Parliament has always been about thwarting the will of the people, only now it’s obvious

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The vote to cancel No Deal changes nothing. It’s not binding. All it has done is revealed those MPs who have betrayed us. A nice little list of people who will be shortly be discovering some additional uses for piano wire.*

Here is the traitor’s list:

Guto Bebb
Aberconwy

Richard Benyon
Newbury

Nick Boles
Grantham and Stamford

Kenneth Clarke
Rushcliffe

Jonathan Djanogly
Huntingdon

George Freeman
Mid Norfolk

Justine Greening
Putney

Dominic Grieve
Beaconsfield

Sam Gyimah
East Surrey

Phillip Lee
Bracknell

Oliver Letwin
West Dorset

Paul Masterton
East Renfrewshire

Sarah Newton
Truro and Falmouth

Mark Pawsey
Rugby

Antoinette Sandbach
Eddisbury

Nicholas Soames
Mid Sussex

Edward Vaizey
Wantage

Bim Afolami
Hitchin and Harpenden

Robert Buckland
South Swindon

Alistair Burt
North East Bedfordshire

Alberto Costa
South Leicestershire

Greg Clark
Tunbridge Wells

Stephen Crabb
Preseli Pembrokeshire

Tobias Ellwood
Bournemouth East

Vicky Ford
Chelmsford

David Gauke
South West Hertfordshire

Mike Freer
Finchley and Golders Green

Amber Rudd
Hastings and Rye

Richard Graham
Gloucester

Damian Green
Ashford

Stephen Hammond
Wimbledon

Richard Harrington
Watford

Oliver Heald
North East Hertfordshire

Peter Heaton-Jones
North Devon

Simon Hoare
North Dorset

Nigel Huddleston
Mid Worcestershire

Margot James
Stourbridge

Joseph Johnson
Orpington

Eleanor Laing
Epping Forest

Jeremy Lefroy
Stafford

Anne Milton
Guildford

Claire Perry
Devizes

Victoria Prentis
Banbury

Keith Simpson
Broadland

Caroline Spelman
Meriden

Gary Streeter
South West Devon

David Mundell
Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale

Plus a load of Labour and TIG scum.

As I said the other day, the ERG need to pull the plug and bring the government down if there’s a threat of a delay. And this might just happen:

But the short delay is also risky, as the government will use that to try and get the wretched Withdrawal Agreement through a third time, and perhaps the frightened little bunnies will vote for it that time.

*Metaphorically speaking, if you’re the police reading this.

May is not our PM. The government is illegitimate. And so is Parliament

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Theresa May has no right to be anywhere near the Houses of Parliament, let alone to be pretending she is our leader. Most Conservative MPs, including most of those who make up the government, have no right to be there. The same applies to most Labour MPs. Not only have they tried to overturn the result of a referendum, they have gone back on their most important manifesto promise, to enact Brexit.

Breaking a few minor manifesto promises is one thing. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if tax can’t be cut quite as much as was promised. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if student fees have to be raised because of budgetary concerns when you promised they wouldn’t. But when it comes to the biggest issue facing the country in a century, an issue concerning the country’s sovereignty, and you’re completely opposing the position you committed to in your manifesto, the manifesto that got you elected, and it’s clear that you’re lying and lying, then you are no longer our leader. Technically you may be, but you are there under false pretences, and you have no moral authority.

I don’t recognise Theresa May as PM. I don’t recognise the government as the government. I don’t recognise my local MP as my MP, because he was elected on a manifesto that was soon thrown in the bin. They may command the police and the army, but that is the only way in which they have authority over me. If they won’t go quietly, if they keep on pretending that they rule us, then they’ll have to be removed one way or another, as quickly as possible.

“I don’t intend to use the ‘cut off his balls’ clause, but no, I’m not removing it from the contract”

Hector Drummond Posted on by

If someone really is prepared to remove X from a contract then X gets crossed out.

But if that person spends weeks and weeks resisting X’s removal, then it’s there for a reason. Even if that person says they’re not really that serious about X. If X stays in despite numerous attempts to get X out, then it’s there to be used if required.

