Category Archives: politics
Necrofelia
I was motivated to write this when I saw a reference to our prime minister’s onanism in an online forum. He threw the press that word, and successfully distracted them – and it seems others – from discussing real issues. In other words, a classic dead cat.
It is now well-known that Boris is the master of the dead cat. He’s not the first, but we didn’t use the phrase when (for example) Blair used them, and in some ways he’s taken it to a new level. We need a word for it.
We have a kind-of precedent in his predecessor Cameron’s necroporcophilia. And now the onanism reference tells us Boris doesn’t merely like a dead cat, but takes gratification in it. So we should speak of him as our necrofeliphiliac prime minister. But that word seems ugly and confusing. I propose contracting it to necrofeliac, or the root necrofelia.
Can I claim the coinage? I guess a quick google will tell me if someone’s already coined it. Dammit, either way the fact I’m talking about it tells us it’s homological.
The Peoples Democratic Republic
I’ve been meaning to have a good rant about this ever since Private Eye surpassed itself with that utterly brilliant headline The Ego has Landed in its Loon Landing Edition, blending the two topical stories of the ascent of Boris and the moon landing anniversary.
Not so long ago I thought May making him Foreign Secretary was a stroke of genius: surely the national embarrassment of so many idiocies would save us from seeing him as the next Prime Minister. The stark revelation of that classic public school trope, the Bully and Coward, certainly cured me of what remained of my one-time admiration for him. But I was wrong: he (like Flashman) has momentum, and Boris’s Momentum is a lot more powerful than Corbyn’s, so it can purge its party of all opposition.
So what’s he doing now? Apart from threatening us with national perdition while waving a Magic Money Tree that would shame Labour’s wildest promises? I think the whole key to it is, provoke the opposition into making itself look bad. And not just the opposition: there’s the media, the judiciary. Either you’re with us or you’re part of a great conspiracy. With his media background, not as reporter (where an effort to tell the truth would be expected) but as a successful columnist, he knows how to pull the strings of both the media and of the public. Or rather, in the latter case, his tribe.
Thus on brexit, keep them guessing. He has to request an extension, what will he do? If the EU see nothing coherent in UK politics – no plan that a sufficiently-united opposition might conceivably pursue – why would they agree to prolonging the agony? And who are the opposition? Two Labour parties that hate each other, Libdems who won’t go near Corbyn, and a handful of others including Tory rebels who. Shouldn’t be too hard to keep them from presenting a credible alternative. The Scots Nats valiantly try a constructive proposition (Corbyn on a very short leash), but even that fails to gain traction.
Meanwhile Boris presents himself as a tribal leader, shorn of any pretence of admitting contrary voices such as those of other tribes in ‘his’ nation. He’s seen that succeed elsewhere, albeit usually with ugly consequences (including Northern Ireland – the part of the UK with a strongly tribal recent history). He’s an obvious master of the dead cat, not least in the stories about sexual misdemeanours that play right into his hands by sending the Chattering Classes into a frenzy while being insufficiently serious for normal people to care. I thought (and nearly blogged) about the Carrie row during the leadership contest, which looked staged to provoke excess outrage and collect a sympathy vote. A few of these stories, and even if the next one were were a credible accusation of actual rape, who would believe it after so much fuss?
On the subject of brexit, the differing opposition attitudes are interesting but unhelpful. Libdems seek a mandate to stop it outright, but they’re too far from a ‘main party’ for that to be realistic. Corbyn presents a coherent plan – to do what Cameron should have done in the first place and present a referendum on an actual plan rather than a blank slate – but his party won’t unite and the media tell us it’s unclear. Looks like too little, too late. And – crucially – while they’re all panicking about WTF Boris might do (possibly in defiance of the law), they’re not uniting around a coherent plan, and what the world sees is headless chickens.
A grand narrative of a PM implementing the “will of the people” against a great conspiracy (conveniently forgetting of course that his predecessor would have delivered brexit if her own party hadn’t voted it down). These past few weeks have given me an insight into how the world got “Democratic Peoples Republic“s: someone pursued an agenda with a genuine belief that it was the “will of the people”, and gradually dispensed with all opposition that comes from democratic checks-and-balances.
