Category Archives: Conservative

BRECON & RADNORSHIRE BY-ELECTION – COCK-UP OR STITCH-UP?

Last week on the 1^st August there was a Parliamentary by-election, the reports of which had been very overshadowed by the national political events, like the formation of the new Boris Johnson Premiership and Cabinet. Then almost out of the blue, as it were, we learnt that the Conservatives have lost the seat.

There were suggestions in the Remainer Main Stream Media that Boris has already lost his bounce. A more obvious point on the facts would be one that they are not so keen to report, given their pro-Labour bias, that in fact the Labour candidate had almost lost his deposit in a Welsh constituency which had once been part of Labour’s Welsh permanent fiefdom! The seat was Labour for many years until 1979.

A bit more enquiry reveals that the Conservative Party’s candidate had previously been the MP, but the by-election was called as a result of a Recall Petition because he had been convicted of creating fraudulent invoices and claiming fraudulently on his parliamentary expenses.

So what on earth induced the Conservative Party to put him up again as a parliamentary candidate? Was it incredible arrogance? Incredible stupidity? Or some sort of devious plot?

Of course in human affairs generally it is often a mistake to discount the role of sheer mistaken stupidity. That maybe what has happened here; perhaps coupled here with a sense of obstinate entitlement.

There is however an alternative idea to consider.

Let’s first look at the timeline here:-

The previous MP and recent Conservative candidate, Christopher Davies, pleaded guilty of putting in false expenses in March 2019 and in April he was sentenced.

The Speaker launched the legal petition on the 24^th April and the petition was opened on the 9^th May and remained open for signatures until the 20^th June. It only needed to get 5,303 signatures but in fact got 10,005 signatures. 10,005 petitioners who signed to remove him amounted to 19% of the 53,032 electors in Brecon and Radnorshire.

Mr Davies was re-selected as the Conservative candidate (the re-selection process now requires not only the local party to support the candidate, but more importantly requires the National Nominating Officer of the Conservative Party to sign the candidate’s Nomination Certificate. The National Nominating Officer of the Conservative Party is Victoria Carslake, who was of course an appointment by Theresa May).

The close of nominations in this by-election took place on 5^th July and, as I mentioned, the election took place last week on the 1^st August.

This timeline alone shows that this by-election can really have absolutely nothing to do with Boris Johnson. The fact that the recently convicted fraudster Conservative candidate still managed to do so well might really show that Boris Johnson, if he had any effect on it at all, very nearly got him re-elected however unsuitable he might be as an MP!

So I return to the question of why would the Conservatives put up a candidate who has not only been recently convicted of fraud on his parliamentary expenses, but also to strong feeling locally about this, triggered this by-election?

Another possibility, other than Conservative stupidity, might be another devious plot by Theresa May and her inner circle.

We now know that Theresa May never sought to negotiate any form of proper Brexit. She never suggested to the EU negotiators that we might leave with ‘No Deal’ and she never attempted to get the United Kingdom a good deal. Her whole effort was to try and tie us up as close to the European Union as possible, which is why she went on, not only lying about what she was doing, but also signing us up to yet further EU commitments, such as the new EU Army.

She also called her General Election not because she wanted to guarantee Brexit, but rather because she wanted to be independent of the Brexiteers and to impose her Agreement on the country.

So I suggest that a possible scenario is that this totally unsuitable Conservative candidate was re-selected in order to lose that seat and so give Remain supporters in the House of Commons yet more clout.

All this was going on whilst Theresa May was trying to and partly succeeding in getting huge further spending commitments which would bind the hands of her successor, which was already most likely to be Boris.

If this is what was actually happening, then this by-election is nothing to do with Boris except in the sense that it was always set up as a trap.

The most laughable suggestion is that this is all the fault of the Brexit Party splitting the vote. This is of course a variant of the old line of the most cynical Establishment vote manipulators that you cannot vote for anybody else other than the Conservatives otherwise you get Labour (or vice or versa if you are a former Labour supporter).

Whilst it is true that the Brexit Party got more than the difference between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat, it does not follow that people who voted Brexit Party would have voted for the Tory convicted fraudster.

