Vaffa!

I’m going to ask you to imagine that we have just had a general election.  I’m going to do more than that: I want you to imagine that the Monster Raving Looney Party has emerged as the strongest force in Parliament.  Impossible, you say; such a thing is beyond imagination.  Oh, no, it is not; at least it’s not in Italy.  Following the recent election Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement attracted a quarter of the vote.  It now has 108 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house, and 54 in the Senate.

Who’s Beppe Grillo, you ask?  He’s a comedian, that’s who he is, part of a long tradition of Italian funny men.  Where people once chanted ‘Du-ce!’ ‘Du-ce!’ then now chant ‘Bep-pe! Bep-pe!’ His story is remarkable, even more remarkable in some ways than that of Mussolini.  Turning from jokes to political activism, Il Beppe founded the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) – the Five Star movement – in Milan in October, 2009, the very same city, incidentally, where life was first breathed into Fascism in 1919.  The capital V in the party title – well, not so much a party as a movement – stands for Vaffa!, the leader’s own signature, which roughly translates as Fuck off! 

And how Grillo wants so much in Italian life, particularly to Italian politics, to, well, Vaffa!  Ever since 2005, when he started his blog, now the most popular in Italy, he has gathered a large following among the disaffected, chiefly from the young.  Many of his new MPs and Senators only just scrape past the minimum 25 age limit for entering Parliament.  These are the people for whom, in their disgust, Vaffa! has become the watchword; these are the people who have been the devotees of Beppe’s Vaffa! Day, or V Day, set up in 2007.

All politicians are crooks, says Beppe, apart from his own, of course, a line that echoes all the way back to 1919.  He’s now had his very own, and rather remarkable, March on Rome.  The Economist, that maiden aunt of political journalism, is tut tutting its disapproval in the latest issue.  Send in the clowns, the old dear trumpets across her front cover, with an additional How Italy’s disastrous election threatens the future of the euro.  Inside the humourless dowager drones on about those naughty Italian children, determined as they are to avoid reality.  It’s not just the future of the euro that is threatened, she witters on, but the future of Italy itself.

Dear, oh dear, there is Beppe and Silvio Berlusconi, the other clown who made a reasonably good showing, moving ever forward while “...Mario Monti, the reform-minded technocrat who has led Italy for the past 15 months and restored much of its battered credibility, got a measly 10%”  Really, there is only one word for that and the word is...Vaffa! 

Democracy would be all right if it wasn’t for the voters.  That’s the reality of the European Union, a reality clearly endorsed by the Economist.  The people did not want Monti; Monti was imposed upon them.  Now the people, rather inconveniently, have spoken, exposing the fraudulent politics of Europe with a bold finger gesture.  Me ne freggo! – I don’t give a damn - , now there is another decent slogan worth reviving. 

The inconclusive result of the election is conclusive on one point at least: Italians do not want to be ruled by the technocrats, either of the Brussels or the local variety.  Monti was imposed on them in 2011 without elections by the Eurocrats.  Charles Moore puts the point very well in his Spectator Notes.  Just imagine (sorry, I hope I’m not overtaxing you here!) if David Cameron was kicked out of office by the European Central Bank, which decreed that Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, was elevated in his place.  Yes, I too would support any British Beppe who came along, Ken Dodd or whoever, rather than the cat’s paw of the European banking-bureaucracy complex.

People can only be pushed so far before they start to get angry.  Our own anger was shown in a small way during the recent Eastleigh by-election, which saw the United Kingdom Independence Party pushing the Conservatives into a humiliating third place.  ‘It’s only a protest vote’, the Tory apparatchiks wailed, ‘The masses will return in 2015.’ Oh, really, will they?  Only, I think, if they are in a gay mood, as Cameron hopes.  But the anger over Europe, over the highhandedness of the dreadful European tyranny, grows by the day.  The Long March of UKIP is by no means over.

And then there is the onward march of Beppe.  His politics are not my politics; he is far too left-wing and statist for that, far too, ahem, fascist!  Still, he is a symptom of a growing disgust across the whole of Europe with Europe, with those who make a mockery of democracy because it does not suit their technocratic ends.  “We are all young”, the sixty-four-year old Beppe says on his blog. “We’re a movement of many people who are uniting from the bottom up.  We don’t have structures, hierarchies, bosses, secretaries...No one gives us orders.”  Yes, I am young. I turn to Brussels and I really only have one word – Vaffa!  

The not so strange death of Liberal England

I’ve been looking at developments oop north, Rotherham in South Yorkshire, to be precise.  Politically it’s a socialist redoubt, held for years by the Labour Party.  It’s the kind of territory where if a red rosette was pinned on a chimp it would be returned to Parliament. 

Come to think of it Denis MacShane, the previous incumbent, is a bit of a chimp; a chump anyway.  I shall be even more unparliamentarily in saying that he is little better than a crook, forced to resign the seat over expense claims that were ‘plainly intended to deceive.’  That’s the parliamentary phrase! 

Anyway, Rotherham has turned into a bit of a graveyard – a graveyard for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.  It’s also become a graveyard for toleration and the birthplace of something altogether more sinister.

 I’ll come to the latter in a bit but first I need to do a spot of crowing.  Caw, caw, I call; my, how I delight in the decline and decline of the Limp Dumbs.  Can it be, can it possibly be that they will turn in ever decreasing circles to the point of complete extinction, the Incredible Shrinking Party?  Let it be, she sings; oh, let it be. 

The Northern Folk, you see, had a by-election last week in the wake of MacShane’s disgrace and forced resignation.  They got rid of Labour and – guess what? – they got Labour.  The vote is dead; long live the vote!  They voted for another chimp, one Sarah Champion, memorable for being completely unmemorable. 

But the election itself was memorable for other reasons, not least of which was the disastrous showing of the Clegg gang, who slumped to eighth place in the poll, behind the British National Party, behind the English Democrats and behind George Galloway’s Respect. 

Incidentally, the Respect candidate was a certain Yvonne Ridley, a journalist of a sort once held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan.  She enjoyed the experience so much that she subsequently converted to Islam.  She is also something of an obsessive, vowing to hunt down Zionists wherever they are to be found, yea, even so far as the ranks of Respect, which must be a bit like hunting for a vegetarian among cannibals. Her anti-Zionist credentials are doubtless why she was chosen to stand in Rotherham, that well-known Zionist stronghold.

Sorry for the diversion.  Let me get back to the Liberal Democrats, now in deep mourning.  I dare say they are falling back on the usual guff about not getting their message across.  I rather think the Rotherhamites got a message across to them.  Polling pundits are saying that no major political party has ever performed so poorly in a Westminster by-election.  Eighth place and a mere two per cent of the vote; that is the message they have to bear!

The thing about the Liberal Democrats is that they had no clear idea of what they are and what they represent.  Oh, yes, they were desperate for power, but power has its penalties, most of all on a movement that was really just a collective gripe.  Out of power for generations, the Liberals and subsequently the Liberal Democrats turned into a protest party, embracing every politically fashionable cause, from windmills to gay marriage.  It was a movement for socialists who could not quite define themselves as socialists, progressives who progressed in whatever direction the wind blew.  In the end power was their Inchcape Rock, upon which their fragile vessel shattered.

I suppose the really interesting thing about Rotherham is that the onward march of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has not been halted.  With over twenty-one percent of the vote, they came second behind Labour, well ahead of the Tories, to whom they must now be considered as a serious rival on the right, following the Corby result earlier in the month

Rotherham’s Ministry of Love, sorry, make that Social Services Department, must be seriously concerned by this trend.  I expect they are already scouring their foster register just in case any children have been placed in the care of UKIP supporters.  After all, one’s political views have a clear bearing on one’s suitability as a parent.  The Labour-controlled Rotherham Borough Council certainly believes so, having previously removed three children, including a baby, in the care of a UKIP-supporting family. 

The great crime of these people was their opposition to multiculturalism, which in the eyes of Rotherham’s KGB-trained social workers makes them ‘racist.’  The older children, who called the people in question mum and dad, are said to be traumatised by the whole experience. Apparently in true KGB-style the social service apparatchiks descended on the family after an anonymous tip off.  Here come a candle to light you to bed; here comes a chopper to chop off your head.  Yes, we become more like Airstrip One with every passing day. 

