Trumpageddon?

We shall not be moved, sang the peaceniks of former years as the children of the post-war generation began to exercise their hard won rights to free assembly and free expression and eschewed the taking up of pitchforks that in earlier centuries may have been the last resort of desperate peasants. Freedom and democracy and the brotherhood of man and the right to turn on, tune in and drop out and let’s all hold hands until we get a better world. The young became enfranchised and politically active in a way they never had before and some things genuinely changed for the better.

And on they went, those children to become some of the wealthiest and happiest people on the planet. Maybe because in an age before the instant wish fulfilment of the internet they had the sustained will to organise, spread the word and turn out; it took resolve and stamina to protest back then and it was effective, eventually. But in the present, when 89.5 million people follow Justin Bieber on Twitter, when the world watches Kim Kardashian’s enormous and ever bared arse and a movement can spring up and die in a day without anybody leaving their bedrooms, protests are just a form of entertainment.

“Anything worth watching?” Not really. “Wanna hit the streets, we can get an Uber?” It’s all too easy and ironically, the ease and convenience of the world we live in distorts perception. It might feel like you’re taking up cudgels for a cause, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find you can buy ready-made protest kits from Amazon: V mask, banner, your-own-message-here placards and tips on taking the best demonstration selfies. There are so many gatherings of zombie-like, pre-contribution citizens that if there is any unified message other than ‘Me, me, me’ it is lost in the chaff and clutter of information overload; it just sounds like an enormous flock of roadrunners out there.

As the US Election result became clearer Shaun King, of Black Lives Matter tweeted: “Dear Friends, If Donald Trump wins within the next hour, we still have 70 days before he becomes President WE MUST ORGANIZE OUR RESISTANCE.” Whatever happened to the democratic will of all the people? Once, people demonstrated in order to be allowed to vote. Now they demonstrate, nay demand, that those votes be ignored or overturned and they have marched on Trump Tower in New York City against ‘Trumpageddon’ and ‘Trumpocalypse’... oh and the all-encompassing ‘hate’.

Does any of this sound depressingly familiar? The anti-living-within-our-means protests, the anti-Tory demonstrations, the anti-Brexit movement. How come we didn’t see anti-Labour demonstrations... at least until Blair upset the bien-pensants of the ‘new establishment’. I think it may be down to a matter of confidence. The students always were revolting, to resurrect an old joke, but today’s ‘yoof’ seem to be in thrall to a whole swathe of loosely bound minority rights issues and emboldened by years of soft administrations willing to indulge them. After half a century of moral grandstanding they have come to believe that what they want is theirs by rights and creating mayhem is the way to get it.

You'd better believe it!

Meanwhile the rest of us, too busy getting on with getting on, grin ruefully because we can see what they can’t. While the entitled classes were going about the business of insisting that their needs were met, that their rights were respected and loudly proclaiming that they would reclaim the streets, end globalisation, abolish war, fight poverty and establish universal equality; while the mob was loudly demanding that everybody else listen to what they had to say, they rather forgot to listen. To see the fallout is truly glorious.

Trumped!

Well, it’s settled; everybody who disagrees with you is Hitler. For the last few years this has been an egalitarian phenomenon – that both sides could openly call the other ‘Nazis’ without a hint of irony. Well, make your minds up – you can’t both be Nazis. Just as racist and bigot and homophobe have been largely abandoned as labels you would do anything to avoid, being called a Nazi has taken on the status of being something of a badge of honour. Being ‘heiled’ usually means you’ve won the argument; maybe not in substance, but in staying power and most importantly, amusement value. This is the routine:

Between mutual followers a discussion on social media arises concerning a topic on which, apparently, none of you are qualified or competent to comment. This invalidity is determined by a third party disagreeing with you saying, for instance, that gender fluidity is a vital concern for only a tiny minority, or that uncontrolled low-skilled immigration isn’t an unalloyed good. These are clearly dangerous opinions, which must be corrected. Fortunately, brave souls scour the Internet for the opportunity to right wrongs by wading in, calling you Hitler and then blocking you.

Collect all the hysteria and knee-jerk blocking together and a clear picture emerges. It is overwhelmingly those on the progressive left who call dibs on the morally higher ground. They are simply better human beings than you are. And then they call for book-burning, banning and gagging. Their mother ship is the Guardian, hilariously and unselfconsciously branding everybody else as Nazi dupes while spreading their own messages of hate. Now it seems, posters alerting you to the possible threat of being blown up are – you guessed it – neo-Nazi propaganda. 

They talk about this hateful rise of the right, this dangerous nationalist surge, never seeing that the rise is not in reality but in rhetoric. It is projection; if you disagree with them then you must not be rational and thus it is that the left finally separates itself wholesale from the feelings and sensibilities of the working people who, they imagine, they ‘fight’ for. Last night Dan Snow’s visceral howl of pain for US Election Day was: “It's the anniversary of Hitler's 1923 coup. Please please let that be the only fascist takeover attempt that today is remembered for.”

