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Spanish governments are always out of favour with their voters. With a quarter of the nation's young people out of work due to the disastrous economic management of the EU, raising spurious claims over the sovereignty of Gibraltar has been a perennial favourite, usually combined with some rather jejune and silly naval provocations. Brexit has brought it out again, with a puerile Spanish addendum to post-Brexit travel arrangements.
However, the British Overseas Territory, which has been under British sovereign protection now for 306 years and has voted twice to reject Spanish claims, was only ever a part of the Spanish realm for 212 years - the shortest epoch of sovereignty in the Rock's history. Following the fall of the Western Empire, Gibraltar has experienced the sovereignty of
Visigoths 414 to 711 - 297 years
Moors 711 to 1462 - 751 years
Spain 1501 to 1713 - 212 years
UK 1713 to 2019 - 306 years
The Rock has its own unique ethnic mix, language and customs. Under international principles of self-determination, the people of Gibraltar are very clear, and have asserted their wishes democratically with overwhelming clarity, that they wish to remain under the Union flag.
The EU's unelected officials are thugs and bullies, used to throwing their weight around without any voters behind them to teach them sense. They exist in a vacuum, in a rarefied world of pretence and privilege that rarely brings them into contact with reality. Hence they are glacial in reacting to risks and threats, such as the coming financial crisis which will engulf the Eurozone. But like all bullies, when fronted up, when challenged, when thwarted they freeze.
The United Kingdom Parliament has stood firm against their attempts to 'punish' the UK. They are now faced with either modifying or removing the Backstop to the UK's satisfaction or seeing us leave in a Clean Brexit. That is the reality, and one can smell the fear in Brussels. Sure, we have made mistakes. Our biggest was to entrust the draft treaty negotiations to a child. As Fraser Nelson writes in the Telegraph
This time, she needs a proper team. Leaving it to a civil servant, Olly Robbins, was always going to lead to disaster.
The mess he led her into – agreeing a “backstop” arrangement with the
EU that Britain might be stuck in forever – was never going to pass
through Parliament. She’s taking Geoffrey Cox, the Attorney General,
whom MPs trust to spot any trap in the EU small print.
Well, there are still plenty of Robbins' mistakes in the draft treaty, but none we can't live with in the short term. We can pick the bones out of it as and when we must.
Parliament's backbone is strengthened if it has public opinion behind it, and the polls are now swinging to a public preference for a Clean Brexit. The British have seen the nasty face of the EU, the bullying, the arrogance and the intransigence and have turned against it. People are prepared to take the hit and get it over with. Yet again, British people have more faith in themselves than do many of their MPs.
Most of all, the unelected officials are now worrying about getting money out of us. Yesterday the threat shifted subtly to 'If you don't pay us you won't get a trade deal', to which we must reply 'Well, no trade deal, no geld'.
We really do want to continue the best possible relations with all the nations of Europe, but they really need to wise up - the trolls, fools and poseurs in the Berlaymont, the folie de grandeur that infects Brussels, with all its silly little medals and petty distinctions, is not serving them well.
I suspect every primary school child in Colchester leaves with a firm knowledge of just two periods in the ancient town's history - the Roman occupation and the Civil War. The town has any number of scars from the latter; the Siege House, with the musket balls still embedded in its timbers ringed in red, or the new (well, 17th century) brick top to a medieval church tower, blown up with its gunner and supply of gunpowder during the siege. Parties of small children are taken proudly to the rear castle wall, against which Lucas and Lisle were shot to death. The bias was, I recall, still tinged with the Royalist hubris that held the town against Parliamentary forces (and the wishes of the townspeople) for some time. The town has a school named for one of the executed siege commanders, but none for the Roundhead commander who won.
That such traces of ancient difference still subside in our breasts became clearer many years ago with the first acquaintance of a lifelong friend I met at university. He is a Cavalier from Worcester - I a Roundhead from Suffolk. It is not a conscious self-definition and we have rarely even spoken of it, but it remains ingrained nonetheless. There is a strong trace of 17th century East Anglian Puritan in me that rejects all corruption, asserts the responsibility of privilege, loves Justice over Law and above all strives for an equitable (but not equal) Realm. My great friend is a scofflaw, a shameless abuser of privilege and position, a serial breaker of road traffic regulations and an unembarrassed wielder of sharp elbows, not above undetectable petty theft. We are, as the Irish say, fierce friends.
For those who imagine our common past allegiances are so distant as to be diluted to homeopathic proportions in our blood, don't be so sure. Allister Heath in the Telegraph also finds echoes of the 17th century in the divisions I have also described so comprehensively in previous posts. Against the hubristic decadence of the New Elite are
... the New Radicals: a heterodox bunch who are often uncomfortable
revolutionaries. They look on, aghast, at our elites’s fin-de-siecle
delusions, at their breathtaking self-satisfaction, and dream of the day
that they can put them back in their place. Many New Radicals used to
trust our institutions and were once small-c conservatives themselves;
today, they believe the “system” to be broken, controlled by a selfish,
morally-corrupt establishment committed to lining its own pockets.