Of course all this undemocratic nonsense relies upon the most appallingly undemocratic electoral system, the “First Past the Post” which regularly cheats large numbers of voters out of their preferred outcome.

At last the two party system is beginning to break-up!

The two party system is beginning to break-up

Monday saw the politically exciting prospect of Labour breaking up into its politically constituent parts!

The Labour Party has long been recognised as a coalition between hard-Left figures like Corbyn, McDonnell and the late Tony Benn etc; and multi-culturalist social democrats like Chuka Umunna, David Lammy and the Milibands; the traditional Labour, like Dennis Skinner and Frank Field; and the remnant of the globalist, liberal lifestyle, Blairites. What happened on Monday looks like it may be the start of the split between the hard-Left and the others. How that split works out in Labour will probably depend on which way the various trade unions jump.

Then on Wednesday we had the further excitement of the Conservatives starting to break up!

Within the Conservative Party there was always some tension between the Europhile, internationalist, social democrats like Soubry and Dominic Grieve and the apparently patriotic global Britain Brexiteers whose view of patriotism is similar to 19^th Century Liberals who were opposed to the State looking after our poorer and less fortunate citizens and all for the free market and low taxes.

Although amongst the non-parliamentary membership, I would say there is a considerable number who are patriotic people with traditional values that support welfare, health and housing provisions for all our fellow citizens. That is however not a group that is very well represented in the Conservative Parliamentary Party.

The interesting thing from within the Conservative Party are that there are moves afoot to deselect more of the Europhile liberal values, social democrats.

I suspect that if those MPs think that they are going to be deselected by their local party, they will jump before they are pushed and might well follow the others in jumping into the new parliamentary group with Chuka Umunna etc.

If that group manages to combine with the Liberal Democrats that will bode well for a major shift in parliamentary representation because there will then be a clear need for a patriotic political party that supports traditional values, low immigration and welfare, health and housing provision for our citizens.

When we consider what is happening with the Union with the likelihood of Northern Ireland and Wales breaking away, it seems probable that that patriotism will be England-only focussed.

So this is a very interesting time where we are beginning to see the shape of a possible realignment of English politics! Let’s hope our politics can also become more honest so that when a voter is asked to vote for a Party’s candidate then that Party will be sufficiently politically coherent for the voter to be able to be sure of the real policies which the candidate will pursue if elected.

HOW BRITISH POLITICS IS FAILING

The web based comment blog “Unherd” hosts interesting contributions from politically minded commentators. The one below is interesting.

It is a recent contribution from Peter Kellner. Peter Kellner is the Blairite Director of YouGov, the internet based opinion pollsters. His opinion on the interpretation of statistics is well worth considering. So when Peter Kellner says:- “I wouldn’t bet a great deal against changes that could be immense, and which not everyone will like”, we should take notice. Also, as he is an enemy of English Nationalism and he is fearful of the consequences – so that should be encouraging too!

Here is Peter Kellner’s article:-

HOW BRITISH POLITICS IS FAILING

Something odd, and possibly dangerous, is eating away at the fabric of British politics. Brexit, of course, has much to do with it, but the consequences could be with us long after the current crisis is resolved, one way or another.

Signs of the malaise can be clearly seen in an exclusive survey for UnHerdconducted by Deltapoll. It shows a remarkable lack of faith in both main party leaders, not just by voters generally but by high proportions of their own voters. Loyalties are being tested as never before.

In the past, one party leader has occasionally had a shaky reputation among their own supporters on one or two characteristics. In the early 1980s, many Labour voters thought Michael Foot was weak; towards the end of her premiership, many Tories considered Margaret Thatcher out of touch. But I have never seen so many supporters of both parties simultaneously hold such low opinions of their own leaders across the board.

The responses of all voters shows that both leaders have strongly negative ratings on all counts. That is unusual enough. But when we look at the figures, showing how Conservative voters view Theresa May, and the figures, showing how Labour voters view Jeremy Corbyn, the scale of the drama becomes clear. The positive scores for May range from 57% of Conservative supporters who say she is strong, down to 40% who back her on Brexit. Her average score among Tory voters is 45%. Labour voters give Corbyn positive scores ranging from 64 to 38%; his average is 50%. Among all voters, the averages are, of course, even worse: May 26%, Corbyn 28%.