The UK government is kidding itself if it thinks it can just declare it can get out of the backstop.

But it suits the EU totally. Tying us up in years of legal quagmire. Just what they want.

Update: The Telegraph:

Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker agree to ‘legally binding’ assurances on Irish backstop

Shorter version: They’re not legally binding.

Pink bits no. 2

Hector Drummond Posted on by

You might have thought that Tim Newman had said all their is to say about poyamory, but then he just comes up with another great fisking:

>We’re both nervous and don’t know what to expect. I’ve pushed Brad to “go first” in dating and sexually exploring other women. He’s been on two dates so far, and we even arranged a crazy one-night stand to sort of break the ice and test our feelings.

 

Nothing screams maturity and responsibility like arranging a crazy one-night stand.

Christopher Snowdon writes that alcohol consumption has been declining, yet alcohol-related deaths haven’t been:

This poses a problem for the modern ‘public health’ lobby for whom it is axiomatic that a decline in overall consumption must lead to a decline in alcohol-related deaths

Kristian Niemietz fuses Marx and Dickens in his A Socialist Carol:

Owen jumped out of bed. He grabbed a tennis racket, and tiptoed towards the kitchen. As he got closer, he noticed that he recognised the music. It was the Soviet national anthem.

 

He peeked through the crack of the door. He saw a man with a large, dark moustache, wearing a uniform. The man was looking at him. He smiled, and waved.

 

“Privyet, Tovarish Owen! Come een, come een!”, he said, in a thick Russian accent.

 

Confused, Owen entered the kitchen. “Who are you?”, he asked.

 

“I am the Ghost of Socialism Past. Come, let me show you something.”

Old Commie Neil Clark somehow manages to con the American Conservative into letting him have an article. In it he tries to convince us that Pete Seeger was really just a good old-fashioned conservative:

In an interview with the New York Times in 1995 [Seeger] declared, “I like to say I’m more conservative than [Barry] Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Farenheit 211 gives the West Yorkshire police a well-deserved beating:

Now winning this award might have stoked the egos of the various ‘diversity-wallahs’ of West Yorkshire Police but the public, who took to Twitter to comment were none too impressed. They were not impressed with the award and speculated about how many Islamic institutions West Yorkshire Police had to politically fellate in order to win it?

The Devil’s Kitchen writes about reforming politics:

But the problem is that, sooner or later, such bodies always become corrupted. The WHO, for instance, has moved from its drive to eliminate real diseases such as smallpox (which it was successful in), to attempting to “eliminate non-communicable diseases by 2030” (state-speak for ”anything that might kill you that isn’t a disease” or, in this case, ”eliminating death”!): this latter mission means regulating the day-to-day lifestyles of ordinary people which is, and I cannot emphasise this strongly enough), not the proper business of government.

 

 

 

A possible treasonous plot that could happen this week

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Here’s an awful possibility: suppose the Tory Remainers join forces with Labour?

They get the no confidence motion passed first, with Labour’s help.

There’s then two weeks in which any grouping has the chance to form a government. The Tory Remainers, along with TIG, then vote for a new coalition government made up of Labour and themselves.

In other words, the majority of Remainers in Parliament join forces to overthrow the elected government, to stop Brexit.

If that doesn’t result in the Houses of Parliament being burned to the ground, I don’t know what will.

Update: This is more than just an abstract possibility:

Update 2: To stop this the ERG could call a direct early election vote, which requires a two-thirds majority. But that’s 434 votes, which will require over 120 Conservatives to vote for it (assuming all the opposition MPs vote for it), and I’m not sure there’s that many prepared to take the plunge.

Pull the plug

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Telegraph reports:

a bill to change the day of our EU exit and bind the Government into a permanent customs union

If I had any cartooning skill then right now I’d be drawing a cartoon of Parliament trying to force the UK into a customs union, while the ERG are about to yank the plug labelled ‘No Confidence Vote’, or maybe ‘Early Election’, from the socket. Hackneyed yes, but it sums up the current situation.