The next stage of course is for our political allegiances to align with the nation's new bipartisan divisions - Roundhead or Cavalier, Caesarian plebeian or Pompeian patrician. Our Commons chamber is made for it, and every atom of DNA in our being is hard wired for a two party political system. Heath fears some form of destructive Corbynism, but, Puritan leveller that I am, I see in Corbyn a potential ally to the New Radical cause. I find myself nearer in many things to Jeremy Corbyn than to Boris Johnson. And if that surprises you, you still don't get it.
I am a happier man today. The Commons defeat of the Grieve and Cooper amendments yesterday was a slap for the Remainers, and the Brady amendment now passes the negotiating advantage to Britain. Our parliamentary system must be both confusing and frustrating to the unelected officials in Brussels, for whom the decisions of their own puppet parliament are always agreed well in advance of MEPs voting, and there are no surprises in the chamber.
In past weeks Brussels have shrugged their shoulders and pretended to ask 'what the UK wanted'. Well, yesterday made it clear; NO backstop, but otherwise we'll take the deal. It's a clear message both to Brussels and the world; either withdraw this nasty and unnecessary little attempt to fracture the United Kingdom, or put tens of thousands of German auto workers out of work.
Although Brussels may appear united, this far from the case. The artificial backstop bears all the hallmarks of Selmayr, making an attempt to punish the UK. However, it will be the nations of Europe, not the unelected officials of the Berlaymont, who will actually pay the price for no deal - and now we'll see whether they're prepared to take the hit to satisfy little Martin's infantile spite.
It puts Brussels on the back foot, and the UK in the position of being the responsible mature democracy seeking a negotiated solution. A flat refusal from Brussels will not be a good look for the EU.
SIR – A “Citizens’ Assembly” can break the current impasse on Brexit, and recreate trust in representative democracy.
On Brexit, public debates too often reflect two unreconciled blocs of
opinion. We urgently need a more diverse range of views to be weighed,
taken seriously, and debated to a conclusion. A Citizens’ Assembly does
that. Experience shows it works in reaching conclusions which carry
public confidence, and in reconciling division.
Many feel a disconnection between Parliament and the public. The
answer is not to weaponise the idea of “the people” against their
elected representatives. It is to involve the electorate in a debate
which influences and shapes a final parliamentary decision, without
removing the decision from it.
It is not too late. The process could be completed in three months.
There would need to be an extension of the Article 50 notice.
Lasting cynicism about national politics will be a likely outcome of
how Brexit was done. It is in our hands to avoid that. Referring
Brexit to a Citizens’ Assembly would reconnect with the public and
revitalise the parliamentary process. We urge our political leaders to
make this happen now.
Deliberative Democracy
This is the favourite of the Remain side, who think that voters in their natural state are not fit to make important decisions. The schemes on offer vary, but all involve some sort of 'sortition' - the use of a voters' panel, a bit like Blair's focus groups, to make decisions on behalf of the rest of us. But only of course after being lectured by experts on the right choice to make. The experts would be neutral in the same way that the BBC is neutral.
To me, this all sounds too much like the pointless design Charettes I have encountered. The architect generally conducts them to convince planners / clients that his or her ideas have community support. They involve the architect talking to a room of people for a very long time with tons of slides and display boards and then asking them at the end which shade of Farringdon Grey, of the three offered, they would like as a finish to the front door?
The fact that the signatories that one knows - Rowan Williams, Dan Snow, Matthew Taylor - are all prominent Remainers tells you all you need to know. The real purpose of their 'Citizens Assembly' is to reverse the most significant vote in British history - 17.4m citizens under universal suffrage voting to Leave the EU in a secret ballot. And with the usual unashamed mendacity of the Remain side they have the front to claim that a panel of 250 people selected by them to determine the nation's future (with suitable 'expert' advice, of course) will 'recreate trust in representative democracy'.
It's a bit like asking some street spiv doing the three cup trick 'Is it fair?' and believing the answer 'Course it's fair guv'.
They really are desperate if they're bringing forward their longer term plans to undermine the fundamental defences of our democracy - universal suffrage, the secret ballot, the right to associate - so rapidly, before the BBC and the MSM have laid a thick mat of propaganda.
It wasn't long after the wall came down in 1989 that I went exploring in eastern Europe. Trains for the most part - they allow you to see things up close, people, infrastructure, traffic, industry, residences. Hotels were still soviet-era, with scorching steam heating in uninsulated tired rooms decorated in politburo formica 1950s style. City centres that had been fought over still bore the scars of shell, shrapnel and small arms fire in the ashlar and brickwork, but around the back and above first floor level on the facades. The easily visible damage was patched.
