Quotulatiousness

September 15, 2019

Explaining Brexit to liberal Americans

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

Andrew Sullivan tries to put the Brexit debate into terms that coastal, urban Americans can understand:

One of the frustrating aspects of reading the U.S. media’s coverage of Brexit is that you’d never get any idea why it happened in the first place. Brexit is treated, automatically, as some kind of pathology, a populist act of wanton self-harm, an absurd idea, etc etc. And from the perspective of an upstanding member of the left-liberal media establishment, that’s all true. If your idea of Britain is formed by jetting in and out of London, a multicultural, global metropolis that is as lively and European as any city on the Continent, you’d think that E.U. membership is a no-brainer. Now that the full hellish economic consequences of exit are in full view, what could possibly be the impulse to stick with it?

I get this. I would have voted Remain. I find London to be far more fun now than it was when I left the place. But allow me to suggest a parallel version of Britain’s situation — but with the U.S. The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973. Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa.

How many Americans would support this? How many votes would a candidate for president get if he or she proposed it? The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government. It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetime. The U.K. has no control over immigration from 27 other countries in Europe, and its less regulated economy has attracted hundreds of thousands of foreigners to work in the country, transforming its culture and stressing its hospitals, schools and transportation system. Its courts ultimately have to answer to the European Court. Most aspects of its economy are governed by rules set in Brussels. It cannot independently negotiate any aspect of its own trade agreements. I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion.

More to the point, the European Economic Community has evolved over the years into something far more ambitious. Through various treaties — Maastricht and Lisbon, for example — what is now called the European Union (note the shift in language) has embarked on a process of ever-greater integration: a common currency, a common foreign policy and now, if Macron has his way, a common central bank. It is requiring the surrender and pooling of more and more national sovereignty from its members. And in this series of surrenders, Britain is unique in its history and identity. In the last century, every other European country has experienced the most severe loss of sovereignty a nation can experience: the occupation of a foreign army on its soil. Britain hasn’t. Its government has retained control of its own island territory now for a thousand years. More salient: this very resistance has come to define the character of the country, idealized by Churchill in the country’s darkest hour. Britain was always going to have more trouble pooling sovereignty than others. And the more ambitious the E.U. became, the more trouble the U.K. had.

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 28, 2019

QotD: The secret power of Quebec separatists that Western separatists lack

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Even back in the day Western or Alberta separatism could never pass the Tebbit cricket test: Albertans have always kept cheering for Canadians at the Olympics or the hockey worlds, even at times when we were convinced intellectually that Confederation was a swindle. Much less would Westerners ever consider rooting against Canada, or hoping for its humiliation, or sabotaging it in a context of warfare or geopolitical struggle. Reform intellectuals like Hill have always wanted to create a sort of Western Canadian nationalism; that the necessary basis for nationalism is a nation, or something even slightly like one, has always escaped them. This is the super-secret advantage that Quebec has when using the blackmail tactics Hill and others are trying to imitate. Quebeckers have a genuine alternative loyalty to their extended Quebecois family, and Westerners have no equivalent. If we did, we wouldn’t have to advertise for secessionist generalissimos in the papers.

Colby Cosh, “Advice on Western separatism: don’t take it any more seriously than it takes itself”, National Post, 2019-07-26.

August 21, 2019

British-EU negotiations under Boris Johnson

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

In a speech to Slovak journalists, Sean Gabb outlines what he expects the British government to be doing about Brexit now that May has been put out to pasture and Boris Johnson is in charge:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Here, I come to a digression on the nature of how Britain is governed. My country is not particularly democratic. At the same time, 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 Britain. 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.

I come at last to the Brexit strategy of the new Government. These people are not right-wing extremists who can eventually be forced to give in. Just like Theresa May, they see Brexit as a problem that needs to be solved. If they could wave a magic wand, they would roll back the calendar to 2016 and make sure that Remain won the Referendum. Or they would roll it back a little farther and make sure the Referendum was not called that year, or at all. But they cannot. Instead, they have to deal with the effects of leaving a political fool in charge for three years of the Brexit process.

