Freedom and democracy

What stops the young, fit and strong from stealing wealth and assets from the elderly, weak and infirm? Of course the very wealthy can afford to employ other young, fit and strong persons who will protect them just as long as their weekly wedge gives them more than killing their employer and taking their stuff. If you want to see just how this works in practice in a society devoid of law or justice, watch a few episodes of Narcos on Netflix. The drugs markets and the lawless societies in which the kingpins flourish are the true example of free markets - power, wealth, ruthlessness and inhumanity are the qualities favoured in this environment of accelerated evolution. A wholly free market would mean not only food and toilet paper but ICU beds, ventilators, vaccines and medical resources would accrue to the wealthiest or those with the biggest guns. So be careful what you wish for.

Research has shown consistently that when faced with great risk and great uncertainty, and with unknown outcomes, we humans will opt for a social safety-net model every time. We will vote for a minimum-provision-for-everyone model when none of us can be sure we will not require it ourselves. But we will also vote for the opportunity to better one's lot - whether that means keeping hens or retaining our existing store-cupboards and hoard of silver. And this model needs a functioning state that can exercise a greater power than any individuals, that can enforce law and justice and protect the weak and vulnerable. It doesn't have to be a big State, or an intrusive state, but it does have to be able to execute the collective will. Expressed through the secret ballot by universal suffrage and the right of free association.

Anyone here who really wants a wholly free market, take yourself off to Mexico or Colombia. Anyone here who really wants a socialist paradise, take yourself off to Venezuela. No? No takers? OK, so I guess we're just discussing where the floor should be in our social-democratic model, then, and the degree of freedom individuals can exercise under various condition of risk, threat and uncertainty.

That we're having to discuss such things for the first time in this new century is actually a good thing. That we've got the internet on which to do so makes this discussion different from the discussions we had in 1850 or 1917 or 1945. Excellent!

Revolutionary fervour and the Parish Council

Anyone who imagined that the resolution of Brexit would be an end to the polarisation of public opinion in Britain will have been disillusioned by the appearance of  Laurence Fox on QT. I have long said that Brexit was merely the proxy for an underlying revolt against the takeover of the establishment, of the institutions of the State, even of the police by a woke metropolitan elite, and that the fight now will move to rolling back their suffocating control and sclerotic grip on our nation. Betz and Smith outlined the takeover in a semantic piece for the Bruges Group almost exactly a year ago

It seems that for at least twenty years the new political classes in Britain have been placing a bet on the political future. They are betting on the quiescence of the public at large, who will either not notice or not care that elites are entrenching their own power and interests. They are gambling that the public, kept compliant by political spinning, a constant diet of soaps and reality television, debt, social media pap, welfare dependency and the like, will not work themselves up into any state of anger of the sort anticipated by Nigel Farage if their political preferences are dishonoured. Or at least not enough of them will to make a difference.

In other words, for many years now, governments, along with a significant fraction of the population, have calculated that the bulk of the people can either be kept in a state of apathy or bullied into submission. How, it might be asked, have they reached such conclusions?

Conservative governments before Boris have been as complicit in this takeover as have the Blairite excrescences of 1997 - 2010. Secrecy, obfuscation, distortion, NDPBs and unaccountable State agencies of the sort loved by Theresa May have flourished. Little people faced smoking bans and wardens issuing £80 fines for dropping litter or putting out the bin on the wrong day whilst council bosses, police, politicians and the apparatchiks of the new elite condemned thousands of innocents to neglect, abuse and loathsome criminality through malfeasance, misconduct in office and maladministration, all in the name of prosecuting their woke social oppression. Robert Nisbet wrote of this in The New Despotism -

What we have witnessed, however, in every Western country, and not least in the United States, is the almost incessant growth in power over the lives of human beings — power that is basically the result of the gradual disappearance of all the intermediate institutions which, coming from the predemocratic past, served for a long time to check the kind of authority that almost from the beginning sprang from the new legislative bodies and executives in the modern democracies.
...

What has in fact happened during the past half century is that the bulk of power in our society, as it affects our intellectual, economic, social, and cultural existences, has become largely invisible, a function of the vast infragovernment composed of bureaucracy's commissions, agencies, and departments in a myriad of areas. And the reason this power is so commonly invisible to the eye is that it lies concealed under the humane purposes that have brought it into existence.

The greatest single revolution of the last century in the political sphere has been the transfer of effective power over human lives from the constitutionally visible offices of government, the nominally sovereign offices, to the vast network that has been brought into being in the name of protection of the people from their exploiters.

This takeover of the State, this takeover of our democracy, was not a coup, a plot or a deliberate strategy. It was not a conspiracy. Nisbet quoted Justice Brandeis -

Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the governments' purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Allister Heath in the Telegraph is conscious of the deleterious effect of the loss of what Nisbet terms our intermediate institutions

Instead, as Michael Lind, the US academic, argues in The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite, the real clash is between a highly credentialed, entitled, managerial and technocratic class that has seized control of the most powerful public and private institutions and is using them to serve its economic interests and impose its faddish worldview; and an alienated, ignored and denigrated “working class” that has lost control.

