1,826 days later…

John Lilburne would have hated lockdown

It doesn’t seem that long ago, but the referendum (not the crappy Scottish indyref), was on 23rd June, 2016.

A truly remarkable, and great, day.

Technically, as I write, it’s 1,830 days, but I use the 5 year period to highlight a wonderful piece by Brendan O’Neill. Amusingly, he gets up the noses of most of the right people, but he is a very very good writer. He was and is a hero of our time, a general in the Brexit wars, in which I played a modest role.

I can’t summarise it all better than him, so I am going to paraphrase (steal) the lot, published in Spiked!, on 23rd June.

Take it away, friend….

It was five years ago today. Millions of Brits marched to the polling stations to answer a simple question: should we stay in the European Union or should we leave it? Everyone expected the answer to be ‘Let’s stay’. Surely the British people would not be so reckless as to tear their nation from the finest, fairest, most peace-loving global institution of the postwar era, which is how Remainers spoke of the EU. Yet as the world now knows, and as history must record, things didn’t go to plan. In defiance of virtually the entire elite, and in the face of a relentless, well-oiled campaign of fear that said leaving the EU would propel the UK into a grim future of food shortages, medicine scarcity and probably fascism to boot, the electorate said: ‘You know what? Let’s leave.’

We all know what happened next. There was David Dimbleby’s ashen face as he solemnly announced the epoch-shattering decision of the British people. Politicians welled up. The commentariat were flummoxed. Then came the demand for a second referendum to correct the destructive idiocy of the low-education masses. There were marches, angry marches, in which thousands of middle-class people traipsed to Westminster under banners calling for a ‘People’s Vote’, which was positively Orwellian given the entire aim of these gatherings of irate influencers was to destroy a people’s vote. There was the Remainer Parliament, in which MPs shamelessly devoted themselves to thwarting their constituents’ wishes. There was Theresa May’s compromises, and the EU’s vindictiveness, and all the rest of it. On and on it went, the noisiest hissy fit of modern times, a political meltdown of unprecedented proportions.

To those of us who voted for Brexit – and who would do so again and again – the response of the establishment was proof of our rightness. Their bitter rage against the supposedly ill-informed, xenophobic masses confirmed our suspicion that they do not take us seriously as citizens. The EU’s Machiavellian machinations – its cynical exploitation of Irish concerns to try to weaken Brexit, its treatment of Britain as an uppity colony daring to question the rights of empire – proved the virtue of our ballot-box revolt against this distant, neoliberal oligarchy. And Labour and the broader left’s decision to side with the EU against the British people, to don their blue face-paint and wave their plastic flags as they demanded that the ignorant throng be made to vote again, attested to millions of people’s belief that those who claim to speak for the working classes actually harbour a seething contempt for the working classes.

This was the beauty of the fallout from our vote: their fury fortified our commitment to the progressive, democratic project of leaving the EU. In the face of the most unhinged display of establishment anger any of us can remember, the electorate stood by its convictions and restated its beliefs every single time polling booths were opened. In the 2017 General Election, when more than 80 per cent of us voted for parties that were then promising to respect the referendum result (the Tories and Labour). In the 2019 Euro elections, when the Brexit Party came top. And of course in the 2019 General Election, when the party that promised to ‘Get Brexit Done’ (the Tories) won an historic victory, while the party that stabbed its working-class voters in the back and aligned itself with the neoliberal cry for a second vote (Labour) received its worst beating since the 1930s. The steadfastness of the British people’s commitment to Leave, and to democracy, has been utterly inspiring.

Here’s the curious thing about the past five years. Time and again, the people made plain their belief that Brexit would be a positive step for the United Kingdom to take, and yet the narrative around Brexit, the political and media rendering of it, was entirely negative. There was a staggering disconnect between the pro-Brexit confidence of vast swathes of the electorate and the daily hysterical depiction of Brexit as an unmitigated disaster, as a demagogic nightmare, as Nazism with a new face. You couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of the chasm that now separates the outlook of ordinary people and the outlook of the political class. Now, though, on the fifth anniversary of this brilliant revolt, it is surely time to wrest the narrative back from the anti-democratic doom-mongers who have more than had their say and to make one, simple point: Brexit is the best thing to happen to British and European politics in the postwar era.

No more screwing up our faces in frustration when the elites say Brexit is a nightmare. No more apologetic statements like, ‘It will be okay, I promise’. No more treatment of Brexit as a technical task we can ‘get done’ if we put our minds to it – I’m looking at you, Boris and Co. No, Brexit must finally be put into its rightful historic context. This revolt against both Brussels and Westminster, this peaceful uprising against the political, cultural and business elites who all warned us not to break away from technocracy, is up there with the Leveller struggle for the right of men to vote, and the Chartist fight for a working-class voice in politics, and the St Peter’s Field march for the enfranchisement of working people, and the Suffragette battle for women’s right to vote. In common with those people-won leaps forward for the democratic imagination, the Brexit revolt was an assertion of the rights of citizens to play a greater role in determining the fate of the nation and the fate of their own lives.

