Cracking on

I am northern and working class but, thankfully, not from one of those tribal Labour cities. I grew up in rural North Yorkshire where the farming community ensured the Conservatives were the natural party of choice. Although politics was never really discussed at home, my dad being Labour by sheer obstinacy, my mother flirting with whichever party might best benefit the family, I became aware of dad’s refusal to countenance any other option whenever the subject did arise.

He was a labourer, he asserted and therefore he must vote Labour, as his dad had done before him. As a teenager I began to see how ridiculous that made him. When my mother voted to install Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street I was away at university but I can well imagine my father’s disgust. He hated the woman for no other reason than he knew he must. Even today, having benefitted from her right to buy policy, he refuses to engage in any conversation about Mrs T, while mum, emboldened in her advancing years takes delight in occasionally poking the bear.

So, I think I understand how hard it must have been for died-in-the-wool Labour supporters in towns which until this election would have been proud to declare themselves red forever. An unthinking blind adherence to doctrine with no understanding of the harm that doctrine does has propped up Labour over and over again. But in 1979 it was workers, fed up to the back teeth with the unremitting mediocrity of their party who revolted and turned to Thatcher. I like to imagine it was the working wives, like my mother, who were largely responsible for that victory.

Now, forty years later, something very similar has happened. But has the Labour Party acknowledged it? Not one bit, for to listen to some of their commentary it appears that they are blaming the voters themselves. Too selfish, too racist, too stupid, too gullible; how dare they decide for themselves which way to vote? Emily Thornberry has been reported as saying to a colleague that she was glad her voters weren’t ‘as stupid as yours’. Yours? This proprietorial attitude towards ‘their’ voters says so much about how far Labour has strayed from the path it originally set out on.

No doubt Thornberry and Co welcome the protests that have broken out in London and Glasgow as the brownshirts of Antifa likewise refuse to accept the result. But the verdict is very much in and lost they most certainly have. They have lost authority, credibility and dignity and the longer they hold onto their belief that those votes belong to them the longer it will take them to realise that they are the architects of their own, crushing defeat.

This is no horror story...

Meanwhile the mood in the rest of the country is one of relief. And of hope. And if Boris Johnson goes forward with half the resolve that won him this election the celebrations will take a long time to fade. A happy new year is in prospect for all and no matter how much they hate him, that includes the petulant children of the hard left. I still don’t fully trust him on Brexit, but I hope to be proved wrong. But anyway, the deed is done the battle won and the war is ours for the winning. So let’s crack on.

Pocket Full of Kryptonite

The spin doctors are weaving their webs everywhere. As fast as one side of the political contest magics up some miracle offering the other (for there are, really, only two) hauls out the green kryptonite to render it powerless. More money for the NHS? Pah, this barely goes to redress the balance following years of Tory cuts! Making society work for everybody? Yes, but it works best for Labour officials. Raising the National Insurance threshold to help the poorest? How will that help those who are too poor to even pay it?

Like every election before it we are – now the manifesti are finally published – engaged in a battle for supremacy between a motley collection of sub-heroes whose powers are nullified when the searing searchlight of truth is shone on them. Every utterance, every pledge, every ‘ambition’ withers under the light of inquiry, to be revealed as yet another false promise. Why do they do it? They can no more resist it than Superman can decline to save the planet. And everywhere the opposition’s Lex Luthers lie in wait ready to humiliate them.

Ian Lavery was banging on this morning, in ‘that’ accent, about re-ordering society to benefit the workers, but every such endeavour has previously failed because Labour believe in a zero sum game where in order to enrich poor people we have to ‘enpoor’ rich people. The trouble is the rich have their own personal supplies of kryptonite and deploy it at will to render impotent the powers of Taxman. Meanwhile the workers, who formerly gravitated towards Labour instinctively realise that their natural ally is any administration which will just let them work.

Let’s get the nation back to prosperity without the negative influence of the morass of confected workers’ rights which, once you have dealt with sick pay, holidays, a bit of maternity allowance and the right not to be exploited are as comprehensive as they need to be. Let’s ditch the ever-expanding suite of legislation that seeks to govern how we think and let’s stop giving every tiny voice a megaphone. Let’s recognise difference, accept it, accommodate it, work with it, but reserve the right to mock it, not endow it with super powers that prevent all criticism.

Let’s stop spinning every drawback as an opportunity and every entrepreneur as an evil exploiter of human capital. Let’s, usher in an age of honesty where the ordinary voter has a real choice between candidates who have been genuinely clear (not a politician’s ‘I have been clear’) about what they stand for and would be mortified if found out in a lie. Let’s, um, call a spade a spade and elect representatives who will do likewise. And let them stand on their honour or fall on their swords.

There are no super heroes here...

As it is, the disgraceful, dishonourable architects of Britain’s crooked, broken society are busily concocting illusions of smoke and mirrors to entice, but also to obfuscate and deceive. The artifice of representative democracy has been shown to be a villain’s charter, allowing MPs to be elected on one agenda, but serve another, to be of the people but for another people entirely. This festival of duplicity, this fête of fraud is not the open democracy which was so hard fought for. Under Westminster a humming noise is heard. it is Cromwell spinning in his unmarked grave.

Politics as usual

Even as the poll ratings tumble, supporters of the Brexit Party are bravely clinging to the flotsam of their mantra: ‘change politics for good’. It’s a great idea, it is sorely needed. And it is never going to happen. The contest, such as it is, is between the two parties which have alternately held power throughout my lifetime. Two parties which currently seem to be trying their best to not get elected. Every manifesto announcement is palpably false; every pledge, every commitment undeliverable.

This is because politics as it has become is a centrist mêlée in which neither side can gain the upper hand and the country always loses. The pundits are saying different, that we have a choice between quite-right and extreme-left, but the reality is that all parties are courting a populist mandate and fighting for the votes of a people long cowed by the spectre of political correctness and afraid of offending. The few dissenting votes cast will go the likes of the Brexit Party and under the first-past-the-post system are likely to fall on fallow ground.

In years gone by we genuinely did have a choice between a socialist, Labour administration whose authoritarian ideals meant they would provide so long as we behaved ourselves and paid our taxes and a more laisse faire Conservatism where we would provide and the government would behave itself.. as long as we paid our taxes. The Liberals, later to morph into the Liberal Democrats would, as is their lot, be the natural repository for the lost votes of those without such strong tribal convictions.

Those who saw themselves bold and different would pledge for the BNP, Cornish separatists or the Monster Raving Loony Party and other fringe rebellions in the certain knowledge that they would never form a government and never influence government policy. But then came UKIP. Nigel Farage, a political force of nature, took a protest movement and brought it national credibility against a barrage of pretty foul play from the establishment to a position where it promised to challenge ‘politics as usual’. And had one elected MP.

This is now, I believe, the fate of The Brexit Party. As much as I and millions of others want to change our politics, we have no model of what that change looks like. For every couch rebel there is also a tribal Labour voter who will return to the socialist fold under Jeremy Corbyn. For every disenfranchised ex-Tory, like me, there will be two who will breathe a sigh of relief that Boris gives them hope of getting their party back.

So, my prediction, for all that it is worth, is a workable Conservative majority under a single elected term Prime Minister, which will muddle through with a form of Brexit that satisfies nobody and then oversee a slow economic recovery just enough to steady the ship. Shortly thereafter, business as usual will see the long knives out again, the EU will come back to savage the Tories and a watered down, post-Corbyn opposition will be all set to let go of the purse strings once more. And so the circle of British political life turns.

Viva la Revolución!

Nigel Farage deserves a peerage, a knighthood at least; what he has done is the closest anybody has ever done in my lifetime to change things. But the disunited might of the entrenched order has done what it always does. The establishment does not tolerate outsiders and one of the ways it quietens their voice is to bring them inside. A Lord Farage would be rendered toothless and regarded as a sell-out, so such an honour would be a poisoned chalice. So what would YOU do? And as for that single Brexit Party MP, it’s going to a cold, lonely few years.

Free as a bird

The party manifestos which have been falling over each other to get airtime are, in the main, packs of unsubstantiated lies. Actually, scrub that; they are composed entirely of unsubstantiated lies. The best that can be said of most manifesto pledges is that they are fanciful and naïve wishful thinking and should be regarded in the light of the referendum, which asked if we wanted to remain in the EU or leave the EU without making it clear that only one choice would ever be acceptable to Parliament.

Political parties, for all their bluster, hate elections because they must knowingly trot out bigger and steamier piles of bullshit than their opponents as the truth is just not sexy enough. It is not sufficient to base claims on your track record in government because if you were a government of fiscal probity everybody hates you for not dishing out enough free stuff; and if you were a government of giveaways everybody hates you because you gave it all to the wrong people.

But who doesn’t like the promise of a better, cheaper tomorrow, even if you have a deep suspicion that tomorrow will never arrive? Labour’s free fibre broadband and internet offer may well be an elephant trap for the Tories – top that, Boris! – but it portends both horror and delight, depending on whether you have been watching the world for the last few decades or not. State-run access to everybody’s online interactions, round the clock, is a totalitarian administration’s wet dream, but, you know, free, right?

If that doesn’t conjure up dystopian visions of 1984 and every post-apocalyptic movie spawned since the dawn of cinema then look around at the world today. China and North Korea are great examples to study. But I’m sure Jeremy Corbyn’s magic free internet will be run on entirely kinder, gentler lines. For sure. Of course. No doubt. But wait, there’s more: Aaron Bastani yesterday opined that should Labour get into government and see a second term they also have ambitions for a publicly owned digital payments system. What could possibly go wrong there?

Then today we get free dentistry. I mean, what’s not to like? For what it’s worth I do believe the state has a role to play in protecting the public from the worst excesses of unrestrained capitalism, but we can’t just lurch from one extreme to the other. Everything has a price; everything has to be paid for somehow and we all know that the burden of payment falls hardest on those with the least. For those at the top it’s only money, but when you have no money the price is freedom. Every time.

People who are considering voting for ‘free stuff’ need to consider the value of choice. The Corbyn/McDonnell/Marx axis is offering a world where you can have any colour you like, as long as it is black. Where the state provides, shortages follow. So, for all their idle chatter about shoring up the rotting hulk of the NHS, waiting times would get longer, medicines would become scarcer and the bed count would shrink, as sure as night follows day. If the government was the only baker, every day we would run out of bread; not from any malign intent but through an ideological inability to allow independent enterprise to pick up the slack.

It's all free, I tell you! 

Likewise, the apparent gift of free access to the all the world’s information will inevitably become free access to some information; information which is deemed suitable and information which does not threaten the government. ‘Approved information’. Because free is not the same as freedom. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: You can have it all or you can have it for free, but you can’t have it all for free.