As for the latest row over language? There’s another brilliant dead cat. The “surrender act” is nasty, but Labour hasn’t got a leg to stand on in criticising it: that kind of language has been their own bread-and-butter for longer than I can remember. On the other hand – and what finally provoked me into a rant about it, Boris’s rabble-rousing conference speech to his acolytes was seriously scary. If we put aside alarming precedents from within living memory, it was at the very least a conscious effort to cast his opponents as turbulent priests: serious intimidation.
Indeed, one striking aspect of politics today is how the Tories have taken on Labour’s mantle. In my youth it was Thatcher who talked mostly sense while Labour pursued tribal dogma in the name of socialism; now it’s Boris’s fanatics who are putting quasi-religious dogma ahead of the country’s interests in the name of ‘the people’. That’s deeper than just stealing Labour’s spending mantle to try and crowd them out, or provoke them to yet-more-loony promises.
What will happen at halloween? If I could get instant information, I’d be watching the hedge funds’ bets. Especially those that help bankroll Boris and the Party, or are controlled by or closely connected to government insiders like Rees-Mogg and Leadsom. They remember how Soros made gazillions betting against Blighty in 1992, but perhaps conveniently overlook the fact that he at least wasn’t doing so as a government insider.
Placing the Blame
When David Cameron resigned, I said here that his successor would come in for a lot of blame. And indeed, it has come to pass: Mrs May is getting the greater part of the blame for the mess brexit inevitably became. Much of her party wants her to resign, and she’s indicated she may do so – albeit as a form of bribe to her party.
But who would want her job now? There’s still a lot of blame to come, and our next prime minister won’t be popular for long either, no matter what he or she may do. There might be someone among the more swivel-eyed loons with delusions, but the Party Establishment can surely see them off.
There’s one obvious candidate. He’s in a position somewhat akin to May in 2016: of an age where if he doesn’t get the job now, he’ll be too old to be considered for it. And every party in parliament – including his own – would just love to see him fall flat on his face, and take the major share of the blame for brexit fallout. He is of course opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn.
And he’s also in a corner. Give him an election and, unlike the tories, he really can’t afford not to fight it to win.
So the question is, how to engineer it, and leave him (and the country) the most poisonous legacy possible. Well, they’re doing that by demonstrating that the tory party is just too dysfunctional and cannot govern. That’s three-birds-with-one-stone: it leads us by default to the worst possible brexit to poison the future; it helps precipitate an election, and it helps avoid winning that election. Genius!
Stalemate?
“Michel Barnier has said Britain would get a better brexit deal if he were negotiating with himself”
— attributed to comedian Henning Wehn.
The sad thing is, the quip is probably true! The real problems lie not between the UK and EU, nor even between political parties here, but within the governing Tory party.
I’ve been meaning to write most of this post – less the above joke – for a long time. I think since last December, when they announced the ‘backstop’ agreement to the Irish border issue. An agreement that was never going to be acceptable to the hardliners, and looked set up as vehicle for pushing blame onto the EU when the UK started to mess with it. But if so, that looks to be failing, as it seems the hardliners eschew such a “double-cross them later” fudge and reject it now.
So what is standing in the way of an agreement? At the core of it are two red lines:
EU red line: the integrity of the rules and regulations that protect our people and other things we care about.
Brexiteer red line: we must not be bound by EU rules: they stand in the way of trade agreements.
OK, that’s a bit abstract. There’s exactly one trade agreement that’s at issue here, and (so far as I’m aware) just one set of EU rules that’s really relevant. The trade agreement is of course with the US, and the rules in question are food safety. Because the US red line that has prevented a big US-EU trade agreement over many years is their freedom to export to us a range of foods that are banned here. I don’t have the expertise to say who is right or wrong when it comes to America’s wide range of genetically modified foods, chlorinated chicken, or beef pumped full of growth hormone (though I’d want to avoid the latter myself if I ate meat in the first place), but we’ll have to accept them if we want that US trade agreement[1].