It wasn’t a racist vote. It wasn’t a vote against foreigners. It wasn’t a desperate cry of the ‘left behind’, pleading with middle-class Londoners to listen for a change. It was a vote to enlarge the democratic life of the nation. It was a vote to wrest control away from unelected bureaucrats and return it to those over whom we the people have a more direct form of democratic control. It was entirely of a piece with the cry of John Lilburne, the great Leveller of the English Civil War: ‘Unnatural, irrational, sinful, wicked, unjust, devilish and tyrannical it is, for any man whatsoever – spiritual or temporal, clergyman or layman – to appropriate and assume unto himself a power, authority and jurisdiction to rule, govern or reign over any sort of men in the world without their free consent.’ That’s what we said, us Brexiteers, in our own way. You cannot make our laws or control our destinies without our consent – that was the meaning behind ‘Take back control’.

This is why the EU referendum continues to cast a shadow over every facet of politics in the UK. This is why we still define ourselves by the tags Leave and Remain. This is why where you stood in that 2016 referendum will one day be spoken of in the same way that people ask where you would have stood in the Battle of Marston Moor, the 1644 clash between parliamentarians and royalists. Because this wasn’t just a vote on a technical matter. It was a wholesale reordering of British political life. It was ordinary people demanding the reorganisation of political debate around issues of sovereignty, democracy and power. It was the people injecting the aloof, sclerotic realm of politics with the serious question of authority and where it derives from. We shouldn’t balk at the division of politics along the lines of Leave / Remain, along the lines of where you stand on nationhood, borders, sovereignty and power. We shouldn’t write these camps off as ‘identities’, as ‘tribes’. We should welcome the historic clarity that the mercifully bloodless civil war between the people and the elites over the past five years has introduced into public life. I’ll be a Leaver forever.

Was Brexit perfectly implemented? Of course not. Look at the mess of the Northern Ireland Protocol. Did the introduction of lockdown just weeks after we celebrated our official leaving of the European Union on 31 January 2020 suggest that ‘control’ – of politics, our lives, our futures – remains elusive? Undoubtedly. Is Brexit an unfinished revolt? For sure. We are still ruled by political elites hostile to the populist spirit and drawn, inexorably, to the dead hand of technocratic governance. And yet for all of that, Brexit still remains a great and stirring achievement. To get overly down about the rocky road of politics post-Brexit would be to risk aligning ourselves with the anti-democratic naysayers who accuse the people of having given rise to a dangerous new era. It is the magnificent promise of Brexit we must highlight, and build upon, if we are to ensure that the centuries-long struggle for a real culture of people power will eventually come good.

Lilburne, O’Neill, Farage (yes), even Boris, and the many millions more – I salute you

The Ode to Brexit Joy

The Eroica copy in the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, with the hole where Beethoven angrily scratched out the dedication to Napoleon

One of the greatest Europeans of them all hugely admired Napoleon, until one day, he didn’t. Beethoven famously wrote his Eroica Symphony (one of his many paradigm leaps) in part as a homage to the tiny Corsican, but when the latter’s superstate ambitions and ego took over, Beethoven lost the rag. He had principles that weren’t for sale.

So it’s both irksome and ignorant of the EU to claim (in 1993) the Ode to Joy from the Ninth (21 years later, from a tired and reflective genius), as some sort of superstate anthem. Beethoven would not have approved.

The nadir of this cultural appropriation was when the routinely stupid SNP whistled and gurned it to ‘protest’ about Brexit (narrator: normal Scottish people are indifferent at best to the EU, don’t believe the hype).

In the real world, intelligent EU types, particularly in the German media, have sensed that the game is nearly up. Merkel has been a disaster, ultimately, and the future without the UK’s dosh and common sense looks scary to them. As it should. Here is one such piece in the mighty Der Spiegel, published on Brexit day, and written by the prescient Romain Leick.  I have copied the whole thing.  One of the key points in the road is spelled out: “Brussels did nothing to help the lamentable Prime Minister David Cameron win the referendum”. In fact they treated him like a turd on their elegant shoes.

Essential reading and reflection:

Just over 47 years ago, when the United Kingdom finally joined the European Economic Community, following intense debates and a close vote in parliament, the era-defining event was celebrated with a gala concert in London. It included a “Fanfare for Europe,” composed especially for the occasion. An idealistic, conservative prime minister – Edward Heath – had led Britain into Europe. In an effort to convince the skeptics, he said: “We have the chance of new greatness. Now we must take it.”