This is what the ERG need to do if the government, or the Remainers in Parliament, try to pull any stunts like that. Vote against the government in a no-confidence motion. That will paralyze Parliament for two weeks, after which an early election must be held if no majority can be formed. Or if March 29 passes in that time, vote for the government again in another confidence motion once March 29 is past. During those two weeks, and during any election campaign, no government business can be conducted, so No Deal will happen by default.

(If the two weeks is up before March 29, then another possibility is for the ERG to vote for the government in another confidence vote just before the early election has to happen, but with the threat of another no confidence vote still hanging over the government if anyone tries to pull another fast one.)

There are two issues here, though. Would the ERG have the guts to do this? It might rip the Conservatives in two (although it’s amazing how the Tories can manage to survive almost anything and still come crawling out from under their rocks when things have settled down a bit, so I wouldn’t bet on that). The ERG would be considered traitors to their party by many MPs, although the majority of party members would perhaps be onside.

The other issue, which no-one seems to have considered, so hopefully it is too far-fetched, is whether Labour, or enough Labour Remainers, would temporarily team up with the government at some stage during the two weeks after the government loses the no confidence motion. Would they decide to vote for the government in a subsequent confidence motion so that the government can ask the EU for an extension to Brexit?

If that happened it would be one of the most extraordinary happenings in the history of Parliament. The major opposition party would vote against the government in a No Confidence motion, but then would vote for them a week or so later in order that the government could defeat its own rebels, who were voting against it, and as a result keep us in the EU.

I’ve got to hope that that’s too much even for Labour, who seem more concerned with inflicting damage on the Tories than with preventing Brexit. But could, say, fifty Labour Remainers rebel and vote with the government, which may be enough to get the government back in power before Matrch 29? That would certainly cause chaos for Labour, and would most likely involve the party splitting into two. But betrayal is in the air at the moment, so nothing can be ruled out.

Will Self has become a weird gothic fantasy creature

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Watch this clip of Will Self and Mark Francois. (Or don’t watch it. I won’t blame you if you just read a book instead.)

Will Self does quite well to start with. Francois doesn’t understand that saying that ‘All As and Bs’ is not the same as saying ‘All Bs are As’. Or maybe he does understand, but thinks that Self is just dog-whistling. It’s hard to know because they just talk past each other.

But it’s the bit after that is funny. Funny peculiar, not funny-ha ha. Self just stares at Francois like he’s a loony trying to kill Francois with his mind power. That weird set of the mouth that he’s always had seems even madder than it used to be. He looks like a demented raven. Perhaps he was tripping and he started seeing Francois as a devil. It was like a vision of the 16th century, with Self as the priest who suddenly realises he is face to face with Satan, and he knows Satan can only be defeated if his will is strong enough

By the time Brexit happens – if it happens – I wonder how many cultural icons will be left standing?

Would you select him for your party?

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Guardian:

Tories are prejudiced against Islam, says council candidate

Why is Islam a protected religion? Would there be any controversy if a political party didn’t like scientologists? Wouldn’t it in fact be a scandal if that political party was selecting scientologists?

And why should a political party with a certain set of beliefs be forced to select candidates who in their estimation don’t fit with the party’s values?

Sadjady said he had rarely been on the receiving end of overt discrimination in the Conservatives

So what actually happened to him? He didn’t selected for a seat. That’s basically it. Oh, and he was seated next to some BAME people at a dinner once. The thinnest of thin gruel. And then he runs off to the Guardian to complain. Yes, he’s a conservative through and through, can’t imagine why he didn’t get selected.

A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said Sadjady and people like him should be allowed to share their experiences to an independent inquiry, allowing people to raise concerns without fearing for the political future.

Nothing’s stopping him sharing his experiences. Nothing’s stopping these people setting up their ‘independent inquiry boards’. What this spokesman really means, of course, is that there should be a government board set up that can gradually acquire the power to tell political parties which candidates they can choose.