So that’s the UK importing all those foods, now legally. And the US exporting them in bulk. And with consequential issues: the US will want to prevent backdoor restraint of trade, so a US importer should have a clear case in law against a British supermarket that uses a labelling scheme (like red tractor) prejudicial to the imports. And that’s a problem for British farmers: how are they to compete if we hold them to higher standards? What happens to the countryside if we lower our own standards to help them compete?
The EU wants to keep them out. It knows there will be smuggling (as with illegal drugs), but we must at least seek to minimise it: confine it to the margins. In the absence of proper border checks, the only limit on smuggling is the capacity of transport links between Belfast and Dublin. Hence the problem over that Irish border.
And it seems the EU really are insisting on the open border if we’re to have agreement. They made concessions in aid of that at the outset: notably the declaration that the Irish border is a unique case, thus avoiding problems like the Spanish feeling the need to veto an agreement that would be unacceptable to them on the Gibraltar border.
Looks like stalemate. Who will blink?
Mrs May has tried to deal with that by preserving regulatory alignment on goods – including of course food standards. But the US lobbyists in her own party won’t stand for that. So unless she can beat them, probably with help from other parties in parliament, that’s going nowhere. And her compromise-attempt was wrapped in a package so convoluted as to present problems to more than just the hard-brexiteers.
Still looks like stalemate. Who will blink?
What about the brexiteer proposal that technology can be a solution? The only real question there is, why do our mainstream media allow such disingenuous distraction to stand? Technology might serve to implement a solution, but that can only happen if and when there’s a political solution to implement! Claiming it as a solution in itself is about as useful to that as supplying bikes to fish: its only purpose is to confuse the issue and throw a spanner in negotiations. I consider the failure to debunk it comprehensively to be Gross Negligence on the part of the mainstream media.
[1] I wonder if that even need have been true if our politicians hadn’t made such a big issue of the standards? If we could have honestly said to the US “our hands are tied”, might a maverick like Trump have moved his red lines (with, no doubt, some give-and-take elsewhere) in the interests of showing the world “look, we can have a trade agreement”?
Bad Law
News story: “upskirting” to be outlawed. Replaced by news story: “upskirting” bill scuppered by rogue MP. Cries of “shame”!
Background. This was a private members’ bill, motivated by a campaigner’s bad experience. The campaigner has clearly suffered a Bad Thing: an event that might be described as assault, with followup that looks like bullying or harassment. That she should have some remedy in law seems uncontroversial, even if two years prison seems disproportionate.
But does that really imply a whole new criminal offence? Looks to me like a cop-out. When we talk about Good Practice like one-in-one-out for new criminal laws, this is precisely the kind of thing we mean. Might it not be much more productive to review why existing laws dealing with assault, bullying and harassment had failed this victim? A proper review might do something for many victims whose equally-distressing bullying and harassment just hasn’t got media attention.
This stinks of Bad Law. And of Bad Processes for making law: it’s been cooked up behind closed doors without any opportunity for review by the representatives we supposedly elect to make our laws (so much for “democracy”). Perhaps if it had had proper (or indeed any) debate, someone would have pointed out that this was a Very Bad fix.
The campaigner is in the right: she should have some remedy. The backbencher who brought the bill is right-ish: a backbencher has no real remedies, and the outcome should have been to put it on the Government’s agenda. But for the Government itself to jump on this populist measure is a disgraceful failure in its obligation to deal with such obvious shortcomings in existing law. The hero of this case is the backbencher who stopped it and forced at least a debate. Must take courage to bring down the wrath of the Establishment and kneejerk media on yourself like that!
Clearing the air
It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged any good rant about matters in the news here. It’s not that I don’t sometimes have things I could say, nor even that my words would be superfluous because the Chattering Classes in the mainstream media are already saying them. Rather it’s a lack of round tuits, and perhaps because I might sometimes post a rant elsewhere instead (for example, El Reg on predominantly techie matters).
So how better to try and restart than by blogging a positive story. One of those rare occasions where out government appears possibly to be doing the Right Thing about one of today’s most serious problems. I can’t find it on the BBC website (where I looked after hearing it on the radio), but Google finds it at the FT.