In the British context, for working class read not just blue-collar workers but also swathes of the middle classes and anybody else who hasn’t got with the Left, social-liberal programme, including many ethnic minorities.

This revolutionary alliance used to feel they had a voice; some were even part of the old establishment. Now they feel they have lost their local institutions, clubs and civil societies, believe the wrong priorities are being pursued by unaccountable elites and that their (relatively) conservative values, their love and loyalty to family and country, are being mocked.

Crucially, their views in 2020 are quite liberal in a classical sense: they are tolerant, anti-racist and want to protect the environment. But they are aghast at the excesses of the woke agenda, at its totalitarian overtones, its obscure obsessions, and want to leave the EU, pay less tax, have better public services, and enjoy a drink at the pub.

And that has been the takeover of our nation, our democracy, that we are now engaged in reversing. Peacefully. Through the ballot box, and by re-forming the Little Platoons, the militia of meaningful democracy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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And others (no connection)

Electoral housekeeping

There were many rumours last week of the government bringing forward in the very near future a Bill to tackle some much overdue electoral housekeeping. Two potential changes were outlined in the manifesto - the roll out of voter ID at polling stations, and the ending of the 15 year limit on the entitlement of overseas voters to participate. Two further changes were not mentioned but will be of much greater interest to many people.

The first is postal voting. Formerly restricted to expats and members of HM Forces overseas, and to the housebound sick and disabled, the numbers involved were negligible. Then came Blair's pollution of our democratic institutions. In December the volume reached 38% of all votes cast - of 31.8m votes cast, 12m were postal votes. Objections are twofold. Primarily is the extent to which postal votes can be abused by vote harvesting, personation, coercion or diversion. No reliable figures are available on the extent of this, but then, if abuses were successful, they would not easily be discovered. The introduction of photo ID at polling stations without having restricted postal votes will of course only vastly increase the numbers of postal votes, and we must ask ourselves whether we want an electoral process in which 75% of ballots are cast in a way that evades all the scrutiny, security and transparency of polling stations, votes and boxes. The second and more minor objection is that the act of physically voting - the polling station, poll card, interactions with polling officials and fellow electors, recognition that those voting with you may be voting for another candidate and so on - is in itself a powerful reinforcer of local democratic identity, one of the parade drills of the Little Platoons.

The second change is to initiate a fresh boundary review, but this time based on the existing 650 parliamentary seats rather than the somewhat aged review on Cameron's instructions that sought to reduce the number of seats to 600. The registers of electors on which the Cameron reviews were based are now even further distant, and were Cameron's review to be recast on the 2019 registers it may produce different boundaries. However, fundamentally I object deeply to Cameron's attempts to reduce the numbers of MPs by 50.

In 1922, the first election carried out within our current national borders, we had 615 seats for a population of around 44m. We now have a population of some 66m. In addition, the centralisation of the State since the Great War has meant that MPs now have very much more on which to legislate. Before that time, water, power, gas, health, hospitals, almshouses, welfare, roads, lighting, transport, planning, public health, licencing, education and policing were funded, designed, managed and delivered locally by democratically accountable members and bodies. Whilst I will campaign for parliament to divest itself of many of the powers accreted over a century, we still need 650 MPs - if only for the great reforms that the Prime Minister must introduce to get our nation and people back upon an even keel.

Baying at our power and booing democracy

On 6th November I wrote a piece that included

The events are designed to show how powerful and important are the broadcasters, and how trivial our political leaders. Silly little bar stools, demeaning sets and intellectually inadequate presenters with little understanding of democracy and frequently an inability to chair either effectively or impartially the debate make the things a spectacle like those in which secret incestuous caravan-park relations are revealed before a studio audience. TV debates are all about the broadcasters.

Well, last night was absolutely everything I hate about these staged spectacles. The set was taken from a game show, the vacuous presenter would perhaps have served to interview a minor royal with the IQ of a slice of bacon but for nothing more challenging, and the audience bayed and booed. The broadcasters have yet again insulted the gravity of our democracy with jejune malice and have turned a leaders' debate during the most important election in a century into an episode of the Jeremy Kyle show.

We must ensure that this is the last time the broadcasters insult our democracy, devalue the power of our vote and belittle our electoral process. A ninety-minute studio debate without an audience chaired by Andrew Neil would serve - but this lurex spangled game show must end.

The fight is not over

This election is round one in an existential war to win back popular democracy. Ranged against the people of Britain are the globalist powers of the deep state and their dags who have infiltrated and taken control of our national institutions. 

The strength of the people has always been made manifest through the actions of what Robert Nisbet called our intermediate institutions - the little platoons that Burke found foundational in creating a national identity. Nisbet locates the chief cause of the feeling of lostness in modern man in the weakening of the intermediate associations that stand between the lone individual and the State; without our local bodies, our little platoons, our guilds, churches, watch committees and town councils, we are hugely vulnerable to the depredations of the central state. This is why I am so committed to Localism. The battles against the deep state globalists are not to be won in SW1 but in our parish halls and meeting places, in places real and virtual, by physical or remote contact. Popular democracy needs local moots.  

