The laxative benefits of political churn

Paul Goodman of Conservative Home is, on the face of it, a textbook professional politician. From student political organiser to researcher, SPAD and MP, to ex-MP and political writer, with a bit of journalism on the side, the broad brushstrokes of his career are little different to the vast homogeneous mass of professional politicians with no real experience outside politics. He stood down from parliament during the expenses scandal. Not, I hasten to add, because of it. The Telegraph's only finding at the time was that

Paul Goodman claimed modest mortgage interest payments on a second home in High Wycombe. Underclaimed by £1,384 in 2006 and was reimbursed by fees office

Paul wrote one of those pieces yesterday for ConHome that strikes one immediately as 'right facts, wrong conclusions'. He notes the number of losses from the Commons, both recent arrivals and seasoned veterans, and postulates

Meanwhile, the shift from the elected representative to the professional politician model has been good news for constituents.  The days when the local MP could ignore the latter, or visit his seat only occasionally, vanished a long time ago.  That’s the effect of consumer competition for you over the years, with the emergence of the SNP, UKIP, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. We are moving from a model in which many MPs sat from late youth until early old age to one in which more serve for one or two terms – as the Editor of this site did.

Though I can't quite reconcile this with the quote someone has included on his Wiki page - "a House in which professional politics predominates, entrenching and empowering a taxpayer-dependent political class distinct and separate from those who elect them...for better or worse, this future Commons isn't for me". It seems he can't quite decide between the old patrician class and modern career professional politicians.

There is, of course, an alternative option. Neither.

Having read and digested the tens of thousands of comments on this blog for over ten years, the one thing I am sure of is that voters despise equally both members of the patrician political establishment and the privileged elite of professional politicians. They have both been responsible, as Paul quite rightly points out, for robbing the people of their rightful political power -

If you send much of your power outwards, to the EU; sideways, to the courts; and downwards, to the devolved institutions, then don’t be surprised if voters become resistant to backing you and funding you – especially in the wake of the Iraq War, “expenses” and the financial crash.

Paul mourns the loss of middle-ranking ministerial experience from the Commons because of recent 'churn'. I think he's wrong. Why entrench the failures, betrayals, sell-outs, mendacity and inadequacy of the past forty years? Why retain experience when clearly they have not only been getting it wrong but acting contrary to the interests of the voters, largely to their own benefit?

I have often pointed out that the only one of the six demands of the Charter of 1838 remains unmet

1. A vote for every man twenty-one years of age, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime.
2. The secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
3. No property qualification for Members of Parliament in order to allow the constituencies to return the man of their choice.
4. Payment of Members, enabling tradesmen, working men, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation.
5. Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much or more weight than larger ones.
6. Annual Parliamentary elections, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal manhood suffrage in each twelve-month period.

Bribery and intimidation - today the corrupting effect of establishment power, and the brutalising consequences of social media - remain a threat. But it is a frequent clear-out of the Commons that will keep it healthy, and not the institutionalising of status, privilege and entitlement.

We are in the process of reclaiming power - the power they have given away - winning it back from the EU, from the courts and from the unelected quangos and NDPBs, from anti-democratic and unaccountable supranational rule-makers and from an elite who have captured the State. It will take time to get a Commons that reflects these aspirations, but we are making a start.

Minor earthquake in SW1

There's really only one story this weekend and it's not about politicians but about the British people. The latest Opinum poll for the Observer gives the following;

The paper reports that Electoral Calculus estimate that this vote in a GE would give TBP 306 seats - short of an overall majority - and the Conservatives 26. This Thursday's bye-election in Peterborough may give Farage his first MP and send shock waves throughout Europe. Without detracting from Nigel's accomplishments - which are momentous - these figures are less about Farage than about the British people, and the direction in which the country is headed. Politicians are either acutely sensitive and adjust their policies to the path the voters are following, or they are history.

And here I have a message for my Parliamentary Party. Sweeties, you're away with the fairies. You're buggering about playing games with the Leadership contest, with Florence of Belgravia and every other hopeless idiot using it as an aid to self-love and a marker for aspiration to future ministerial preferment. You're all on the verge of being swept away by a Teal tsunami. I hope you've got other careers on which to fall back (Florence can walk back to Afghanistan for all I care). 