The story is rather different between the BBC and the FT, but the gist of it is that Michael Gove and/or the Department of the Environment (of which he is minister in charge) is at last considering proposals to clean up our air, by restricting or banning domestic wood and coal fires. These fires have become a huge problem in recent years. I believe they have standards about keeping their own house unpolluted, but for anyone who happens to live downwind[1] of such fires, it can fill the house with smoke for extended periods: many hours a day, many months a year. We’re talking levels of smoke comparable to not one or two but a great many smokers in the house, and this is seriously nasty smoke that hasn’t gone through the considerable cleanup that’s been forced onto the tobacco industry in recent decades.
In summary, for people affected by this, it’s an order of magnitude worse than regular exposure to passive smoking, or to those diesel emissions that have created such a fuss in recent times.
Governments have occasionally been known to do the right thing on pollution. In the 1950s we had clean air legislation to clear up a reportedly-serious smog problem. In my lifetime we’ve rid ourselves of most of the blight of tobacco smoke (including legislation that has been very successful despite my reservations at the time). Let’s hope we can see the spirit of that 1950s legislation revived and give us back our air!
[1] The prevailing wind here is approximately west-south-west, and a very common winter weather pattern includes mild damp weather and very light westerly winds. So the greatest killer is to be between east and northeast of a woodburner.
Schadenfreude
So, which is more satisfying in today’s election results? A bloody nose for Mrs MegaloMayniac? Or a kick up the backside for the Labour party Establishment who loathe Corbyn as much as they hate democracy, and have spent a year and a half in civil war? All without delivering the other hypothetically-possible disaster of a Corbyn government.
A fly in the ointment is what the Coalition of Chaos that now looks likely may do to Northern Ireland. The DUP will want their price, and the Tories’ desperation will surely strengthen the hand of the more extreme elements in the DUP. Talk about setting a match to a powder keg!
Sultana
(The title derives from here).
I was as surprised as anyone when our prime minister called a surprise election. OK, with Libdems knocked out in 2015 and Labour tearing themselves apart, she has no opposition in most of the country: she’ll walk it, right? But just after setting the clock ticking on brexit??? Good grief, how can we afford the time for this nonsense? Her policy platform looked like the progeny of an unlikely match of Farage and Miliband, with a touch more of Blairite authoritarianism that either of the main parents would seem likely to favour.
To state my own prior position, I was a strong supporter of Mrs Thatcher in my youth, but have become much-disillusioned with her successors, as browsing this blog (e.g. here) will reveal. I had hoped that the Libdems might come to the election with a positive programme I could support despite inevitable elements of gratuitous Political Correctness and the Loony Left, but they were quick to disappoint. Once again, I say None of the Above.
The justification seemed dodgy from the start, raising a strawman argument about being frustrated by … well, in fact, an exceptionally supine parliament. A couple of outright lies put my back up somewhat. But anyway, the Chattering Classes soon came up with some ideas: she wanted a personal mandate; she needed a big majority to stand up to the loony fringe of her own party. Really?
I live in a very marginal constituency, so I expected to be on the receiving end of some campaigning. The first I received on the doormat some weeks ago was a large glossy from which a mugshot of Jeremy Corbyn stared up at me. Interesting: Labour have got into gear commendably fast? Nope, this was Tory literature, featuring a bogeyman as its most important message.
When the (less-glossy) actual Labour leaflet followed, the only mugshot in it was the candidate himself. And a set of policies that read like a checklist of opposing everything the Tories are trying to do right. Ugh. No mention of Corbyn: is this candidate trying to dissociate himself from his own leader?
A second Tory letter – this time in an envelope – calls for a mandate not for my candidate, nor for the Party, but for Mrs May herself. Well, sorry, I can’t vote for that. Even if I wanted to live in Maidenhead (her constituency), I’ll never be able to afford it, so I don’t get the chance to vote either for or against her. But the message is becoming clearer than ever: we are to dispense with Parliament, relegate them to something more like a US-style electoral college, and crown our Supreme Leader. This cult of personality is not entirely new: perhaps we should be glad that she’s being more open about it than in the past? But coupled with her authoritarian leanings and secrecy over her agenda beyond the coronation, it scares me.