The left-leaning media talk about how bitter and divisive the campaigning has been, which is generally code for “We don’t understand why everybody doesn’t agree with us!” But isn’t this at the heart of it all? For two decades the illiberal left-leaning administrations of much of the first world have had their chance at delivering their ‘third way’ and it hasn’t worked. As it happens, working people, whatever their nationality, have far more in common with each other than they have with their unelected ‘champions’. This goes against the narrative, however, so it must be ignored.

Winter is coming? I cancelled winter already!

And while they’ve been ignoring the voice, the feelings, the real concerns of the bulk of the population, labelling their fears as hate and dismissing their frustration as insignificant against the backdrop of the great socialist dream the people have been looking for a way ahead. Not by organising mass demonstrations. Not by crying Hitler and denouncing every opinion with which they disagree. Not by violence or even very much intemperate language, but at the ballot box, the way democracy is supposed to work. The real Nazis just don’t realise they are the Nazis. 

Building on sand...

I spent this weekend assessing the ability of a bunch of trainee electricians to carry out fault finding. I spent all of last week assessing the ability of a variety of candidates in carrying out inspection, testing, certification-of and reporting-on electrical installations. And one thing is clear; you can’t build a decent house on weak foundations. I see the same basic errors, time and again and it has been a preoccupation for me to find out why so many trade specialists are so poorly equipped with a foundation skill.

In the forces, trainers are always taught: “Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” And repeat. At the heart of all that is going wrong is a failure to get to grips with basics, to understand what is being asked and to care about getting it right. There are fundamental issues with the skills, knowledge and attitudes of some of the products of our education system. Literacy is grudgingly and somewhat sketchily demonstrated but numeracy is a mystery, as, it seems, is the desire to actually understand; quick fixes are so attractive compared with going the hard miles to get it right.

It’s not the stupid – people are rarely quite as stupid as I’m often tempted to believe – it’s the lack of preparation and ability to learn. Original information, the first version you hear, tends to be quite sticky, so if education starts out with the wrong premise, it can be hard to alter those incorrect foundations and dangerous to try and build on them before they have been consolidated. The euphemism ‘low information voters’ is a deliberate slur and ‘ill-informed’ means uneducated. If people hear this often enough, the foundations on which their democracy is built will include the notions that they are incapable of understanding complex issues and that their vote doesn’t really matter.

It’s just like my candidates; they show up with a lack of confidence and an unclear understanding of the importance of getting it right and then flounder around, not entirely sure what they are trying to achieve and hoping to, literally, tick the right boxes. So, if voters are told that they have the power and then, when they exercise that power are told they don’t really have the power, is it any wonder that frustration ensues? The ill-informed, of course, occupy both sides of the EU question. Maybe this is why the EU is so keen to avoid referenda; those shaky foundations don’t support the house they want to build.

But it seems that it’s only those who regard themselves as highly intelligent and informed who are in doubt over what ‘leave’ means. As more cracks appear, the current quick fix is to tell themselves that although people voted to leave the EU, nobody voted to leave the Common Market. What will the next patch be? That free movement of people was never on the ballot, that nobody voted to specifically reject legislation from Brussels? That sticky information, the thing that people believe because it was the first thing they were told? Wasn’t that the bit where David Cameron said the people would decide?

Built on Jack...

But let’s say the action to give Parliament a vote one Article 50 was an innocent attempt to enforce the rule of law. And let’s say all the Remain MPs whose constituencies voted to leave do vote to uphold the referendum outcome when they exercise that vote. And let’s say MPs like Hillary Benn don’t try and delay the invocation of Article 50 on the spurious grounds that we have to wait until European elections are over. Do you honestly think Brexit will still mean the Brexit that those who voted for it expected? Our whole society is like the house that Jack built, with one modification built on top of another. We need to get a grip on this before the whole bloody lot comes tumbling down.

Heel!

When I was growing up the townsfolk still referred to ‘Squire’ Bell and it was a given that this man, whose family had once owned much of the land on which the town was built, was looked up to. But not everybody felt that way and in a free country – a phrase that was used every day – that was their prerogative. As a mark of respect, however, many of those who wore caps, would still doff them. The class system, for all its flaws, engendered a certain sense of belonging and a rung to perch on between endeavours to climb higher. Our local lord and master, it seemed, had been a worthy one and had earned that respect.

Fifty years later, however, the world is very different. Far from the smoky back rooms of pubs and working men’s clubs, insurgency and revolt can be arranged on the fly. No furtive passing of notes or spreading of pamphlets is needed to know what’s going on (at least in part) and according to the great theme of the age, everybody is the equal of everybody else. The automatic respect for birthright is considered ludicrous and the doffing of caps is merely a metaphorical device, the physical manifestation of which may well be entirely outside the experience of most of those who use it.

Enoch Powell used the old colonial expression ‘the whip hand’ in his infamous speech and as a motif for overbearing entitlement the use of the whip appears regularly in historical drama illustrating the relationship between the pit bulls of the tyrannical and rapacious upper classes and their lowly, working class underlings. Who would defend such an order today? As you will hear every day this week, ‘men fought and died for free speech and we should remember them’ and for two minutes on Friday, all decent people will stand silent in such memory.