It must have been twenty years on when I went back for the first time and the change was stupendous. The cars on the streets were new - or newish, mostly under ten years old. Bright shopfronts and consumer goods and services had swamped the historic city centres and everywhere, everywhere, were the same concrete, glass and steel shopping malls filled with exactly the same outlets. Prosperity, of a sort, had arrived. The youngsters wore a simulacrum of what they were wearing in Paris or Munich, at least in the individual parts. The ensemble effect was still a little experimental, not quite as finessed. Boots for the snow, not trainers, for example.
Some old traces remained. On the sidings outside Budapest station small mountains of coal and logs to feed the station's heating covered a two hectare plot. British stations heated, if you were lucky, a waiting room and the staff side of the ticket office. European stations heated everything - the whole station complex other than the platforms. Restaurant, barbers, newsagents, offices and counters. In Budapest the waiting room was large, with solid oak benches in rows like a church seating perhaps 200 - and it was full, in the harsh winter in which I returned, with the poor and elderly. As I watched, a railway official pointed to several persons, alone and in couples, and made the 'out' gesture. They picked up their bags and left, to be replaced by others who drifted in quietly. It reminded me of the children's boating pond in Colchester castle park and 'come in number 14!' Clearly there was a free warmth rationing system in place, understood by the rail officials and the elderly poor. Max parking 2 hours, no return within 1 hour or something.
These were the people who had not been lifted onto the elephant's back, at least not then. For the youngsters, their enthusiasm for the new Europe was understandable. It was an H&M, McDonalds, Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Svarovski, Adidas, Burger King, C&A, Converse, Hervis, KFC, Levis, Nike, Pizza Hut, Schwarzkopf, Sony, Superdry, Swatch, TGI Fridays, Body Shop, Tommy Hilfiger, Zara paradise of post-soviet consumer choice; the same lines, the same stores in the same chrome and glass malls in every city in Europe.
The success of the global corporates in creating new markets for their cars, white goods, phones and consumer goods not only in eastern Europe but throughout what we used to call the second world has been remarkable. They have created a new middle class, hungry for the manna of the factories and plants throughout the globe. Billions have been lifted out of absolute poverty and enough wealth created to allow them to buy 3g phones even in the meanest favelas and barrios.
This has come at a cost. It has been the older, less skilled, less 'agile' in the new terminology, who have paid. Non-metropolitan. C1,C2,D,E in the UK - rural drivers in France. Those who have never seen an upswing since the 2008 crisis, those who have little to lose. From the elephant's forehead to the valley floor of his trunk, these are the losers from globalisation. The corporates have moved their factories from Japan to Wales, then from Wales to Bulgaria, and will soon move again from Bulgaria to Ecuador or Kenya. At each move leaving in their wake broken communities, debt and worklessness, upheaval and disconnection. Coupled with 'State capture' - the takeover of democratic structures by a new privileged, patrician establishment - it is inevitable that social and economic stresses and tensions will roil.
We have a duty, all of us who can still think and write and hold dialogue between us, to resolve this. There MUST come a system of reform and renewal that re-balances power, a change that includes the currently excluded. Those that have captured the State must learn to share - to devolve, decentralise, empower. But above all to recognise that we are One Nation.
The continent faces its biggest challenge since the 1930s. We urge European patriots to resist the globalist onslaught
The idea of Europe is born again.
'We've had enough of cultural heritage, enough of the value of place and national self-worth!' The wreckers cry. 'Let us destroy the burden of the past and the traditions of Europe's diverse peoples and create instead the secure blandness of an homogeneous empire, a celebration of mediocrity, a joyless characterless technocracy!'
Europe is being destroyed by bureaucratic socially-progressive corporatists, an elite of patrician managerialists, who would destroy every vestige of democratic self-government, and who would destroy the principles of Westphalian Sovereignty for which Europe's nation-states have striven since the seventeenth century.
This is the noxious climate in which Europe's elections will take place in May. Europe's globalists want to dismantle the historic Europe of Westphalian states and to replace them with an unelected, unaccountable and anti-democratic cabal of permanent and self-replicating officials, law-makers sans Justice, rule-makers sans Right, who wish to degrade our rich diversity into a grey, amorphous, dead culture of compliance and pettifogging risk-aversity.
Those who believe in the legacy of Burke, Hobbs, de Toqueville or Nijaz Ibrulj also believe in our ability to raise ourselves above the corrupt and power-hungry machinations of Brussels, will have faith in our ability to defend our peoples and cultures against this new and barbarous totalitarianism, three-fourths of a century after shedding the last fascist burden, and a generation after we razed the Berlin Wall to a stump.
The nations of Europe have given us Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Voltaire, Verlaine, Mann and Dante. The technocrats have given us the Animal Waste Directive. They have banished love and joy on the Precautionary Principle - such emotions detract from technocratic rationalism. Love of the little platoons, for the local, for institutions within our compass are scoured from our earth in their unforgiving and relentless managerial trampling on the nations and peoples of Europe.