His eventual successor, Boris Johnson – a gambler rather than an idealist – used almost the same words to mark the country’s plunge into independence. He won his bet with the promise that Britain’s departure from the European Union would give control back to the people of Britain. He sold the illusion that a proud nation state is still the most powerful force of all, even in this age of globalization – freed of the shackles of a woeful and tedious alliance that had been inaccurately sold as a community of fate.

The EU considered the impending tragedy of Brexit to be so absurd, so idiotic and backward, that it was long unwilling to accept it as a possibility. Brussels did nothing to help the lamentable Prime Minister David Cameron win the referendum. The EU thought it had to be unyielding in negotiations with Cameron’s successor Theresa May (“this deal or no deal”) in order to convince Britain not to go through with it and to scare others away from trying.

But the EU achieved exactly the opposite: In the three-and-a-half years since the June 2016 referendum, the British only became more determined to leave and more disgusted with the bloc. The Continent must now be at pains to avoid repeating those mistakes by once again transforming negotiations over future relations into an obstacle course.

The temptation to succumb to resentment and take steps to penalize Britain remains strong in Brussels. Simply allowing a powerful member state like the UK to leave unpunished calls the EU’s own self-image into question. The European project is rooted in the belief that there is no other option – in the rationally, though not emotionally, coherent conviction that European nation states must sacrifice a portion of their independence in order to find success in a globalized world.

Germany had no trouble doing so. On the contrary, the country had forfeited its sovereignty in World War II and only completely got it back again following reunification in 1990. By then, it was already firmly anchored in the EU and in NATO. In order to allay concerns about a newly reunified Germany, particularly those in Paris, Germany agreed to give up the deutsche mark, the most powerful symbol of the country’s sovereignty, and join the currency union. From the very beginning, European integration was a path for Germany to release itself from the demons of its Nazi past and abandon its destructive dreams of a “special path.”

But the situation was completely different in Britain. They, too, had followed a special path in Europe for a thousand years, one with its own set of stumbling blocks. All in all, though, the path was a positive one. “We in Britain are not going to turn our backs on the mainland of Europe or on the countries of the Community. We are a part of Europe: by geography, tradition, history, culture and civilization,” Heath said. “Our destiny has been to help to shape Europe,” said Tony Blair, the subsequent British prime minister who, at the height of his appeal, was celebrated as something like the John F. Kennedy of the EU.

Now, Brussels shouldn’t keep the UK at arm’s length: It must be possible to have them both out and in at the same time. It would be the second act of the tragedy if Johnson were able to strike a trade deal with Donald Trump’s America quicker than with the EU. When it comes to foreign and security policy — for example, in relations with Iran — Johnson is closer to Europe than he is to the big brother across the Atlantic. It has not been forgotten in the UK that Blair’s downfall began when he followed George W. Bush into the Iraq War in 2003, while both Paris and Berlin declined. Johnson’s goal is to remain a political actor within the European system without becoming an also-ran in an asymmetric partnership with the U.S.

Continental Europeans are fully aware, of course, that if the relationship were to remain sour on the long term, the harm to them would be at least as large as it would be to the British. Nevertheless, a majority of the European public appears not to have understood the consequences that the historical break could have. And many European politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, must face up to criticism that they didn’t do enough to truly understand the reasons for the sense of alienation between the UK and the EU. Otherwise, they would not have stood by and done nothing over the years as the crack widened into a gaping breach.

The unique role Britain played in Europe was mocked and impugned, seen as a yearning for lost greatness and caused by lingering pain from the loss of its empire. Much of Europe acted as though Brexit was only about British – or, more specifically, English – sensitivities, as though it didn’t also have existential implications for all of Europe. Some of the most zealous federalists even appear to be hoping that the EU has now been freed of a major hindrance and that the path is now open to a political union, as was agreed to in the Maastricht Treaty almost 30 years ago.

But the tactical maneuvering, the delays and the missed opportunities since then cannot all be blamed on British intransigence. Europe has always been ready to grant exceptions to Britain (and others), so-called opt-outs – on the currency union, on the Schengen Agreement and on the European Social Charter.

That was the deal from the very beginning: Britain would never be part of a complete political union, preferring instead to just a member of a confederation of states with a common market. Continental Europe could comfortably hide behind this contradiction because it concealed its own conflict over whether it wanted the EU to be an association of states or a true union. Britain’s EU membership was a misunderstanding inasmuch as it rested on the EU’s own disparity between the goals it proclaimed and the reality it lived.

Now, though, it is time to soberly admit that the British, in their allegedly small-minded cost-benefit pragmatism, are actually the more far-sighted realists. The EU as a political project, devised in the late 20th century for the 21st century, in part also as a palliative against post-reunification German hegemony, has failed.