One of the most sustained assaults on popular democracy since the middle of the last century has been by the central state on our intermediate institutions. Many have been destroyed beyond any hope of resurrection - but our future lies not in replicating the past, but in creating new forms of local identity using the tools and relationships enabled by technology. Localism need not be limited by geography, defined by place but by purpose. This blog is also valid as a local moot. Your own family is an intermediate institution, and a powerful nexus of a belonging, an allegiance, a strength that the central State cannot defile.  

Robert Tombs in the Telegraph today also delineates the battles ahead;

All across the democratic world, more and more power has shifted away from elected national governments towards non-elected bodies – international organisations, law courts, treaties, quangos. Governments have voluntarily surrendered their own authority. But in doing so, they have limited democratic choice: voters are told that there are things they cannot do, choices they cannot make.

This has gone furthest in EU member states. A void has been created between rulers and ruled. Two networks of power, influence and patronage have grown up: one based on domestic politics, the other based on the EU institutions. These two networks – two establishments, one national, one trans-national, which include politicians, civil servants, academics, business lobbies, non-governmental organisations – overlap in every EU country.

It is those virtues that the technocratic elites claim as liberating - individualism, egality and the supremacy of central or supranational authority - that Nisbet found destructive of popular democracy;

What is often overlooked, as Nisbet points out, is that in making individuals independent of each other and of society, Rousseau would also make them dependent on the State. The State would ensure the individual's equality and liberty. But "liberty" in Rousseau’s terminology, of course, means submergence of the individual will in the General Will. The citizen will be "compelled to be free." He will be protected from the discriminations of society; the State, in Rousseau’s mind, is to be the great protector of the individual’s rights. But, in turn, the individual must be willing to relinquish any of his own wishes that conflict with the dictates of the General Will. There would be no room for rebellious intermediate associations. In Rousseau’s would-be State, even "religion must be identified, in the minds of the people, with the values of national life, else it will create disunity and violate the General Will." Thus does freedom become identified with obeying the guidelines of a central authority.

The struggles of the past three years to re-assert the supremacy of popular democracy are not the end of it. This election is but one battle, with a struggle ahead. All those who have fought so hard for UKIP or The Brexit Party have not fought in vain, nor are their efforts ended. That commitment to the powers of the people of this nation under democratic norms is still needed. Democracy doesn't always mean winning, as Tombs concludes

Democracy is not a system for discovering the "right answer" to political issues: we can rarely if ever 
be sure what the right answer is. Democracy, rather, is a system for creating consent and solidarity by allowing all to have an equal vote. For making people feel that the way they are governed, though not perfect, is at least one in which they are fairly consulted and their voices listened to. So that, even if they do not get their own way, they accept the outcome without trying to sabotage or evade it.

That is what we have come perilously close to losing. Next month we have the chance to regain it, with all the opportunities and risks that democracy entails.

The only winners from TV debates are the broadcasters

I'm not a fan of TV debates in which the party leaders are encouraged to sneer and bark at each other like bare knuckle boxers. Inevitably these things are designed by broadcasters deeply biased towards the metropolitan political establishment, a social state in which the broadcasters have a privileged supremacy. The events are designed to show how powerful and important are the broadcasters, and how trivial our political leaders. Silly little bar stools, demeaning sets and intellectually inadequate presenters with little understanding of democracy and frequently an inability to chair either effectively or impartially the debate make the things a spectacle like those in which secret incestuous caravan-park relations are revealed before a studio audience. TV debates are all about the broadcasters.

'All politics is local' is not an aphorism understood by the BBC, ITV or Sky. As far as they're concerned, all politics is centred around SW1. For two years they've given us the bear pit of College Green, with its mentally-ill ranters and painted fools in the background, and a primitive forest of flags waving above the outdoor stages, a contrived palio of conflict designed to drive up the political temperature and crowd-out sense and reason from political debate. It's all about spectacle, about a gladiatorial knock-about. I'm sure that the parliamentary authority has offered a score of times to site temporary portacabins for the broadcasters on the river terrace and have been spurned - they want extremist behaviour, they want the threat of violence and they want noise, fear and the mob. It is the broadcasters more than anyone else who have whipped up the death threats, spittle and assaults on MPs and have deepened the division in the country. Do we really trust them to act any different in designing TV debates?

It is a truism that the best way to treat the broadcasters is to deprive them of the oxygen of publicity. To refuse to play their game. As Channel Four news has found to its cost. This is the most important election for almost a century - do we really want to contrive with the establishment TV barons in turning it into a game show?

And as any fair televised punch-up must include both the illiberal anti-democrats and BrexitCorp® I suggest that only making the nonsense both fair and equitable and agreeing a format that takes the heat, steam and hate out, in effect making the four-way debate a quiet, considered debate with no yowling studio audience and no black-tee shirted security guards to restrain the studio mob from attacking the guests is the only sensible way ahead.

