Ignorance is Strength

 What should happen, do you think, when a crime has been committed?  For me the answer is simple: the offenders should be brought to account; justice should be done and be seen to be done; the law should be applied.  No, that’s wrong; if the law is broken it’s far better to spend heaps of money thinking up new laws, legislating for more legislation, laying rules upon rules.  That’s the way to do it; that’s the British way.

We’re having a Public Inquiry here at the moment into the ethics of the press.  Headed by Lord Justice Leveson, it was set up in a panic by Prime Minister David Cameron last year in the wake of the News International phone hacking scandal.  Panic, I say, because it was a way of distancing himself from people with whom he was altogether too cosy. 

Oh, how we love Public Inquiries in this country.  It’s a way of ensuring that resources are well spent, not on the trivialities of life like decent public services but on truly important things like legal fees.  So far Leveson has soaked up £5.6million, that’s about $8.9million. Just think of all the golf club bashes that will cover.  

Some people think it might have been possible to short-circuit this legal circus.  After all, the various crimes of the less savoury hacks are all covered by existing law: phone hacking is illegal; prejudicing issues to be tested in the courts is illegal; publishing unfounded accusations against the innocent is covered by the law of libel.  Forget all that nonsense; let Leveson dance. 

The issue itself is unsavoury enough.  No grand principle of freedom was being defended.  The hacking hacks at News International were not looking into issues of great public interest.  There was no Woodward and Bernstein fearlessly exposing political corruption.  No; there was a lot of slimy slugs breaking into the private conversations of celebrities and crime victims, a practice that gives muckraking an altogether new meaning.  The law would have done well to follow its natural course.

Instead we have the Leveson sledgehammer bashing a few nuts; instead we are likely to get new regulators challenging the freedom of the press.  We may very well be about to see a process of even more intimidation by those powerful enough to have genuine matters of public interest hidden from the public.  In the baleful atmosphere created by Leveson it’s already happening.  I note that one journalist even received a complaint from a foreign despot, the King of Bahrain, irritated by her coverage of the death of forty of his benighted subjects in anti-government protests.

I have no interest at all in knowing that a seedy and sordid little man like Max Mosley, one of the driving forces behind the move to gag the press, likes to have his bare backside spanked by prostitutes dressed as Nazis.  But I do have an interest in defending free expression; so surely do all of us who blog and tweet, all of us journalists in a sense, all threatened by regulation and intimidation. 

Are we really going to have to re-fight battles that we thought won in ages past because of few untypical arses were interested in celebrity arses?  We may soon have occasion to feel the full truth of William Wordsworth’s poem London, 1802, which opens with some particularly memorable lines;

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. 

If Leveson follows the anticipated trajectory into statutory press regulation then the pen will indeed be stagnant.  We may have need of a new John Milton precisely because he was the first great defender of a free press.  In Areopagitica, a pamphlet published in 1644 during the height of the English Civil War, he argued for free expression and against licensing and censorship.  “Give me the liberty”, he wrote, “to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

I also call to mind John Wilkes, another champion of press freedom, who over two centuries ago argued in North Britain that “The liberty of the press is the birthright of a Briton, and is justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country.” 

But my favourite quote about press freedom is an observation by George Orwell: “Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.”  It’s a bit like two plus two equals four: if that is granted all else follows. But we may about to find that a Ministry of Truth has emerged post-Leveson, with powers of regulation and interference far in excess of anything that exists at present. 

Between Leveson and Freedom there is no third way.  David Cameron would do well to be mindful of that simple truth.  But for some Ignorance is Strength.  

Bishops and Toads

James Delingpole is one of my favourite journalists. He was in great form last month in the Telegraph, aiming several well-placed shots at the risible Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London and the third most senior clergyman in the Church of England.

Apparently the benighted bish visited the Occupy protestors on Christmas Day, handing out a box of chocolates in his munificence. These are people whose dirty presence (they certainly look dirty to me) has disfigured Saint Paul’s Cathedral for several weeks now, the worst kind of rent-a-mob lowlifes in their ugly little tents, like some kind of gypsy encampment.

The sooner they are off the better, one would have thought; the better for London, the better for Saint Paul’s and the better for the Church. But, no; Chartres has promised them a permanent memorial. With the chocolate came some saccharine: “The canons have been very imaginative and consulting with the protestors about how to leave a legacy of the protests. We are looking for honouring what has been said when the camp moves on.”

Is he married, I wonder? He reminds me of Bishop Thomas Proudie from Barchester Towers, the novel of nineteenth century clerical doings by Anthony Trollope. If so, he really should have a wife as indomitable as Mrs Proudie to put him in place, to draw him away from his embarrassing public absurdities.