Theresa May had one job after 2016. This was to produce the minimal departure I have mentioned. Instead, she negotiated a Withdrawal Agreement that caused a storm of outrage among the English. The details of what this Withdrawal Agreement contained are, again, unimportant. What does matter is that the Withdrawal Agreement was published in English on the European Commission website, and millions of us read its 585 pages. We may not have been that interested in the details of our membership. But the details of our “withdrawal” were unacceptable. She tried three times to force it through the House of Commons. Each time, a majority of some very trashy people were terrified to be seen supporting it. Anyone else less stupid would have tried something else. Instead, Theresa May treated us with open contempt. Whether or not we really cared about it, we had been asked if we wanted to remain in the European Union. Having voted “No!” we expected some show of respect for our clear instructions. We did not welcome a Brexit-in-Name-only.

At first, the damage was confined to the possibility of a Labour Government. Then, with the rise of the Brexit Party, the system as a whole moved towards a crisis of legitimacy. The European elections of the month before last were seen as the second Referendum the Remainers had demanded. It was won by the Leavers. The Conservative were crushed. Labour was humiliated. It seemed that a general election would, for the first time, produce a bloc in the House of Commons of Members opposed not only to the peripheral issue of the European Union, but also to the Transformation.

So Theresa May had to go, and she was replaced by Boris Johnson. His own inclination, I have no doubt, is to get a few cosmetic changes to the existing Withdrawal Agreement, and then tell us he is a diplomatic genius. His problem is that this will no longer do. Theresa May has left too much poison in those waters. Brexit must now be more meaningful than was at first projected. Last week, there was an election in Wales to fill a vacancy in the House of Commons – a bye-election. This should have been won by the Conservatives. Instead, the Brexit Party took enough Conservative votes to give the seat to one of the opposition parties – not the Labour Party, which did badly. The political arithmetic is that anything less than a No-Deal Brexit or a diplomatic triumph will mean a collapse of the Conservative vote at the next general election. And this will not mean a Labour Government, but political chaos and a crisis of legitimacy.

In a post at the Continental Telegraph, Alex Noble shows the quite different political trajectories of Change UK (or whatever they’re calling themselves this week) and the Brexit Party:

[Simon Jenkins in the Guardian claims that] the majority of Britain want to stay in the EU.

Is he right?

Well, the recent defectors from the main parties clearly believed he was – Chuka Umunna, Anna Soubry et al abandoned their positions to form the CUKs and provide the disenfranchised British masses with the staunch Remainer party they had all been failing to demand for so long.

They came out of the blocks fast, called in favours with journalists to get favourable press coverage, and burst upon the political consciousness of Great Britain like a glitter-filled Zeppelin of cross-party europhilia.

And then … oh the humanity.

Whereas Brexit geezer Nigel Farage sauntered out of the blocks under withering crossfire from the establishment and its pet churnalists, and immediately went hypersonic – from 0% to 20% before the establishment pollsters could unlimber their clipboards and stutter their leading questions.

Up and down the country, the British voter was encouraged to overlook the Brexit Party by an establishment still traumatised by the referendum, with pollsters snidely relegating the party to the column entitled “Other” during their obfuscatory enquiries.

And the British voter seized them by the lapels and yanked them into a ferocious Brexit headbutt.

The desperate EU stooges in the Tory party, realising their puppet Treason May was fatally wounded, threw her under the bus and began their Stop Boris campaign, but all the manufactured scandalettes failed to prevent the Johnson Juggernaut from roiling over them and into Downing Street.

For now, the Brexit Party have stalled on 20% – they hold their position now like a lioness crouched in the long grass, waiting for Boris Johnson to reveal the slightest Remainer tendencies. And if he does, the catastrophic injuries he and his party will suffer will make Theresa May’s mauling look like the amuse bouche at the Marquis de Sade’s final soundproofed basement party.

August 17, 2019

The British Empire in retrospect

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

It’s been fashionable to dismiss the British Empire as a positive force in history for about 100 years (partly in reaction to the losses during the First World War), but Casey Chalk reviews a recent book that counter-cherry-picks the facts to show it wasn’t all an authoritarian dystopia and cultural wasteland:

… the central argument of University of Exeter professor of history Jeremy Black’s new book Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World, which, according to the book jacket, is a “wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness, its language, misuse of the past, and grasping of both present and future.” The imperial legacy of Great Britain is also, in a way, an instructional lesson for the United States, which, much like the British Empire of the early to mid-20th century, is experiencing a slow decline in influence.