The greed of these unprincipled dullards for power and status will take our souls. So eagerly do they strive for the complete eradication of cultural identity that they will level the graves of our forbears, desecrate sacred memories and totems with the foulness of their touch. We must fight their depredations; we must speak our poems, recite our fables to our children, fire our micro-distilleries, thrill in our dance and our music, take pride in our raiment and costume, preserve the skills of the hearth and the oven and teach them to our sons and daughters in defiance of the poisonous homogeneity of their multinational globalist factory-fertig foodstuffs.
From Tallin to Vienna, Porto to Budapest, we must fight these globalist managerialists, fight to preserve our nations, our cultural identity, our rich diversity, our local institutions and our allegiances. We are our soil, we are the heart of our lands, we are a Europe of nations and we must strive against the aggression and hate of these soulless monsters for our very existence.
[written in response to a bunch of obscure 'intellectuals' of little wit and less wisdom who have signed a chain letter in favour of the global corporatists destroying our continent - see The Guardian]
==================
UPDATE
How could I forget - Happy Australia Day to all the 'Strines in the UK; sink one for me
There can hardly be anyone left who believes that Brexit is just about the EU. It has come as a shock to the Patrician establishment that all this .. hostility .. to everything they hold dear has come out of left field, and 'Remain' is coming to mean not only remain in the clutches of the Federation, but to remain in a Britain ruled by this scabrous elite.
They write about 'State Capture' - the process by which the Patrician elite have progressively taken over the State -
"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."
"... At the same time a technocratic political elite has arisen that is
willing to contract out decision-making to supranational organisations
like the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and United
Nations on just about everything from finance, the law, border security,
and the environment."
"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."
Well, we won't have it. We want our Parliament back, our democracy back, our public administration back, our schools and universities back and an independent unshackled media free to speak. But just what will it take? Will we spawn a domestic Gilets jaunes movement? And this is where I have difficulties. I deprecate violence and disorder. I hate riots. I can never advocate such action except in the case of foreign invasion, for the preservation of our realm. And yes, I can anticipate your responses. The profs go on to say
"Cumulatively, over the past three decades, then, the empirically
demonstrable lesson is that violence and threats work. Crudely, there is
simply no arguing with the fact that violence is the deus ex machina
for changing the way people think and act. Physical force is a method
of political communication, and when it is sustained it invariably
succeeds in changing minds and changing policies.
Under the threat
of violence, it is often easier for governments to knuckle under for
the sake of maintaining a semblance of peace, to wax piously about
societal cohesion and resilience, and to climb onwards as though the status quo ante
were not crumbling beneath them. The progressive factions of academia,
culture, and media cheer them for it. So, if the populace don't really
react in the face of such threats and actual violence, and merely light
candles and hug teddy bears, then the bet of the political classes is
sustained. They have gambled correctly."
And here in intense self-examination I ask whether writing this blog is on the candle-lighting and teddy bear-hugging side of the spectrum, or on the side on which thirteen Gilets jaunues have already been blinded by State munitions? But then this blog is utterly irrelevant in the face of the tsunami about to engulf Britain, a crashing mass of reform that will sweep away the deep ordure from the Augean stables our nation has become. Betz and Smith write
"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."
Should Parliament betray Brexit, that limit could be passed next week.
Please be very careful in the comments.
David Betz is Professor of the War in the Modern World, Department of War Studies at King's College London. MLR Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory and Head of Department, Department of War Studies, King's College London.
============================= Apols to those expecting the HRA today - I'm holding this over
As a youngster I first encountered the British establishment through satire. Private Eye, TW3, the Pythons, and notably Derek and Clive. So as I grew, I saw in my mind red-robed judges invariably with ladies underwear, stockings and suspenders hidden from view, priggish bowler-hatted paragons mired deep in sleaze and vice, MPs preaching virtue then stealing the silver, sin-damning bishops caught cottaging in public lavatories. Of course, cases such as 'Bunnies can and will go to France' provided joy and hilarity, and Peter Cook's take on that bent judge's summing up remains a classic.
However, these things aren't static. That 1960s establishment is just a crude parody today. Pompey's faction, the new Patrician Class, is in the twenty-first century a very different cohort. Here are my candidates for its composition.
THE POLITICAL CLASS
Professional politicians of all shades, lobbyists, advisors, SPADs, researchers, consultants. In particular, those who have never had a job in their lives unconnected with politics, those following explicitly the fast-track Oxbridge PPE - researcher - MP route. Neither party, sex, race or faith preclude anyone from membership and indeed one of the most egregious exhibitions of political nepotism is from Labour; Jack Straw's son Will, Tony Benn's boy Hilary, Kinnock's lad Stephen, Corbyn's son Seb, McDonnell's 'political advisor' and being groomed for a safe Labour seat are amongst the most famous.