Freedoms. The EU’s so-called freedoms of movement, of goods, services, capital and people, are at the heart of our current big debate, but there is also at stake that very freedom of expression whose winning will be silently commemorated during the two minutes. All of which makes it a bit rich for the Bar Council to effectively demand respect for the judges who, on  point of law, have aroused anger and indignation and not a little amount of fear in the far-from-silent majority who voted to leave the EU. It is one thing to have freedom to choose; quite another to have ‘freedoms’ imposed upon us.

Claiming that disapproval of the verdict somehow challenges the independence of the judiciary is a pretty far stretch, even for those whose contempt for the underlings on which they serve judgement seems at times to know no bounds. Demanding that the government back up this demand, hiding behind the skirts of the Lord Chancellor and insisting the press have no right to criticise their opinion, only serves to illustrate what people mean when they refer to an ‘out of touch elite’.

It's a free country...

Nobody doffs their cap any more, not by diktat at least. The sequestered huddles of fearful Wizards of Oz; frightened little men, demanding respect and trying to use the mechanisms of state to put the little people in their place and accept the unaccountable decisions being imposed upon them? Isn’t this precisely the system that the derided ‘populist’ movements across the developed world are railing against? They are repeatedly told ‘you just don’t get it’. Well doesn’t their running to mummy demonstrate exactly this? You rule us, judge us and police us by our consent. You can only abuse this old dog so far before it bites back.

Laws and Asses

Well, what a rum old do this is. Since the 24^th June, although many did indeed accept the admittedly slim outcome of the referendum, some on the remain side have hardly covered themselves in glory by belly-aching at every turn and cheering on every dip in the value of the pound or the FTSE or the employment figures that seemed, however fleetingly to prove their thesis; their thesis that Britain outside the EU could not possibly survive. They seized on every negative announcement as proof that Brexit would bring the sky down but when those expectations largely failed to materialise they did their level best to wish economic and cultural disaster upon us.

It would be impossible to ever calculate, for any turn of events, how much was caused by genuine fears regarding Brexit, as opposed to confected fears spread by influential Remainers. Investment and success in business and in the markets is often founded on and driven by optimism and perception. It is entirely possible to destabilise individuals, companies and even the whole economy by indulging in morbid pessimism. Call it a Ratner moment; telling everybody “We’re shit” is hardly likely to improve things. In the meantime, of course, many £billions will have been made by the fundies and other speculators, relishing the chance to indulge in a bit of profitable mischief.

Whatever else may be at stake, make no bones about it, there are many, in government and beyond, who do not and will not accept the now decried ‘will of the people’ and the referendum promise made by David Cameron’s government has become ‘advisory’. Yes, we know the referendum was not made legally binding – some say to this very end – but it was promulgated very clearly that whatever the electorate chose would be carried out. At the moment, the 48% believe they are the majority; in the future, the writing on the barn door may yet be mysteriously altered to reflect that ‘fact’.

The Remain trope and taunt: “You wanted parliamentary democracy; now you’ve got it you don’t like it!” holds no water. Whether wilfully or through actual ignorance the Remain lobby simply do not understand one of the principle reasons the vote went against them; the sense that democracy had been given away to unaccountable and distant elites. It doesn’t really matter if those elites are in Brussels or here at home, if the machinations of law are too complex, too subtle for voters to grasp then there is something wrong with the law.

Nuance is the problem – if this meaning of law is so friable that we need expensively trained and remunerated lawyers to tell the little people what it means, then the law is no better than the koran or the bible. (Religious scholars are a con; charlatans purporting to interpret the literal word of a non-existent god.) If legal decisions can be appealed and appeals overturned by examining the same texts then we are not dealing with anything solid but shifting sands whose navigable channels can be bought by the highest bidder, the law is, in the eyes of the masses, just wrong. And every legal decision unintelligible to the average man – such as not deporting violent criminals with multiple convictions because they have rights their own actions denied others – heaps mockery on top of suspicion.

The sophistry being used to justify in retrospect that which should have been clear from the outset is not an honourable use of law. I agree we need checks and balances on the power of governments and high officials, but those checks and balances are supposed to return the power to ‘we, the people’. Odd then, isn’t it, that the noisy demonstrations, the hysterical rhetoric, the wailing and gnashing of teeth having largely been ignored as the protests of bad losers, the large part of the establishment who want to remain in the EU are now relying on a supposedly private citizen’s action to get their way. And relying in turn on unelected and possibly biddable lawyers? Because, of course, no judge has never been found wanting in moral fibre or propriety, have they?

I always expected I’d be long dead before Britain became a truly successful, independent nation state again, but I thought I might get to see a glimpse of the optimistic upturn as we left the sinking EU tramp steamer. That is looking less likely by the day. Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I’m beginning to believe that the current interpretation of parliamentary democracy may well be the worst form of democracy.