Dear James might serve in the role, judging on the basis of his remarks, direct and to the point;

What’s particularly depressing about this episode is that Chartres is supposedly one of the Church’s more traditional senior clerics. If this is the line the Church’s reactionary old school is taking, imagine what insanities its more progressive elements are yearning to impose on us. Presumably they won’t really feel that justice has been done until St Paul’s has been razed to the ground and replaced by a permanent Anti-Capitalist Peace Camp.

Actually, I’m going to change gear completely here. I almost never read the comments that follow articles, written by so many jackals following a lion, petty, snarling and vicious. On this occasion I’m glad I did because there were truly excellent remarks by someone posting as Tayles. His point was quite simple, that the leftists are not opposing capitalist society as it really exists, but a fictionalised version that forms part of a broader narrative;

According to this narrative, the poor and the disadvantaged are victims of oppression and prejudice by the rich and powerful. Capitalism is the economic expression of this travesty, allowing the rich to hoard wealth at the expense of everyone else, who must make do with whatever crumbs the rich deign to brush from their table.

As he quite righty says this is rubbish. I would only add that it’s complete rubbish. Capitalism, unlike socialism, isn’t even a system; it’s freedom, it’s what happens when people are left to their own devices. Condemn economic liberty then one condemns personal liberty.

But the left-wing narrative, the narrative embraced by the Protest crowd, is far more satisfying for some, Tayles proceeds, portraying as a ‘mistake’ the kind of society that evolves when people are free to express their wants and needs. It condemns success as much as pardons failure, all gains, of course, being ill-gotten.

It’s a narrative that would turn the things upside down, granting wealth and power to those who, by their natural incapacity, would be denied these things. It creates, above all, a paradigm of good versus evil: “If you are a clergyman, a control freak, a metropolitan poser, an over-entitled layabout, or an envious toad, the left-wing narrative holds considerable appeal.”

Envious toads – how I love that! Returning to the Bishop I don’t think he envies very much at all; he’s just a trendy doing the trendy thing. Sadly the trendier the C of E gets the less relevant it becomes, less relevant to those who care, and irrelevant to those who don’t, like the happy campers.

However I’m feeling charitable enough in this New Year to offer Chartres and the canons suggestions for the prospective permanent protest memorial. I think a mountain of Starbuck cups might serve, cast in bronze, or an unmade tent in the style of Tracey Emin. I would favour the latter. Perhaps talentless Tracey might even be commissioned for the project? The Bishop might even be charitable enough to extend the principle of memorial to embrace the summer riots. A statue of a hoodie carrying away a TV would be good, a real anti-capitalist statement.

The Masque of Anarchy

Decent people did well to keep out of central London on Saturday as a ghastly mob exercised their right to ‘peaceful protest’ against the present government’s cuts (cuts; what cuts?). How much more convenient it would have been if they had marched across the English Channel, the waters helpfully parted by God. How much we would have benefited if, half way across, God had allowed the waters to close again, in a moment of ennui or perhaps exercising His own peaceful right to peace.

Just think how much this country would have saved if these tax eaters, dole recipients, holders of worthless public sector jobs (Assistant Deputy Chief Liaison Officer to the Disabled Black Lesbian Caucus); student nurses, ready to learn how to abuse the elderly in lethally dirty National Health Hospitals; teachers who teach nothing in state schools to pupils too stupid to learn anything; recipients of third rate degrees from fourth rate universities, the work-shy ‘workers’, ignorant and worthless people of all sorts, had disappeared for ever. Oh, I can always dream.

No, instead they exercised their right to ‘peaceful protest’ bringing violence and chaos to the streets of our capital, summoned there by the Trade Unions Council; summoned by the likes of Red Len McClusky, a lover of Cuba, Communism and Castro (what; no peaceful right to protest?), so repellent to look at with his thick nose and his heavy features that he would win any ugly man competition nem con.



Once this mob had gathered it was given the support of the Labour Party in the person of Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, a former member of a government, a criminally incompetent government, responsible for the financial morass this country is in at present. Oh, yes, however he may wish to distance himself from the thugs who rampaged along the city streets, sub-human orcs (sorry, I couldn’t resist that!) who relish destruction for the sake of destruction, his very presence was a spur, an indication of the true worth of his loathsome party. This rampage was planned months in advance, as a casual glance at Twitter and Facebook would have shown. Only an idiot would have failed to realise that a riot was in the offing. Oops, sorry, I’ve clearly given Ed a way out.



Only an idiot and the Metropolitan Police, apparently, who in their handling of the mayhem appeared more Keystone than ever, even more than they did in last year’s march against the increase in tuition fees. What the hell is going on? How much more pathetic can London’s police force become, not the ordinary officers, who had light bulbs filled with ammonia thrown at them, but the command, senior officers so anxious to be goody goody that that they invited civil liberties activists to monitor their softly softly approach. How are these idiots going to cope with the forthcoming royal wedding, another anarchist target?