Not because the British sunk the project, but because Europe – in its euphoria over the convergence of the continent and the proliferation of democracy – overreached. Not an “ever closer union,” but a flexible union would have been a more successful strategy for an EU of 28 member states. The euro crisis and the debt crisis brought the north-south economic divide into stark relief while the refugee crisis split the east from the west. And all the crises together stoked anger at Germany’s “geo-economic nationalism” and “moral imperialism.”

Brexit has made it clear to everybody that the goal of a united Europe is far from certain. The British are leaving the EU because they can. The Irish historian Brendan Simms, who teaches at Cambridge, argues that if there is a power in Europe able to stand on its own two feet, then it is the British. That conclusion is borne out of the thousand years of conflict and cooperation in the British-European relationship and out of hundreds of years of parliamentarian sovereignty. In World War II, Britain was the only European participant not to have experienced occupation.

 If the UK were to really turn its back on Europe, if it is driven into isolation by trade diktats from Brussels, then European geopolitics would have to be completely reimagined. The Continent would no longer be able to count on a disgruntled Britain – which remains the second-largest military and economic power in Europe – to stay engaged in the defense of Europe’s eastern flank in Poland and the Baltics. It would lose an ally with nuclear deterrent capabilities and with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. A severely weakened Europe would remain held back as a world power-wannabe.

Instead of sinking into haughty self-pity, into bickering and recrimination, the EU should set aside its arrogance and accept that for the foreseeable future, it will be a confederation and not a true union. Who, after all, could pave the way for a relaunch of the kind demanded by French President Emmanuel Macron in his September 2017 speech in the Sorbonne in Paris? Macron, weakened on the domestic front by unending strikes, is hardly a shoo-in for re-election in two years. In 2005, the French voted against a new draft constitution for the EU. It is also unclear who his partner might be in the German Chancellery.

Either way, boldness and an appetite for risk isn’t to be expected from Berlin. But it’s standard procedure in London. Boris Johnson showed that, if necessary, he had been prepared to accept a hard Brexit, complete with a hostile stance toward Brussels. And such acrimony is still a possibility if, as the British prime minister has demanded, a fair – and generous – trade deal isn’t reached between the Continent and Britain by the end of the year.

Bye-bye Britain? How about: Welcome to the neighborhood!

 ….and to counter the Remoaners’ and the EU’s traducing of Beethoven’s memory, here is a guilty pleasure – noted Brit musician and Germanophile Ritchie Blackmore’s far more fun take on the Ode to Joy….

 

#Brexit, and a brief history of the EU

The Channel, from the International Space Station

 

This author, like many Brexiteers, didn’t really have a problem with the Common Market and its initial manifestations. It all went downhill with Maastricht (1992) and Lisbon (2007), where the terrible undemocratic behaviour of our politicians – not least Gordon Brown shamefacedly skulking away from the press –  became writ large.

Today is Brexit Day, and one of the Guardian’s headlines shows you just how deluded Remainers became, whilst admitting that there might have been a teeny problem with the EU..

….are you sure about that?

In any event, I have a lot of time for some of the early EU types – Monnet, Schuman, de Gasperi and even Jacques Delors -but their civilising influences were swept away by the ghastly ungodly bullying technocrats who followed.

Here is the Great Spartan of Scotland, Gerald Warner, from behind a paywall at Reaction, on today’s events, and the preceding decades. Superb stuff:

Today is the day. After 47 years of sovereignty submerged beneath the Brussels behemoth and three and a half years devoted to frustrating the attempts by the EU fifth column within our domestic elites to overrule the result of the biggest democratic exercise in our history, Britain finally reclaims its place among the sovereign nations of the world.

Membership of the European Union was a catastrophic mistake. The people of Britain were lured into the snare by an endless series of false prospectuses, deceit and downright lies. Our accidental protector was Charles de Gaulle, whose implacable “Non!” deferred our entry into the EEC for years. De Gaulle himself believed in a Europe des patries and would have given short shrift to the integrationist policies being championed by his remote successor Emmanuel Macron.

The monstrosity whose disintegration we shall now watch with a mixture of morbid curiosity and satisfaction from the safety of offshore was introduced by a process of osmosis: who could possibly feel threatened by a Coal and Steel Community? The project, ironically, was conceived by its founders not only as a political project, but as a culturally Christian endeavour – a kind of restoration of the Holy Roman Empire.