As a former history teacher who has visited many former British colonies in Africa and Asia, I’ve been well catechized in how British imperialism is interpreted. The British, so we are told, were violent aggressors and expert political manipulators. Using their technological superiority and command of the seas, they subjugated cultures across the globe, applied the “divide and rule” policy to set ethnic and linguistic groups against one another, extracted resources for profit, and stole cultural artifacts that now collect dust in their museums. Thus, so the story goes, blame for many of the world’s current problems lies squarely at the feet of the British Empire, for which she should still be paying reparations.

Yet, Black notes, “there is sometimes a failure to appreciate the extent to which Britain generally was not the conqueror of native peoples ruling themselves in a democratic fashion, but, instead, overcame other imperial systems, and that the latter themselves rested on conquest.” Take, for example, the Indian subcontinent, which was a disparate collection of kingdoms and competing empires — including Mughals, Sikhs, Afghan Durranis — during the early centuries of British intervention. All of these were plenty brutal and intolerant towards those they subjugated. Moreover, Hinduism promoted not only the oppressive caste system, but also sati, or the ritual of widow burning, in which widows were either volitionally or forcibly placed upon the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands. It was the British who stopped this practice, and others, with such legislation as the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856, the Female Infanticide Prevention Act of 1870, and the Age of Consent Act of 1891.

Nor has India been able to escape the same imperialist tendencies as the British. Just ask the Sikhs, whose demands to “free Khalistan” have gone unheeded by New Delhi, and who in 1984 suffered great atrocities at the hands of the Indian military and civilian mobs. Or ask Indian Muslims, of whom more than 1,000 died in the 2002 Gujarat riots and who suffer increasing persecution under the ruling Hindu nationalist party BJP. There’s also not a few folks in Kashmir who happen to call the Indians imperialists. One might note here that many of the problems in former European colonies are not solely, or even largely the result of European imperialism, but can be attributed to many other causes, population increase, modernization, and globalization among them. Corruption in some former colonies, including India, is almost certainly higher than it was during British rule.

India is only one such example where the modern narrative ignores both historical and contemporary realities, including, one might add, the fact that India as it now exists is largely a creation of British colonial efforts. It was Britain that united a disparate group of people into a single cohesive unit with a national identity. Indeed, as Black rightly notes, “modern concepts of nationality have generally been employed misleadingly to interpret the policies and politics of the past.”

This is further complicated by the fact that in many places, especially India, “alongside hostility, opposition and conflict,” between the imperialists and the colonized, “there was inter-marriage, intermixing, compromise, co-existence, and the process of negotiation that is sometimes referred to as the ‘middle-ground.'” One need look no further than the First and Second World Wars, in which more than 1.5 million and approximately 2.5 million Indians, respectively, fought willingly and bravely in the service of the British crown.

August 5, 2019

More on the still-damaged diplomatic relationship between India and Canada

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

Ted Campbell quotes from a recent article in the Hindustan Times about the not-yet-healed damage in the diplomatic world between Justin Trudeau’s government and the Indian government of Narendra Modi:

Justin Trudeau and family during India visit
Image via NDTV, originally tweeted by @vijayrupanibjp

In the influential Hindustan Times, Toronto based journalist Anirudh Bhattacharya writes … “in an astonishing attack that will not help heal fraught ties between India and Canada, the former top advisor to the North American nation’s Prime Minister has accused the Indian Government of sabotaging Justin Trudeau’s visit to India in February 2018 to favour his political opponents [and] This scathing statement is in the forthcoming book, Trudeau: The Education of a Prime Minister, written by senior Canadian journalist John Ivison. The author [Ivison] confirmed to the Hindustan Times that Butts’ comment came during an interview.” The article adds that “Indian diplomats didn’t comment on the matter because it is so politically charged and the Canadian Government has yet to respond to questions from HT on its stand on the incendiary remark from Butts.”