Mad pitbulls and manipulative experts

Dr Keith Sutherland has a job at Exeter University. His piece in the Speccie detailing the shortcomings of citizens' juries and of deliberative democracy is therefore supremely professional and details the myriad technical faults of the process that makes it unsuitable for important democratic decisions.

In my time I've done plenty of design charettes with local communities affected by development. I recall one dreary November evening; it was cold, it was dark, and freezing rain made sodden and hopeless the scruffy hall at the edge of a council estate affected by our plans. Sheltering under a tree in a vandalised play area were a group of teens; even on such a night, being out and together was better than being at home. I was told of one 16-year old lad highly skilled on a BMX bike that his mother and stepfather had given him notice to leave the house; no job and no post-16 education meant he earned nothing for them, was just a mouth to feed, and so got pushed out of the nest. It was that brutal.

Inevitably those that came to the meeting were, as Dr Sutherland describes, overrepresented by partisans and activists. Boy, they hated young people. They wanted a public realm equipped with the design equivalent of barbed wire and searchlights, with the painful silent shriek of 'mosquito' transmitters on every street corner (these satanic devices emit a painful noise at a frequency that can only be heard by those under about 20 - advertised as 'teen deterrents'. I guess dogs would hear them as well - possibly accounting for so many mad pitbulls in these places) When I challenged the 'community' plod on his repeated description of the kids that hung around outside the shops as a 'teenage nuisance' and suggested that as they weren't breaking any law and were as much citizens as the rest of us, it would be more accurate to describe them as a 'teenage presence', I was practically lynched.  

Our architect, a gentle and artistic man, was so horrified he never attended further. He sent instead a duffer assistant, a talentless gofer who was useful in the office because he could work the CAD system.

Sutherland points out that 95% of those invited to citizens' juries never turn up; "Out of the 30,000 invitations sent out for Rachel Reeves’ climate assembly, only 110 will receive the golden ticket. Would you have any confidence in an opinion poll that relied on 110 volunteers?" he asks. A citizens' assembly that reproduced exactly the 52:48 Brexit result would need a minimum of 6,766 participants.

But Sutherland understates, professionally, the key reason that deliberative democracy is never suited as a replacement for democracy - that those using it are themselves biased towards a certain outcome and will seek to run the process to produce that outcome. The RSA, for example, a strong advocate of deliberative democracy, suggests that the cattle are well-briefed by 'experts' before they are allowed to raise their hands - on the basis that decisions such as Brexit should be made by 'informed' voters rather than we ignorant, stupid, uneducated and inexpert citizens.

Beware all those who seek to use any method other than universal suffrage and the secret ballot for our most important decisions. They don't have democracy in their hearts. 

The enemy within - the democracy-deniers

I have posted here previously on my concerns over a potential lack of confidence in democracy amongst the young. Several polls have suggested consistently that there is a gulf between the younger and older in our nation in the degree to which the fundamentals of democracy are valued. I hold that universal suffrage, the secret ballot and the right to associate and form political parties are together one of the most profound achievements of human civilisation; some folk don't share this faith in fair decision making in our society.

The benign rule of technocratic experts is a model of anti-democracy much beloved of supranational organisations. Why bother with popular opinion, campaigning for elections, allowing actual people to vote as they like? Surely like-minded well qualified experts can rule their subjects to ensure the best possible outcomes for the maximum number? It is not extraordinary that those who who belong to or support such organisations should believe this, but I am genuinely mystified as to why this form of anti-democratic serfdom would appeal to any subject person with more than one brain cell. Yet apparently it does - and the young, who should in a healthy society be the most intolerant of all of authority, would seem to be amongst them.

I am old enough to remember Franco ruling a Spain that had been politically and culturally shut off from democratic Europe since 1939. When tourism could be resisted no longer, from the early 1970s, the social impact was akin to dropping a lump of Sodium in water. The harsh, backward rule of a Catholic church complicit in fascism (unelected technocratic experts who thought they knew best what was good for people), a population fearful of the secret police and the night-time hammering at the door, could not withstand the bikini and the transistor radio. Democracy is contagious.

And in my heavy-smoking days when Spain sold cheap fags, the £60 cost of a day-return trip to Barcelona with easyjet was exactly equivalent to the saving of UK duty on just one single carton of cigarettes. The aircraft left Gatwick at about 7am and Barcelona at about 4pm, allowing for a leisurely lunch in the Ramblas and to be home in time for Eastenders. There were always little tents and roped off areas in the large expanse of flat, scrubby wasteland between the city and the airport; only later did I find that they were exhuming the remains of the victims of Franco's death squads, clearing the ground for development. That made me value democracy even more.

I am fearful of the anti-democrats within our nation; the propaganda lies of broadcasters, the intolerance of the snowflake generation, the violence of the Soy Boys, the coarse, bullying ignorance of those who would sell their democratic inheritance for a Eurorail pass. The anti-democrats, the democracy-deniers, are truly the enemy within, and we must defend from their assaults with our every breath our democratic rights and freedoms.