Meanwhile dear Mr Trump is worth listening to; if you have a sensitive ear you will have detected a minor shift in tone. When speaking ad hoc and off piste, Donald is increasingly channelling his senior White House advisors. What we are hearing are the headlines lodged in his memory from secret Presidential briefings. Despite SW1 still trying desperately to pretend Nigel Farage doesn't exist and everything's still the same, the possibility that he may be the UK's next PM but one is clearly one of the US government's planned scenarios.

Light dawns on the Political Class

For the second time in about a week there are signs that the issues that are driving the electorate, and to which the political elites have been so far blind and deaf, are finally emerging into their consciousness. Today it is Janet Daley in the Telegraph who shines the torch - and I hope the 'graph will forgive me for quoting her at greater length than is normal here;

(Parliament's failure to deliver Brexit) is not the real democratic scandal. The discussion that should be dominating the public debate is whether true self-government within nation states can remain possible in an age of globalisation. In a world where international players dominate economic and geopolitical reality, can the idea of an elected government accountable to its own populations survive?

The Remain lobby says, in so many words, that it cannot. Indeed, this is their principle argument: the world is too big for parochial little guys who want to make their own way with their own leaders making decisions on their behalf. At least, that is what they say when they deign to argue at all. Mostly they just smear their Leave opponents as bigoted know-nothings. But the terms of that abuse all add up to this one significant point: Britain cannot go it alone in the way for which it has been renowned, with only its unique institutions and the judgement of its own population to guide it. The world is a different place now: you have to belong to a much bigger conglomerate whose authority must take precedence over your piddling little outfit if you are to have any chance of competing for business, making your mark, having your voice heard, etc, etc.

This may or may not be true. (Most of the factual evidence suggests that it is not.) Either way, it is the argument that must be called out. It must be seen for what it is with all its deeply unattractive implications. This is what the case for Remain really amounts to: the democratic nation state is the past. The corporatist global bloc is the future.

There you have it. It is a political division between Globalists and Internationalists, between those who believe in the supremacy of supranational organisations such as the EU, IMF and UN and those who believe in the supremacy of the nation State. Can we determine our own future or must our potential, our wealth, the rewards for our children all be decided in the boardrooms of the global corporates and the corrupt plenums of unelected technocratic supranationalists?

What is considered to be extraordinary but actually isn't is the extent to which we - the ordinary folk, the little people - are alive to the key issues when the patrician elite at the centre of power are blind and deaf to them. We, after all, are the first to be affected; we are neither dumb cattle nor ill-educated political fodder. We are intensely sensitive to the things that matter. As Daley writes

It is that inexorable logic that is sensed by so many of the dissident “populist” forces in Europe and even beyond the EU. For there is a critical loss of confidence in government in much of the democratic West: a sense that what was once one’s own country is being run by some world-dominating club to serve its own interests, and that this global hegemony regards ordinary people with contempt (“They don’t care what we think”.)

We have fought long and hard for democracy, for the secret ballot and universal suffrage, for the freedom to form and associate in political parties. That is why Farage's simple message - It's Democracy - resonates so strongly through every part of the electorate.

And Daley is quite right - until our parties align as either Globalist or Internationalist, we will not have a settled demos.

All change!

For an inspired series of graphics of the Brexit alignments and realignments in Parliament, visit the Guardian - one of the captures below.

Like an amoeba undergoing mitosis, our Parliament is resolving into four distinct factions. Brexit has split both Labour and Conservative parties, and the papers are just beginning to pick up on the fallout.

The Guardian reports on talks to form a new Lab/Con centrist party, a sort of Son of Blair I suppose whilst the Telegraph reports on 25 Remainer MPs including Dominic Grieve who face deselection by the end of March. Further 'Party Split' pieces by John Longworth and Tobias Ellwood, for the sake of balance I guess, feature in the Telegraph, whilst the Express gives us a 'JRM for new ERG Party' piece.

None of which is at all surprising for a system that has a Leave party led by a Remainer pretending to believe in Leave and a Remain party led by a Leaver pretending to believe in Remain.

All of which makes me cheerful. I loathe the privileged complacency and sense of entitlement of our politics more than anything - it's time to give the bag a shake.

Brexit Party - told you so.