So, while some pundits forecast that the return of Gerald Butts would reignite the whole SNC-Lavalin/Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould scandal, it appears that the damage will be deeper and we will get a chance to revisit the disaster that Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland visited upon Canadian foreign policy in 2018. India is a rising great power; it helps to contain China in new “Western Approaches:” the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. India is a growing trading power; it is a HUGE potential market for Canadian goods and services. India is one of the top three providers of new Canadians ~ and that’s where our problems with India originated. Someone in the Trudeau PMO thought (since thinking was the problem that probably lets Justin Trudeau off the hook) that it would be a good idea for Prime Minister Trudeau to attend a Khalsa Day parade in Toronto back in April 2017. I explained, back at the time of the India trip fiasco, why that was a mistake and how Jason Kenney had already set the example of doing it right. Now Khalsa Day, also known as Vaisakhi, is an important festival for Sikhs, it marks their New Year. But the festivities, especially in Toronto where 300,000 Sikhs live, are, sometimes, taken over or interrupted by Sikh separatists who advocate violent revolution in India. Jason Kenney saw that in 2012 and he stormed off a stage and berated his hosts, in public for trying to use him to undermine Canadian foreign policy, which valued, as it should, good relations with India. But, in 2017 all the Trudeau PMO (headed by Gerald Butts and Katie Telford) could see were all those Sikh voters. Neither the PMO team nor new Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland was able to prevent Trudeau from being used as a photo-op prop by avowed Sikh separatists … there is no indication that anyone tried although, even though, given the bureaucracy’s corporate memory of events in 2012, I would be amazed in alarms were not sounded.

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.

July 9, 2019

The main economic damage of Brexit is the extended period of uncertainty

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

At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall interprets a recent Bank of England recommendation to really mean “do Brexit” and “get it over with”:

To pull that out of the jargon, when every bugger’s running around screaming because they don’t know what’s going to happen then things are dark for the long term future of the economy. Just because the screaming and the running around means no bugger is doing anything else.

And here’s the thing – that lookin’ dark bit gets worse the longer the uncertainty lasts. To the point that the effect just of the not knowing becomes greater than the possible effect of any particular event in that universe of possibilities. It really is true that continuing to delay Brexit will, at some point, become worse than any particular Brexit outcome.

Thus get on with it, get it done. And given that we’ll get something of a bloody revolution if the Remainers win – we Brits being really quite keen on this democracy idea, we get to choose not they – then the getting on with it will have to be to leave. Yesterday would have been good, tomorrow if that’s not possible.

July 1, 2019

Theodore Dalrymple on “the ancient rhetorical tricks of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi“

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

In the New English Review a recent Theodore Dalrymple post on “inventing European identity”:

I doubt whether there is anyone who has never resorted to the ancient rhetorical tricks of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi. Some do it knowingly, others unknowingly. The omission of relevant facts and the insinuation of falsehoods are dual and often inseparable techniques that are the stock-in-trade of most practising politicians. Arguments have often to be schematic and if in theory it is possible to tell no falsehoods, it is virtually impossible not to suppress, or at least omit, some truths if a discussion of complex matters is not to be interminable.

Nevertheless, universal resort to error, whether honest or not, is no defence for those who utilise it. This is particularly so of intellectuals, whose metier above all is, or ought to be, honest argumentation. I was therefore intrigued to read an open letter published in the Guardian newspaper by what were described as “30 top intellectuals.”

The letter began with a ringing suggestio falsi: “The idea of Europe is in peril.” What the authors meant was that the idea of the European Union is in danger. They implied, in effect, that Europe and the European Union were synonyms, which is clearly false. If a country ceases to be a member of the European Union, or has never been a part of it, it does not cease to be European, neither geographically nor culturally.

The opening salvo sets the tone for the rest. Any opposition to the ever-closer union that is the aim of the European Union is characterized as purely irrational, nostalgic and even fascistic. It cannot by definition be founded on any rational considerations whatever. It success would be, as the authors put it, the triumph of “a politics of disdain for intelligence and culture” — which is in effect to say that anybody who opposes the proposed ever-closer union is either a demagogue or uncouth and stupid. Thus the top intellectuals, including five winners of the Nobel Prize and many world-famous writers, appear to have learned nothing from the single most disastrous phrase used in any recent election, Mrs. Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables.” Who is more stupid than whom?