In post-War Europe, groping around uncertainly for security and guarantees of peace in the face of an escalating Cold War, by coincidence three Catholic statesmen had come to dominate the European geopolitical landscape by 1950. They were Robert Schuman, the foreign minister of France; Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of West Germany; and Alcide De Gasperi, prime minister of Italy. So devout was Schuman that he has been declared a “servant of God” by the Church, the first step towards beatification. This Catholic influence in the founding of the European Steel and Coal Community (ESCC) might seem to play to the delusions of those today who make the historically illiterate error of comparing Brexit to the English Reformation. In that, they echo Ian Paisley’s strident condemnations of the Treaty of Rome. Any comparison of the mainly spiritual powers of the Pope, plus the modest dues of Peter’s Pence and Annates paid for the upkeep of the Church, before the Reformation is completely derisory compared to the vast powers and massive fiscal exactions of the EU.

In any case, this initially Catholic inspiration was being dissipated as early as 1950: when Schuman read the Declaration that bears his name, founding the ESCC, the text had already been edited by Jean Monnet. Thereafter, relentless secularism increasingly captured the European project. When the EU was drawing up its constitution in 2004 the Vatican and seven member states pressed in vain for even the briefest acknowledgement of Europe’s Christian heritage. Later, on the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, Benedict XVI condemned the EU’s increasing marginalization of Christianity as “apostasy of itself”.

That was true even in a secular sense: the present-day European Union is totally deracinated from its original philosophy and character. It no longer knows what it is or aspires to be. No two member states share the same vision. Just as the north-south divide has brought the euro currency to the brink of collapse, interpretations of the EU as diverse as those prevailing in France and Hungary create an irreducible tension that can never be resolved except by either the reduction of the number of member states or the dissolution of the whole Heath-Robinson contraption.

One thing is certain: the EU is not democratic. Unelected apparatchiks hold the reins of power. Any attempt at asserting democratic values has – until the success of Brexit – been cynically and ruthlessly crushed. This is most observable in the EU’s treatment of referenda in member states. As long ago as 1992 a referendum in Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty. Some cosmetic changes were made, including exempting Denmark from adopting the euro, and the following year the Danes held a second referendum and obediently fell into line.

Because the Irish constitution requires all treaties to be subjected to plebiscite, in 2001 a referendum was held in Ireland on the Treaty of Nice, which was rejected. After frenzied propaganda by the establishment Ireland voted again in 2002 and accepted the Nice Treaty, with a face-saving provision of exemption from joining any future EU army.
In 2005 referenda in France and the Netherlands both rejected the draft EU constitution. Since forcing a re-run in two countries would have been bad PR, Brussels re-packaged the constitution as the Lisbon Treaty. But a referendum in Ireland in 2008 rejected the treaty, so 16 months later the Irish were required to vote again and this time they came up with the right result.

With that history of consistent refusals to accept a democratic verdict it is unsurprising that the EU imagined that, with the help of the Remainers in Britain, it should be possible to force the UK to hold a second referendum, after years of Project Fear scaremongering, and secure a penitent revocation of Article 50, with a chastened Britain returning to the EU fold to be treated with obloquy for the indefinite future.

The British, happily, are made of sterner stuff and cherish the rights for which they made large sacrifices in two world wars. So, we are leaving, and not before time. Since we joined the EEC in 1973 this country has contributed £215bn to the EEC/EU budget. And for what? The continual erosion of our independence, the imposition of foreign courts and laws on our legal system, the hobbling of our natural instincts of entrepreneurship.
We have always been a net contributor to the EU: apart from propagandist froth, no British project has ever benefited from “European money” – only from a portion of our taxpayers’ money returned to us on its own terms by Brussels. So far from benefiting from EU membership, three decades of Brussels regulations have hobbled productivity and real wages, causing loss of growth of around 0.2 per cent annually, totalling £120bn over 30 years.

Now it is over. The psychological effect of restored sovereignty will be enormous. It must be reflected in Britain’s approach to the 11-month negotiations during the transition period. Michel Barnier must be made to realize he is dealing with a wholly different entity from the cap-in-hand suppliant that was Theresa May. Domestically, the government has got off to a bad start, losing the opportunity to draw a line under the past by instantly excluding Huawei and scrapping HS2. That would have sent a robust message to Brussels which still believes the deep state is in control in Whitehall. Our negotiating position must be unyielding: no extension after 31 December, no concessions on fisheries, no ECJ, no alignment with the regulations that have for too long crippled enterprise in this country.

It will be virtually impossible for a defeated and discredited Remoaner rump to demonize a WTO exit if EU intransigence makes it inevitable. The mood is confident; we are a great nation. When the present Queen came to the throne there was much optimistic talk, despite the weakness of our post-War economy and the continuing dissolution of our Empire, of a “New Elizabethan Age”.

An establishment philosophy of managed decline and the constrictions of EU membership stifled that aspiration. Perhaps now, in the later stages of the reign, that neo-Elizabethan vision can finally be attained. Welcome, Brexit, and welcome the return to the world stage of a sovereign, independent Britain.

It’s up to us now.

Standing on the shoulders of a ….

…we have plumbed the depths with this one

Like most people who’d heard the quote, I assumed that it was original to Isaac Newton.

Not so.

In 1676, Newton wrote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”, which is indeed a memorable phrase, and speaks well to the natural humility of an extraordinary person. 

However, Wikipedia gives the palm to Bernard of Chartres (a 12th century philosopher), and possibly much earlier: “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.” The giants being the ancient philosophers and scholars of Greece and Rome. 

Which preamble is to bring us with a bang back to Brexit and the state of the British polity. Here is a nice little summary from a Spectator Coffee House commenter Paul Sutton, of what the ludicrously self regarding Speaker, John Bercow did:

It is clear to all that the Speaker has torn up three lynch-pins of our constitution – and ones which are essential safeguards:

1. The executive controls the order paper: Bercow (like something out of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe) allowed “emergency legislation” (i.e. it’s an “emergency” for Remainers, if we leave the EU) to propose a bill.

2. The bill involves massive additional expenditure, and so should only come from the executive.

3. The bill completely removes the use of prerogative power, from the executive. Comically, the Speaker (under probably non-existent “legal advice”) decided it didn’t, so no Queen’s consent was sought.

Even more fundamentally, the net effect is to cancel the 2016 vote to Leave – the first time in our history where the legislature has cancelled a popular vote.

…which just refers to the latest Benn Bill – never mind all the preceding attempts from Cooper-Letwin etc, which were also unconstitutional if we can really claim that the UK has a constitution (it doesn’t, it probably should, but one worries who would draft it).

So it’s all down to Useful Idiot Bercow, in whom, like the similarly self regarding Gina Miller with her legal case to give the final say to our mostly awful MP’s, we can identify a key figure in the attempts to derail democracy in the form of overturning the referendum result. It’s not a good look.

The four Speakers preceding Bercow, over the period in which I’ve followed politics, have been exemplary, unbiased public servants, irrespective of their party allegiance.

I can remember vividly Bercow’s persona as a genuinely far right Tory from the hang ’em flog ’em weirdo crew of the Monday Club. There was always an air of inadequacy about its members, with a strong undertone of failure with their preferred sex**. Numerous people over the years have commented on his diminutive stature, even though in reality he’s not that small (5’4″ – 5’6″). I’m not one to pick on physical characteristics normally, but it is the case, I suggest, that his behaviour in seeking and clinging to the role of Speaker has an aura of ‘compensation’ about it. As recently as 2014, The Guardian, of all media outlets, described their current hero in this way “Those who target Bercow are more likely to do so because of his foolish comments and insufferable, pompous interventions at Prime Minister’s Questions“. …as opposed to his height, which is what he was claiming. The Guardian was right.

Yet it is this vain, prickly, spiteful, bullying luvvie, with no discernible principles other than self glorification, and his weird fake gruff voice in the Commons, who is the rock on which the desperate Remoaners, who have no qualms at all about ignoring history, convention, tradition etc, have built their case.

I wasn’t intending to write this post, as I’m aware that it has an intrinsically unpleasant theme. Such is the situation though, created by this gang of dishonest, voter-hating, elitist unpatriotic tossers, some sort of analysis seems unfortunately necessary.

We can do better than Bercow***, whether we’re Remainers or Brexiteers.

 

**…and as if by magic, The Guardian comes up trumps. He really is revolting

Yes, it is genuine

 

*** the day after this piece, the poisonous pygmy quits. Long overdue. Tim Stanley on Twitter has it right though. Even in his departing he ruins it

*

The painful reality of #democracy

Things are looking up. Brexit is on its way.

I think it’s a good time to briefly examine a favourite Remainer trope, which is: the voters were lied to/misinformed/duped/not in full possession of the facts.

Intimately associated with this hilariously patronising approach is a weird compulsion to label the other side of the debate with particularly vicious terms – racist, fascist, white supremacist (eh?), uneducated, xenophobes, little Englanders (plenty of Brexit fans outside of England’s green and pleasant land), blah, blah, blah, blah.

It’s not reciprocated. I do like to occasionally insult the worst Remainers (think Alastair Campbell, Ian Dunt etc), but by and large the Brexiteers are a calm and peaceable lot. They’ve had to be.

Their problem though, is partly that Remainers don’t understand democracy. They really don’t get one person, one vote. They really don’t, in practice. It’s just been tested, and they’ve been found wanting (again and again).

The thing is, a vote is a vote is a vote. It is an integer, a marker, a single voice. It cannot be parsed, interpreted, reinterpreted or dismissed, it just is.

Which is why, that even if every label in paragraph three above was true, for every one of the 17.4 million who voted for Brexit, it doesn’t matter. It is intrinsically irrelevant. That is not how democracy works, or can work.

It is beautiful. 

And the corollary of that is the ugliness of the Remainer rage.

I leave it to John Locke, courtesy of Wikipedia, to explain the basics to the diehard Remainer horde:

“There is no practical alternative to majority political rule – i.e., to taking the consent of the majority as the act of the whole and binding every individual. It would be next to impossible to obtain the consent of every individual before acting collectively … No rational people could desire and constitute a society that had to dissolve straightaway because the majority was unable to make the final decision and the society was incapable of acting as one body.”

Rafael, The School of Athens, 1511. Vatican

The music of #Brexit – Oscar Peterson edition

This is just about the finest thing Canadian jazz superstar Oscar Peterson ever did. Technically he was near perfect, but his inspiration could waver a bit. Ed Thigpen and Ray Brown are wonderful here. The crescendo past halfway is something else.

The tune sounds familiar, as a lot of great pieces do, though the writing credit goes to Oscar. It does sound like the theory that the music was cribbed from spirituals of the slavery era could be correct.

It has lyrics too apparently, but I imagine they could detract from the quite extraordinarily inspiring effect of the music. The title “Hymn to Freedom” will of course appeal to Brexiteers. The tune and performance could sway even the most rabid Remainer. Except probably the unsalvageable @campbellclaret

Take it away Oscar….

The theatre of #Brexit – Robert Bolt edition

I think it is the awful Lib Dems who have frequently pointed out that we should, like the US, have a written constitution. We don’t, but we do have hitherto accepted norms that have in the last two years – and particularly the last two weeks – been gleefully trampled down by the Remainer mob. This is generally aided and abetted by much of the media, who don’t report these quite unprecedented decisions as being anything other than ‘normal’ in these trying times.

But normal they are not.

The unwritten constitutional arrangements of the UK, with their checks and balances, have been chucked out where it suits the Remainers. However, where it doesn’t suit, the screeching starts immediately…

There are innumerable examples of what we should continue to call ‘constitutional vandalism’ – it’s beginning to catch on. A few at random:

1. Theresa May handing the control of government business over to backbench Remainer MP’s
2. Rushing a banning No Deal bill through parliament then whining about a bit of filibustering (which is entirely licit)
3. The big one of course is attempting to ignore the 2016 referendum result

and try this tweet…

…making it up as they go along. HUGE constitutional issues

…but there really are lots of others. Does it matter? I think it does. It seriously matters.

I am not a fan of the theatre, despite many attempts. Actors declaiming loudly while stomping around the floorboards just make me cringe. That’s why movies were invented**. I suspect that I’m not alone, even if it sounds like philistinism (it’s not). However, one play with which I am familiar – written, on stage and on film – is Robert Bolt’s work of genius A Man For All Seasons. The scene which applies here, and I realise that this is not an original point, is when Thomas More is debating with his son in law, Will Roper, who is protesting self righteously about his view that what he considers ‘right’ trumps the law of the land (from 2:14, but watch it all):

That’s where we are today with the attempt to destroy a legitimate democratic vote. God help us.

Bolt was not religious, despite the magnificent portrayal of (Saint) Thomas More, but he tended to develop certain themes, one of which was the corruption that developed in authority figures and institutions. How right he was.

It was another irreligious, but intelligent, man who provided the prediction of what we’re witnessing currently in Britain. Thanks to the great Kate Hoey for this:

 

**for what it’s worth, I think Paul Scofield’s Oscar-winning portrayal of More is just about as good as acting gets.

The art of #Brexit: Leonardo da Vinci

Among his many other achievements, I half suspect that Leonardo da Vinci invented Twitter, in its essence. Here is his 1493 pen and ink masterpiece Quattro Remoaneri arringano un nobile Brexiteer, from the Queen’s Collection, currently on display in Glasgow.

Quattro Remoaners arringano un nobile Brexiteer, 1493

 

It was said of the great man: Most notably, he believed that sight was mankind’s most important sense and that “saper vedere”(“knowing how to see”) was crucial to living all aspects of life fully.

How to see indeed. To live as a clear sighted rational being should be the ambition of all of us, yet how quickly it falls by the wayside. And if our Remainer friends who have actively connived in wrecking democracy in the UK had this quality, they perhaps would have held back, and actually respected the result of the referendum.

End of sermon (for now).

#Brexit news: Thermopylae edition

Not long ago this blog introduced the concept of the ‘hardcore’ Brexiteers – that is to say, the most principled ones, who have stuck to the details of the referendum – as the 21st century equivalent of the 300 Spartans.

I don’t know how many people read it, but it got passed around Twitter a bit, and, possibly by coincidence, these MP’s labelled themselves, or had it awarded to them, as “The Spartans”. The Daily Mail made a thing of it (1, 2, 3), plus a few other papers (1, 2) and a bit on the TV.

