Losers waving the white flag don’t speak for the public

Hector Drummond Posted on by

There was a lot of defeatist talk around last night, in the media and online, from pundits about giving up on No Deal (just as No Deal is taking off like fire amongst the greater public).

My reply to this is twofold.

(1) The surest way to scupper No Deal is to start talking in this defeatist way, when it is fact time to seize the day. Stand up and be counted, and stop giving up just because the opposition is talking a good game.

(2) The public has its own mind and it isn’t listening to pundits any more. This has gone beyond commentators. It’s gone beyond the power of the chattering classes disapproving of Brexit. If it is driven to it, the public will sweep over Parliament like a tsunami reducing a town to matchsticks.

Drummond’s Law and the evil of the left

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Drummond’s Law says that whatever the left accuse the right of doing  is something they’re up to themselves. Now, the left is always accusing the right of being evil, whereas, so the story goes, the right accuses the left of merely being wrong, not evil. But if Drummond’s Law applies to this situation then we have to say that the left really is evil.

Now, Drummond’s Law isn’t completely serious, but over the last few years it’s started to become clear that a lot of the modern left is not just wrong, but evil.

This isn’t such an outlandish proposition as it may seem. Certainly we know that an awful lot of historical leftists have been evil, such as the tens of thousands of Communist party officials in the USSR, probably even more in China, and so on in various other Communist countries. Some of them were filled with righteousness, and thought they were on the side of good, but they were deluding themselves. No matter how morally pure they were to start with – idealistic students who got angry at how the ruling classes treated the peasants, or whatever – they all ended up as evil, or they ended up working, however reluctantly,  in the service of evil. (The reluctant gulag guards were no less evil than the reluctant Nazi concentration camp guards.) Leftism usually ends up with death squads, and the leftists who turn out to not be evil usually find themselves being dealt with by one of those death squads.

You may think modern western leftists are different. You may think that they’re deluded and foolish, but not evil. Well… evil’s a difficult concept, but let’s take it in the sense that leftists use when they say conservatives and libertarians are evil, by which they seem to mean something along the lines of monstrously selfish, cold-hearted and spiteful. When they say someone is evil they mean that person delights in harming others, ignoring their rights, and cares little about anything other than what is in their own narrow mindset. Someone who is prepared to ignore misery and death, or even to cause it, if it means they get their own way, or if their political beliefs are advanced. Something along those lines (I’m sure you can add some material of your own).

When we put it like that, it should be clearer that a lot of the modern left fits this description. Maybe not your nice old buddy from Uni who now works in middle management but who still goes on about wanting higher tax rates for the rich, or how plastic is bad for the oceans. Maybe not him. (Or maybe him. That’s to be decided.) But the tens of thousands of leftists on Facebook and Twitter who scream and harass at every opportunity. By their own definitions, they’re evil. Or the media leftists, twisting stories every day into leftist fairy tales.

The latest buillshit  story that the leftist media and online commentators have been pushing is this one:

This guy, Shaun King, is simply evil. He’s not just wrong. He’s not just dangerous. He’s evil.

Perhaps saying this doesn’t really help us, I don’t know. Perhaps we should concentrate on his wrongness, of which there is plenty. Perhaps we should use another name than ‘evil’, which has all sorts of weird connotations. I just know that I’m getting pretty sick of being called evil by people who are clearly evil bastards themselves. People who would be running gulags given half a chance. Leftists who are ramping up the evil week by week. So I’m no longer going to hold back my words when the evidence is clear. These people are evil, they seek our destruction, they seek the destruction of freedom, and we should stop pussyfooting around them.

Did you hear they’d taken the word ‘gullible’ out of the dictionary?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Telegraph reports on an unfortunate lady:

I nearly married a conman. It’s more common than you think

Was he a good liar? I presume he didn’t just spin this lady the usual guff about working for top secret government organisations, which meant he couldn’t tell her anything?

He worked in dark ops; by nature, it had to happen beneath a cloak of secrecy

Oh.

Still, I expect he didn’t tell her the usual ridiculous conman boasts about all the amazing things he’d done which had to stay secret because it was all hush-hush?

she spent hours rapt in his extraordinary tales. While serving in Afghanistan, he had operated on Osama bin Laden; received a Purple Heart for his military service; he had been shot while held hostage and tortured on a Secret Service mission in China. “You wouldn’t have heard about it,” he told her when she pressed for detail, a common response she would receive over the course of their year-long relationship.