No more leaflets until last Friday, when a sudden flurry brought one each from the Libdems, UKIP, and an Independent, plus three more from the Tories for a total of five from them (good grief)! Only the Greens missing (perhaps they practice what they preach?), and sadly our Green party is solidly Loony Left. The Independent candidate actually has an anti-party platform I could strongly support (it’s distantly related to my own), but sadly falls down on other issues. And neither the Libdem nor UKIP feature their respective party leaders, so maybe I was being unduly cynical about Labour doing likewise.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Surprisingly, her bogeyman doesn’t seem to be doing the job of annihilating himself. Indeed, Corbyn is looking the most statesmanlike of a dreadful bunch, and his own party have suppressed their hatred for him and moved from attacking him to ‘clarifying’ what he says. The “strong and stable” and “coalition of chaos” slogans have come back to bite her as it becomes painfully clear she herself is more chaos than strength, and the latest image of Corbyn “naked and alone“(!!!) with all those Eurocrats sounds almost like panic. It’s obviously nonsense: brexit negotiations will be conducted by Sir Humphrey’s civil servants regardless of who wins the election. In the still-inconceivable event of Labour beating the tories, I expect their political master would be Sir Kier Starmer, KCB, QC, not Corbyn himself.
So Corbyn has momentum. How far can it take him? Not into government, but perhaps far enough to upset the master plan. We need a bigger rallying point than that mugshot. What do people respond to, fast? Not any new promises: messing with the manifesto is just more egg on the face. It’s got to be a real threat. Big enough to grab the headlines and the national conversation. And preferably focus attention on matters where We Beat Them in public trust.
Where can we find such a threat? Given the tight timescale, we’re never going to make it with a foreign power. But there are a fair few alienated idiots in Blighty, susceptible to being inspired by heroes like the biblical Samson. We’re told our security forces have thwarted no fewer than five terrorist attacks in two months between the Westminster Bridge attack (March 22nd) and the Manchester one (May 25th – being more than a month into the election campaign). That’s more than one a fortnight, so it’s unlikely to be long before a next attempt. If one of those gets through, we have our threat and out enemy to rally against, and of course security is precisely where both the parties and their leaders individually are very clearly differentiated!
With that in mind, it seems an extraordinarily convenient coincidence that Manchester happened when it did: surely the security theatre of raising the threat level and deploying troops on the streets would kill that momentum and distract the media from the manifesto fiasco? Against all expectations, it didn’t! Then we had London Bridge, and this time a firm No Nonsense message: playing directly to traditional strengths.
Of course suggesting a connection is deep into conspiracy theory. But for the security forces – who routinely prevent terrorist attacks – to have failed twice in such quick succession – is extremely unlikely to be purely random. Did someone quietly send 007 on a wild goose chase – like for instance looking for Russian influence in the election – and leave Clouseau in charge back home? No, that’s a bit far-fetched. A botched information system update disrupting communication among anti-terrorist forces would make far more sense. And since all the people concerned work on a need-to-know basis and only see small parts of the overall systems, no individual would actually know what was going on!
And just to add icing to the conspiracy, what if the botch messed with third-party systems that must access the anti-terrorist information system, like an airline’s passenger information? What unlikely account might the airline be able to give of it if they were unable to operate? No, ignore that, it’s too far-fetched: BA is much more likely to have been hit by their own botch, perhaps with the aid of the big thunderstorms we had on the Friday night.
The tail that wags a very big dog
Our new Prime Minister famously said “brexit is brexit”. The general media responded straight away with “but what is brexit?”. OK, they’re onto the troubles with it. No need for me to say anything more. Right?
Well, something less than half-right. They’ve grasped the Humpty Dumpty nature of the word “brexit”. But they’ve failed miserably to follow through and consider the implications. Dammit!