Surveys by twits

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Quite a few of my readers don’t like social media, and don’t use it. Lucky buggers. One of the idiot things you miss out on is surveys. What happens is Mr Flat Earth does a poll, saying ‘Do you believe the Earth is flat or spherical?’ Mr Flat Earth’s followers, 99% of whom believe in a flat earth, answer ‘Flat’,  and so Mr Flat Earth declares that the public has spoken and most people really believe in a flat earth, despite what the media tells you.

Actually, this is unfair to flat earthers, who are probably well aware that their view is not widely shared. But it is how most political Twitter polls work. Mr Crazy for Brexit and Ms Crazy for Remain run their respective polls, which, not surprisingly given the nature of their followers, give 85% support for their views, and then they declare victory.

The slightly less dim surveyors will say something like, “Well, this is not a scientific poll, I admit, but as a lot of people have answered, it’s probably close to being right”. Or they’ll say “Please retweet widely for a representative sample”. Of course the poll only gets retweeted widely amongst people with similar views, so a representative sample is most definitely not what they’ll get. Even if one of their enemies sees it they’re hardly going to engage with it.

The less dumb but more cynical know all this but say “Retweet widely” anyway, because for them it’s really all about promoting themselves (something I wrote about recently here).

The best Twitter polls are the humorous ones, such as this one of mine:

It has to be May, though, doesn’t it?

Climate change and alternative medicine have a lot in common

Hector Drummond Posted on by

I don’t think this is something is has been noticed much, but one of the key reasons why claims about anthropogenic climate change have been able to thrive despite a lack of serious underlying evidence is similar to one of the key reasons as to why alternative medicine has been able to thrive despite a lack of serious underlying evidence.

What reason is that? Well, alternative medical practitioners have learned that they are best off making their claims in relation to conditions that naturally wax and wane. Homeopathists are not so stupid as to claim that they can fix a broken leg. Acupuncturists are not crowding around people brought into hospital with stab wounds saying they’ve got just the thing for that. Herbalists are not writing articles in their herbal magazines about how they can fix a ruptured kidney.

The alternative ‘doctors’ prefer to treat people with conditions like back pain, skin conditions, depression, stomach problems, chronic tiredness, and other conditions which vary a lot over time (and also which are subject to some degree to a patient’s state of mind). When the natural variation results in the patient’s condition taking a turn for the better, this can be attributed to the marvellous medicine.

Climate change works in a similar fashion. Weather and climate naturally wax and wane. Some summers are hotter than others, some colder. Some winters are hotter than others, and some colder. Some years are hotter than others, and some colder. The same applies to decades, and to centuries. Just as the alternative conman can turn ordinary fluctuations to his advantage, so to can the climate change flim flam artist, using precisely the same faulty reasoning, only instead of attributing the disappearance of the headaches to the reiki sessions, a period of naturally occurring warmer weather gets attributed to the use of 100 watt light globes. Episodes that don’t fit into the narrative are ignored – only the successes are reported and considered significant.

In one way, of course, there isn’t a parallel, and that is that climate change gurus, instead of being scorned by the scientific establishment are rewarded with money and prestige and moral authority, when really they should be treated as on a par with bioelectromagnetic therapy practitioners, and drummed out of the academy.

Update: Alternative doctors were a lot bolder in the distant past about claiming to be able to fix things that don’t naturally wax and wane, and it didn’t work out well for them – one notable example being the Bates Method, and the famous episode with Aldous Huxley. It was from episodes like those that they learned their lessons.

Only a bloody fool would sign anything the EU put before them now…

Hector Drummond Posted on by

Seriously, how much of a fool would you have to be to sign a contract offered to you by the EU? After all the thuggish behaviour we’ve seen them engage in? Now that it’s clear that they don’t represent the other 27 EU countries? Now that it’s clear that they’re an oligarchy who are only interested in their own power, and increasing their empire?

How much of a bloody fool – or a knave – would you have to be to still sign the piece of paper they’re putting in front of you, knowing all that? Possibly the biggest fool – or the biggest bunch of fools – who have ever ruled this country since the beginning of recorded history.