The top intellectuals say of opponents of the drive towards a large federal state something like, “Let’s reconnect with our ‘national soul!’ Let’s rediscover out ‘lost identity’!” They go on to say, “Never mind that abstractions such as ‘soul’ and ‘identity’ often exist only in the imagination of demagogues.”

I overlook the fact that any British politician, however fervent a supporter of Brexit would never use a term such as “the British soul” for justified fear of being laughed out of court, but notice only that a few lines further on the top intellectuals say “We count ourselves among the European patriots.”

June 22, 2019

History Summarized: The Fall of Rome

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 21 Jun 2019

Go to http://www.audible.com/overlysarcastic or text OVERLYSARCASTIC to 500500 to get a free audiobook, 2 free Audible Originals, and 30-day free trial.

Rome, in one form or another, has been around for a *while*. Kinda seemed like it was going to last forever, like it was basically immortal. Well bad news for everyone involved: Rome goes bye-bye just like all the other empires in world history. So let’s talk about when, how, and why Rome fell!

SEASONS OF ROME T-Shirt: https://www.threadless.com/discover/s…

SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall: https://amzn.to/2FwBRvO
Mary Beard’s SPQR: https://amzn.to/2Wwu2x3
The History of Rome Podcast: https://apple.co/2U7Q4tq
Lectures from TheGreatCourses: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?” (Gregory Aldrete), “Late Antiquity — Crisis and Response” & “Barbarians & Emperors” (Thomas Noble)
If I see anyone complaining that I didn’t sufficiently cite this video I’m going to sack your ancient capital and pillage your temples.

PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP

OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/

June 17, 2019

Britain’s Conservative Party – the Quisling Right

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

Sean Gabb outlines recent British history, with emphasis on “the project” — the gradual take-over of the educational and cultural power-centres of Britain by a self-styled new ruling class and the total melt-down of the Conservatives:

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 will begin with what I believe has been a loose Project unfolding through my entire life. Since about the 1960s, we have seen the rise of a new ruling class, committed to the transformation of Britain into a new sort of country. Because I have discussed the Puritan Hypothesis at some length here and here, I will now give only a summary. In short, the new ruling class wants to reshape our thoughts into its own conception of The Good. This means a long-term project of securing cultural hegemony through control of education and the media, and a shorter-term project of compelling us to act as if we already believed in the new order of things. Though I will emphasise that it is in no meaningful sense either Marxist or socialist, the overall Project has been carried through by a careful use of what Louis Althusser called the ideological state apparatus and the repressive state apparatus.

One important element of this Project has been to maintain the appearance of political diversity. Because Britain — or at least England — is a rather conservative nation, this means ensuring a Conservative Party that makes conservative noises, but never does anything measurably conservative. I spent several years after 1997 grumbling about “the Quisling Right.” Though I have mostly fallen silent since then, here it is the idea of the Quisling Right briefly stated in a speech I gave in 2005 during a debate with Boris Johnson.

Though I will not call their predecessors real conservatives, the Conservative Party was taken over in 2005 by a small group headed by David Cameron. These people spent the next five years making vaguely conservative noises, without ever challenging the new order of things that had come fully into shape under the New Labour Governments. Because of this, they failed to win an election against Gordon Brown, but were able to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, who were just as committed to the new order of things as Labour.

[…]

I think it a reasonable conclusion that the Conservative Party is the Quisling Right — and, or but, or both, that it is run by a clique of politicians unfit for any conceivable purpose. Theresa May will leave office with the label fixed to her of the worst Prime Minister in history. But the reason she was able to last so long is that she had no obvious replacement. As I write, her most likely replacement is Boris Johnson. He is lazy. He is unprincipled. He is a thug. He is an adulterer who paid for at least one of his mistresses to have an abortion. He was a ludicrous Mayor of London. He was the worst Foreign Secretary I can recall. This Conservative Government has landed us in a first-class national and international crisis. It has provoked the European Union into refusing to entertain any leaving terms short of the ruinous. It has made no good preparations for leaving without a deal. It has landed us in a position where the best exit involves throwing ourselves on the mercy of the Americans, and to hope that they will treat us no more ruthlessly than they did in 1940. The last person we should ask to navigate this crisis is Boris Johnson.