On Saturday they probably took heed of Ugly Red Len’s admonition to keep their hands off “our kids”. I expect they planned a nice party with the anarchists, all sitting down and singing Kumbaya. What a pity it is that heads were not broken instead, what a pity that the ‘accidental’ mayhem was beamed across the world as ‘their kids’ behaved like the apes and troglodytes they are, what an impression others will have of England. How sorry I feel for the poor benighted tourists caught up in the sickening madness.

Does it get any worse? Yes, unfortunately it does. We have a government that pretends to cut public expenditure while increasing it in practice; we have a government that loses control of the nation’s capital while bombarding that of another; we have a government that last week sent six Storm Shadow rockets flying into Libya at a cost of £1million pounds ($1.4million) each. Yes, that’s quite right: £1million each! We have a government unable to read the intelligence properly, a government so besotted with ‘uman rights that it sees virtue in the ‘peaceful right to protest’ even when that ‘peaceful right’ is the prerogative of low class animals, the vermin of the inner city estates, trade unionists and other such creatures. I could suggest a better use for those rockets, another way of reclaiming the expense, just as efficacious as the waters of the Channel.

Last came Anarchy; he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

Iron Chancellor

Imagine yourself lost, somewhere in rural England. You are on your way to London; your sat nav has broken down, and you are on a minor road without signs. The only way of getting back on course is to stop and ask one of the passing locals. A man approaches on a bike; you wind down your window. "London", he repeats, with a thoughtful expression on his face, "Sorry, you won't get to it from here."

This came to mind as I reflected on the panicked reactions in the aftermath of last week's spending review, in which George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced £81billion in cuts in government spending. It was a bold move, an absolutely necessary move to deal with the massive hole in the public finances left by the fiscal irresponsibility of the previous administration, so bad it comes close, at least in my estimation, to being criminal.

Cuts are necessary; most people agree on that; even the Labour opposition agrees on that...at least I think they do. Alan Johnson, the Shadow Chancellor, better known to his many friends, including me, as Postman Pat, is a little bit lost when it comes to economic matters, rather a liability, given his brief. Cuts are necessary, just not now; it's not the right time. But as Norman Lamont, a former Chancellor, says in today's Sunday Telegraph, now is never the right time.

I'm a Tory, a particularly proud admission. I come from a family with a deep tradition in the Conservative Party. I wobbled slightly in my mid-teens, when, much to mother and father's horror, I formed an attachment to a chap with links to the Socialist Worker's Party or some such organisation; but that lasted all of about three weeks before the pendulum swung back to its natural stasis! I don't think I've ever been prouder to call myself a Tory than now, don't think I've ever been prouder of a politician than I am of George Osborne, whom I believe is the coming man, the man to watch, the man of the future. My admiration for our present Coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats has also increased tremendously, set to become one of the most politically significant marriages in British history.

It was not always thus. I was disappointed and angered by the outcome of the General Election earlier this year, which saw the Conservatives emerge as the strongest party but still short of an overall majority, and that after the worst (no qualifications here; not one of the worst) administration in British history. I was convinced that the emerging coalition, the deal between David Cameron, the Conservative leader and now Prime Minister, and Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats and now Deputy Prime Minister, had a limited life; that there was bound to be another election within a year. I no longer believe this to be so; I think the coalition will last for the duration of the Parliament. The marvellous thing is that it's not weak, not tied by shifty and evasive compromises. No, the spending review has shown that it is willing to accept the tough decisions, willing to accept temporary unpopularity in pursuit of the greater good.

But the driving force is George Osborne; he is the one to recognise how necessary this fiscal realism is before this country sank altogether in the rising floods of debt. The overgrown state, nurtured by Labour, will be tackled at source in a major cutback which will see the loss of some half a million jobs in four years. Foul, cry the unions, foul cry their bloated communist bosses: this is unfair, an attack on 'working' people. Oh but how mild it is compared to Cuba, a country they so admire, that is proposing to cut half a million state-sector jobs in six months, and that only as a first stage. That's the way to do it, comrades.

Yes, here is where we are, but how gentle, how realistic the Osborne cuts are. It's as well to remember that £81billion is a mere two years of interest payments on our current levels of debt. Postman Pat predicts disaster, the dreaded 'double dip' recession, but the Osborne squeeze will only reduce public spending from 48% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to 41% by 2014-15, still above the post-war average for this country. Spending, in other words, will fall to the same proportion of GDP as in 2007-8, the point when Mad Gordon Brown, then Chancellor, set out to prove that the economy was not based on boom and bust but bust and bust. Despite all of the dire warnings from the ghastly official opposition, at the the end of the of Osborne's four year cycle the government will still be spending more in real terms than when Labour came to power in 1997.