Oh.

Well, that was the extent of the bigging himself up, I trust.

[He] had re-enlisted in the Navy as a military doctor, seeking to open a hospital in Iraq for children with cancer. A lieutenant commander, he would soon be starting work at the Pentagon.

Oh.

Still, I expect she was just a dumbo, not the sort of upper middle-class intelligent professional who knows what’s best for us.

Ellin was due to move to Washington D.C. to study for a Master’s focusing on human rights

Oh.

Pity she wasn’t a journalist then, they’re the last person who’d fall for a load of made-up, feel-good, unverifiable bollocks.

The cogs had begun turning six years earlier when Ellin, a journalist then writing a piece about high-end detoxes, was put in touch with a doctor running a practice in Beverly Hills

Oh.

When Guardian World meets Westminster World, you know there aren’t going to be fireworks

Hector Drummond Posted on by

According to the Guardian, a female artist was allowed to hang around Westminster harrassing MPs for their thumbprint on a work of art about Brexit. The work itself sounds supremely uninteresting; it’s basically just a bunch of coloured thumbprints. The story consisted of a few Conservatuve MPs like John Redwood saying ‘No’, and some of them coming back later. The Guardian is so desperate for stories that it decided to still run this. It’s become like Slate (or was it Salon), which at one time (and probably still now) consisted of nothing but wall-to-wall anti-Trump stories.

Here’s some of the excitement:

Later, while she’s temporarily away from the stall, someone stamps one of the small ink blocks on the artwork. I see it as an act of vandalism (and suspect Redwood) but Robinson sees the mark as representing the vote itself.

And make sure you’re sitting down for this one:

When it’s all completed – Robinson can’t say when that might be – she plans to tour the country with it on the back of a truck, ideally with some funding.

There may have been even kore to this story, but I fell asleep.

The Biscuit Factory Vol. I: Days of Wine and Cheese serialisation. Part 55

Hector Drummond Posted on by

2001-02

Semester 1

Week 6

Monday (cont.)

 

A room full of students who won’t talk is the academic equivalent of getting very constipated and consequently having to try desperately hard to force some pooh out. The atmosphere is rather strained, like everyone’s girlfriend or boyfriend has left them for their best friend, but we’re not mentioning it. In his early days, when he was a less experienced seminar leader, Ren would end up losing his nerve when faced with a Funeral and just start giving a virtual lecture instead. That was easier to do with his own lecture courses, where he could talk intelligently for hours about the topic and at least give the students some useful information, even if they’re failing to develop their own speaking, arguing and critical skills. But that wasn’t so easy to do with a course that he didn’t know that much about, like Ethics. Although he exaggerated his lack of knowledge of Ethics in order to avoid having to lecture in it, he is pretty hazy on the details, and he isn’t about to do any more mugging up on it than he should have to for a first-year seminar.

He wouldn’t have been able to cope with a Funeral today at all, except that there is a reading for this week, which he already knew, and which everyone was supposed to have read. Which, of course, most of them, in all three of today’s classes, haven’t, because it has never happened in any Philosophy seminar at Grayvington ever in the modern era that more than three students have attempted to read the set reading, and usually they’ve only got through a couple of pages. After the third page the reading could consist of nothing but entries from the telephone directory, and nobody would say anything about it.

‘I’ve sort of skimmed it, didn’t have time to read it properly’ was what students usually said. In this situation one thing you can do is to go through the reading, slowly, with the students, section by section. This isn’t just a time-filling tactic, it’s a good way for the students to learn. He remembers one of his old undergrad lecturers who used to take the students line by line through Aristotle. You need good students for that level of analysis, though. No point trying that with Sarah from the University Ski and Champagne Society.

(Also, if you, as a seminar leader, go into class with a reading you don’t know that well, then reading it slowly allows you to get a grasp of what it’s about as you go, and you can pretend you know it. But it’s a bad idea to try to wing it with a reading you don’t know at all, and any seminar reader fool enough to do it once never does it again.)

Ren hasn’t re-read this week’s reading recently, but it’s a piece he knows fairly well from his teaching experiences as a grad student. It’s a paper by Judith Thomson arguing in favour of abortion. Suppose somehow a violinist gets attached to your body, and uses your body for sustenance. To remove the violinist would kill him. Don’t you still have the right to remove him from your body? The argument has a lot of stages, so Ren can take the students through it slowly if he needed to.

He didn’t need to with the first group, which is always a Roller class. There were at least five good students who joined in with the discussion. Normally Ren tries to bring out the non-talkers as well, but today he didn’t have the energy, it was a struggle enough just to stay awake, and he let those five get on with it.

That went well, but by the end of the class he is feeling terrible, exhausted, with a parched mouth, and his injured leg and arm ache. He has to change rooms for the next seminar, so he goes off limping, hoping no-one will notice, to the next room he has to teach in, which thankfully isn’t far away. He sits down and rubs his leg under the table. The ache is making it hard to concentrate, and the hangover isn’t helping much either, and he is virtually asleep on his feet. He doesn’t know how he is going to get through the next two classes if they aren’t good groups. Especially the last one. Groups that meet later in the day are always the worst, and so far in the course that group been keen to play up to the stereotype.

The second class is less good than the first. It’s a Ford. A Ford Focus, at his estimate. Not a Mondeo. In fact, a somewhat older Focus, really, with squeaky brakes. It could have been a brand new Mondeo, or even a slightly used Roller, except that it is spoiled by a student who doesn’t understand things properly, isn’t keen to let anyone else speak, and gets on everyone’s tits. Normally this would annoy Ren, and he would make a concerted effort to quieten this student down and bring others in, but today he doesn’t mind so much because at least someone else is doing the talking. Talk away, arsehole, he thinks. Tick tock. Tick tock. Occasionally he says, ‘Let someone else speak for a change, Phil,’ but inside he’s raising a Lucozade toast to Phil.

He lets them go five minutes early, pretending that’s a favour to them, and sits there wondering whether he has enough time to rush to the cafeteria to get a Lucozade. God, how he wants a Lucozade. The cravings an alcoholic feels for another drink are but nothing compared to his craving for a Lucozade. He could taste that sweet amber liquid now, pouring down his throat, with its molten bubbles, soothing all his fears, enveloping him in a warm glucose glow. He wishes he could ask one of the students to get him one. He’d gladly pay twenty quid if someone offered him one right now. Or even the worst machine coffee ever made. He should have bought a Lucozade before the classes. There is no way he can make it to the cafe in time now. If it was yesterday, there’d be just enough time, but today his left leg and arm – especially his leg – are are so painful and stiff that it would take him half an hour.

The glorious thing about a Lucozade, he thinks, is that you can just have it there, in public, in class, and drink it right in front of everyone without them batting an eyelid, without them knowing that it’s reviving you from the dead (for a while, at least) like a magic elixir, charging up your brain like a vodka. You couldn’t do that with a beer. Or a vodka.

As he waits in the empty room, he wonders whether he could risk taking a peek at his bruises and mounds. When he last had a chance to, in his office, they’d become spectacularly horrible. Better not, though. Don’t want a student to walk in while I’m peering intently down my trousers with a look of horrified astonishment on my face.

The third class trickles in. There are only seven there. This gives him an excuse to start five minutes late, as they wait for more to come. No-one does. Sometimes a smaller class can be a good thing, it makes it feel more intimate, and usually it’s the sulkiest, energy-sucking students who haven’t turned up, which improves the atmosphere, and the good students enjoy the increase in the average IQ of the room.

But sometimes, usually with a Funeral class, a lack of numbers is a bad thing. The students who have turned up are not much better than those who haven’t turned up, and they start to panic. You can see it in their faces. I should have gone home, their faces say to each other. Sometimes they say it out loud. ‘I should have gone home too,’ they’ll say, in a semi-whisper, perhaps hoping the seminar leader will say, ‘You can go home if you want, today’s class is sort of optional.’ They’re worried because they don’t know the reading, they don’t know the lecture material, they think they’re no good at Philosophy, and they don’t like talking in public, and now it’s going to be much harder to hide.

Then, at seven minutes past the hour, after they have finally started, another student comes in. Ren is glad, because it sort of justifies his decision to wait five minutes before starting, even though late students shouldn’t really be waited for. He can see the look on this student’s face as she walks through the door. Where is everyone? Oh shit. Is it too late to sneak off? No, he’s seen me. Damn it, I should have gone to the bar, now I’ll have to say something and I haven’t a clue. That’ll teach me for being conscientious. In future stay in the bar. Ren agrees with her. In future, stay in the bar.

Philip Hammond, he knows what size knickers you wear

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Another lame young Telegraph writer appears, this time with a ludicrous article drooling all over Philip Hammond and his non-existent achievements:

it’s not so much Mr Hammond’s fondness for the single market that should worry the hardliners of the European Research Group, but his penchant for being correct.

What has he got correct then? What the article provides is pretty thin gruel:

Where the predictions and visions of his Brexiteer colleagues have often fallen by the wayside, Mr Hammond’s track record is impressive. Eighteen months ago, he said Britain would remain “recognisably European” and that the UK’s current “social, economic and cultural model” would not change. Mrs May has subsequently agreed to “level playing field” provisions on environmental protections and workers rights.

Wow, what a seer. Not much has changed while we’re negotiating Brexit, who could have predicted that? And in such minute, exact detail. Even physicists can’t work at this sort of precision: “the UK’s current social, economic and cultural model won’t change”. We’d better do as he says, he clearly has supernatural powers of rightness and will soon be calculating both the position and the momentum of individual atoms.

Philip Hammond after he has just calculated the colour and design of Fiona Bruce’s knickers.

Anyway, the whole thing is very shady. Yesterday the Telegraph published a scoop in which they caught Hammond admitting on a phone call that he was going to cancel a No Deal Brexit (a phone call the transcipt of which reads suspiciously like it had been scripted). Yet today they run a puff piece on him?

Quote of the Day

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Jim in the comments:

I have this suspicion that Corbyn is very carefully trying to make sure that he has nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit at all, and is leaving the Tories to sink or swim themselves over it. On the wise principle its better to let others make decisions that have only hard outcomes, and let them get blamed for them. Who now remembers that the Tories pretty much unanimously voted for the war in Iraq in 2003? No-one, Blair and Labour get the blame.

 

So I suspect he will studiously ignore May’s entreaties to get involved, and let her swing in the wind. Not least because I don’t believe you lose 30+ years of anti-EU sentiment overnight, and I reckon Corbyn will privately be quite happy with a hard Brexit, not least because it gives him a stick to beat the Tories with, and there could be a Tory split over it as well, and if he were to get into power not having the EU breathing down his neck would be a plus for a Hard Left Prime Minister. It might well also purge a few Blairites from Labours ranks as well, which would be another bonus as far as Corbyn is concerned.

Will Remainers eventually vote against the government in a no-confidence motion?

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Will Remainers eventually vote against the government in one of the many no-confidence motions Labour are threatening to bring in the next few weeks? Juliet Samuel thinks they may well do so:

But there is another avenue of pressure: votes of no confidence. If Remain-supporting Tories become convinced that Mrs May is steering the country towards a no-deal Brexit, they could decide to vote to collapse their own party’s government. This could split their party and they would risk being accused of treachery by their own supporters but, from the looks of it, there are easily enough Tories prepared to do so to make it a credible threat.

But here’s the problem with that. If the government loses a no-confidence motion then there’s going to be another election (assuming those rebels don’t decide to prop up Labour long-term, which would probably be too much even for the likes of Anna Soubry, and anyway she ruled that out pretty vehemently yesterday).

What are the chances of Anna Soubry winning her seat again at another election next month? Close to zero, I’d say. Same applies to lots of the other loony Remainers. So I’d say there’s actually very little chance of them doing this. Yesterday I said that I thought the likes of Soubry would give up their own Parliamentary careers for the EU, but I think that was a bit strong. I’m not sure they would if it came down to it tomorrow.

Anyway, they also wouldn’t do it for another reason — how could they stop Brexit if they’re not MPs? They’re finding it difficult enough as it is to stop it even though they’re in Parliament. If they’re just another ex-politician, and not even an ex-PM like Major and Blair, then they’ll be greatly reduced in power, and that’s not what they want. There’s little guarantee that a new government, be it Labour or Tory, would be able to stop Brexit, or even to get an extension on Article 50, and our heroic Remainer ex-MPs would longer be on the front lines, or on the TV and the papers all the time, and Remain would be greatly weakened without its brave little soldiers.

So I can’t see it happening.

What is slightly more possible is the Tory Brexiteers collapsing the government sometime from late February onwards in order to prevent any moves that are being made to stop a No Deal Brexit, as that would tie Parliament up in a new election which wouldn’t be decided until after March 29. That’s also pretty unlikely, though (the Brexiteers aren’t as unscrupulous as the Remainers), unless those moves really looked like being successful. But I don’t think the Brexiteers would fancy going into battle against Corbyn being led by Theresa May and Phillip Hammond. And if Labour wins who knows what might happen? A permanent Customs Union? (Whereas with Labour in oppisition they’re just going to vote against anything the Tories propose, which is what they’re now saying, which is what we Leavers want, because we want nothing to happen until March 29.)

Mind you, these Brexiteers  could always vote with the government again in a further confidence vote within the two-week period (which Parliament gets to see if a new government can be formed) on the basis of May promising No Deal.

The DUP are probably the party most likely to vote against the Conservatives in a no-confidence vote, because they have no party loyalty to the Cons, and I presume they won’t have the same difficulties re-winning their seats as Anna Soubry will. Yesterday they pointed out that a 325-309 vote win means that if they change their votes the government goes down, which was a coded way of warning May that if she takes the wrong approach then she’s facing an election. But I also think this is unlikely. What is another election at this stage going to achieve for them? They’d probably lose the balance of power they currently have. If Labour gets in anything could happen. If the Tories win big then there’s an increased chance that an amended deal gets through.

So although the Conservatives have reportedly started preparing for a possible election, I doubt it will happen. But that’s me being rational, and nothing in UK politics at the moment is very rational…

Quote of the Day

Hector Drummond Posted on by

From Ducky McDuckface in the comments:

Naked exercise of the power. The EU, particularly the way the UK government chose to implement membership, means that ministers and civil servants have a great deal of latitude in the development and implementation of regulation and legislation before the concept of oversight from the Commons ever begins to intrude. If you are a member of an opposition party, this is the position you desire.

Brexit raises the spectre of actually having to justify themselves and their actions to the Commons (and thus all the way down to us plebs) before they do it, and afterwards.

This is utterly unthinkable, and must be avoided at all costs.

As far I can see, the Ultra position is inexorably trending towards abandoning representative democracy in any useful form. There will most likely be attempts to bind the Commons internally via legislative proposals, and legal manoeuvres via the Supreme Court, and Miller established that this was effective. Since we're talking about a date at the end of March, this sort of thing could arise really quite quickly.

Why do Remainers want to stay in the EU?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

There’s been a lot of comment recently in the newspapers about how Remainers want us to stay in the EU because they don’t trust themselves to run things any more.

This is the wrong answer. The real answer is that they think that the further away power is vested from the people the better. It’s not that they trust themselves less than, say Junker, it’s that they don’t want power to be invested in national parliaments where ‘populist’ movements might be able to change things. They want it all safely locked up in supranational organisations and treaties where grubby proles and jumped-up right-wingers and loonie leftists can’t get at it (one can sympathise over the last of these, of course).

That’s why Remainers have been acting so bizarrely over Brexit. They’d hardly go so mental if it was just because they think we don’t know how to rule ourselves any more. It’s because Brexit threatens to remove some vital foundation bricks from the power stitch-up that’s been working so well for decades, and which promised to gradually remove all power from us. That’s why they’re willing to throw everything — including party and country — at it. They don’t really care about their party. They certainly don’t care about their country, that’s the very thing they’re trying to undermine. They’ll even wreck their own political careers if necessary (although most of tham have law careers or something similar to fall back on, they’re not going to starve). What they care about is keep the power transfer mill going.

The new Sopranos

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Telegraph re-published a Clive James piece on the Sopranos from 2004, and the one thing in it that stood out for me was this:

The wise guys work their Thing by intimidating each other from the top of the hierarchy down, and maintain the cash-flow of their Thing by intimidating everybody else. When the soldiers toe the line and the civilians keep up their payments, life can go on peacefully from episode to episode.

But if, God forbid, one of the subordinate wise guys should get ambitious, or some innocent citizen should get the idea that there is a real law beyond the one that the wise guys impose, hell briefly but effectively breaks loose. It hardly ever does, because every member of the crew, whether a made man or not, has proved in his youth that he will go on kicking and hitting until the victim expires.

This is about the Sopranos, but nowadays it’s also a pretty good summary of how the modern left-dominated Establishment works.

Matthew Parris is clueless about paternalism

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Following on from yesterday’s post about Matthew Parris and his recent MPs-should-ignore-the-people Spectator article, you’ll notice, I trust, that Parris’s whole way of talking is more suitable to a member of a hereditary ruling class than an elected democratic representative. He quotes, as an example of the more traditional Conservative mindset to which he subscribes, Arthur Balfour’s quip:

I have the greatest respect for the Conservative party conference, but I would no more consult it on a matter of high policy than I would my valet

You can talk like this when you’re a part of the ruling Royal Family, or a military junta, for whom there are no real consequences for ignoring the little people. But that way of thinking won’t survive long in a real democracy, because – guess what – eventually voters will become sick of you acting like you’re the Tsar, and vote you out (or revolt).

Unless, that is, you’re very clever at using the ruling system to your advantage, and/or you have a pliant population, and a successful economy which keeps people happy. But even then, you won’t be able to string things out forever, because eventually your decisions will piss enough people off, and a rich populace isn’t necessarily a pliant populace. More and more people will get wise to you, and they’ll stop voting for you. (Especially if you start telling them what your game is.)

So that is why that type of Conservativism went out of fashion, which for Parris is a cause for lament. People don’t want to vote for an MP if they know he or she will ignore them. That’s why the number of Conservative MPs who talk like Parris has been falling for years. (Parris himself admits that he can only talk like this because he is “not running for office”). Trust in politicians is falling to extremely low levels, so most politicians have evolved in recent years to talk about respecting the wishes of the public. Balfour could get away with talking like he did in 1909 because people had a lot more trust in politicians then. They don’t any more, and for good reasons (although I note that in Roy Jenkins’ biography of Churchill, Jenkins says that it may have been no accident that Balfour become one of the few Conservative leaders to be forced out of office within three years of making that remark, so perhaps that attitude didn’t go down very well even then).

What astounds me most about Parris’s article, however, is not its undemocratic nature, because that’s been apparent in Parris’s writing for years, but the incredible stupidity of saying things like this:

Even today, of course, politicians can and sometimes must dodge the popular will, and they know it. But who now dares say these things? And what today we do but no longer dare say we do, tomorrow we may not dare do. Tory paternalism is in long, slow retreat. People like me will stay where we are, increasingly exposed as our friends melt back.

This is incredibly stupid for two reasons. The first is that while it is true that politicians have been increasingly talking about respecting the democratic will in recent decades — even Labour changed their tune when Blair took over — it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that this is mostly lip service. It’s all talk. If anything, politicians have become more willing to cheat the electorate than ever before.

Does Parris really think that Theresa May, for example, who is always going on about respecting the will of the British people, is really doing anything of the sort? She speaks the cliches required, while doing the exact opposite. Did Tony Blair really do what he people wanted when he deliberately opened the immigration floodgates? Are the hate laws that have come into being in recent years an expression of the greater public’s desires, or something forced down their throats?

This isn’t just a British phenomenon – the same has been true in recent times of Barack Obama, Malcom Turnbull, Justin Trudeau, George Bush, Emmanuel Macron, Kevin Rudd, and so on. Not to mention the majority of European politicians, when they pulled the new EU constitution after it was set to be defeated by the people and called it a treaty instead, pretending it was just a reform of the existing constitution, and passed it without consulting the people.

No, it’s obvious to everyone except Matthew Parris that, on balance, the majority of modern politicians are no more to be trusted with carrying out the public’s desires than they were fifty years ago (and they’re perhaps even less trustworthy).

The other reason why Parris’s comments here are incredibly stupid is that Brexit itself, plus the rise of Corbyn, has seen an explosion in the number of politicians openly declaring in the last year that they will run the country how they damn well please, and the people’s will be damned. Parris’s comments may have just about been understandable, if dangerously naive, if they had been made a couple of years ago, but how can any self-respecting observer of recent political events seriously write that political paternalism is dying when half of Parliament is explicitly calling for Brexit to be overthrown? And when the Labour Party has become overrun with hard-left SJWs who have about as much interest in democracy as Vyshinsky had in holding a fair trial?