People -v- Parliament III

Yesterday our rogue parliament had one chance to redeem itself. Whether or not you agree with Boris' deal, it was the very best that was available and leaving the EU without some sort of agreement is a damning failure of statecraft for a mature democracy. Up until now, the public perception of blame for the Brexit fiasco could be split between an intransigent Brussels and a petulant parliament. Yesterday that all changed. Now it is solely our own anti-democratic MPs who will go down in history as narcissistic zealots of the worst sort, jejune attention seekers bloated with hubris and self-righteousness, inflated with pompous self-worth and messianic delusions.

Yesterday they had one chance to redeem themselves. Had they swallowed the government motion even at this late stage, they could have won back a large part of the utter contempt in which they are held by the people of this country. The nation's relief at closure, at moving forward, would have acted to lift substantially the opprobrium covering parliament like a steaming blanket of ordure.

Instead they have condemned themselves to nemesis at the hands of the electorate, an electorate revolted and disgusted by their abuse of democracy, their abuse of the ordinary people of this nation. Letwin has no future anywhere. Business, industry, finance and the penumbral shadows of the grey men of the deep state were all behind this deal; everyone in this country with any power and influence backed this resolution. Letwin is now friendless, unless one counts the few mentally-ill ranters and painted idiots clustered on College Green. They are hardly in a position to compensate for the directorships and sinecures he will now have lost now after his constituency voters have also scorned and rejected him.

By their actions yesterday, parliament and its little bent Speaker have shown that they are not worthy even of the pretence of polite regard. The contempt shown to them by the government and Conservative benches yesterday should be repeated until they are gone. The time for the polite pretence of listening to their deluded bombast is past. Let their inanities echo around an empty chamber for another week or so, with their gurning fool Bercow squirming in the Chair. We can't be bothered with them any longer. They are nothing.

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.

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 -

Democracy Trumps Courts

Lord Sumption was clearly by accident or design a superb choice to deliver the Reith lectures this year. The current hysteria is seeing the courts and judges assailed by a plethora of very wealthy litigants, from London to Edinburgh and Belfast, litigants fired with zealous righteousness and with faces infused to a shade of puce with the justice of their cause. They are seeking to find a court, any court, that will assist them in blocking the nation's democratic decision to leave the EU. Sumption had this to say - albeit as part of a lecture on Human Rights law, but it fits -

Democracy, in its traditional sense, is a fragile construct.It is extremely vulnerable to the idea that one’s own values are so obviously urgent and right that the means by which one gets them adopted don’t matter. That is one reason why it exists in only a minority of states. Even in those states it is of relatively recent origin and its basic premises are under challenge by the advocates of various value-based systems. One of these is a system of law-based decision making which would entrench a broad range of liberal principles as the constitutional basis of the state. Democratic choice would be impotent to remove or limit them without the authority of courts of law. 

Now, this is a model in which many lawyers ardently believe. The essential objection to it is that it is conceptually no different from the claim of communism, fascism, monarchism, Catholicism, Islamism and all the other great isms that have historically claimed a monopoly of legitimate political discourse on the ground that its advocates considered themselves to be obviously right. But other models are possible. One can believe in rights without wanting to remove them from the democratic arena by placing them under the exclusive jurisdiction of a priestly caste of judges. One can believe that one’s fellow citizens ought to choose liberal values without wanting to impose them.

This recourse to private law is in many cases an attempt by those who do not enjoy democratic support  for their viewpoint to seek to bludgeon, compel and coerce a majority whom they cannot outvote into giving them their own way. As such, this use of our courts and judges is a clear abuse of process in an advanced democracy. It is open only to the very wealthy, and if it succeeds it unbalances our democratic equilibrium. Remember that Mrs Miller only has one vote, and it is worth exactly the same as your vote or my vote, however wealthy and well-connected she may be.

Sumption also examines in depth the relationship between law and democracy in the area of, for nations that have one, the constitution. Spoiler alert: he is opposed for very clear reasons to the adoption of a written constitution for Britain, and I'll tackle this in a future post.

And as that arsewipe Bercow must learn, an anti-democratic and Rogue Parliament and a bent Speaker hiding from the ballot box and the electors behind the walls of Westminster must also be brought to heel by the votes of the people.

The British Road to Dirty War - a cogent warning

I am struck by the prescience of a considered piece by two British academics for the Bruges Group, which we featured when it first appeared back in mid-January, over eight months ago. 'The British Road to Dirty War' by Betz and Smith has been right on every count so far in detailing the process and the consequences of the establishment Remainers blocking the people's democratic choice to Brexit. I urge you to read it again in full. They say

The system works because everyone behaves by the rules. On either side of the bargain—the governed and the government—mutual obligations are observed in service of the common interest, which is the stable continuance of a non-tyrannical political order. Here we come to the disquieting part of the continuing Remain campaign, a campaign that seemingly supersedes party loyalty, not to mention national loyalty, which is its willingness to throw away the rulebook. Only a brazenly confidant, or foolishly out-of-touch, political class would chance this. The bet on the future is doubled.