In any event, there’s some serious disconnect between Leavers like Guido, Boris, Dominic Cummings (who I admire) and others claiming that Theresa May’s utterly terrible deal was the best we could get so we should take it, and what a reasonable voter should expect after a referendum in a democracy. I’ve followed it all pretty closely. Clearly there are back channels of chit chat within the Establishment assuring everyone that it’s May’s deal or no Brexit. I have no criticism of the Spartans who chose not to compromise. Good for them. Despite this, numerous Twitter gurus dropped heaps of ordure on the likes of Steve Baker for taking a firm view. In fact he was behaving admirably.

Only Dominic Cummings said what we wanted to hear – that if May’s ridiculous deal was accepted we could trash it over the next few years and get a real Brexit. How would he know, bright fellow though he is? Here’s what he claimed. I like his style:

Also, don’t worry about the so-called ‘permanent’ commitments this historically abysmal Cabinet are trying to make on our behalf. They are not ‘permanent’ and a serious government — one not cowed by officials and their bullshit ‘legal advice’ with which they have herded ministers like sheep — will dispense with these commitments and any domestic law enforcing them.

Nevertheless I remain  a Spartans supporter, and I don’t think for one minute that this is over. Nor does a huge – and very pissed off – chunk of the electorate.

All of which leads me to Thermopylae. Here’s a recent purchase – a 1784 map of the pass and the local features. A £20 bargain I’d say.

Where heroes saved Europe

 

I do recommend Frank Miller’s book, and the very closely allied (and quite brilliantly filmed) movie. It may yet come to a Salamis. In the earlier post I hadn’t identified our modern day Themistocles – it requires Theresa May to get her richly deserved P45 first, but there are plenty of candidates: Jacob Rees-Mogg (despite his wavering), Liz Truss, even Dominic Raab. And there are plenty of good people left in Labour: Graham Stringer, Caroline Flint, Lucy Powell, Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart.

Leonidas knew that he wouldn’t survive, but his actions won the war.

….95 yards. Quite amazing

 

Themistocles, by the great Stavros Zouliatis

Who are the #Brexit 300?

Juncker – he’s not happy

It may be an acquired taste, but Zack Snyder’s innovative epic, 300, concerning the Persian attempt to invade and subsume Greece back in 480BC, strikes me as masterpiece of film making. A Room With a View it is not, but it is surprisingly accurate to sources (ask the undoubted expert – Victor Davis Hanson), as it portrays the principled fight of a small group of Spartans, against the multinational might of the Persian Empire, led by its bullying power-crazed unelected leader, Xerxes.

Sound familiar?

The Spartans are fighting for the future of their nation and its citizens, not for themselves. They expect to die, to literally go down fighting. Indeed, they do lose the battle, Thermopylae. But it was the start of the fall of the Persian Empire. A couple of months later the Persian fleet got trashed at Salamis (thanks to the brilliance and leadership of Themistocles). The next year they got humped again at Plataea and Mycale. The empire started to fall apart, however slowly.

By 331 BC, Alexander the Great had reversed the whole scenario, and was the ruler of Persia. (Greeks are tough, what happened to Grexit?)

You can see where this is leading.

A huge factor in the defeat of the Spartans at Thermopylae, lead by Leonidas, was the treachery of Ephialtes, who as a deformed, physically limited citizen was not allowed to fight (that’s the movie version of his background). His pride stung, he turned to Xerxes, and betrayed his fellow citizens by revealing the mountain path by which the Persians were able to sneak up on the tiny Spartan contingent, negating the advantage of defending the narrow pass between mountain and sea.

A very inspiring story, genuinely. Read Tom Holland’s classic Persian Fire if you’d like to know more.

So, who’s who?

The godking Xerxes, bizarrely, is Jean-Claude Juncker.

The Spartans are those Brexiteers who are not interested in Theresa May’s utterly crap deal. Plenty of other Greeks (to continue the metaphor) are, even Guido.

Leonidas is the plum role. To add more cognitive dissonance it has to be either Boris or Jacob Rees-Mogg. Given Leonidas’ uxoriousness in the movie, it probably has to go to the latter. The supporting Spartan warrior cast includes John Redwood, Kate Hoey, and others. Possibly not more than 300 though.

Themistocles has yet to be cast.

 

Blair

Ephialtes

Ephialtes is easy. Take a bow Tony Blair. We thought that we’d got rid of you, but here you are again, betraying your country, actively loathing the electorate. Like Ephialtes, it appears to be making you miserable, but you’ve been able to persuade yourself that wrong is right for so long, it’s probably just a little nagging pinprick lurking at the back of your thoughts.

Lose the battle – perhaps – but win the war.