Who's in charge here?

A rum old do, yesterday. First we have Call-me-Dave announcing some thinly thought-through and badly launched policy to do with English language lessons for certain muslim wives, the shadowy outcasts from British society, who remain in Pakistan even as their corporeal selves inhabit back-to-back terraces in Bradford. Then we have the unedifying sight of Parliament, hoist by their own petard and backed into a corner whereby they must debate the wholly un-British notion of banning a prominent person for having an opinion.

I say debate but it was more of a virtue-signalling whine-fest by a bunch of the sort of illiberal morons the left would allow to make decisions affecting everybody. Because, of course, the left know best how we should all behave. When I say ‘the left’ I also include a good many Tory MPs because the Tories have truly lost their way as well, desperate to fall into the centre-left vacuum created by Corbyn’s dragging Labour back to the heady days of Ban the Bomb and the hippy-dippy Greenham Common peace camps. What can any of them be thinking? (Can any of them be thinking?)

Firstly Trump. What caused the mother of all Parliaments, in what was formerly proud to be a free country, to waste time discussing the banning from these shores of a United States presidential candidate who directly echoed the views of millions of American and British people? If the leaders of countries must – as the EU clones all do – sing out from a monotone song-sheet a pack of lies few of them can genuinely believe, then we have no leadership at all. Thankfully, despite the whining of the perpetually offended the inevitable conclusion of the ‘debate’ was the only one that made any sense. Had they actually decided to ban Trump we may as well have shut up shop there and then.

But there’s the flaw in ‘direct democracy’. As a twitter dialogue clarified, socially conservative people – the natural order of the traditional British - tend to be independently minded and don't need to rally to social causes of low merit. This is in contrast to the visceral reaction of the social media rent-a-mob who went at it like knives. Half a million people signed that petition to debate banning Trump, so what? Over a million people petitioned the BBC to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson. Neither represents the strong views of the majority of people, they are simply barometers of reaction to events and depend heavily both on entrenched views and how they were spun.

Maybe we should ban petitions and polls altogether on the basis that they are likely to engage ‘the wrong type’ of voter? Radio 4 is currently airing a series looking at the failures of the pre-election pollsters who put Labour ahead and failed to predict the election outcome. It turns out that the polling organisations have belatedly realised that knocking on doors in the daytime was more likely to garner the views of Labour voters. (Nobody on the programme I heard dared to explain why, but we all know the reasons.)

Similarly while nobody with a sense of proportion who values freedom of speech would want to ban somebody like Trump, on comedy value alone, the opponents of freedom readily engage in the sort of rent-a-mob frenzy that fuels movements like Tell Mama and Unite Against Fascism, both of which, along with many others, agitate for aggression against ‘the silent majority’.

New petition - Teach Trump English?

Of course, it’s not only the majority who have no voice. Part of Cameron’s thinking depends on the notion that if those closeted muslim wives were to speak-a-de-English more good they would be able to engage in the community and help to counter the threat of radicalisation. (If only they could talk, eh?) Like the pollsters this flies in the face of reality and only serves to bolster the opinions of those who believe our leaders are spineless when it comes to the real threats to our way of life. Trump has no plans to behead, burn, rape or eradicate our traditional culture, whereas islam has expressed every one of those desires and has taken steps to carry them out. Who is the real threat here? It seems to me that it is those ‘leaders’ who refuse to lead but are happy to be led.