The object of all these machinations has been to corral the British population into a Hobson's choice between Brexit-In-Name-Only and no-Brexit. It is no secret now. The plotters, finally, so close to the bell calling time on Britain's membership of the EU with a deal or without one, have declared it openly that they will not permit to occur what is the current legally mandated outcome of events. They will instead tie the government in knots, prevent its preparations for No Deal Brexit, and if necessary, crash it.

They think they can get away with it, the authors write, because they think we will lump it; that they can cancel the biggest democratic mandate in British history and we will all just shrug and get on with letting the corrupt and anti-democratic establishment continue to rule.

Those behind the plan to thwart Brexit by altering the standing orders of the House of Commons on the fly imagine this as a temporary alteration to the established mechanisms of power, which will return to normal after Brexit. That is to say, when the rules serve their ends, they are inviolably sacrosanct; but when they do not, they are perfectly mutable administrative procedures. 'This is not a wholesale reordering of the British constitution', averred one of the plan's prime movers. 'It would be a one-off surgical strike and afterwards things would go back to normal'. Such thinking reflects an astonishing degree of mental closure, an astonishing degree of hubristic contempt, or an astonishingly dangerous wager—anyway it is simply astonishing.

The two academics are amongst the nation's foremost experts in War Studies. They know of that whereof they write. Their final warning is chilling (my emphasis)

But we are expert on these matters. We have for decades studied why things fall apart, how a stable, essentially self-policing, productive society can turn into an ungovernable tumult roiling with rage. We know that this happens at first very slowly, a creep-creep-creeping to the limit; and then very fast indeed after the limit has been passed. We also know that no amount of free beer and pizza parties will swiftly return a society deranged by the shattering of the social contract by its own elite back to normality.

The Hattersleys of this world are deeply complacent. They are the new Bourbons who have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. The threat of violence is not absent in the British polity. It is there, lying dormant. From time to time, it even makes an occasional appearance. A hollowed out and increasingly discredited set of political institutions is all it can take to set the flames alight. This is the British road to dirty war. The political classes are sowing the wind. They shall reap the whirlwind.

We must hope and pray that Speaker Bercow, the deep State actors behind the plot to thwart democracy, the credulous and gullible dags and fools of politicians and broadcasters who support them and the simple idiots who think it will work will all pull back from the brink.

If democracy is denied, and if Betz and Smith are right in their predictions, I weep for my nation.

Anti-democrats fighting like rats to retain power

The anti-democrats in parliament determined to block Brexit are fighting like trapped rats to try to cling onto power. It will do them no good. There is a hurricane coming - a storm of popular anger that will sweep them from their corrupt sinecures, flush them like recalcitrant turds, smash the barriers they have built against the peoples' will.

There is a Twitter meme doing the rounds; a capcha grid of the sort you must complete here to post a comment. The squares are filled with a view of the Commons chamber and the caption "Select all squares with a c**t". It pretty much sums up the mood of the nation.

Not only Corbyn's Labour are scared of the electorate. Up to a third or more of sitting MPs face being wiped out, swept away in the democratic storm at the hands of the Conservatives, Brexit or LibDems, and along with them any other MPs in Leave-voting constituencies that have betrayed their voters. This is the last we'll see of Yvette Cooper.

An election is inevitable and this time it will be People vs. Parliament. 

For the first time since 1945, the people of Britain are remembering the power of universal suffrage and the secret ballot, and the anti-democratic rats are cowed in fear of their only nemesis - Democracy.

A tsunami of popular anger will sweep away the anti-democrats in parliament

Are we raising a generation of fascists?

Some years ago I assisted in arranging a garden party for those mainly of the younger generation. We had awnings, food, booze and a string band - all, we imagined, that was needed for these bright young things to become effervescent. As I watched, they had splintered into many small pairs or trios that knew eachother, and worryingly many lone figures not interacting. A septuagenarian Chelsea Arts Club member stood with me and advised firmly "You've forgotten what it's like to be that age. They want to be organised, told what to do. Go on!" So we organised games, encouraged non-sexual physical contact and interaction but most successfully got them dancing English folk dances that were designed for just this purpose. Don't laugh. If you've never Stripped the Willow or circled the Draper's Maggot* you haven't lived. We were blessed with a skilled and enthusiastic string band who for little more than money and beer exceeded their contractual sets and it became a roaring success.

I share that anecdote by way of introduction to a report and poll that, at time of writing, are not available online but clearly will emerge soon from their embargo as the Telegraph's Camilla Tominey has penned a teaser piece. "A third of millennials want martial law and 66 per cent prefer strong leader over parliament, poll finds" reads the strapline. It will I am sure be more nuanced than that, but the spin is the thing for the originators.

'Onward' is a Cameronian soft sort of dilettante centre right remainian think tank based on the premise that what young people want is, erm, a soft Cameronian centre-right remainian politics. However, they have produced one decent report - Generation Why? -  that is worth reading. I will wait for both the Onward report and supporting Hanbury Strategy poll before commenting on the pre-release spin.

I have commented before on other research that suggests strongly that the young are far less keenly committed to democratic forms than my own generation. Of course, they've never lived through the Lord Chamberlain's censorship, the battles that TW3, the Pythons, Oz, Private Eye and the whole counterculture movement fought in the '60s and '70s. Or the Cold War, when the nation's wealth went on guns rather than butter. We didn't drink Mateus Rose because we had no taste but because the economy had little room to support frivolities such as wine.