Yes, Osborne is my hero. I will only venture one small criticism. The tough decisions have been taken; the Guardian state will be pruned right back, the state where the most fatuous and unnecessary 'jobs n services' were created, a forest canopy that choked the life out of the real economy, the productive economy. Killing sacred cows, that's what Tories do best, not being in thrall to some past practice or favoured idea. Taking tough decisions inevitably means courting unpopularity. But some shibboleths still remain. The pledge to protect the National Health Service from cuts, made during the election, has been maintained. This, I believe, is a gross error for the reason that the NHS budget grew extravagantly under the previous administration, that it is an enormous waste of national resources at a time when we cannot afford such waste. This monster now accounts for a fifth of government spending, riper for cuts than any other government department. The same goes for special concessions to the elderly, who will continue to be given certain financial privileges, like free bus passes, whether they need them or not. Such provision, like the welfare budget in general, should be rigorously means tested. As The Economist quite rightly says, under the previous administration the state became more of a comfort blanket than a safety net.

I'm continually tempted to say that this government is rapidly shaping up to be one of the best Tory administrations in post-war history, perhaps even the best, better even than that of Margaret Thatcher, and that’s saying something! But it's not a Tory administration, it's a coalition. I think we are being protected to some degree, protected from the full truth about the public finances. How else does one explain the Liberal Democrat adherence to a policy of financial realism that goes against the happy-clappy politics they have pursued hitherto?

This is the road we have to take. These cuts, I believe, are only the beginning, an absolutely necessary way of ending the dreadful lie that prosperity can be built by borrowing and credit; it can't. As Lamont says, prosperity, real prosperity, has to be earned, not borrowed. Yes, there is a gamble here, but a necessary gamble. It's to be hoped that the British people, in a deeply rooted entrepreneurial spirit, will rise to the challenge, not descend into mass hysteria, like the French, or murderous mass hysteria, like the Greeks. Coming from nowhere, never before having held senior public office, George Osborne is shaping up as a great politician and a great Chancellor. Yes, I'm proud to be a Tory.

Green hypocrite

Caroline Lucas is the leader of the British Green Party. She is also their only member of parliament, winning the constituency of Brighton Pavilion during the general election earlier this year. Perhaps you know her; perhaps she is even your MP? But how much, I wonder, do you know about her? It’s not all cosy environmentalism and global warming tosh, believe me; there is so much more to this woman’s portfolio. So, let’s have a look.

To begin with I have to say that I am far from being an admirer of Julie Burchill, a columnist and sort of left-feminist answer to Ann Coulter, but when it comes to the insufferable Lucas she and I are in absolute agreement;

Lucas is another ‘Have’ telling the ‘Have Nots’ how to live their lives. Always suspect a political party that has NO leaders from the lower orders – they are guaranteed to be a bunch of hypocrites, scolds and bed-wetters.

Oh, dear Julie, the Green Fuhrerin is so much more than that, as you will discover if you read Julie Bindel’s comment in the Overrated section of the latest issue of Prospect. She represents the most degenerate stage in the intellectual development of Western feminism – that of cultural relativism. What I mean by this is that she is the kind of person who would be outraged by certain practices in Brighton while remaining blind to them in, say, Baghdad.

You see, in the great sisterhood, all women are equal but some are more equal than others; and the least equal of all would appear to be women who live in Islamic countries, particularly in those places dominated by a dark interpretation of Sharia Law. For Lucas, as Bindel points out, has shared a platform with those who believe that adulterous females should be stoned to death.

She is also in favour of the hijab, not for herself, of course, or for her tofu-eating friends, but for ‘the others’, the less-equal sisters. She has been seen in the past in the company of Ken Livingstone and George Galloway, also great purveyors of hypocrisy and cultural relativism; she has been seen in the past in the company of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Who is he, you might wonder? Well, he’s a good friend of Red Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London. Like Ken he is a truly enlightened individual who just happens to believe in female genital mutilation, wife-beating, and the execution of homosexuals in Islamic states. Lucas’ constituents might like to pay particular attention to the latter point as I believe that Brighton Pavilion is home to a higher than average number of gay people. Don’t worry; none of this is for you: it’s for ‘the others’, the less than humans, people who don’t breakfast on muesli and dine on tofu.

But the poor Sheikh is a much misunderstood man, Lucas says, the victim of a smear campaign. The stories about women and gays are all wicked press lies. All the evidence, all the independent evidence, to the contrary is just a fabrication. See what you want to see, hear what you want to hear, other symptoms of the terminal cultural relativism from which this woman suffers. She went for the pink vote during her election campaign, not mentioning in her literature that she sits alongside people who wish to see them dead.

Green politics are now her politics, and her politics are all so much guff and fluff. Remember that, you good people of Brighton, when you next tuck into a decent nut cutlet or a tasty tofu surprise.

Don’t be vague; say goodbye to Hague

William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, is going through a ‘little local difficulty.’ Though married, there have been persistent rumours on the internet that he has a gay past, fuelled by the fact that he shared a room with a male aide half his age during the general election campaign earlier this year.

This suggests to me one thing and only one thing: that for a senior politician he is extraordinarily naïve, a bear of very little judgement, a bit of a liability given the responsibilities his office carries. Perhaps, on reflection, it suggests something else: that there was nothing in the least untoward in his sleeping arrangements; that he is definitely not homosexual. If he was he and the aide, who has since resigned, would surely have been a lot more discrete. Surely, they would?

But there are other things I have to say here, other things I’ve been reflecting on after reading the coverage of this story in the weekend press. What I am about to write makes me far from comfortable, because I would rather not do or say anything that would in an any way compromise the government of David Cameron. Read on at your peril but let me rush to my conclusion by saying that I think Hague, now aged forty-nine, is in the grips of a mid-life crisis, except in his case it began when he was sixteen, a crisis that raises serious questions about his state of mind and his capacity for high office. It’s now an open question whether he is fit to continue as Foreign Secretary.

To begin with I care nothing at all about his sexual preferences. While the rumours must be hurtful for Ffion, his wife, he can sleep with Men, Martians or Moonies if he pleases: it would not make a bit of difference to me so long as it had no bearing on the conduct of his public office (well, OK, I might worry slightly about the Moonies.)

Also I should say that I quite admire Hague as an intellectual and a writer. He is as passionate about the political history of the eighteenth century as I am about that of the seventeenth, and has written commendable biographies of William Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce. I just wish to God that he had grown up, showed as much maturity in public life as he does in the life of the mind.

Now none of this matters. His whole career has been called into question less by the internet rumours - all so much stupid and malicious fluff - more by his public rebuttal of these rumours, rebuttals in which he made some deeply personal and wholly unnecessary revelations about his marriage. His wife, he said in his official statement, has suffered numerous miscarriages in their frustrated attempts to have a child. I could make no sense of this at all. Yes, I felt sorry for them, but what on earth was the relevance of this information?

Writing in The Telegraph on Saturday Simon Heffer immediately sent the point into sharp relief: the wholly gratuitous statement about her miscarriages was an abominable abuse of her in the interests of his political career. More than that, the sub-text was blatantly clear – I’m just another one of the lads; I can get a woman pregnant heaps of times; I’m no homo.

Yes, I’m sorry, it’s appallingly distasteful, but it’s evidence of his mindset and his insecurity. This is the same man, a middle-aged, baseball-cap wearing perpetual teenager, clearly uncomfortable with his baldness, who claimed, when he was leader of the Tory Party, that he drank fourteen pints of beer a day as a teenager. I’m William Hague, I am; I’m one of the blocks; I can drink fourteen pints a day; I can get women pregnant; I’m from oop north.

This is the key, that and the fact that he has been trying to live down a nerdish appearance at the Conservative Party conference when he was sixteen. In the same edition of The Telegraph Damian Thompson, a contemporary of Hague’s at Oxford, described him in his student days as a ‘professional northerner’, one of the wisecracking Yorkshire lads who could even charm baby-eating members of the Socialist Workers Party.

There was no irony here; the article was sympathetic and supportive, but Thompson has given away more than intended about Hague and his self-perception. What on earth is a ‘professional northerner’? Is there a qualification, perhaps? I’ve never heard anyone described as a ‘professional southerner’, so it’s clearly no more than a badge of condescension, one that Hague seemingly wears with a degree of pride, fourteen pints a day and on and on. Forgive me; I’m just a sharp-talking professional Surrey girl with a sauce of London spice, fourteen Pimm’s a day, don’t you know.

The whole thing is such a massive joke, a joke made by Hague about Hague, a joke at his expense. The rumours were nothing; his sexuality is nothing; his statement and his conduct are everything. Yes, it began as a little local difficulty but he has allowed it to spread rapidly. I no longer believe that England’s foreign relations are safe in this man’s hands, both because of the weakness of his character and the weakness of his judgement, compounded by his personal vanities and insecurities.

William, take your baseball cap and your naff wrap-round shades and go. Depart; I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Hanging England

The world will know by now that England has a ‘hung parliament’ an expression that is taken from ‘hung jury’, meaning no clear decision has emerged. The Tory Party gained almost a hundred seats, one of the most significant electoral advances in its history, but one that still left it short of an overall majority in the House of Commons. Labour and the Liberal Democrats both lost seats and votes, with the former having a share of the vote as bad as 1983, a real electoral disaster, and the latter failing to make the much promised breakthrough, despite all the media hype.

So, what do we have now? Simple; we have one of the worst, most unpopular Prime Ministers in this country’s history clinging on to power for the sake of power, no matter how much damage this is doing. We have the Liberal Democrats, third in the share of the votes, third in the share of the Parliamentary seats, attempting to sell themselves to the highest bidder.

This party is a positive danger to the country, this party of proportional representation, unlimited immigration and unilateral nuclear disarmament. Yet, here we are with these amateurs effectively dictating terms. We have had a whole weekend without an effective government, without any clear idea of where we are going. If one wants to see the future, a future with a ‘fair’ voting system then one could do no better than look at the present.

There was a demonstration in London yesterday in favour of the aforesaid ‘fair’ voting system, presumably to put some iron in the soul of Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader. A ‘fair’ voting system, however it is devised, is the worst possible option for this country. Never again would a party be returned with a strong mandate. Manifestos would almost invariably be based on a lie because no clear programme would be possible.

The Liberal Democrats, third, always third, would forever be in a position to dictate terms. They would also most likely enter into a permanent and undemocratic ‘progressive’ bloc with Labour, forever blocking a right-of-centre programme, even if that is what a majority of the electorate wanted. A ‘fair’ voting system is the worst possible solution, no matter how loud rent-a-mob shouts out platitudes and slogans. These people have not got the first clue.

Go Home and Prepare for Government

I wrote this piece for another website but I'm adding it here, dedicated to my friend Adam, in thanks for his appreciation. :-)

There is a famous moment in Liberal Party history –perhaps some people reading this will remember it? –when David Steel, a former leader, roused the troops at the end of his conference speech, telling them to loud applause that they should “go back to their constituencies and prepare for government.”

This was a time when David Owen and the Social Democrats, fellow travellers with the Liberals in pre-merger days, were on the up and up; this was a time when the Labour Party was in disarray; it was a time when Margaret Thatcher was facing some of her toughest challenges. It was 1981. What happened? The Falklands happened, the general election of 1983 happened, Margaret Thatcher cruised to one of her greatest victories, and poor David Dee and David Dum never got their snouts anywhere near the trough of office.

It’s been something of a burden the party has had to carry over the years, a stick to beat the poor dears with, an indication of just how pompously self-inflated they could become, what a joke they are, this ‘David Steel moment’. So, no matter what their present expectations, one is unlikely to hear Nick Clegg or any senior member of his party offer such a stupid hostage to fortune. But, hold on just a moment; have I’ve got news for you – this campaign has produced its very own David Steel moment, and appropriately enough it comes from Scotland.

There Alistair Carmichael, the party’s Scottish affairs spokesman, said that it was “increasingly likely” that the Liberal Democrats would either be the largest party in a coalition or they would win an outright majority, and all on the basis of a telly debate!

The Lib Dems are surfing on the top of the wave; they are the irresistible force, moving forward by rapid stages. Their time has come; they’re set to win their first election since 1910. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls – go home and prepare for government!

Everybody loves a winner
So nobody loved me;
'Lady Peaceful,' 'Lady Happy,'
That's what I long to be
All the odds are in my favour
Something's bound to begin
It's got to happen, happen sometime
Maybe this time I'll win

Saying no to Smiler Brown

Did you watch Dr Who on Saturday? I’m an avid fan and I think the new Doctor is such a dream; I just love languid, laid-back men! The episode itself was called The Beast Below. Let me just sketch a brief outline.

The Doctor with Amy Pond, his new assistant, arrives in a future where Britain is a wandering spaceship. On landing he and Amy find a community dominated by some grotesque smiling puppets. At five year intervals people have the right to go into a voting both, presided over by a smiler, places where they are shown a video tape of the realities of Spaceship UK. Then they are given a choice: press a protest button or press a forget button. But the message is so awful that people invariably push the forget button. “Every five years”, the Doctor said, “people chose to forget what they have learned-democracy in action.”

My dear Doctor, touché! My goodness, is there a Conservative resistance cell deep within the bowels of the socialist BBC, I have to ask? A grotesque smiling face asking all of us to forget everything that has happened since the last election, could there be any better metaphor for the present realities of Spaceship UK?

But I’m a rebel; I always have been. I chose the protest button as an angry scowl appears on the face of the puppet. And what do I see? Unbelievable levels of fiscal irresponsibility by a smiler who was Chancellor and who is now Prime Minister. I see a man who created a kind of South Sea Bubble economy, recalling the great financial crisis of the eighteenth century. I see a man who sent more and more soldiers to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, while starving them of the equipment necessary to perform the task they had been given.

I see a man who allowed immigration to get out of control, to the point where the cultural cohesion of this country is in danger. I see a man who presided over one of the most venal and corrupt Parliaments in our history, again with eighteenth century parallels, and immediately went into denial when the truth came out, not having the courage to begin a proper cleansing of the Augean Stables.

I see a man responsible for ever greater moral turpitude in the standards of public life, surrounding himself with aides whose favoured method of dealing with opposition and perceived enemies is the vilest forms of character assassination. I see man who surrendered more and more of our national sovereignty to a corrupt European oligarchy, a practice that at one time would have been defined as treason. The list could go on and on.

Yes, I press the protest button; I will press the protest button on 6 May. Some truths have to be confronted, and confronted with courage.

Battling Bercow

The Rotten Parliament is gone, one hopes never to rise again. But there is one man standing for re-election who seems to me to be a living reminder of its existence, of everything that was wrong with that wretched assembly. He is John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Standing for re-election in his Buckingham constituency he will by convention be unopposed by the other main parties. It’s rather a pity because I would like to see a genuine Conservative stand against this man. It’s no secret that he is widely detested in the Party, no secret that he was elected as Speaker in a game of farcical one-upmanship by Labour MPs at a time when Parliament needed, more urgently than any time in its past history, a figure of determination, courage and stature, someone who could face the expenses crisis head-on and rise above it. It needed a giant; it got Little Bercow.

Simon Heffer was in fine form in last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, aiming both barrels at this ridiculous man. And as he quite rightly says the voters of Buckingham, those who want a genuine conservative, do have a choice. There are those on the fringes who are mounting a challenge to Bercow, but the one with the best chance would seem to be Nigel Farage, the Euro MP and former leader of UKIP. “I am in no doubt that the people of Buckingham”, Heffer wrote, “not least to perform the public service of removing the smear of Bercow from British politics, should vote for Mr Farage.”

Well, yes, I would vote for him if I lived in the constituency. It’s certainly one of the results that I will be looking out for on election night itself. After all, this might very well be the 2010 version of the Martin Bell moment, the moment when the man in the white suit dislodged Neil Hamilton at Tatton. And Farage would have the added virtue of not being Martin Bell! Not so much Mr White Goes to Westminster, more Mr Blue goes to Westminster. Blue, because he has embraced traditional conservative policies that I feel sure will go down well with many of the local people, especially when set against Little Bercow, a symptom of all that has been wrong with our politics over the past few years.

Fire up the Quattro

In a new propaganda poster Labour has depicted David Cameron as Gene Hunt, the TV detective played by Philip Glenister in Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes. There he is, Dave himself, a tough, rakish-looking guy, wearing snakeskin boats and sitting on top of his Audi Quattro, the car made famous by the series, all beside a slogan saying Don’t let him take Britain back to the Eighties.

Labour really has lost the plot. First the howler over their national insurance jobs tax and now this, this wonderful gift to the Tory Party, a propagandist’s dream! The poster itself was designed by one Jacob Quagliozzi, a twenty-four year old Labour supporter from St Albans, who came out top in a competition organised by Saatchi and Saatchi, the party’s advertising agency. It’s being launched by David Miliband, that geek Banana Man himself, who says that it will be a “powerful reminder of the damage which the Tories did to Britain in the 80s”

What rot; it will be nothing of the kind! The Tories are so pleased by this altogether flattering image of their leader that they have produced the very same poster with a different slogan –Fire up the Quattro. It’s time for a change. Why, have they done this? Well, anyone who is familiar with the show – as Millie Banana clearly is not - will know exactly why.

Gene Hunt, you see, is a no-nonsense, tough-as-all-hell, get things done kind of cop as one can imagine. More than that, he is a walking, talking rebuttal to all forms of fashionable political correctness. He gets results by breaking the rules, cutting through all bureaucracy and established procedure. He is the kind of guy who may not go down all that well at an Islington dinner party, but if one were in a tight spot one could wish for no better companion. He is the type of guy who is completely out of place in New Labour Britain, completely out of place in the elf ‘n’ safety and 'yuman rights culture that has been thrust upon us from the dinner tables of Islington.

To give Cameron this image shows just how out of touch Labour is with the people of this country, just how out of touch it is with popular culture. It makes David look super cool, and who would have thought that possible! Conservative bloggers have responded with a Gordon Brown version, not at all flattering, showing him in some really naff clothes beside a really naff car, all under the caption Back to debt, decline and the 1970s with Gordon Brown.

Well done, Jacob; the cheque’s in the post!

The Once and Future King

We have been here before in the cycles of our history, the fag end of yet another Labour government, ever deeper into incompetence and mismanagement, ever deeper into debt. It has been proved time and again that these people are simply not fit for government; they never will be. They left the country in a mess in 1951, in 1970 and again in1979, but this is nothing compared with the horrendous mess that will be left by Brown and co.

Indeed, though still months short of a general election, it is doubtful if we have a ‘government’ any longer in the meaningful sense of the term, people who are willing and able to face up to the problems of the nation, the very real problems before us. No, we do not have a government, we have a party machine determined to hold on to power at all hazards, no matter the damage that is caused.

We have a Prime Minister, if we can call him that, the most ludicrously incompetent in our history, fiddling like Nero, pretending that the debt crisis, the horrendous debt crisis that he is responsible for, can be met with ‘efficiency savings’. He will by these means, save £3 billion, while a Golden Palace is spun out of the £655 billion that remains. Oh, what palliative treatment we will need when Nero is finally driven protesting from the stage and the New Labour circus is over. What an artist will die in Brown. What an artist indeed.