So it’s pretty dangerous to be a supporter of UKIP in Rotherham, especially if one wants to be a parent.  It’s reasonably safe, though, to be a member of a predominantly Asian gang trafficking underage white girls for sex.  Big Sister in the shape of Joyce Thacker, Rotherham’s social services director, goes around the place defending her dawn raid, all the time ignoring that her department was one of those singled out earlier in the year for its negligence over the pimping issue.  If only the perpetrators had been members of UKIP.  That surely would have made all the difference.  

Thacker Speaks

Old Soldiers Never Die

With voting in the presidential election scheduled to begin on 23 May, Egypt is descending ever deeper into anarchy and faction.  There have been violent clashes recently with protesters in Cairo and Alexandria, during which journalists were attacked by supporters of the military, one allegedly having his ear sliced off. 

Much has changed since the fall of Mubarak.  Hopes, once high, have fallen low.  The generals seem to be playing a close game, both inciting violence and denying any responsibility for the outcome.  They have no interest in who will emerge as president, they say, no desire to cling to power after 30 June, the day they have promised to step down.  Yes, of course they will. 

There is violence, yes, but there is also an element of comic absurdity.  Hazem Abu Ismail is as orthodox as they come.  With his long white beard he was the front runner for the fundamentalist Salafi sect.  His was a populist platform of religion and revolution.  Unfortunately for him he also had an Achilles’ heel – his mother is an American!  That is to say, she took American citizenship before she died, a fact he kept quiet about and then denied altogether.  Au contraire, Mon Frère; out you go, beard and all. 

It’s all a plot, you see, all part of an American scheme to discredit the poor man, so say the Salafists, because of his anti-Western agenda, though it would seem obvious that the ‘plot’, such as it is, originated far closer to home.  To air their disapproval the beards massed in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where they immediately clashed with Egypt’s dwindling band of liberals.  That’s one thing; clashing with the army quite another. 

The Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest force in the country’s parliament, was there too.  For long they declined to field a candidate for the presidency.  All at once the hive mind was changed.  Khairat al-Shater was put forward as their drone of choice.  All at once the electoral commission, whose edicts are not subject to judicial review, disqualified him.  Why?  Because he had been convicted in the bad old Mubarak days of being a member of a banned organisation that was no longer banned! 

There is a fallback here; there is Aboul Fotouh.  He’s well-known to the Brotherhood; he should be; he was long included in their ranks.  There is only one problem – he was expelled.  Why?  Because, contrary to the former party line, he decided to run for the presidency! 

Worried by its declining influence, the Brotherhood has now put forward Mohammed Morsy, something of a colourless nonentity.  The army, which favours nobody, either favours Amr Moussa, a former veteran of the Mubarak regime, or Ahmed Shafiq, the former commander of the air force and another Mubarak stalwart.  He has let it slip that the army, which favours nobody, actually favours him. 

The real power in the land is Field Marshall Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has governed Egypt since the fall of Mubarak.  Actually it governed Egypt long before that; it has effectively governed Egypt since the days of Nasser.  Whatever the outcome of the election nothing much is likely to change.  The state within a state will continue to govern the state.  Old soldiers never die.  In Egypt they don’t even fade away.  

The face of Clegg forever

At the beginning of last month I wrote about our forthcoming referendum on the Alternative Vote (Rotten Alternative). To recap quickly, it’s about changing our present first past the post, constituency based, electoral system in favour of something ‘fairer’, something that supposedly will give an equal weight to all voters and, by happy chance, a greater weight to some parties, most notably the insufferable Liberal Democrats, the party that brought us the European ‘ideal’…and Nick Clegg.

I’m drawn back to the subject by a recent article in the Spectator by Andrew Roberts, one of my favourite contemporary historians, who always manages to speak with a fresh and stimulating voice on whatever subject he chooses to tackle, latterly the Second World War. The article contains some interesting points on Winston Churchill’s views of AV and the mediocrity such a system of voting would induce.

I’ll come on to this in a moment, but first a word about the celebrities who have been corralled into the yes campaign. Celebrity endorsements are virtually guaranteed to put me off a product, but just look at the slebs in Camp Clegg. They include Eddie Izzard, an insufferable prat who passes as a comic. It gets worse; the yes men also include Jonathan Ross, the biggest oik in British broadcasting, bad dresser, worse accent, who enjoys making abusive phone calls to old men. Izzard and Toss, sorry, Ross, is there any better reason for voting no?

Probably not, but there is Sir Winston’s view to add to the mix. As Roberts says, he described AV as ‘the child of folly’ which would become the ‘parent of fraud’, that it was the worst of all possible plans, the ‘stupidest, the least scientific and the most unreal of all voting systems’. It would mean that our elections would be determined ‘by the most worthless votes given to the most worthless candidates.’

Most serious of all, Churchill was of the view that such a system of voting would lower the prestige of Parliament and the parliamentary process and, as Roberts points out, he was speaking at a time when respect for our parliamentary system was far higher than it is now, still languishing in the doldrums of the expenses scandal.

Look how pathetic Nick Clegg is, look how he crumbles under pressure, this bland and hopeless man. Look, then, at the future of British politics, with him and his successors forever the kingmakers, the Limp Dumbs in command no matter the popular vote, in the same way that the Free Democrats were so long in command in Germany. The will of the people will no longer matter, just the will of the politicians and the parties, the third placed most of all.

Nobody I know cares much about this vote. At best some express a watery opinion in favour of ‘fairness’. The British are a fair-minded people who will generally go for the ‘fair’ solution. It worries me that we are sleep-walking as a nation onto this Clegg-de-sac, worries me that we will adopt AV on a low turnout, with most people not having the first clue as to what they are voting for. Well, what they are voting for is mediocrity, no quick decisions but unseemly horse-trading, no strong government but an apostolic succession of coalitions, yea, to the very crack of doom. It’s politics without politics; it’s mediocrity in command; it’s the face of Clegg forever.

Rotten Alternative

We are having a referendum here in May, only the second in our history (the earlier one was on membership of the European Community) and the first in my life. It’s on our voting system: are we to continue, the question will go, with our present first past the post method of sending people to Parliament, or should we opt for a ‘fairer’ system? The ‘fairer’ system on offer goes under the rubric of AV, the Alternative Vote, where candidates are listed in order of preference.

The last thing we need at this point in time is a vote on voting. But it has to be; it’s part of the package agreed to by David Cameron, the prime minister, to draw Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats into the present coalition government. It’s something the Liberal Democrats, and formerly the Liberals, have been wittering on about for decades, bemoaning the fact that the votes they gain are disproportionate to the seats they win.

Corporal Clegg says that our present system leaves “too many voices unheard.” I’ll come to this in a moment but first a word on our present electoral horse race. It’s simple: the country is divided into so many constituencies, each sending a single representative to Parliament. In elections the candidate with the most votes wins, even though the combined vote of the other candidates may be greater. Though we have rather lost sight of the point, people are voting for an individual, not a party; so even if their particular political preference loses out they are still represented in Parliament by the victor. They still have ‘a voice’, contrary to Clegg’s assertion.

So what’s the alternative? The alternative is not fairness; the alternative is Clegg and all those like him, who forever after will decide the outcome of elections, not the people. Every election will be followed by the kind of horse-trading we saw last spring; it may take days before that nation knows what shape the future government will have. If the people say yes to this change we face a future of political uncertainty and grubby deals; we face the politics of Australia.

We can say goodbye to any prospect of strong government in future. Manifestos advanced in elections will be no more than opening gambits; promises to be discarded as the occasion demands. But first past the post is ‘unfair’, it leaves too many voices unheard, bleats the little Corporal. Would that be the people, I wonder, who were assured that there would be no increase in university tuition fees? Did they not shout loud enough?

I have absolutely no interest in the hypocrisy of people like Clegg. What angers me is the duplicity involved, the duplicity of the Liberal Democrats, a sort of political glee club for the woolly-minded. Our constitution, the system that has served us so well in the past, is in danger of being undermined because Nick and his gang are irritated that they simply do not have enough bodies in Parliament. It’s all about numbers, its all about vanity; it’s all about the worst kind of political pettiness. It has nothing at all to do with what is right and what is fair.

The Horror of the Hustings

Those who have read George Elliot’s novel Middlemarch will remember, I feel sure, Arthur Brooke of Tipton’s humiliation on the hustings, having announced his candidature for Parliament. Indeed, it’s hardly possible to forget the scene depicted by the author, in all of its comic intensity!

The novel is set in the 1830s before the passage of the Great Reform Act, a time when only a tiny proportion of the adult male population-and none of the female-had the right to vote at all. But the kind of open air public meeting addressed by Brooke was an example, if you like, of popular democracy in action, almost in the style of ancient Athens. Even if most of those who came had no say in the outcome; they could at least make their views know, as they often did in the most vigorous way possible. For candidates it could be a really bruising experience, often physically as well as mentally.

The story of this aspect of English political history, the rise and fall of popular confrontation, is well summarised in John Lawrence’s new book, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British political Culture from Hogarth to Blair.

For all of the eighteenth century and a good bit of the nineteenth century Parliament was largely dominated by a narrow landed elite, resistant to all forms of popular pressure. But even candidates hand-picked for rotten boroughs, those in the gift of the local landlord, still had to go through meetings and even public nominations hustings, not abolished until 1872.

It was on these occasions that the public had a chance to make themselves heard, shouting abuse as well as throwing rotten vegetables, eggs and what was euphemistically referred to as ‘street dirt’! It was a two-way process: the crowd had a chance to let off hell and the candidate had a chance to prove that he could go through hell with equanimity. Poor old Brooke could not! It’s possible to get a sense of what went on, as Lawrence says, from the Hogarth’s wonderful prints. Writing in the 1930s Churchill put it thus;

Dignity may suffer, the superfine gloss is soon worn away…much has to be accepted with a shrug, a sigh or a smile; but at any rate in the end one knows a good deal about what happens and why.

Churchill, in a sense, represents a late flourishing of a form of popular democratic interaction that played such an important part in political tradition, played such an important part in making him the man he was-a grandee, yes, but one who understood even the most ordinary of people, one who had the ability to manage crowds achieved by few others. I say late flourishing because the hustings as a form of political contact declined steadily in the course of the last century with the rise of other media. John Major’s 1992 ‘soap box’ election was a late, personal and temporary revival.

Now politics and elections are much more managed. Television is the preferred mode of communication rather than face-to-face encounters. The expenses scandal saw a slight move away from this trend, though those MPs called to account in their constituencies faced not general meetings but in camera assemblies of their own parties, though this was bruising enough for some!

Politicians, particularly senior ones, are largely cushioned from potentially dangerous contacts with voters. Yes, the eggs and the rotten tomatoes have gone, though so too has much of the vibrancy. I imagine the very idea of returning to the hustings would terrify so many of the mediocrities who occupy Parliament now: not that many Churchills; lots of Brooks!

Keep on Smiling; Gordon Brown, the Joker and Europe

I mentioned Gordon Brown’s U Tube appearance recently, the one where his face suddenly acquires an unbelievably stupid grin that bears no relation whatsoever to the things he is saying. I was reminded of something, the lunatic smile reminded me of someone, but I could not quite recall exactly what it was. Now I know: it was the Joker from Batman!

Well, he’s got no reason to smile today, no reason at all. The reports I'm getting on the Euro elections indicate that the Labour vote is projected to sink as low as 15%. Can you believe that? It’s the lowest ever for Labour as a national party, a real record.

What a wonderful achievement Mr Brown. You keep breaking records, not the records you might want to be remembered for breaking, but records notwithstanding. Can any other Prime Minister claim to have so many cabinet colleagues walk out in one week? Can any other Prime Minister say that he allowed the shape of a reshuffle be dictated by his colleagues? Now your vote has haemorrhaged away. I think it must be your proudest achievement that at least part of it bled towards the BNP, which now sends two representatives to Europe, another milestone attained under your watch.

Oh, well, Joker Brown. Never mind. You can continue to call on the services of Mandelson, aka Lord Rumba of Rio, a man who has risen from the political grave more often than Dracula! He’s soon to be joined by Lord Sugar of Shoddy, another inspired choice of yours, two greater hucksters I personally find difficult to imagine.

Do you believe in karma, dear Joker? I do. All through the Blair premiership you sowed the seed, yes, you did. Now you are reaping the fruit. I wish you a hearty appetite. Keep smiling, Joker: keep smiling. :-)