THE FOURTH ESTATE
The mainstream press and broadcast TV - Sky, BBC, ITV. For years they've skated by convincing us that the balance they should maintain is that between left and right - when in fact left and right are just adjacent faces of the same new establishment. The fourth estate, the MSM as they are known in abbreviation, are unashamedly pro-establishment, pro-globalist and pro-supernational, and thus deeply hostile to reform.
THE UNELECTED ELITES
Not only the unelected bosses in Whitehall, but those at the most senior chief officer level throughout the civil and public services. Police chief officers, NHS and local government chief executives, specialist scientific and technical advisers and more commonly now those who run the unaccountable NDPBs and fake charities - the agencies and their drivers, doing the dirty work of the establishment away from public control and scrutiny. Salaries exceeding that of the PM, generous golden hello and farewell payments, murky routes of appointment, make this entire cohort so utterly remote, so completely unfamiliar with the ordinary people of Britain they could all be aliens.
THE JUDICIAL GLOBALISTS
British trained lawyers, judges, jurists who believe that the future of law is global, a world legal order, encompassing intellectual property, tax, incorporation, contract, mercantile and relations between the global corporates and the supernational authorities. They support the executive legal authority of the EU, UN and other global agencies and want to see more legal power flow from the world's nations to these bodies, staffed and run by unelected elites. Already they have corrupted part of UK law with Eurolaw, through the role of the ECJ, the EU's political court, in destroying national judicial independence
THE FAT ABBOTS OF ACADEME
As bloated, dissolute and greedy as the greasy-palmed Abbots of pre-reformation days, our university vice-chancellors have stuffed their mouths with ponzi gold. These are the new denizens of an aircraft's first class cabin and free champagne, jetting to Asia, Australasia, the States for missions and conferences, five star hotels and lavish film-star treatment, their air-con limos gliding them from one spurious quasi-academic event to another. The merry go round is reciprocal - hosting their wealthy foreign counterparts at home, with generous hospitality and an official blessing. Theirs is no longer the world of scholarship, education and knowledge but a billion dollar globalist business that makes its elites very, very, wealthy.
THE GLOBALIST THUGS
It's now a familiar game for the global corporates, the mutually beneficial trade-off with the supernational organisations of the EU, UN and other globalist bodies to encourage ever-greater and complex regulation. Regulation restricts competition, creates barriers to entry for new firms, gives huge advantages of incumbency to the existing global actors and disadvantages competition from SMEs and start ups. The globals have exhausted their own capacity to be profitable, and exist solely through this anti-capitalist thuggery and by an ever decreasing series of takeovers and mergers. Their stranglehold over the UN and EU, and through their adherents and beneficiaries in the new establishment their power over us all, has slowed growth to a glacial pace here in the West. Only freeing the creators of growth and innovation - the SMEs and national actors - from the shackles of the global corporates can restore Britain's international competitiveness.
There are more. This list is by no means comprehensive. Bishops and Brigadiers no longer play the roles they played in the past, and though they may hold globalist establishment views, their effect is diminished. For a comprehensive list of establishment individuals, including those in show-business and so forth, see the Wikipedia catalogue of Remain supporters.
And don't be disheartened by their number and power. They are Pompey's bloated patricians - and they face us, Julius Caesar's lean legions of plebeians. And we always win.
I'm really not keeping count, but the launch yesterday of 'My Brexit Party' by someone of whom one has never heard could have been mistaken for a fashion or lifestyle piece in the papers rather than a news item. Perhaps, I thought, this is the new equivalent of 'My Charity', much beloved of ladies of a certain age and income. Or perhaps a winter fundraiser, in a marquee at a suburban golf club, with vol-au-vents and Prosecco. Was I out of the loop? Was England frantic with leave socials? Were diaries full of leave book club nights, leave wine tastings, leave clay shooting days, leave fishing trips?
But no. This was the launch of yet another political party offshoot from UKIP. To be frank, apart from Britain First I was unaware there were so many - the others are Veterans and Badgers against Brussels and the Purple Blazers, apparently. My Brexit Party was apparently founded by a lady who was a UKIP spokesperson for something or other, and has only one political objective - to reach Brexit. She claims to have Nigel's support, but I haven't seen anything from the man himself endorsing this.
Well, I'm in no position to criticise. The Conservative party has already split into two, and like one of those comedy joke cars in two halves continues to roll down the motorway out of control but with the Leader in the driving position holding the halves togther with her legs. The Labour Party has become a Matryoshka doll, with more factions than a Scots Presbyterian church, but with the same condition - that two or more must be gathered together to make a conference group.
So why aren't we seeing more change at the centre? They can't be staying together 'for the sake of the voters' because by and large they prefer to ignore us. Perhaps they're having mediation, or sorting out who gets the CDs, the Le Creuset, the Party HQ and the members.