So what’s the problem? Brexit is a coalition of differing views, ranging from on the one hand some who see it as an opportunity for more trade and more immigration (like Tim Martin, who had “vote leave” messages printed on beer mats at Weatherspoons, a chain of about 1000 pubs, predominantly big ones in city locations), right through to outright racists and xenophobes who won’t be satisfied until their streets are purged of anyone speaking foreign. Plus of course a general protest vote. No outcome is going to satisfy all the brexit voters. Indeed, it seems unlikely even to satisfy a majority.
So now a majority – the 52% – have a sense of victory and entitlement to their agenda. Among them, the outright racists have been making the most noise: within 24 hours of the result they’d screamed “traitor” at Boris (who had been so bold as to hint that brexit didn’t necessarily mean closing the doors to all immigration), and even at Farage. There were also posts in public fora prophesying blood in the streets if any doors remained open. How things have changed since Enoch Powell!
That’s an agenda claiming – and believing they have – a 52% electoral mandate, yet not really representing even the whole of the BNP/UKIP. Give them their isolationism and we can rapidly slip back to poverty, and with less food or energy security than even in the 1970s. Deny it to them and it seems most unlikely they’ll shut up.
Even the Tory party’s internal troubles, which the referendum was intended to deal with (hence the gerrymandering in favour of Out), seem unlikely to go away. Mrs May is making a valiant attempt by putting brexit leaders in charge, but some of the backbenchers will surely be back on the warpath as soon as there’s any whiff of compromise in the air.
Thought experiment. UK general elections give us a choice of several parties and candidates to vote for. A party that gets 40% of votes cast becomes a clear winner. If we voted 48% for the status quo (Tories) and 52% for all other parties, that would give the Tories the biggest landslide victory of any party in our history. And that’s how the referendum campaign was conducted: on the “in” side a lacklustre status quo, on the “out” side a coalition of different agendas each with utopian promises they had no expectation of having to deliver.
Well, we voted 52% for the array of promises that were “not the status quo”, and could be handing that 52% not to the mainstream opposition (Labour, or perhaps the SNP – the opposition party with a real mandate in its home turf) but to a loony-fringe party that happens to shout loudest.
And perhaps the worst of it? Whereas Tim Farron (libdem leader) promised to make it an election issue for positive reasons, Labour hopeful Owen Smith is doing exactly the wrong thing jumping onto that bandwagon with an entirely negative and condescending “you got it wrong” message. Cameron already alienated enough people to tip the balance, and Smith is consolidating that alienation. I hope Corbyn firmly beats him.
DoS attack?
Government system to register to vote in the referendum gets overloaded. Deadline gets extended. Cockup or conspiracy?
News reports tell us the best measure of traffic they had was the peak of registrations ahead of last year’s general election, and they built the system to cope with many times more traffic than they’d had then. Yet traffic surged way beyond even that ‘surplus’ capacity. So while cockup is entirely plausible, it’s by no means inevitably the cause.
It is widely supposed that late registrations come predominantly from younger people, and that younger people are more likely to vote In. So bringing the system down ahead of the deadline would favour “out”, while extending the deadline would favour “in”. Overall my best guess would be they more-or-less balance – at least if the system doesn’t go down again.
Most campaigners on both sides seem to accept it’s just one-of-those-things. But a few “out” campaigners have been remarkably quick to jump on it. It’s gerrymandering (Ian Liddell-Grainger). It could be cause for Judicial Review in the event of a narrow “in” vote (Bernard Jenkin).
Hmmm, cui bono? Jenkin’s line of reasoning points to a vote-again-until-you-get-it-right scenario. We have a motive: someone stood to gain from the system failing on the last day. If the deadline is not extended, a chunk of predominantly-in voters are excluded. If it is extended, they’re preparing the ground for judicial review: get the courts to decide. A win-win.
A Denial of Service attack can bring any system on the ‘net down for a while, and is very easy to mount (buy yourself control of a million virus-infected PCs and have them all bombard the target system to overwhelm it).
Cockup or Conspiracy? I anticipate some more evidence, albeit far from conclusive. If it goes down again tomorrow, that signals cockup – unless someone could organise a new DoS attack remarkably quickly. If it survives to the new deadline, it smells more of conspiracy.
niq's soapbox 