Forgive me if once again I stress the utterly fundamental importance of free political association, universal suffrage and the secret ballot. If the anti-democrats who are so determined to erode these fundamental guarantors of freedom are making headway with the Millennials, I am worried.

*Both of which, for maximum enjoyment, should be danced slightly drunk by people who get the moves wrong

Peterborough - Labour voting fraud

It seems increasingly certain that electoral fraud won Labour its tainted Peterborough seat. An authoritative report in the Sunday Times which has been repeated in other sections of the serious media has started the discovery of widespread evidence of vote rigging and postal vote abuse. There is also clear evidence, as Conservative Home writes

In it, whilst he conceded the importance of tackling in-person impersonation and voter intimidation, Jackson focused on the challenges posed by postal vote fraud, as well as the evidence behind the Electoral Commission’s belief that it appears more prevalent "in areas which are largely or predominately populated by… those with roots in parts of Pakistan or Bangladesh"

The Electoral Commission's 'target list' of constituencies subject to enhanced scrutiny are largely those which have substantial Pakistani / Bangladeshi populations.

Whichever Conservative candidate wins through to Number Ten, they MUST push through reforms needed to regain for our electoral system the probity that an advanced democracy needs. This means not only radical reform of Blair's postal vote free for all, but the correction of our Electoral Quotient to the +/- 5% level essential for Western democracies, if not the +/- 3% adopted by advanced democracies such as New Zealand.

I'm aware of the deep anger and heat on this matter - so to ensure comments remain within the framework, I'm switching to comment mod for this post. Apologies in advance.

Reith lectures - ECHR

The third of five Reith lectures this year by Lord Sumption is a corker. For any of you willing to invest half an hour this weekend I commend most strongly listening to the podcast - a transcript is also available. Both are slightly marred by the lightweight inanities of Anita Anand (who she?)

Rarely do we get the chance to hear from either non-politicians or non-social media polemicists on matters of urgent threat to democracy. Here we have one of Britains most senior judges setting out with impeccable reasoning the threat posed by judges to what we have understood hitherto to be the preserve of democratic processes and decisions.

He also exposes the most fundamental difference between the supranational globalists ever seeking to expand the powers of unelected authority and those of us stalwart in our defence of democratic rights;

For those who believe that fundamental rights should exist independently of democratic choice, dynamic treaties have an obvious attraction. They create a source of law which is independent of democratic political choices. The European Convention on Human Rights is a classic dynamic treaty.

For a heavyweight case for the UK's withdrawal from the ECHR and the ECtHR - not Lord Sumption's first choice - here are all the arguments. Anand's irritating vacuous twittering is only a very minor impairment. Don't bother with the Q&A segment at the end. 

The first two lectures are also well worth hearing - challenging tangentially the moral certainties behind both Remain and Leave - and not always comfortable. There are two more to come - the next with a US (Washington, I think) audience on the subject of written vs. unwritten constitutions .

I haven't paid the TV Tax since 2015, but here at least is some of my money back.

Rory Stewart - Antidemocrat

Just when I thought I was fairly well acquainted with the liggers on the green benches, up pops one I've never noticed before. Commentators use terms such as 'original' 'different' or 'out of the box' to describe Rory Stewart (Eton and Balliol), the son of a senior civil servant, when what they mean is a weird but ruthless narcissist so deeply in love with himself he's lost touch with reality. Tory leadership elections are also opportunities to judge politicians we never want in positions of responsibility, and for me, Stewart is a member of that small and exclusive club.

The Guardian reports on Stewart's latest inanity -

Instead he hopes to deliver Brexit via a citizens’ assembly, which he said he would convene on day one of entering No 10 and would pay a jury of 500 UK citizens to work a seven-day week to find a Brexit consensus that parliament would respect.

Citizens' assemblies, a process also known as Sortition, are a favourite of the anti-democrats who cried in frustration in 2016 that the 'wrong sort of people are using democracy'. We only voted for Brexit because we're not as clever as Rory, apparently. Clearly, we're wrong. All we need - 500 of us, picked at random - is to be locked up together and lectured by experts until we reach a consensus, which will be, effectively, to cancel Brexit. Problem solved.

As an absolute Baldrick of an idea, it has few equals. A suggestion so utterly, risibly stupid that only an extremely clever moron could have thought of it.

Sortition does have a role.  For stuff like the council's new masterplan for the High Street, as part of the consultation process before it goes to the planning committee. Where it has absolutely no place is in replacing universal suffrage and the secret ballot in matters of constitutional significance, for which a truly democratic referendum has already given Stewart and his chums in the Commons a clear and unambiguous instruction. If he doesn't like it, I suggest he either resigns his seat or joins the CUKs.

Citizens assemblies and other varieties of sortition are increasingly a favourite of the anti-democrats who fear that we, via the ballot box, may displace them from their capture of the State. That a champion of such anti-democracy seriously imagines that Conservatives will vote for him as leader displays a greater than usual self-delusion.