Update: Possibly even one of the biggest fools in the whole of history. At least the other countries who’ve signed humiliating deals in the past had no choice. Whereas our fools have no reason to, and have been clearly instructed by their countryman to get out of the EU, not to get further trapped by it. I cannot believe that our rulers are considering signing a contract that even a medieval peasant would recognise as a bum deal.

The chlorinated chicken hysteria

Hector Drummond Posted on by

The Guardian has been going on again about the recent Brexit boogieman of ‘chlorinated chicken’ from the US:

All of which brings us to our second glimpse of the kind of deal a post-Brexit UK might expect from the US. On Thursday Lighthizer released Washington’s “negotiating objectives”, starting with “comprehensive market access for US agricultural goods in the UK”. Translation: they want the right to fill our supermarkets with their chlorinated chicken.

I expect US chlorinated chicken is manky and green and tastes disgusting, don’t you?

The only thing is this: when you go to the US, the meat is amazing. I’ve travelled around the US a lot, and being a meat fan, I’ve eaten a lot of meat there. In the big cities, and in the small backwater places. And it’s always good. Much better, on average, than the meat you get in the UK (although UK meat has improved a lot on the last few years). So the idea that we’re going to have our good old British chicken replaced by disgusting chemical meat, or perhaps rubbery tasteless processed pap, doesn’t really hold up, does it?

Internal wars in Britain used to be the norm

Hector Drummond Posted on by

For centuries Britain was a place of continual wars between all sorts of tribes and factions. Fighting and rebellions were commonplace. Heads were regularly displaced from bodies. You hardly need me to give examples.

It’s only in the last few hundred years that internal peace settled over the land, and that was mainly due to the British Parliament doing a reasonably good job of keeping a lid on things (for the most part).

As a result, the British people have become averse to internal strife, believing that our institutions can be eventually trusted with leadership, and that our peaceful democracy is preferable to going to war again, even if that democracy has sometimes led in directions that many people have not been happy with.

But now that Parliament and the Establishment are so clearly riding roughshod over the democratic will in regards to Brexit, that peace may be about to end. It’s not just Brexit, of course, there has been decades of festering resentment from people who’ve put up with the country moving in a direction they can’t stand, none of it with proper democratic approval. Brexit looks like being the proverbial straw, rather than a cause out of nowhere.

The Establishment has bet the house on the British people being too complacent to do anything to stop them, because that’s the way they’ve been for a long time, but as I said above, traditionally Britain has been a warlike, blood-soaked nation, endlessly quarrelling over who gets to rule. Now that democracy is being revealed as a sham, those days may be about to return. A lot of people have sensed that Brexit is the last chance we have to stop the nation becoming transformed beyond recognition, and they’re willing to fight for that. The other side, meanwhile, will do anything to stop Brexit.

We don’t know what form it will take, but that there will be some sort of civil war is now inevitable. Hopefully it will just involve the destruction of the existing political parties, and tearing the civil service a new hole. But Britain may turn into France, which – although the media won’t tell you this – is fast becoming ungovernable.

Always look on the bright side of life

Hector Drummond Posted on by

After yesterday’s dark Brexit news it may seem hard to see the sunny side. But here’s the upside of Brexit being stymied.

The Conservatives killed off.

Labour killed off.

A new set of parties in power with very different aims, and a mandate to flush out the civil service and the BBC.

Brexit eventually achieved anyway.

But what would be best is if the Queen finally does something useful in her life and suspends Parliament for a few months. On this, however, I don’t have much optimism. She probably thinks, even if she wanted to do it, that it would hasten the demise of the Royal Family. But that family is rapidly going down the plughole anyway, so she might as well do something grand and have the Windsors go out with a bang.

Turns out all that loss of trust in politicians was… completely justified

Hector Drummond Posted on by

How can anyone vote for the Conservatives or Labour ever again? It’s not just the massive betrayal, it’s also the sheer incompetence, which is no longer hidden, but completely out in the open now.

Michael Deacon asks the question:

Will Theresa May ever give us a straight answer on Brexit?

You’d have thought that after two and a half years he’d have twigged that the answer is ‘No’.