Unless Parris has been holed up in a cave in the Derbyshire Dales for the last two years you’d have to say that he has the observational skills of a man who has just stood too close to a World War I explosion. The country (and his old party) stand on the brink of civil war because hundreds of MPs, led by Tories, refuse to accept a referendum result, and Parris’s attempt at insight consists of lamenting how sad it is that Conservative politicians these days kowtow to the public?

This may possibly be the most myopic political take since Virginia Woolf claimed that the British were just as bad as the Nazis, and that one should be indifferent to who won, should a war between them start. At least Woolf had the sense to dimly become aware that she was mistaken once the bombs started falling. One wonders whether Parris would also come to his senses if the Houses of Parliament were to start burning. Or would he stand there puzzled, still thinking ‘How sad it is that Tory paternalism is fizzling out. Oh look, the angry mobs are now stringing MPs up from lampposts, but I doubt that has any bearing on the truth of my dazzling Spectator-worthy observation’.

(Thanks to commentator Pcar for the sending me the text of Parris’s article.)

Quote of the Day

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Jim in the comments:

The thing is he’s [Parris] not 100% wrong. You can’t have the public involved in every small decision of government, it would be chaos. To govern is to choose and sometimes you have to choose things that if given a choice the public might not agree with. However these are usually administrative things. Things that can easily be changed by a change of government, tax rates, laws even.

 

Brexit however is not an administrative thing. Its a fundamental change in the direction the country wants to take going forward. And that is why a referendum is a reasonable answer to deciding such issues – everyone is affected by the outcome, not just for the next 5 years of a Parliament, but potentially in perpetuity. So its only fair that instead of the 650 MPs getting to decide, in effect we all become MPs for a day and get to vote of a matter of such importance.

 

This is why what Parliament is doing over Brexit is so wrong – they as MPs delegated their power (which of course derives from the voters anyway) back to all 45m of the electorate. And all our votes (on the matter of Brexit) were equal. My vote was the same as David Cameron’s. What the MPs are now doing is saying that their votes now count for more than the rest of the 45m.

 

Which is totally wrong, and a denial of democracy.

Matthew Parris says the people are not to be trusted and MPs should ignore them

Hector Drummond Posted on by

A few weeks ago in the Speccie Matthew Parris came right out and said that the government should ignore the people:

Oddly, then, this column is not really about Brexit, but about trusting the people. I don’t. Never have and never will…

 

Tories like me, and I think we used to be in the majority, see good governance as an effort to live with democracy rather than to an effort to live by democracy. It is why we were so chary about referendums in the first place. We are wary of the populace and instinctively hostile to the instincts of the mob. We see the popular will as a sometimes dangerous thing, to be handled, guided, and on key occasions (and subtly) thwarted.

The rest of the article is mostly an admission that he and his fellow Tories deliberately deceived the public on a daily basis:

at the idea that the people should dictate the policies of government on a daily basis, we shudder

and

in 1977, it was commonplace among us Tories to see and describe ‘the will of the people’ not as our mentor but as a rock to be navigated.

The analogy is telling. When you navigate around a rock you aren’t ‘engaging’ with it. You’re sailing on by and leaving it behind. You’re avoiding it, and having nothing to do with it. Once past you continue to your destination at the speed, and in the direction, you desire, and the rock can be safely ignored; it has no more influence on you.

So although Parris says that “the people’s will cannot be overlooked”, and “we see it as a corrective to the over-mighty and a warning to those who govern not to lose touch with popular feeling”, this analogy is basically an admission that Parris thinks that the ‘public will’ is to be generally ignored and ‘(subtly) thwarted’ (his own words). It isn’t something you let steer the ship. It’s the rock that threatens the ship.

There’s no great argument given by Parris for why it is right to ignore the popular will. The closest thing to an argument given is that the public used to be in favour of hanging, and as that is, in Parris’s mind at least, self-evidently wrong, then the public should not be trusted. He doesn’t show any understanding that the same logic will also lead to the conclusion that as most of the worst atrocities in history have happened as a result of governments, states and rulers deciding that they were right, we should never trust our rulers with decisions.

But let’s acknowledge that all of us may be tempted to feel and act like Parris in some situations. Suppose the majority wants to set up Gulag system where right-wingers will be imprisoned and worked to death. Wouldn’t you resist that? Sure. But just as hard cases make bad law, so do extreme situations make for bad general political principles. Parris isn’t talking about situations where the public wants something highly immoral, even evil. He’s happy for the public will to be routinely overriden, on most things, just because he’d prefer things to be done his way. That just isn’t democracy, and any system that allows that needs to be overhauled.