It seems the sheep in the Parliamentary Party have agreed he is their only hope of keeping their seats at the next election. Perhaps the Party membership will be taken in by his Churchillesque wind-baggery. But this will not do. He will be brushed aside by the Europeans. He will be taken for a ride by his fellow Americans. That is if, before then, he can avoid a general election in which he will by murdered by Jeremy Corbyn. I am told, in his defence, that only he who is without sin should cast the first stone. Well, I have never done what Boris Johnson so far has. So, if I am not the first to ask for one, hand me a stone, and make it a big one.

No conspiracy here. These people have failed us. But it was never their purpose to do otherwise. More importantly, they have failed the Project. For that, I suppose, we should feel minimal gratitude. Even so, their survival in office for so long raises a further question with no comforting answers. How could a clique of total incompetents have been allowed, without meaningful challenge, to take over and run into the ground one of our main parties of government? What does this say about us as a people?

June 2, 2019

Andrew Heaton defends Basil Fawlty John Cleese

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

In his latest newsletter (subscribe here), Andrew Heaton takes up the cudgels to defend John Cleese against accusations of racism, sexism, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc., etc. and suggests that the answer is that he’s “just old”:

First, “Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city anymore.” Well, he’s right. London is geographically English, but other than its physical proximity to Surrey, it’s not English — it’s global. Its last census reports that 36.7% of its denizens are foreign-born. About 45% of the people who live there are White British (Welsh, Irish, English, Scottish). Which is to say, less than half of London is English [a lot less than half — the Welsh, Irish and “porridge wogs” don’t appreciate being called “English”, nearly as much as Canadians don’t like being called “Americans”]. The rest are a mélange of Europeans, non-Europeans, first and second generation immigrants, Klingons, Vulcans, Wookis, and folks from elsewhere in the Commonwealth and/or Narnia.

It’s a global city, like New York. It is richly diverse and cosmopolitan, which is a strength and draw to millions of people who live there. However I will argue that it’s difficult to be ethnically diverse and cosmopolitan while simultaneously being homogeneously English. Mutually exclusive, in fact.

Although to be fair, people aren’t mad at Cleese for observing that London isn’t English, they’re mad because he wishes it were. Cleese appears to prefer Englishness over multiculturalism. (Note the distinction between “culture” and “race.” Following the media storm, he tweeted, “… I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation. Will this will be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them – on someone else’s behalf, naturally.” [Sic.])

My read on the situation is that Cleese is not racist, he’s old. What I mean by that is: life is always in flux, cities are by nature dynamic, society is fluid. People tend to want things to stay static, and they don’t, and that’s irksome for many, particularly as they grow elderly and nostalgic. I question when London was last really “English,” given that it was the imperial capital of half the globe well before he was born, and no doubt had several pockets of Indians and Jamaicans and Vulcans living there by the time he showed up.

All the same, is John Cleese allowed to prefer English over polyglot? Because I think that’s the root heresy at work here: saying that English culture might be superior to some others, and preferring it to them.

New York City is far, far more diverse and multicultural than, say, Portland, Oregon. Portland is so overwhelmingly white that it’s basically a giant bleach commercial with some craft breweries and street buskers thrown in. Ethnicity aside, can Portlanders prefer their cultural homogeneity over the vastly more polyglot city of Houston? So long as people agree that immigration is positive and we should be neighborly and welcoming to newcomers, I’m disinclined to hound people for their personal preferences.

I don’t know whether or not John Cleese meets that threshold. We know that he favored Brexit. I suspect, based on scattershot Cleese musings, that wants a Britain which is open and welcoming to foreigners, but that he would also like them to become polite, uptight, tea-drinking gardeners once they’ve moved there.

