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Saturday 28 September 2019

A Fair Go

There is somewhere in the anglophone world ingrained, sometimes deeply, sometimes more superficially, a peculiar sense of fairness. The post title is of course Australian vernacular - a phrase that even finds a place in the citizenship handbook, defined as "what someone achieves in life should be a result of their hard work and talents, rather than their wealth or background". It's a pretty good example of how the English language can take several meanings; 'A Fair Go' means equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. Outcomes should be dependent neither on inherited privilege nor on protected status.

This idea of fairness  is redefining our political landscape. It's powerful. Douglas Murray points out in the Telegraph that even the BBC, normally impervious to accusations of unfairness, has had to admonish two presenters, Emily Maitlis and Naga Munchetty, for being so blatantly unfair on-air that it was an embarrassment to the broadcasting behemoth. Murray writes
The idea of impartiality in news has always been something of a misnomer. The choice of which story to cover owes something to the preconceived ideas of whoever makes that decision. What we are now seeing is the line between commentary and reporting becoming increasingly blurred.

As partiality in its different forms becomes ever more flagrant, the idea that broadcasters are at least making an honest attempt at being unbiased is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. All this raises the prospect of British media following the example of that in the US, where nobody expects anything but partisan coverage.
The point about the BBC is that everyone has to pay for it; one can choose whether or not to buy the Sun or the Mirror, but not the BBC. As I have written previously, if the BBC has passed the point of balance between Leave and Remain, it has forfeited the right to the Charter - due for renewal in 2027.

The Speaker, too, has failed to chair a chamber in a way that embodies fairness. His petulant holiday tantrum in which he promised to the media to block the government, his dodgy egoistic partial judgements from the chair, his bullying and bias all mean he has lost utterly the respect of the nation.

The current turmoil is a battle on many levels - but most fundamentally it is a battle for fairness, between a crude alliance between those with inherited privilege and those with protected status on the one hand, and the mass of the people on the other. The former have, in the words of Betz and Smith, captured the State;
With the rise of the new political classes, a different political dynamic is emerging. Drawn from similar backgrounds (often middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside politics itself), members of parliament increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. The evolution of a monochrome political establishment is producing a radical disconnect, which the Brexit denouement is throwing into stark relief. What we appear to be witnessing is the corrupt mutation of the notion of the representation of the people in parliament, into the substitution of the will of the people by the interests of the political class. We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture. What happens when sectional interests capture the political institutions of the state? This is a question we will get to, but first it is worth reiterating that in many senses this has been a long time coming, and to emphasise, in the British case has little or nothing intrinsically to do with Brexit.
On this level, what the dominant class are given to sneering at as 'populism' is actually a protest from a vast mass of people, who thought they were living in a democracy, that the entire system had become unfair - advantaging the political elite and their supporters at the expense of the mass of the people.

In that light, watching hereditary Labour millionaires such as the younger Kinnocks, Straws, Benns, Sawars, Soames and Millibands pontificating about anything at all 'for the many not the few' becomes farcical. Watching Owen Jones working himself up into a mouth-frothing fury in defence of globalist corporations and gay-murdering factions is free entertainment and listening to anything said at all by Shami Chakrabarti on people misusing their power and privilege is pure comedy. Even Labour MPs who took advantage of the Brighton conference to take their kids out of the dorms for a weekend exeat from their £30,000 a year public schools ('but keep clear of the press when you're out ..') whilst promising to abolish such schools on the platform provided exemplars of a depth of hypocrisy rarely seen in public politics. A Fair Go is not for them. For any of them.

Thursday 26 September 2019

Boris - The People's Champion

Every citizen in the land who supports democracy over disempowerment, who supports the rule of law but not rule by lawyers, will have cheered the people's Prime Minister for his bravura performance in the Commons yesterday. Boris is the people's champion, and he rode to the lists fueled by righteous indignation and with millions upon millions of electors behind him in demanding the cowering, frightened illiberals on the benches opposite go to the people.

Of course they don't want to go. Most of them will lose their jobs. That's why they're trying to force a surrender to the EU - yes, let's use that word; they ARE collaborators and Quislings as complicit as Petain, Laval and Darlan in selling their nation in order to cram their mouths with Euro gold. Surrender is right.

Never before in the history of this nation have a tiny, unrepresentative cabal of saboteurs of democracy, who lied to their electors in 2017, denied the ballot box to our forty-five million voters. Never before have these wreckers, these selfish, entitled arses, this political elite, felt so emboldened in denying democracy to the masses of the British people. 

They're Frit, scared of the ballot box, frightened of the verdict of the voters, afraid of democracy itself. Of course they love the EU - whose anti-democratic, corrupt and crooked regime requires no elections at all to win and hoard power - oh how the opponents of democracy in our own Parliament must long for that!

But even a bent Speaker, a dishonest BBC and MSM in thrall to the enemies of democracy cannot hide the anger starting to build in the country, from a proud nation being denied access to the ballot box in order that we can sort out the mess this Quisling political class have created. WE DEMAND AN ELECTION. Hear us.

When even the Daily Remain reports polling that suggests that 64% of those who voted Labour in 2017 want an election, you know the time is nigh.

Wednesday 25 September 2019

GENERAL ELECTION NOW

It's time to clear the shit from this stable.

Yes, let the people decide. I suspect the HoL SC  may just have won an electoral landslide for the Brexit parties. It's People vs Parliament - and they may delay it, but we will win.

I must apologise for not penning a longer post. We're waiting for the government to speak, to give leadership, direction and reassurance to the nation. No one knows what happens next. The elite may conspire to postpone an election even further, the government may pull a rabbit out of the hat.

However, yesterday's ruling has changed our democracy for ever. An open conflict between the people and the political establishment may be fought on the battlefield of Brexit but we're fighting for power - they to retain the State they've captured by stealth, we to regain the democracy that is our birthright. This conflict will not end until one side is defeated and the other victorious.

And we demand an election.


& H/T Mark for this -

Tuesday 24 September 2019

Dumbstruck

I'm dumbstruck. Just dumbstruck.

Well, we live in a democracy ruled by law and the judgement was delivered by our own highest court. It was unanimous. Therefore Boris screwed up.

I think I may have just seen the death of the Conservative Party - I can't imagine us even getting the 9% we sunk to in the EP elections. I can also understand if the entire Conservative vote goes to TBP in the inevitable GE.

However, before this is all final, we must wait and see what the Prime Minister has to say.

But let's be clear what the judgement was about - it was about the legality of the government's action. The Brexit vote, and the need for us to leave the EU still stands.

And By God when we've got a majority in both houses, there will be a tsunami of legislation to come to ensure that this can never happen again..

Addendum
========
I've just put my finger on the moment in the past I felt exactly like this - it was the announcement that HMS Sheffield had been sunk.

All that did was to fill us with a terrible resolve that we must win.

Intermission II

Whilst we wait for the judgement, I've been re-acquainting myself with Somerville and Ross' The Irish RM. The problem that Brussels completely fails to understand in relation to any Brexit border is the character of the Irish themselves. For many years, before the pre-2008 development boom destroyed much of what was valuable, I made an annual early Summer pilgrimage to a cottage near Oughterard on the shores of Loch Corrib for the trout fishing. The fish went into feeding frenzy during the mayfly season, and the technique was to 'dap' a live fly on a thin floating line. Local kids sold boxes of live flies to fishermen, and the sport was so easy that even an Englishman could not fail to land a couple of 3lb fish before the 'Boat' opened. So here (with apols to Messrs Somerville and Ross) we have ... The Irish MEP

A Horse! A Horse!
In which Flurry dyes a hunter and smuggles it across the border as a 'ringer' for the favourite in the point-to-point, evading EC78/245 'Movement of equine livestock (marking, tagging and chipping) cross-border trade Directive'

The Dispensary Doctor
When Finn is caught with a poached salmon by the Gardai he protests that as the fish had swum from Northern Ireland it was an alien species that had violated EU phytosanitary controls by failing to claim asylum status at the border. Whilst the case was referred to the authorities in Brussels the fish was eaten by Dr O'Rourke, to whom it had been passed for retention as evidence by the Gardai.

Oweneen the Sprat
A car from the north has an accident near Galway - but is not fitted with Winter tyres in accordance with Directive EC 86/294. It damages a tractor being used by Oweneen the Sprat but he refuses to exchange insurance details as the land he was working was being claimed as set-aside under the CAP. Instead he demands that Sergeant O'Connor lock the motorists up until they pay in cash - but he is wary of their Article 8 Human Rights

The Muse in Skebawn

zzzz OK that's enough whimsy

Loch Corrib

Monday 23 September 2019

Intermission ..

With great sympathy for the staff and customers of Thomas Cook this morning, I fear this is as much a casualty of the High Street squeeze and the decline of the Catalogue Culture as of the obvious overcapacity in the budget flight and travel markets. The firm's competitors will now fight like jackals over landing slots, but I wouldn't put much interest in those High Street travel shops.

Whilst we await the main news event of the day (if it comes) I leave you with a photo of a charming young girl no doubt forced by peer and parental pressure into a cult youth group, the BDM or League of German Girls back in the 1930s.

Update 14.40
==========
The Supreme Court ruling is due at 10.30 tomorrow. I'll post following.


Sunday 22 September 2019

BRACE BRACE BRACE

Issued by Conservative Press Office at 08.30 today, Sunday

"In the difficult days ahead I hope all MPs recognise that we are servants of the people, they have spoken, and we must keep faith with their democratic verdict"