It’s one thing for the elected rulers to make the occasional decision to overrule something which the public desires but which is manifestly wrong, but you can’t be doing it all the time on every routine matter. That’s a society run by a ruling class, not the people. You certainly can’t override the popular will when it concerns whether we are to be ruled by a foreign oligarchy. How is wanting to leave a trading bloc that has overreached its powers akin to, say, killing the Jews? That’s exactly the sort of decision we should leave up to the public rather than the MPs and the Establishment, especially when so many of those people have massive conflicts of interest.

(Thanks to commentator Pcar for the sending me the text of Parris’s article.)

They can’t let go of their pathetic drivel about the Brexit bus

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Natalie Solent at Samizdata quotes from a Times review of Brexit: The Uncivil War:

Oh and putting that £350 million for the NHS claim on the side of the bus. It wasn’t true but, hey, who cares in “war”, eh?

This endless fudged crap about the Brexit bus is getting tedious. There were two main sentences on the bus. The first was “We send the EU £350 million a week”. The second was “Let’s spend it on the NHS instead”. The second sentence is a suggestion, so it can’t have a truth value (ie. it can’t be true or false because no claim is being made).

Only the first sentence can be true or false. Was it false? No, we do send the EU £350 million a week (more, in fact — at the time it turns out that at the time we were sending the EU on average £363 million a week).

Was it misleading? A bit, but not as much as the Remainers say. We get a rebate of about £96 million a week, so really we were sending £267 million a week, which was £83 mill less than the bus said, but who really thinks that that would have made any difference to the voting? Do you really think anyone would have thought, “Sending £267 million a week to the EU is fine with me, but £350 mill is just too much, I’ll have to vote Leave”? Nope.

(All these figures taken from the ONS link above.)

The other thing Remainers say is that the figure on the bus also ignores the fact that another £86 million comes back to the UK to be spent on various EU-approved projects, so the real figure is lower again: it should be £181 million a week.

But the Remainers are wrong here. The fact that the EU spends this money in the UK is irrelevant, because they don’t spend it on the NHS. Therefore that money would be available to spend on the NHS if we left, just as the bus suggested. The Leave campaign is right about this, and the Remainiacs are wrong.

Some Remainers still like to say — well, scream actually — that this ignores the fact that the money still comes back to the UK, so really, it shouldn’t be counted because it’s our money again, not the EUs. As I said above, this simply ignores the fact that the bus’s suggestion was that we could spend this money on the NHS instead, which indeed we could. And more generally, it ignores the fact that this money is spent on things that the EU deems suitable, not the British people. If I am forced to give an amount of money every week to some gangster, who gives some of it back to me but only on the condition that I give it his cronies to fund their lifestyles, you’d hardly say it was my money again.

Think of it terms of tax. I send the taxman a certain amount of money every month (well, I used to when I had a job, I don’t now I’m a novelist). The government spends that on what they want to, things which may or may not benefit me. Yet clearly it’s not a lie if I say I send a certain amount of money to the taxman every month. It’s not made a lie just because he spends it on things that may possibly  benefit me. No-one says, “Oh that’s a lie, you don’t send that much to the taxman every month because all that money is spent wisely on things that help you, so in actual fact you send no money at all to the taxman every month”. That’s obviously absurd. When we talk about sending money to the taxman we don’t talk about some mythical ‘net’ amount, we talk about the gross amount I send him.

The same applies to sending money to the EU. It’s the gross amount that we send that counts, not the net. (I’m not including the rebate money here because that money does come directly back to the government.)

In fact, this applies ten times over with the EU because while some UK government spending undoubtedly does benefit me (the NHS, and roads, for example), very little of what the EU spends its money on benefits me, nor does it benefit the average person much.

And even if it did, it doesn’t make the bus’s message a lie. The whole point of the bus’s message was that we send a lot of money to the EU (which we do), which spends it on what it deems worthy, when we could be in control of that money and spend it on what we deem worthy, such as (if we so decided) the NHS. As the last sentence of the bus said, let’s take back control.

Update: You know, there really should have been a Remain bus driving around with the message “Don’t bother voting Leave as John Bercow and Parliament won’t let it happen”.