A new style of leadership is needed, a new form of government, altogether more sober and more realistic. What better model than Henry VII, the first Tudor, the five hundredth anniversary of whose death came this year? His reign had none of the drama of Henry VIII; none of the frustrated promise of Edward VI; none of the tragedy of Bloody Mary and none of the glory of Elizabeth. No, but he was still the smartest and shrewdest of them all. A careful manager, a founder of the modern English state, a believer in financial responsibility and political stability, a man who recognised that military adventures, adventures beyond our capacity, were bad for business, bad for security and bad for stability. Yes, a smart man, a shrewd man, a careful man. Altogether the best example for the difficult times ahead.

Stopping Hitler

Those on the political left, particularly those whose views have Marxist overtones, usually tend to be keen on reading the teacup of history, drawing lessons from the leaves. Yes, they read history…and they almost invariably draw the wrong conclusions.

The classic example here, the one I am thinking of, is the rise of Hitler. Talking, so the argument goes, was not enough to prevent this; only direct action would suffice, only violence and more violence; only getting Nazis off the streets.

Oh, but there was violence in the last years of the Weimar Republic, intense violence directed against the Nazis by their opponents, particularly the KPD, the German Communist Party. In the early 1930s Germany was in a state of political civil war. I suspect that the peace time murder rate for 1932 has never been exceeded. Yes, there was violence and the Nazis grew strong and stronger; the more their opponents hit out, the more they benefited, nowhere more so that in ‘Red Berlin’, where Joseph Gobbles, Gauleiter since 1928, increased membership dramatically.

So, yesterday, Nick Griffin was forced to abandon a press conference by an egg throwing mob, shouting “Off our streets, Nazi scum”, a mob that was clearly mindful of the ‘lessons of history.’ Weyman Bennet, the organiser of the attack, and the national secretary of an organisation that goes by the name of Unite against Fascism, said that it was important to ‘stand up to the BNP’. Standing up to the BNP is apparently to allow the nation to see a chanting and vicious mob throwing missiles, in the belief that political victory for them lies in silencing those they do not want to hear; those they do not want anyone else to hear.

For smart-suited Griffin the propaganda value of these scenes probably carried far greater weight than what he would have said, if he had been allowed to say it.

Violence will not stop the BNP, oh no it will not; only words will. And the words I have in mind are their own. Yes, I would allow a platform for Fascists for the simple reason that once people at large know just how simplistic their words are it will collapse from under them. That is the intelligent deduction, not the ‘lesson of history.’

Watt Tyler, Where Are You Now?

Yes, you’re tired of the expenses scandal; I’m tired of the expenses scandal; we are all tired of the expenses scandal, but we must not allow this issue to die by a process of lethargy and exhaustion. That’s what Joker Brown, ‘The Best Man for the Job’, is relying upon. One would have thought, though, that he would have acted with a little more skill and political acumen in playing the game of time and opinion, but these are qualities the man clearly does not have.

The one thing that may have been to his credit is to get on top of the whole fiasco in the way that David Cameron has, even though his own MPs expenses claims are, for the most part, far more outrageous than those of the Labour benches. But he did not; it got on top of him.

Now, only two days after he emerged from his ‘vote of affirmation’, refreshed and renewed, he has reappointed Shahid Malik to the government. Malik stepped down last month as justice minister after revelations about his creative-and lucrative-living arrangements. Shady Shahid claimed a minimal rent for a three-bedroom house as his main home while designating his London property as his second home, allowing him to make off with an impressive £66,827 in three years, the maximum allowable. He also claimed £65 for a court summons for non-payment of council tax. My, what fools we mortals are!

Now Shady has been ‘cleared’ of wrong doing by Sir Philip Mawer, the Joker’s adviser on ministerial conduct. What wonderful news, one bright light on a dismal episode! Well, yes, it might be, except the Joker is refusing to allow Sir Philip’s report to be published. Is there anything this man can do right, anything at all?

Let me finish with two letters from today’s copy of the Telegraph which made me smile;

SIR, We know have the absurd situation of an unelected Prime Minister being nursemaided by a twice-disgraced former MP who, as an unelected peer, sits at the Cabinet table alongside other peers, one of whom, the new Minister for Europe, comes straight from Brussels. Cromwell would be apoplectic and so should we the electorate.

SIR, I am becoming increasingly frustrated by MPs, including Gordon Brown, telling me that, despite what I might feel or think, what I actually want is for them to continue the fight against the recession on my behalf, because I know they are the best people for the job. This wholesale nationalisation of public opinion is becoming very annoying.

Watt Tyler, where are you now we have need of you? Alas, all we have is Jack Straw. :-))