Nigel writes in the Telegraph

In contrast, the Brexit Party will have a leader who then appoints a board of their choosing, and the party will ultimately succeed and fail on the judgement and personality of that leader.

This will be a disciplined machine and will run more like a company. Dissenters can go elsewhere

Well, the entire nation owes Nigel a huge debt for getting to the 2016 referendum in the first place. It was an outstanding effort and one which cannot be regarded too highly. And the model that he's chosen for this new political corporation - an autocratic and authoritarian organisation almost certainly funded by a very small number of very wealthy donors who will be in effect Nigel's 'shareholders' - may well reach its objectives.

I look forward to a future democratised Conservative Party, a political party that will be run by its members and funded from the grass roots, working constructively with Nigel's BrexitCorp.

Personally, I would have written 'succeed or fail' but perhaps his chosen phrase is deliberate. 

The Causes of Revolution

With a few Brexit gaps in the run up to Christmas, I'd like to look at some of the drivers behind the current hunger for political change and reform. This all started way before the 2008 financial crisis, but it's what has happened since 2008 that has been most telling. The appetite for reform has a number of roots, including but not exclusively

• Increasing inequality
• Living standards down
• People excluded from decision making
• Decline of working class power
• Globalism / AI causing disempowerment
• Cultural loss - damage to cultural identity

A couple of graphs from a recent ONS report -

Take a look at the clusters for the C1,C2,D&E cohorts - APT&C and downwards. You can see a bar at about £30k - £570 a week - and perhaps a little surprisingly, two key cohorts for working-class advancement, skilled trades and factory workers, trapped between the £20k and £30k bands. Neither is the Professional category to which I belong doing so well - in terms of pay at least. Those most at risk of displacement or redundancy by AI are not obvious; robots can carry out knee surgery, but can't cook a curry. Just as many Professional jobs are at risk as factory jobs. 

Now look at what's happened to the Median Wage adjusted for inflation since 2008 - the median wage is just on about £30k / £570 a week in 2018, but worth quite a bit less than the median wage in 2008.

I haven't got the US equivalents, but I suspect they follow the same lines. 

And what have the trillions in QE thrown into the battle since 2008 achieved for the greater part of our people? Nothing. Instead we have seen strong growth in GDP, in asset values, stocks and the most hurtful news to hit the headlines - the wealth of the top 1%. The mass of our people on £570 a week before tax - with tax levels at over 34% of GDP being at their highest in 40 years - simply cannot comprehend the boss of Persimmon 'deserving' a bonus of £75m for the year. It's not even as if he's built that many houses, or even built them to an acceptable standard. 

I really can't blame anyone for feeling angry, frustrated, used or abused. And our political class had better turn their attention to the people who make up the 'median' - and that doesn't mean more vacuous insincere platitudes from the privileged metropolitan elites.

Boris returns to Europe

Boris Johnson uses his Monday Telegraph column (£) to politely dismiss both claims and assurances given in Theresa May's weekend piece for the paper and Nick Boles' 'Better Brexit'. With conference approaching (and with the prospect of Arron Banks in attendance) Boris is clearly laying the ground for his keynote bombshell. On May's contrived Brexit belligerence he writes;

 I just hope you aren’t one of those trusting souls who still thinks it could really go either way. The fix is in. The whole thing is about as pre-ordained as a bout between Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy; and in this case, I am afraid, the inevitable outcome is a victory for the EU, with the UK lying flat on the canvas with 12 stars circling symbolically over our semi-conscious head.

So much for the Robbins Plan. On the subject of which, Boris alludes to the sabotage of Brexit by the enemy within;

It is now clear that some in the UK Government never wanted solutions. They wanted to use that problem to stop a proper Brexit. Solving Ireland would mean a solution for Dover-Calais, and they didn’t really want that. They wanted essentially to stay in, and to create a Brexit in name only.

And though the Damascene conversion of Nick Boles from fervent Remainer to Chequers-loathing critic, his preferred alternatives find little favour

The answer is not to lurch for a Norway or EEA option that is actually more humiliating than Chequers: it would mean taking even more rules from Brussels (on services, for instance) – and does not fix Ireland.

All of which usefully prepares the ground for a true alternative to the Robbins Plan, now being finessed by Boris and his cerebral chums of the ERG, and to be served up to the sound of trumpets and at the optimum moment. And that's his advantage - he's in control of timings, whilst Mrs May is subject to the timings of others. 

As for our Jew-hating Worzel Gummidge across from the Treasury benches, I have a feeling in my water that his moment has passed. He stopped being a thing sometime over the weekend. He's missed his tide, his star has turned. Yvette Cooper for one is working hard from one of her refugee-free homes to whip up her press presence; Labour's ladies at least have decided it's time for the Party's first female Leader.

Personally, my money's on Mz Eddie Izzard.

Politics in turmoil - conditions favour the extremists

WE have had an unequivocal assurance from Mrs May in the past few days that there will not be a second Brexit referendum. Of course, that means nothing. Mrs May's past assurances on the Customs Union, free movement and ECJ jurisdiction have been over-ruled by the elite establishment, and today no assurance from her on a second referendum means anything unless confirmed by Oliver Robbins. 

The BBC is giving much airtime to anyone calling for a second referendum at this time because the polls have been swinging towards 'Remain'. However, the polls are close and erratic, and could easily shift back. The most recent, from 14th July by Deltapoll, shows 50/50 but this could be a rogue. 

 Yougov however cautions against relying on polls re-asking the referendum question;

However, just because people think Brexit is the wrong decision, it doesn’t necessarily mean they think it should be reversed. They do not. When we ask what people think the government should do about leaving the EU, just over half (53%) think that it should go ahead with Brexit, mostly on its current course (42%) though 11% would prefer a softer Brexit. A fifth (21%) think that the government should call a fresh referendum instead, while 13% would prefer them just to halt Brexit altogether.

Neither is there much support for other means by which the decision to leave the EU could be reversed. By 50% to 29% people think it would be illegitimate for MPs in the House of Commons to vote against Brexit going ahead, and by 45% to 37% people oppose the idea of another referendum once the terms of the withdrawal negotiations are known.

With confirmation that Vince Cable has been in talks about a new Limehouse Declaration to save the rapidly dying LibDems, offering a broad leftist Remainer umbrella, there is also a poll suggestion that a new pro-Brexit party could get 38% of the vote and rumours that Nigel Farage is in funding discussions to form such a party to attract both Conservatives and the lighter mauve UKIPpers.

A new far-right authoritarian anti-Islamic party could, frighteningly, attract 24% of voters from deep purple Kippers and those with a ' British National Party, National Front, British Freedom Party, British People's Party, English Defence League, Britain First or the UK First Party' background - currently 'banned' from UKIP. Cough cough.  

And with confirmation expected today that Labour will officially go anti-semitic and all the little lefty Nazi Corbynistas can trample the Star of David, the old parties are hardly helping to preserve political stability. 

'Turmoil' I think is the word. 

Tony Blair - Godfather of Illiberal Authoritarianism

It's not only columnists from the centre-right such as Allister Heath in the Telegraph who are awake to the threat to our democracy of the new Illiberal Authoritarianism - the centre-left is also now waking to the threat. They, too, point to Putin (correct) and China (correct) but also to Trump (stupidly wrong). The problem is, the solution of the lefties to a threat to democracy is often, erm, less democracy. 

Reading a mirror article to that of Heath, featured in the post below, in Der Spiegel, the bells started ringing as I read the following;

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary has adopted a similar approach, one which has kept him in power for eight years and recently got him elected for four more. His people now occupy not only all key positions in Hungarian ministries and agencies, but also in universities, clinics, theatres and courtrooms. He has also managed to bring a large part of the economy under his control by way of a network of companies that are well-disposed toward him.

Good God. That is exactly the plan developed and carried out by one Anthony Blair - and had he not been deposed by the petulance of a political pygmy in the wings and his own criminal culpability over Iraq, he could still today be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He stitched up the entire machinery of State, allied himself with the global corporates and paralysed effective opposition in a stranglehold of central control. The Blair model of Illiberal Authoritarianism is now being applied across the globe.

Well, good luck to Der Spiegel. If they find an effective way of prising-off all those political appointees who cling like pubic lice to their posts, sinecures and tenures, I do hope they tell us - we're still in urgent need of a cure here.

PPERA: The third leg of the stool

Keeping Labour out of power since 2010 has allowed our democracy a chance at correcting the deep corruption of our democratic systems that had crept-in during Labour government. I put it no more strongly than that; under Labour, democratic systems tend to corruption whilst under Tory government some healing and maintenance take place. 

Two legs of the stool - voter registration and the Electoral Quotient - have already undergone or are undergoing substantial correction. The 2022 election will be fought on new mostly equal constituency boundaries with mostly real voters within them. The third leg - party finance - remains a running sore, to mix my metaphors. Quite how Labour, who vaunt such pretence at 'equality, ' could allow such unequal, discriminatory and inequitable errors to pollute our democratic system is beyond my understanding.  

Party finance is a sod. Today's announcement that the CPS will not be proceeding against 14 constituencies in which the cost of the Tory battlebus was not accounted against the candidate's £30k spend limit is probably right. When Soros is deploying millions in a secret, unaccountable campaign in his own interests that undermines the British people the operating costs of an old coach really do seem trivial. I harbour faint hopes that the intelligence services will serve up Soros like a roast turkey when they are ready.

Labour won't cap donations because it would restrict Union funding. Both parties now want to fight campaigns as central, metropolitan advertising campaigns using slick voter targeting and marketing tools. A million unpaid supporters of their own views (including of course we bloggers) pump out words and memes over the social channels at our own cost. Technology and secret money, together with the peerages for loans scandal of the Blair years which Cameron continued without shame, bent commercial and trade deals, promises to the Bruvvers and other corrupting influences all make a nonsense of the PPERA provisions as they stand. Voters roundly (and rightly) reject State funding - the idiotic proposals from both Hayden Phillips and Christopher Kelly would have preserved the wealth of the LibDems but would also have brought UKIP £12m a year whilst Mr Carswell was sitting for the party and Zero when he wasn't. 

I do therefore look forward to a vigorous debate amongst those that care on how we may best reform this third leg of our democratic stool.  

Corrupt EU Nomenklatura miffed at Romanian justice win

Political corruption is endemic throughout Europe, and Britain can only boast that our populist checks and balances make it harder here for bent politicians to cheat, steal and defraud than elsewhere. Despite a Parliament-wide expenses fraud scandal in the UK, jut a handful of the most egregious thieves were jailed. The political establishment rapidly realised that the Commons green benches would be empty if all the crooked MPs were acted against. The rest remain on probation, watched by the hawks of a free press that they yearn to muzzle. 

Elsewhere, auditors simply refuse to consider the EU's risible offerings of accounts. So mired by fraud and corruption, so deeply infiltrated by organised criminal networks, so abused by bent and hungry power-seekers are the Federation's finances that no one in Europe regards seriously their fatuous offers of financial records. The EU is corrupt to its core. 

I must admit that my previous confident prediction that François Fillon would walk the French Presidential election looks somewhat shaky now. It emerges that he fraudulently bunged his family members hundreds of thousands of crooked stolen Euros on the pretence that they worked for him - much on the same basis that our MPs claim their young nieces are qualified parliamentary assistants worthy of a £30k salary. It's just theft. Just not the sort of theft that earned a young rioter who stole three bottles of water six months banged up in a Victorian cell with a Muslim rapist and a bucket to shit in. 

So when Romania passed a decree legalising theft, fraud and crookedness by politicians and public officials provided the sums stolen came to less than £38k, bent little ears pricked up all over Europe. This may be small beer in the UK, where £38k is just a year's worth of flipping homes by our MPs, but in Romania it will build you a tasteless vulgar palace with gold taps and individual stables for the goats. I'll bet the EU nomenklatura were particularly interested; if they exempted all transactions of less than €0.5m from accounting transparency, they might just be able to find a bent auditor somewhere in Europe to sign off their accounts. All seemed well and establishment politicians and public officials were rubbing their hands.

Then the people of Romania took to the streets. The politicians remembered what happened the last time they did so, and rapidly backed down. The thieves decree was rescinded. All over Europe one could almost hear the gentle hiss as miffed politicians abandoned dreams of new scams and frauds and let the air out of the hubristic pomposity that criminal immunity confers. Little tear-soaked tissues were flushed from the cloaca of the Berlaymont. Empty Sancerre bottles crashed inverted into Westminster ice buckets. We, the people, have won this round - but the price of a Parliament free from corruption is eternal vigilance.