I could be wrong. I don’t know the depths of John Cleese’s heart, and whether or not his pro-Brexit stance comes from hatred of distant bureacurats (good) or dislike of foreigners and immigrants (bad). I suspect most of the people shouting at him on Twitter have no idea either.

Which is my main and final point. Maybe a single isolated tweet isn’t sufficient information to psychically intuit whether someone is a bigot or not? We’re all on the same page here: bigotry is bad. Don’t be a racist. Don’t be a homophobe. But if we’re going to champion the idea that the worst non-criminal thing you can be in our culture is a bigot, then we should also be at least a tad reserved about passing out scarlet letters just because there’s a slow news day and we spot a fun Twitter pile-on to get worked up about.

May 29, 2019

The EU election was “the Tories’ worst result since 1678”

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

Mark Steyn on the results of last week’s EU parliamentary elections:

In any normal UK election, it would be inconceivable for either of the two main parties – Conservative and Labour – to attract just 23 per cent of the vote. The fact that that is all they could muster between them is hilarious, and greatly to be enjoyed. As I put it on the radio last week, the departing Theresa May has led the Tories to their worst result in two hundred years. But, really, that’s praising with faint damns. I saw Daniel Hannan on the telly extending Mrs May’s impressive feat back through the pre-Reform Act era and accounting it the Tories’ worst result since 1678. Which is kind of hard to spin. Her forced resignation last Friday morning (by which point her party had made it clear they wouldn’t stick with her past lunch) ensures that she and that election result will be yoked together for all time. And jolly well deserved it is.

When the party of government falls from favor, the beneficiary is usually the principal opposition. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party saw its vote fall almost as precipitously as the Tories’. Against the Conservatives’ single-digit nine per cent, Labour could muster only fourteen per cent, its own worst result in a century – in fact, since 1910. Which would also be hard to spin, had Theresa May not done Corbyn the favor of pulling off an unbeatable record.

[…]

Instead, Mrs May in particular but also Parliament in general chose to double-down on the estrangement from the masses revealed by the referendum, and spent the next three years demonstrating that, whatever the Prime Minister had in mind when she first declared “Brexit means Brexit”, it obviously doesn’t mean leaving the European Union. Either through malice or stupidity or condescension, the political class opted to widen its breach with the people – and Nigel Farage, who is a very canny fellow, decided six weeks ago to create a party to fill the gap in a European election the UK shouldn’t have had to participate in.

Listening and/or watching to the BBC on Sunday for as long as I could stomach it, I detected a strange urge to suggest that the Brexit Party had somehow under-performed, as though it’s normal for a six-week-old party to win twenty-nine out of seventy-three seats, while the century-old Labour Party wins only ten, and the Tories four and the nearest Nigel gets to a run for his money is the second-placed Liberal Democrats with sixteen seats. Farage and the other officially pro-Brexit parties (Labour, Tory, Democratic Unionist) won 44 seats. The Lib Dems and the other officially Remainer parties (Green, Scottish Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin, Alliance Party) got 29. Adding in the unelected UKIP and Ulster Unionists, the Leave share of the vote was 58 per cent.

Yes, yes, I know, that’s a bit of a simplification, in that the Tories are supposedly pro-Brexit but totally bollocksed it, and Labour is only pretending to be pro-Brexit as part of a difficult straddle between its Old Labour working-class base and the New Labour preening metropolitan Euro-luvvies. Many of the latter – including such hitherto loyal champagne socialists as actors Simon Callow and Michael Cashman and even Blair’s old Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell. – flew Corbyn’s coop and voted for the Lib Dems. Even so, for those demanding a second referendum (or, as they cynically call it, a “people’s vote”), there’s not much evidence for a second-time-around sadder-but-wiser Remain majority. Among riven Tory families, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s sister stood for the new Brexit Party while Boris Johnson’s sister stood for the equally new “Change UK”, a militantly anti-Brexit party formed by a coterie of disaffected Remainer media self-promoters of the soft left and soft right. Annuziata Rees-Mogg was duly elected in the Farage surge, while Rachel Johnson flopped out because “Change UK” had barely any statistical support outside the more desperate bookers of telly current affairs shows.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress