A Fair Go

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

This idea of fairness  is redefining our political landscape. It's powerful. Douglas Murray points out in the Telegraph that even the BBC, normally impervious to accusations of unfairness, has had to admonish two presenters, Emily Maitlis and Naga Munchetty, for being so blatantly unfair on-air that it was an embarrassment to the broadcasting behemoth. Murray writes

The idea of impartiality in news has always been something of a misnomer. The choice of which story to cover owes something to the preconceived ideas of whoever makes that decision. What we are now seeing is the line between commentary and reporting becoming increasingly blurred.

As partiality in its different forms becomes ever more flagrant, the idea that broadcasters are at least making an honest attempt at being unbiased is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. All this raises the prospect of British media following the example of that in the US, where nobody expects anything but partisan coverage.

The point about the BBC is that everyone has to pay for it; one can choose whether or not to buy the Sun or the Mirror, but not the BBC. As I have written previously, if the BBC has passed the point of balance between Leave and Remain, it has forfeited the right to the Charter - due for renewal in 2027.

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

The current turmoil is a battle on many levels - but most fundamentally it is a battle for fairness, between a crude alliance between those with inherited privilege and those with protected status on the one hand, and the mass of the people on the other. The former have, in the words of Betz and Smith, captured the State;

With the rise of the new political classes, a different political dynamic is emerging. Drawn from similar backgrounds (often middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside politics itself), members of parliament increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. The evolution of a monochrome political establishment is producing a radical disconnect, which the Brexit denouement is throwing into stark relief. What we appear to be witnessing is the corrupt mutation of the notion of the representation of the people in parliament, into the substitution of the will of the people by the interests of the political class. We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture. What happens when sectional interests capture the political institutions of the state? This is a question we will get to, but first it is worth reiterating that in many senses this has been a long time coming, and to emphasise, in the British case has little or nothing intrinsically to do with Brexit.

On this level, what the dominant class are given to sneering at as 'populism' is actually a protest from a vast mass of people, who thought they were living in a democracy, that the entire system had become unfair - advantaging the political elite and their supporters at the expense of the mass of the people.

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

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 -

Dumbstruck

I'm dumbstruck. Just dumbstruck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intermission II

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

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

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

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

The Muse in Skebawn

zzzz OK that's enough whimsy

Loch Corrib

Intermission ..

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

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

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

BRACE BRACE BRACE

Issued by Conservative Press Office at 08.30 today, Sunday

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

Ten lessons for young climate activists

1. More layers
Don't keep turning the thermostat up when wearing just a tee shirt. We're saving the planet at that 18° setting. Put on more layers.

2. Plastics
Look for well-made clothes fashioned from linen, wool, cotton or even hemp. The other stuff - stretchy, spangly, fleecy, non-crease - is made from plastics or oil-derived synthetics. Don't keep buying new cheap throw-way stuff from Asos and suchlike - you're either serious about the planet or about Instagram. And learn to darn your socks and sew buttons - if your grandfather can do it so can you

3. Lights
When you leave a room, turn the light off. When you leave a room unoccupied for any length of time, turn the radiator off or down to the lowest setting. Don't leave stuff on 'standby'. Dont leave chargers on all the time.

4. Shoes
Cheap glued Chinese and Asian shoes and trainers made from plastics, synthetic rubbers and oil-derived fabrics that last only a few months are killing the planet and choking landfill. Invest in well-made long-lasting footwear from UK makers - leather for preference.

5. Coffee
We know you don't like Starbucks any more, but Costa and the fake-brand 'artisan' chains owned by big-name global corporates are just as bad. Make your coffee at home, take a thermos and donate £9 a day to a climate change charity instead

6. Reuse and recycle
This doesn't mean just chucking stuff into the right bin but not chucking stuff away at all. Why does everything have to be new? What's wrong with your old phone that we need to poison the world with rare-earth cyanides and enslave children in Asian factories just so you can have a new one every year?

7. Walk and take the bus
Your parents are not free Uber. Maybe if you didn't keep treating them like it they wouldn't need that huge SUV in the drive. Walk. Take the bus. Lose a few pounds.

8. Help with the vegetable patch
A little help tilling and weeding the veg patch wouldn't come amiss. You're missing just how much growing our own French beans for the freezer saves the planet. And ditch avocados. Where do you imagine they come from? Somerset? Learn to love courgettes.

9. Forget Festivals
Don't even think about Glastonbury. It's not the fact that you throw away 80,000 plastic tents each year and create 5,000 tonnes of unrecyclable landfill waste but your travel carbon costs are killing the planet - fan travel costs make up 80% - 90% and performer travel costs the balance. And we're talking 10,000 tonnes of CO2 in total for Glasto.

10. Copy your grandparents
 Remember, your grandparents were saving the planet long before you were born. Brewing their own beer, making and mending their own clothes, keeping hens, growing food, making jam and cycling and trips in their old 2CV. You may be surprised that they regard you as an insufferable self-absorbed eco-lout trashing finite resources who talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. 

Avocados are not grown here

Schrödinger's Weekend

The HoL Supreme Court will keep us on tenterhooks until Monday (I think) for the prorogation ruling so enjoy the next three days. I always regarded this time, between the conclusion of submissions and the finding of the adjudicator in construction disputes, as a Schrödinger's Holiday; you don't know whether you've won or lost, so both states exist, you can do nothing more, there are no more deadlines, no more lengthy case conferences, so you might as well chill and do some leisure.

It seems Dave's gob has ended any hopes that Sam Cam may have nurtured at ever becoming Lady Cameron. Silly chump. However, Fraser Nelson  in the Telegraph reckons that Dave's Brussels experiences should have made him a Leaver anyway -

Once inside its inner circle, he was exposed to the horrors. The directives, the stitch-ups, the knives always out for the City of London. He found Silvio Berlusconi advising a table of EU leaders to take a mistress in Brussels, because it was the only way to survive the late-night summits. The purpose of these meetings, he discovered, was to grind everyone into submission. Including, eventually, him.

He found the EU to be "peacenik" on security, unable to respond to threats on its doorstep. He vetoed one of the eurozone bailout packages that threatened to suck in Britain, only to see the rules changed so the UK veto would not count. When the UK tried to go its own way, it "wasn’t simply a disagreement with the others, it was a heresy against the scripture".

We were early here in blogging about the deep need for democratic housekeeping in the UK and certainly over the months and years posts about reform and renewal, legal and electoral systems generate deeply felt and high quality participation. I'm wondering whether constitutional reform could be another Europe - let me explain.

Before the referendum, the political wisdom was that no-cared about the EU except a small and vocal group of fanatics. June 2016 brought a Damascene revelation - suddenly the entire nation was galvanised into passionate interest. Who knew? Well, today the political wisdom is that an election can be fought on the old ground of education, law and order, the NHS. To suggest that local government or constitutional reform might be a manifesto issue seems as absurd as suggesting in 2010 that the nation would polarise over the EU.

Democratic reform and renewal

This follows on from the previous post. Today we have the prospect of the cerebrally inadequate John Major making an appearance in court - though not speaking - for his 12.10 to 12.30 slot. One hopes Lord Garnier, who represents this most mediocre of intellects, has made some substance of his simple-minded bigotry or we will be bored to tears.

European nations as we know them are, constitutionally, mostly infants. As I have written before, by the end of the 14th century in England (and I mean England and not the UK) serfdom had almost practically ceased to exist, the wage labourer having emerged from the Black Death. By the end of the 16th we had an independent and prosperous middle class and were developing systems of law and democracy from which we would emerge through the turmoil of the 17th to the era termed by historians 'early modern'. In contrast, serfdom and feudalism survived in Europe until the mid-19th century, and Europe's birth-pangs took a century or more of war and chaos before democracy (of a sort) emerged. Yes, they have written constitutions - but in English terms, are barely out of nappies;

Date of Constitution
Sweden	1974
Denmark	1953
France	1958
Germany	1949
Italy	1947
Spain	1978
Portugal	1976

For most of Europe, the Maastrict and Lisbon treaties - in effect the EU constitution - are just a natural progression from what are already new systems of governance.

Not so for the UK, though as commenters made clear yesterday, Brexit has exposed major faults in our system which now needs some fixing. The Lords and the Speaker are the most obvious. Allister Heath in the Telegraph does a decent job this morning of setting out the Heads of Terms -

.... the next government will have to legislate to prevent MPs from ever “seizing control” again and then repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. The power to conduct international treaty negotiations must be left solely to the executive; at the same time, the ability to prorogue needs to be codified, alongside much else.

The governance of the Commons must change radically, with the Speaker bound by clear rules. Any MP who wants to change party should be forced to call a by-election.* The House of Lords will have to be scrapped or, preferably, comprehensively reformed, with a debate about who should belong to it and what proportion should be elected and how. An English Parliament is long overdue, with tax and spend genuinely devolved to a properly federalised United Kingdom.

The civil service is in desperate need of an overhaul: ministers should become CEOs, with staff working directly for them. In a world where special advisers have become so important, we ought to discuss whether more ministers should be directly appointed, or belong to the upper rather than lower chamber.

The next government must take to heart Lord Sumption’s Reith Lecture, perhaps the best political analysis of the year, and row back on the "rights culture". There has been too much mission creep, and too many decisions have been taken by the courts, rather than left to democratically elected politicians. This doesn’t mean that we mustn’t continue to protect rights: on the contrary, I would argue that we need a robust British Bill of Rights to replace our membership of the ECHR.

Add a general power of recall with a threshold high enough to prevent vexatious abuse and an overhaul of local government and electoral health measures and there you have a legislative agenda for the greatest reforming Parliament for over 150 years.

I hope and believe we can do all this without a written constitution. Just as statute law sits happily alongside common law and precedent, we can achieve change without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As Blair found to his frustration and chagrin, you cannot abolish the Lord Chancellor.

It's really no longer just about Brexit. It's about re-forging our nation for the benefit of future generations, a legacy of love. 

*Allister is thoroughly wrong about this particular point; MPs represent their constituents, not their parties. It's the constituents who should have the right to force a by-election, not the judges. A power of recall would cover this.  

In praise of our non-constitution

The interest with which the HoL Supreme Court has captured an unimagined video audience yesterday strained the government's servers. One could actually detect additional servers kicking in like generators on the national grid coming online, and the government's very recent upgrades of IT capacity to meet the heavy demands generated by the 'we're Leaving' ad campaign look now like a sound investment made in good time. The EU nomenklature and apparatchiks tuning into Middlesex Guildhall, used to the rehearsed and pre-determined theatrics of their own political court must have been deeply confused. They must have thought our eleven law lords were doing a brilliant job of pretending not to know the outcome of the case - surely they could never imagine, based on their own experience, that in the UK cases are not actually decided before they come to court? Let's hope for more bundle-fun today - the joy of an entire bench of QCs each charging Mrs Miller £2k an hour for losing their files in public is a pleasure not to be missed.

Back to Lord Sumption's Reith lectures and this:-

For quite a few years now, these calls have taken the form of proposals for a written constitution. I have been concerned in these lectures with our persistent habit of looking for legal solutions to what are really political problems. Calls for a written constitution mark the extreme point of that tendency. Theoretically, we could have a written constitution without expanding the constitutional role of the judiciary. The constitution of the French fifth republic, in its original form of 1958, came pretty close to that, but, in practise, every scheme of constitutional reform suggested for Britain in recent years has sought to limit the powers of Parliament and government and to increase those of judges.

This is not an accident. A written constitution is, by definition, a supreme source of law. It prevails over Parliamentary legislation. Any supreme law which sets out to regulate relations between the citizen and the state must necessarily put some rights beyond the reach of the elected legislature. But the power which the legislature loses under such schemes does not simply disappear, it passes to judges. Judges recognise, interpret and sometimes create constitutional rights. Judges decide when these rights may be trumped by other interests.

And it really does come down to how we want our democracy to operate - with, as David Starkey explained, the People sovereign or the People ruled by a caste of lawyers, a political class alien to the masses, a political class that holds us in contempt? The question hardly needs asking.

Wellington, after Waterloo, compared his own command of the armies to a bridle made of rope - that of the French to a bridle made of stitched leather. Theirs may look more elegant, more perfectly designed but it was vulnerable. Wellington said that if his bridle broke, he simply knotted it back together and carried on. If the French leather bridle came apart, it was finished and could not be rescued. And at the Duke's hands the French bridle frequently came apart. Our non-constitution is similarly - to use the jargon of the management consultant - agile. Sumption again;

If our existing constitution was intolerable, we might have to put up with the disruption and instability involved in jettisoning it. But, in fact, it has brought us real advantages. Because it remains essentially a political and not a legal constitution, it is capable of significant incremental development without any formal process of amendment. This has enabled the British state to adapt to major changes in our national life which would have overwhelmed much more formal arrangements, the onset of industrialisation and mass democracy, the existential crises of two world wars, the creation and then loss of a worldwide empire, the rise of powerful nationalisms in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

All of this has been accommodated politically without changing the basic constitutional framework. Take devolution, not just because we are gathered here in the capital of a politically reborn Wales, but because it is probably the outstanding modern example of the advantages of constitutional flexibility. Devolution has radically altered the internal workings of the United Kingdom, but it was achieved politically by ordinary legislation after a general election in which it was part of the successful party's manifesto.

This Supreme Court case is seminal not just for the issue of the Brexit prorogation before their Lordships. Its outcome will also be a landmark in our constitutional history; either the affirmation of our unique democratic advantages, or the start of a descent into slavery under the heel of the political class and an end to the longevity and stability of our system of governance. 

Bettel nuts

The images cannot be unremembered; a hysterical hairy little man in a cheap suit, looking more like Ricky Gervaise than the Prime Minister of a European nation (albeit a very small one) ranting about how much he hates Brexit. And this after he had tried unsuccessfully to set Boris up in a trap to be caught by a hostile crowd of establishment British ex-pats (mostly EU civil servants and their dags, I'll bet) yelling and chanting just yards away. Herr Bettel was nuts.

You can understand Herr Bettel's pain. Luxembourg is a handout State; 5% of the country's GNI, some €1.8bn a year, comes from the pockets of other European taxpayers. Brexit may mean a lower handout for the coddled citizens, coupled with a competitive UK that will be attracting overseas investment  at a time when Luxembourg's crooked corporate tax arrangements (set up by one Herr Juncker - whose criminal conviction hasn't stopped him reaching capo di capi of the EU) are being brought to an end.

However, this was an appalling display of boorish incivility not just towards Boris but towards Britain. Our Head of Government was there representing us, our nation, and this calculated insult from a little Nazi-friendly joke of a nation (they didn't exactly welcome Liberation) that has sponged on our taxes for too long is unforgivable. It was a major lapse in Statecraft.

The vacuous gurning fool who we are told is Luxembourg's PM

Finally, many thanks for the pointers to Brendan O'Neill's superb hour with David Starkey. rarely have I enjoyed a podcast more - and for anyone who hasn't yet heard it I commend it. HERE on the spiked! site. Worth it alone for the vehemence with which he calls Dominic Grieve a shit.

The three day hearing of the prorogation judicial review starts today in the Supreme Court with the appellants' arguments, government respondents tomorrow and 'interventions' on behalf of various concerned citizens (one John Major and others) on Thursday. Ho hum.

Rogue Parliament - Rogue Speaker

When I was a youngster there was a dinosaur factoid about the time it would take a nerve impulse to travel from the tip of a Diplodocus' tail to its minuscule brain. I've still no idea whether it was true or not for dinosaurs, but it's a convenient metaphor for the lag between a change in public mood and the realisation of that change by our MPs. At times the message doesn't get through at all, as in the case of status and expenses. Contrary to every single snapshot of public opinion, MPs, like the models in the cosmetics adverts, believe they're worth it. They really do imagine that they're special.

Yet over the weekend another poll appeared that confirmed once more that our MPs are utterly mistaken in their high opinion of themselves. The ComRes poll for the Express hasn't at time of writing appeared on the ComRes site so I must rely on the paper's published excerpts.

- 73% of Remain voters think Parliament is in desperate need of reform
- 85% of Leave voters think Parliament is in desperate need of reform

- 73% of all voters think Parliament does not attract the brightest and the best

One MP in Parliament thinks he is even more special than anyone else - the vile and meretricious Speaker Bercow, the sanctimonious dwarf who has, more than any other MP, trashed our democratic nexus. He is defending nothing but his own tattered reputation, standing for nothing greater than his personal notoriety, committed to nothing but his own egoistic fantasies. And the British public are united in their view of his disastrous time in the chair - he has helped destroy confidence in Parliament.

My hope is that our only saving grace is the venality, cupidity and self-interest of MPs themselves. Faced with this crisis of confidence, they will agree to sacrifice the Lords to save themselves. It may be too little too late. Janet Daley writes in the Telegraph -

... even if the Leave case wins through, the damage that has been done to British political life is horrendous. We seem to have imported two of the worst features of the American tradition. First there is gridlock. In the US this occurs when one party has the presidency and the other controls Congress, thus making government inoperable. This should not be possible in the British system since the executive is comprised of the majority, or a functioning minority, in parliament. But the Speaker and Continuity Remain have found a way to abolish the principle of democratic consent which once accepted this arrangement.

Then there is the US predilection for a losing side to try to sue its way to victory with continuous vexatious litigation. This is alien not only to our customs but to our national understanding of the role of politics and the function of the law.

My own view is that the system, the configuration, is robust. It has been corrupted by a Rogue Parliament and a Rogue Speaker, a man who should never in a million years have been elevated to the chair. I just hope we can cull them, throw them from the place, eject them and reclaim OUR Parliament and OUR democracy free from these vulgar weasels.

An excellent graphic from the Daily Express

Cameron and the Referendum

"I remember exactly how I decided to call the Referendum. Giles and Penny were coming up for a kitchen supper, and Sam had a spag bol on the go. I had cued-up a whole box set of the West Wing, fluffed the sofa cushions and had ordered up three bottles of Rioja, which were nicely chambré.

Then the internal phone went, It was Oliver from the private office. I had sneaked away early (as I often used to do) using my usual trick of leaving an old suit coat on the back of my chair - a trick I learned at Eton to make me appear a girly swot when I was really listening to the Smiths on my Walkman behind Wankies. Oliver had discovered I hadn't done my red boxes again. Boring! In fact I had been looking at brochures for houses to rent for the Summer in Rock. I couldn't wait for the annual hols in Cornwall - miles better than all this politics and government and stuff!

Oliver said I had to make a decision on the EEC thing. Well, if there's one thing I learned from Mrs T it was never to get serious about anything to do with that Brussels lot. Just leave them be, sign anything they sent and pay the money - that way the hols wouldn't be interrupted by pesky phone calls from blokes with funny foreign accents! So I told Oliver to bring the file up and I'd break off my evening to give it full consideration.

It was HUGE. I couldn't read all that! I had a rule that if anything took more than three minutes to read I'd just pretend I'd read it. Well, this was no different. I turned straight to the signature and decision sheet. There were two options, one of which had to be crossed out. I reached into my pocket and called out to the kitchen

'Sam! Heads or tails?'

'Tails' she said - brave girl!

'Right then! Referendum it is!'

'What?'

'Nothing'.

I gave the file back to Oliver in the morning looking a bit haggard, as though I'd been up all night reading. In fact we watched an entire series of the West Wing and drank all three bottles of wine and Giles and Penny didn't leave until 1am!"  

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.

Deep State moves towards conflict

Few would ever have imagined that the deep State - that unlawful cabal of senior establishment, civil service, intelligence, legal, business and political actors - would ever break cover to the extent that they have in the past weeks in a final Ardennes offensive to try to sabotage Britain's exit from the EU.

Like the Ardennes offensive, they are throwing everything into a final gamble, risking all, including the peace of the country, to maintain their grip on power. We must wait until next week to see what happens to yesterday's display of nationalistic Scottish petulance masquerading as jurisprudence. Oh yes - that's exactly what it was. They have no evidence for the defamatory slur they made against the government - a defamatory slur that would be legally actionable had it been made outside the Safe Space of their McLordships' court - and like mini-me Sturgeons they relied, as the Telegraph tells us, "on an arcane 17th century law originally designed to protect Scotland’s right to self-determination before the Act of Union". This was nothing more than Scots establishment foot-stomping.

More sinister are the actors uniting the Parliamentary opposition in an alliance against the government; parties normally so disunited that they cannot even agree within their separate selves what to have for lunch are now phone-conferencing and mounting a co-ordinated response. Even the police are joining in with advice being solemnly given to the public across Scotland to assemble 'grab bags' of the kind we keep on board our vessels in the event of having to abandon ship. Documents, medicines. Thankfully, this Caledonian panic-mongering been met so far wih public ridicule.

We must deal with this deep State offensive in precisely the way Montgomery did with von Rundstedt's offensive; let them expose themselves in a deep salient that strains their lines of supply until their intentions are unmistakable, then chop them off at the knee. This is an existential battle for a free and independent British nation - and in preparing for conflict, the deep State, the enemy within, normally as invisible as a submarine, is showing itself. They're actually making themselves a target.

The Scottish establishment's national police force invites ridicule

The Brexit economy

Whilst Boris has a breather to consider how best to tackle the Gordian Knot of Brexit (a mess, it is being reported, exacerbated by Bloody Blair's machinations on behalf of  our European friends across the negotiating table - does anyone else think it's about time he lost the by now purely decorative 'right honourable' and 'PC' post-nominal?) let's take a quick look at Eurozone matters. 

The pound remains depressed but at €1.12 or thereabouts is where its been all year. Gold on the other hand is through the roof; oscillating at around £950/oz since the referendum three years ago, this Summer it soared to around £1,250 and is still today at around £1,200. The UK economy is still in robust shape, if not thriving, but clearly this cannot go on - the global slow-down and more importantly, investment and other key decisions by business that have been postponed time after time as Brexit drags on are taking their toll. Business and the economy need certainty more than anything; even the CBI, whose Remain stance on behalf of about 3% of UK businesses has been aggressive against Brexit, must admit that we need, as the Septics say, closure.

The Eurozone is in the doldrums and about to get worse. As the Telegraph reports, Cristine Lagarde, who narrowly escaped jail with her conviction for complicity in a fraud, takes up the Presidency of the ECB. She brings a unique brand of incompetence and poor judgement to the role. There may be some consolation for the feminists in that the grave errors she is about to make are about to be made by a woman, but few consolations for the rest of us. She's not an economist she's a schmoozer and cannot bring to the role the genius required to get the Eurozone out of intensive care -

They can do nothing about Brexit, they can do nothing about trade tensions, they cannot force Germany to loosen the fiscal purse strings, they have no answers to growing political instability, and they cannot force the pace of innovation and structural reform as Europe requires. Central banks have been reasonably effective in keeping the patient alive during the political paralysis of the last ten years, but they can provide no long term cure for the chronic nature of today’s economic ills.

Poor Sajid Javid's spending review was lost in the Parliamentary noise, but I think he is making the right moves. Plenty to include in the Conservative election leaflets, anyway - but it was a budget for more than that. Unlike the dreadful turncoat Hammond, he's actual budgeting for Brexit - and that's a first.

Good riddance to a meretricious arsewipe

For anyone landing on this post from the post title, I bet you knew the subject straight away. At least UK readers would. Yes, this is the excellent news that the meretricious little arsewipe who has disgraced the office of Speaker for the past nine years (I think - I really can't be bothered to check the creature's Bio) is to vacate the chair.

Parliament was first broadcast on radio at the same time as I acquired my very first 'music centre' as they were called in those days. A chipboard-plated slab with a plastic cover, a record deck and cassette player on the top and controls and radio tuning window on the front, with a pair of little chipboard cased speakers. It may have been low tech but by God it put me straight at the centre of our national politics in full stereo FM. George Thomas was in the chair, and as the historic Callaghan VoC debate went out live, the debate in which Callaghan half-sang a Marie Lloyd ditty and Mrs T called him 'Frit'. Callaghan lost by 311 to 310 and the rest is history. George Thomas was magnificent. I was transfixed, and in thrall thereafter to the wonder of our Parliament. There was one factor of which I think I and all others were unaware at the time - as Wiki tells it

In the BBC documentary "A Parliamentary Coup" it was revealed that Bernard Weatherill played a critical role in the defeat of the government in the vote of confidence. As the vote loomed, Labour's deputy Chief Whip, Walter Harrison approached Weatherill to enforce the pairing convention that if a sick MP from the Government could not vote, an MP from the Opposition would abstain to compensate. Weatherill said that pairing had never been intended for votes on Matters of Confidence that meant the life or death of the Government and it would be impossible to find a Conservative MP who would agree to abstain. However, after a moment's reflection, he offered that he himself would abstain, because he felt it would be dishonourable to break his word with Harrison. Harrison was so impressed by Weatherill's offer – which would have effectively ended his political career – that he released Weatherill from his obligation and so the Government fell by one vote on the agreement of gentlemen.

Of course that same gentleman, Bernard Weatherill, took the seat as the next Speaker, and set standards of equity and probity in the chair that remain unsurpassed.

After Weatherill came Betty Boothroyd - ex Tiller Girl, and to date our only female Speaker. She brought a twinkle and a touch of humour to the chair in a way that in no wise diminished either her dignity, the authority of the Speaker or her command of the chamber. For the matters of her term, 1992 - 2000, she was perfect.

Then came Gorbals Mick, an inadequate and corrupt machine politician with little merit who sought to suppress, by power and bullying, the expenses scandal from reaching the press. And after Gorbals Mick the arsewipe, that sanctimonious dwarf Bercow. Two lousy Speakers, Bercow the very worst in my long memory and possibly in the life of our Parliament.

I could not help catch some of those oleaginous encomiums bleated from the benches yesterday at the diminutive cretin, who has devalued the office, shat on the accomplishments of former Speakers and corrupted the business of the house. How low have we sunk to tolerate such worthless trash at the heart of our democracy.   

Another momentous week ahead

We are living through times that will feature large in the history texts of the future. These are times as portentous as those of 1688 or 1848. This time we are not fighting a Catholic monarch or a wealthy land-owning oligarchy for control of our lives and futures, but an elite of globalist supranationalists who would trade away nation and people for petty self-advantage.

Readers and contributors here previously drew our attention to the error of appointing Amber Rudd to government. I was ready to give Boris the benefit of the doubt - but it seems she gulled and fooled me as much as she did the Prime Minister. With a week ahead of events as momentous as any I have known in my life, I'm giving the rest of this morning's post over to a comment made by Sobers to the post below, which deserves a more prominent airing; 

"So why don't they just accept the democratic vote of 17.4 million people and give up then? Why can't they accept losing?"

Because they don't understand what losing is. What one needs to understand is the the Remain element of the HoC, and their supporters outside it (which are not all Remainers by far, just the vocal ones) are all members of the same class - the one who for 30 years, ever since Thatcher basically, have been the winners of the political game. They are the sort of people who swan from politics to heading large charities, from heading quangos to think tanks, to well paid media jobs, to running NHS trusts, or whatever. They all swim in the same sea, move in the same circles. They are the movers and shakers in State funded circles. They consider they run the country, and for 30 years its always moved in the direction they agree with. Yes there might be a nominal Conservative government every now and again, but none of them ever do anything to reverse the flow of more regulation, more State control of everything, more immigration, more taxes, more public spending, more European integration. A Tory government might slow the advance a bit, but the direction of travel always remains the same.

So in their heads they have decided that what they want is the only way the country can move in. Its just the natural state of affairs to them. Anything else is immoral as far as they are concerned. Just suggesting slowing down the speed of travel generates plenty of vitriol at those who dare to question them, the very idea that someone might throw the supertanker into reverse doesn't even fit in their comprehension.

So all of this isn't really about the pros and cons of being in a supra-national body such as the EU any more. Its about a political class being faced for the first time ever with the word 'No'. Its so discombobulated them, the mask has slipped. No longer are the usual platitudes about 'working families' and 'democratic choice' even paid lip service. They have been thrown out as their naked desire for power is exposed. Its become a nothing less than a power struggle - who is to govern, the People, or the Political Class? That's why they can't let Brexit happen, not because of any specific arguments about it, but because its become an existential fight - if they lose it they lose everything. If the voters can force the political class to leave the EU against their will, what other ideas might the people get?

All Out! Boris to go on strike

As the early Autumn chill bites, an environmentally-friendly coke brazier at the entrance to Downing Street warms both the government pickets and the policemen on duty. Michael Gove leans his strike placard against the railings and warms his hands at the glowing coals. He is talking football with one of the policemen.

" ..... and on the pitch, he moves like Nijinsky"

"Like a horse? Not sure I see that, Mr Gove"

"No no not the racehorse, the dan ....." they are assailed by a fug of heady gin vapours

"I demand to see the Prime Minister!" screeches Mother Soubry, for it is she

"Scab! Scab! Blackleg! Blackleg!" chants JRM languorously. He is wearing his lounge-lizard double-breasted boilersuit. Chalk striped. A police officer raises an eyebrow in warning.

"You can't" snaps Gove at Mother Soubry "he's on strike."

"But I've been deputed by the Commons to demand that he he obeys them! Either he gets on with it or we'll .... we will ....."

"You will what?" snarls Gove "trigger a general election? Yes please! Why do you think he's on strike? All you have to do is vote him out and we go to the country!"

"But we can't do that! Most of us would, er, um.. a lot of us would ..."

"Lose your seats? Be kicked out by voters? Be thrown on the scrapheap?"

Outside on Whitehall a furious squawking and a flurry of feathers indicated that the Leader of the Opposition was on his way to the House.

Mother Soubry sidles up to one of the policemen "Got any gin, love?" she asks plaintively