Our Watchdogs of Democracy are not working

Of our two guardians of the minutiae of democracy, the Boundary Commission and the Electoral Commission, the EC is held in the lowest regard. Both have, to an extent, failed in their objectives, but the failures of the EC are by far the most egregious. I do not believe this is as a result of wilful conspiracy but of institutional inertia. Their faults lie in their evolution into institutions defending a monochrome political establishment rather than defending our democratic processes; their Commissioners and senior managers are not so much Common Purpose shills as unimaginative and semi-capable public servants utterly unable to understand the world in which they now function. Both are well past their sell-by date and are now in urgent need of reform.

Looking through the EC's website at its written Election guidance one is struck by its high quality. Clear, cogent, succinct, well written and helpfully presented and indexed; no manual of how to conduct fair elections could be better. Our teams of dedicated junior Town Hall officials who conduct the polling stations, counts and checks, who guard the ballots and facilitate candidates and their own teams openly inspecting every stage of the process cannot be faulted. We can have full confidence that the processes are tight enough to prevent the sort of abuses endemic in lesser nations.

Yet at the top level, their perceived bias against Leave-supporting political movements, a bias that culminated in their 'raiding' the Brexit Party's offices practically on the eve of the election whilst seemingly ignoring the most blatant breaches of electoral law by a Remain campaigner, as exposed by Guido, has destroyed any remaining faith that millions of voters had in the EC's impartiality.

Their reluctance to implement ID checks at polling stations is also seen as pandering to the Labour Party - who have long defended corrupt electoral practices in the big conurbations that favour their candidates. One cannot pick up a packet from the local Post Office sorting office on a Saturday morning without showing a passport or driving licence, so why resist this simple check for elections, which may happen only every two years? The Commissioners show an alarming bias to political partiality - for the most part, they are retreads from the Commons or local government of no great distinction who fit Betz and Smith's description

Here are different kinds of political ice cream for sale, but when licked they all turn out to have roughly the same unpalatable taste: a bland, socially progressive, anti-traditionalist, globalist, corporatist flavour.

The EC are also unable to get their collective heads around technological change. Our election rules were created in an age of 'push' media, when newspapers had circulations in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands and the TV audiences of our three channels could reach over ten million. We've moved to an era of 'pull' media, when the audience decide individually on their own news, information and entertainment sources, timings and formats. The EC have proved incapable of adapting the existing rules and are unwilling to move. No, I don't think our electoral processes have so far been corrupted by external interference but clearly foreign powers have been experimenting in how to use technology and social media to disrupt democracy - and we must protect against it.

Political funding and its abuse are also once again under our scrutiny. Whether it's the buying of political influence by the mega-wealthy global corporates, Russian oligarchs or the abuse of Trade Union block funding, we cannot allow our democratic systems to be bought and sold. Recent attempts at funding reform by Hayden Phillips and Christopher Kelly failed because they were establishment solutions aimed at institutionalising the then-existing 2.1/2 parties into quasi-constitutional bodies - all in the name of  'stability', i.e. of preventing the sort of shake-up that millions of voters are now demanding.

This catalogue of failure, of serial incompetence, of second-rate actors not up to the job and of a complacent patrician elite with no interest in correcting these failures must end. We must have institutions that defend our democracy that have probity, integrity, transparency and the ability to protect and defend our most fundamental and hard-won rights at a time of profound change.

SMASHED

Well, you can read the news as well as I can. Just 3 MEPs for the Conservatives, but including Dan Hannan. I must say 9% of the vote was better than I was expecting - if May hadn't announced her resignation, I'm convinced we would have got no more than 6% and no seats. More good news in PTSD Adonis having been disappointed, but that's thin cheer.

For most people of course TBP's success is the single story. Nothing can detract from 28 seats - possibly 29 when the last two areas declare. If the party had been around a month or two longer I suspect they would have taken even more votes from both Labour and the Conservatives.

And of course the LibDems, the Remain party, with some 2/3rds of the Brexit Party votes, will also now move to consolidate their status as the Brexit opposition party with an eye to the next GE, with the advantage of an established party structure and existing parliamentary incumbency. They can sell themselves as "We're not Corbyn" and also take more voters from Labour and Conservative parties. The CUKs are nothing - forget their grandiose delusions of a 'pact' with the LibDems. Cable can tell them to join-up or FO.

All over Europe the victor has been .... democracy. Turnout up, apple carts overturned, politicians in tears, some dreams shattered, others come to fruition. Nothing earth shattering, but a clear message. The Conservative Party, like Labour, may have no future, the corpses of both parties picked over by the Teal and Orange insurgents, but for now will remain in government . Our MPs will be shitting themselves and will avoid a GE like a vampire eschews garlic.

Have a good day all - Today is a good day. 

                                       Predicted %             Actual %
Brexit                                        34                       32
LibDem                                     17                       20
Lab                                            15                       14
Green                                        11                        12
Con                                             9                          9
CUK                                           4                          3
UKIP                                          3                          3