10, 2019

Enter Yugoslavia Part 2 | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1929 Part 3 of 3

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 9 Aug 2019

As 1929 approaches, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes spirals closer and closer to collapse. When the parliament descends into murderous chaos, it is up to King Alexander to decide what to do…

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August 1, 2019

“Since I recently called [Johnson] ‘a bag of living offal,’ my view is unlikely to be positive”

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

Sean Gabb provides a brief evaluation of new British PM Boris Johnson:

Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs at an informal meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council on 15 February 2018.
Photo by Velislav Nikolov via Wikimedia Commons.

I have been asked to comment on Boris Johnson’s appointment as Leader of the Conservative Party and therefore as Prime Minister. Since I recently called him “a bag of living offal,” my view is unlikely to be positive. However, I will try to be fair. More to the point, I will try to relate this latest turn of events to my general analysis of British politics.

Last month, I wrote that membership of the European Union was a peripheral issue for our ruling class. The main agenda for this class is to carry through a neo-Puritan remodelling of our institutions, and indeed our minds. The details of a customs and regulatory union are less important than control of education, the media and the criminal law. This being said, membership is useful so far as it blurs the lines of accountability. It is also an article of belief among some elements of the Ruling Class. For this reason, the verdict of the 2016 Referendum was unwelcome. It meant a diversion of effort from the main purpose. It upset various important people. The obvious solution was to give us a minimal departure that would satisfy us, but would keep in place those elements of the European Project that really are important to the Ruling Class.

Here, I come to a digression on the nature of how we are governed. There is no cabal of evil persons directing all events and appointments from behind the scenes. This is generally not how ruling classes operate. A more realistic model can be taken from Ian Kershaw’s analysis of the National Socialist revolution in Germany. This proceeded with limited central direction. Before 1939, the leaders were concerned mostly with foreign policy, after that with fighting a big war. Instead, the revolution was decentralised. Reliable men were put in key positions and told to “work towards the Fuhrer” – that is, to act in any situation as they might imagine Hitler himself would act. The result was often administrative chaos. The benefit was that the leadership could concentrate on what it saw as the essentials, and more local knowledge could be used in the overall revolution than would otherwise have been possible.

This is largely how things work in England. Our own transformation is not driven by detailed orders from the Shadowy-Ones-on-High, but by creating a bias within every useful institution to those who are broadly in favour of the transformation. The benefit is a constrained diversity of approaches that can be presented as a genuine diversity of opinion. The disadvantage is that executive power lies in this country where it has since 1701 – that is, in the hands of the Ministers of the Crown, who are accountable to the House of Commons. If the Prime Minister turns out to be a fool, and the other ministers are too cowardly to stab him in the back, there is no easy way to remove him.

On balance, Theresa May was more stupid than malevolent. Her job was to produce the minimal departure I have mentioned. The question of who wrote her Withdrawal Agreement is less important than the fact that few who mattered wanted or dared to accept it. She should never have thought it would be accepted. Having discovered it was unacceptable, she should have tried something else. Instead, she tried four times to ram it through the House of Commons. She also reached out to a Labour leader who is feared or just hated by important strands within the Ruling Class. At first, the damage was confined to the possibility of a Labour Government. It then widened, with the emergence of the Brexit Party, to the threat of a general delegitimisation of the system as it has emerged since 1997, or perhaps 1979.

“People in Ottawa don’t invoke PMO frequently or lightly. It is done to intimidate and obtain compliance”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, China, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

What we’re not allowed to know can’t hurt us … the federal government apparently figures that no charges can be contemplated if there’s no investigation allowed:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

Before colleagues voted to quash a review of whether the Liberal government acted improperly after a bureaucrat asked former ambassadors to temper public comments about China, Liberal MP Rob Oliphant told Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee that he’s “distressed”.

Apparently, he was not distressed about a Foreign Affairs assistant deputy minister being asked to “check-in” on two former Canadian diplomats to China before making future pronouncements on Canada’s shambolic relations with the communist regime.

Oliphant’s also not distressed about the troubling optics that either diplomat – David Mulroney and Guy Saint-Jacques – felt The Globe and Mail should be aware of their reservations about said interactions, which the paper reported last week.

“I am very distressed, at the tone, at the idea and at the allegations that are being cast about by members of the opposition,” Oliphant, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and non-voting member, claimed at the committee’s emergency meeting Tuesday.

Oliphant’s claim comes after either diplomat says the department’s ADM Paul Thoppil told them his call was at the behest of the PMO. Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland have denied they directed such outreach.

Mulroney, who had earlier warned about travel to China following the detention two Canadians there in December of last year, told the Globe that Thoppil cited the “election environment” and asked him to contact the department before making future statements.

“It wasn’t, in my view, so much an offer to consult and share ideas as to ‘get with the program’. People in Ottawa don’t invoke PMO frequently or lightly. It is done to intimidate and obtain compliance,” Mulroney is quoted as saying.

Saint-Jacques told the Globe that his conversation with Thoppil differed somewhat, “But I can understand that one could come to that conclusion when they say we should speak with one voice.”

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