The Chuggers have spent years softening up the nation to take out direct debits for Panda fertility clinics, palm oil re-planting in Niger and a score of causes about which we don't give a fig, but the lady with the clipboard and the cleavage and the smile somehow persuaded us. We're ripe for signing up to £2 a month for a party membership - and the Corbyn Momentum faction have done just that.
But few I suspect will do so for Lucinda from Daventry or whoever she is solely because she's registered a party with Brexit in the name.
The narcissistic Remoaners in Parliament who are deluded enough to believe that their own selfish views, their personal inflated opinions, trump the bellow of the people of Britain, 17.4 million voices crying LEAVE, are sowing the seeds of their own downfall.
Yvette Cooper, who with her husband Ed Balls 'flipped' main residence three times solely out of greed, to maximise the expenses they troughed from our taxes, now wants to augment her Parliamentary stipend with a Leader's wedge. Her vacuous pledge to house a migrant in one of her several homes has come to naught; instead she is flipping the bird to the people of Britain with petty Parliamentary jiggery. Likewise Dominic Grieve, a man who loves himself so greatly that he cannot conceive that his opinion, contrary to that of 17.4m voters, should not prevail. So like some plague rat he labours in the dark to concoct Parliamentary shenanigans that will frustrate our leaving the EU.
They must be unaware that the public view is shifting. Leavers and Remainers. And that instead of appearing as Robin Hoods to the electorate, they are looking like Orcs. Everywhere it is becoming apparent that the people of Britain are becoming sick of the saboteurs, frustrated with the delay and uncertainty. All Grieve and Soubry and Cooper and their ilk are achieving is to strengthen public support for Theresa May.
Did you see Question Time on Thursday, and hear the roar of audience approval for the suggestion that no deal might now be the best option? There is a sense in which the public are braver – and wiser – than their MPs.
Update
======
As Guido spotted, The Grauniad has hidden a bang-up-to-date ICM poll that makes 'No Deal' the most popular option with the public - supported by 28% of voters, against 24% who want a second referendum.
Of course remoaners will doubtless claim that as the polling was done last week, many of those polled will have died or changed their minds since, and that the pollsters only actually polled a couple of thousand random but representative Brits. Polls should ask every person in the UK their opinion, they will say, including babies and infants - with glugs, gurgles and random noise to be counted as support for a second referendum.
In Brussels, there are only three correct responses to Brexit: denial (“they’ll come to their senses”); fury (“they were lied to, the vote was stolen”); and contempt (“the arrogant fools deserve what’s coming to them”). The thing no one is allowed to do is to ask why Britain voted Leave, or whether Eurocrats might have behaved differently to make the EU more popular.
I think we've seen just about every spurious, fallacious, fatuous, illogical, mendacious and downright silly variation of those responses. That we hadn't included the votes of babies and infants, that a simple majority was too low a bar, that some voters in 2016 are now dead and others enfranchised, invalidating the poll, that Russians / dark financiers / Martians rigged the vote, the voters were too stupid to understand the issues, that every word of the Leave campaigns was a lie whilst the Remain campaign was a model of veracity and virtue, that opinion polls (which have somehow miraculously become more accurate since the manifold polls prior to the vote) prove people have changed their minds.
It's all away-with-the-fairies fantasy. As both John Curtice and Diane Abbot have advised, don't bank on a Remain result if the poll is run again. Which it won't be.
The truth is that a Goliath patrician establishment with all the resources of the State, the nation's elites, broadcasters, global industrialists, international supergovernmental actors, the then US President, and with a vastly greater campaign pot, twice that of Leave, was defeated by a David with the greatest democratic mandate ever seen in this country. 17.4m electors.
As 'Politico' reasons, A General Election may now be the best way out of the political impasse that has paralysed British politics. John Redwood does the maths that demonstrates the impasse. Mandarins have been put on alert for a snap election, and cabinet ministers have already secretly warned their constituency chairs. A rapid Brexit election would kill calls for a second referendum - which would take many months to arrange, if agreed, and would also - with luck - break the stalemate in the Commons.
The key question for the Conservatives is who will lead us in an election? Certainly not Mrs May. She has the emotional intelligence of a robot with Asperger's, and is simply unable to connect with voters. She appears insincere even when she's being sincere. And for me, will I as a member get a chance to vote for a new leader, or will this be another Parliamentary Party stitch-up?
For I give a helpful and constructive warning now, that unless a candidate favoured by the Party as a whole is dropped into the vacancy, there will no longer be a Conservative Party. A new Conservative Party in which Nigel Farage could find a home, a reforming and forward looking party, would emerge - and would garner members, backers and support rapidly. I am loyal to the Conservative Party, but that loyalty must be reciprocal. If the Parliamentary Party continues to ignore, frustrate and oppose the will of the vast majority of Party members, it will be crushed.
For now, look to your constituencies and prepare for a Brexit election - with one candidate to stand, and one only, in each constituency as the Pro-Brexit candidate, be they Conservative, UKIP or Independent. A liaison group must be effected rapidly to ensure this is done - we cannot afford to have the Brexit vote split.
Both Nigel Farage and Kate Hoey have now spoken authoritatively confirming that the destruction of Brexit by the Patrician establishment is under way. The destroyers have an end game in sight, and will ensure that the biggest ever democratic vote in British history is overturned.
However, if anyone seriously imagines that after a brief spell of upset, everything will go back to normal they are deluded. Britain is now changed for ever - we are a different nation to that which went to the polls in 2016. The EU too is much changed; their naked ambition for an army now clear, as for a central ministry of finance, for all the laggards that are not yet in the Eurozone to be forced to switch to the Reichsmark, and for an even greater power-grab from the nations of Europe than ever before.
If Brexit is finished, the EU with which we are being forced to conjoin, like a slave forced in concubinage to the Master's son, is not the one we voted to leave. Many Remainers will be shocked and appalled at the result - but they will have done the deed.
I have no doubt that this shotgun second-wedding would be short lived. Within a year or two, when the chains of serfdom have bitten, if the EU had not then collapsed from internal dissent, we will decide overwhelmingly, for the second time, to leave. And next time there will be no mistake.
But the economic, social and international damage to Britain will have been done. We will have lost years of opportunity, even more of our institutions will have been destroyed or corrupted. We will look across Britain and see the barren, hungry, cursed and divided land that blighted Europe following the Thirty Years War. That will be the result of destroying the first Brexit.
With revelations in the Telegraph of Hammond's conference call with the global corporates just two hours after Parliament's rejection of the Robbins-Selmayr Treaty, assuring them that the government would continue to scupper and sabotage Brexit, comes confirmation that not only a Remainer Parliament but a fifth-column Remainer government have turned their backs on the people of Britain.
This is a fight for liberty not only from the Imperial zealots from Brussels but from our own corrupt and anti-democratic establishment.
However, Hammond and those of his ilk may be dissappointed by the masters they yearn to serve so slavishly in Brussels. It's emerging that they don't want us back. Not only do they not want Nigel Farage back in the EP in July, at a time when they will be contending with a surge of grass-roots democracy throughout Europe challenging the cozy and corrupt chumocracy, but they don't want a divided and disruptive UK in which more than 20 million voters now regard the EU as more lowly than a snake's belly.
While Hammond has provoked the question of whether he is in government for the good of the people or as the tool of the globalist corporates that would no doubt reward him well when he has outlived his use, he cannot be so sure that the EU will actually accept the extension of Article 50. And this could end Brexit. For if the EU reject a request for an extension May could be forced both by Parliament and the grey men of the deep State to cancel Article 50 altogether - Britain's unilateral right. A second referendum to reverse the first would then doubtless be ordered, this time with all sources of funding for 'Leave' neutered and an even greater official bias and advantage for 'Remain' engineered .
(Dominic Grieve) is far from alone and the arguments used more than a century ago to deny the working class the franchise have returned to disenfranchise them over Brexit. Instead, Parliament is changing procedure in order to get an outcome that MPs feel they can’t get in any other way. But rules exist for a reason. In times of crisis they define the known parameters to resolve disputes and reach consensus. Starting to tear up the rule book is the path to anarchy.
THE TIDE IS TURNING
The Raedwald blog looks as if it increasingly represents public opinion in the UK. A bang up to date COMRES poll finds -
- 50% say NO to a second referendum, only 40% say YES
- 42% OPPOSE the Robbins-Selmayr treaty, 26% support it
- 74% think politicians are out of touch with the mood of the country, only 10% think otherwise
The country is split down the middle over almost every aspect of Brexit, with one notable exception: two thirds of voters say that when Brexit is complete, “the UK should try to become the lowest tax, business-friendliest country in Europe, focused on building strong international trade links”. This is also the majority-held view across all age groups (18-34 56%, 35-54 60%, 55+ 77%) and political affiliations (including 54% of Labour voters).
And that's the future. Internationalist not globalist. Hammond is the past, and is backing a dying horse. Don't let him throw the nation's wealth away backing a loser.
Well, we wanted a stake through the heart of the Robbins-Selmayr treaty, and that's exactly what Parliament has delivered. They will be weeping into their beer in the Berlaymont tonight.
We're in uncharted waters here.
Right. I'm going to drink a bottle of Prosecco, play some loud music and maybe air guitar. Ahem.
Since the beginning of the Gilets jaunes protests in November, reports Liberation, 93 protesters have been seriously injured by the French police, 13 of whom have been blinded in one eye by the careless use of 'flashballs'. Press reports are showing pictures this morning of police being issued with automatic assault rifles. It can surely now be only a matter of time before the police shoot dead their fellow Frenchmen and women. Older readers may recall the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, in which four protesting students were killed by the National Guard, and which traumatised a nation. And many more younger people in the UK today will draw a direct parallel to the Peterloo massacre in 1819, at which 11 were killed by Yeomanry. Mike Leigh released a film about it last year; few would imagine that Macron now fills the role played by William Hulton two hundred years ago.
11 were killed at the original Peterloo
So far, 93 have have been seriously injured by Macron - including 13 blinded
There are strong parallels between the democratic disempowerment that motivated both the Peterloo protesters and the Gilets jaunes; as we have often remarked, ordinary people are the losers from a globalism that has seen
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
Street protest is the French way. In Britain we have been lucky in that parliaments and governments have usually eventually listened to the voices of the people before blood was spilled. But Peterloo was an exception. Let's hope and pray that we don't breed our own Macron here - a violent and authoritarian man prepared to use extreme measures to retain power - nor ever again see a Peterloo.
This is a filler post until the conclusion of the Commons vote tomorrow. As debate continues in the House, we must look forward to the UK's role in the world post-Brexit - and start to identify those characteristics of our national economy which most drag us down.
A useful tool is the WEF's 2017/18 Global Competitiveness Report. For starters, I've pulled off the rankings of the UK and of our closest competitor, Germany, in the field of Institutions.
Well, we rank much higher than Germany overall - 12th to their 21st - but we could do a lot better. In terms of legal rights - investor protection, property rights, judicial independence - we're way ahead. Giving investors confidence that the State won't seize their wealth on a whim is a sound foundation.
However, there are three key indices that completely drag us down. Government favouritism (pork barrel corruption), government efficiency (27th globally compared to Germany's 6th) and the burden of government regulation (32nd globally to Germany's 7th). My own view is that the drag of government on the nation's output is due to our highly concentrated central State. Whitehall wants to control and micromanage everything, but does so badly - and as a consequence economic efficiency is badly impaired.
The other index that lets us down badly is trust in our politicians. Britain's politicians are trusted less than 16 other nations. Of course, this was compiled before their disgraceful behaviour in Parliament over Brexit. Today it must be off the page.
There is a remarkable consensus as to what MPs must do tomorrow evening. The weekend's final spasms of government frenzy in seeking to terrify Conservative MPs barely lasted past Sunday lunchtime - the story of the Chief Whip stumbling across a dastardly plot in the cloakroom, as Boris Johnson puts it in the Telegraph, "like Jim, the narrator of Treasure Island, who overhears the conspiracy of the pirates while hiding in an apple barrel"
The call now is not just for MPs to defeat the Robbins-Selmayr Treaty tomorrow, but to do so demonstrably, driving a stake through the heart of Martin Selmayr's plot to split Northern Ireland from Britain.
After tomorrow? Who knows. Corbyn has declared he will call a vote of no confidence in the government. He is likely to lose it, but if by some chance he gains the needed two-thirds majority, it would mean a General Election on Thursday 21st February. Other desperate Conservative Remainers are doubtless plotting puerile public schoolboy tricks, with little notion of the fury they will unleash amongst the 17.4m, who have to date proven remarkably patient, well-behaved and responsible in the face of naked anti-democratic sabotage.
If the PM is defeated on Tuesday, she should come to the House and announce:
(1) that the UK and EU will keep the sensible bits of the deal, notably on citizens;
(2) that the backstop is coming out;
(3) that we are going to use the implementation period to negotiate a Canada-style free-trade deal, and withhold half the £39 billion until we get it; and
(4) that we are going to intensify preparations for no deal – in the knowledge that it is by preparing for no deal that we are likely to get a very good deal.
Not my favoured Clean Brexit, but a pragmatic 'well, we did offer ...' solution that I'm sure Brussels would reject, giving us a Clean Brexit by default.
Amidst all the hysteria from those who should know better, all the shrieking and foot stomping that Dover, as the UK's principal port, will be rendered into stasis by 200 mile long queues of trucks in the event of a Clean Brexit, comes a simple and informative briefing from the government.
Now I have to apologise to the myriad ranks of mid-level civil servants here, dedicated and professional. They lack the anilingual abilities, mendacity and hypocrisy of those destined for permanent secretaries, but their straightforward research and inherent honesty has built up a dam of information that has been held back by their bosses, such was Mrs May's determination to restrict any useful information that would weaken the Robbins Treaty. From such internal censorship grew myths such as Dover.
Well, the recent past, once the government could deny Clean Brexit planning no more, has seen a veritable tsunami of evidence in favour of Clean Brexit coming from the bowels of government. I offer, ladies and gentlemen, just one graphic from UK Port Freight Statistics, from the Department of Transport (one of whose alumni is a valued reader of this blog):