To put these figures in context, a successful leader would expect average scores of around 80% among their party’s own voters and 40% among the general public. For both leaders to fall so far short of these figures should set off alarm bells in both parties.

Here, though, is the paradox. Precisely because both leaders have terrible ratings, the scale of the problem is less obvious than it would be if only one was doing badly. In that case (as when Foot led Labour and towards the end of Thatcher’s premiership), their party would have support well below 30% in the polls and facing a landslide defeat. Instead, nothing much seems to have changed since the 2017 election. An average of recent polls shows the two parties still close together, and with almost as many supporters as 18 months ago. The high commands in both parties, though plainly struggling over Brexit, see no wider reason to panic.

In truth, they should be terrified. For the poll shows that the disenchantment with the main parties and their leaders has spread throughout Britain. Within Westminster, it is rare to find any backbench Labour or Conservative MP who, giving their candid views in private, will say their leader is any good or that their party is in anything other than deep trouble. But some hope this despair is a feature of the Westminster bubble, and that real voters away from London have not changed their views of politicians and parties that much.

In fact, it is increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of voters Left and Right are losing faith in the people who either govern us today or aspire to do so in the future.

Which brings us to the possible long-term consequences of current public attitudes. In any country with a different electoral system, the chances are that support for both Labour and the Conservatives would have crashed by now. Across Europe, countries with more proportional voting systems have seen the traditional big parties slump in recent years – even with leaders less widely derided than Britain’s.

Here, first-past-the-post creates a huge barrier to entry. Elsewhere, small parties ranging from the Greens to the far right have obtained a foothold in their parliaments with as little as 5% support, and then managed to increase their credibility. Here, they can’t. In 1983, the Liberal/SDP Alliance won 26% and only 23 seats; in 2015 Ukip’s 14% gave them just a single seat.

The party that might have benefited from the Tory and Labour travails is the Liberal Democrats. But they paid a heavy price for their role in the 2010-15 coalition government. While their support has picked up a little in recent months, they are still scarred by decisions they took almost a decade ago.

It is, of course, possible that when the Brexit drama has played out, normal service will resume. Perhaps May and Corbyn will both be replaced by leaders who have greater personal appeal to the electorate.

I am not so sure. My reason is that May and Corbyn’s truly awful ratings do not flow solely from their personal attributes. Both lead deeply divided parties, and these divisions are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The faultlines will remain: inward-looking nationalism versus outward-looking enterprise with the Tories; ambitious socialism versus progressive capitalism with Labour. A leader that combined the strategic ability of Napoleon with the genius of Einstein and the moral courage of Mandela would still struggle to win public approval if they could not reunite their parties. The Deltapoll figures providence symptoms of a deeper crisis.

In short, both main parties are more fragile and less stable than for many decades. First-past-the-post could save both Labour and the Conservatives from the consequences of their current divisions. But it is no longer ridiculous to image a different future. Once the adhesive glue of our electoral system starts to crack, things can change with bewildering speed. A century ago, amid the stresses of post-First-World-War Britain and the divisions within the Liberal Party, realignment happened quickly. Labour climbed from fourth place in 1918 to government in 1924.

Will Brexit end up having the same glue-cracking effect? And if it does, will the beneficiaries be existing herbivores such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens; or some new centre party created by disenchanted Labour and Tory moderates; or carnivores on the outer fringes of Right and Left? Is the century-long dominance of Britain’s Parliament by competing forces on the centre Right and centre Left about to end?

Ask me again in 10 years’ time and I shall tell you. Meanwhile I wouldn’t bet a great deal against changes that could be immense, and which not everyone will like.

Here is the link to the original article>>>https://unherd.com/2019/01/how-british-politics-is-failing/

LEADING REMAINER ADMITS SYSTEMATIC LYING TO THE PUBLIC

LEADING “LIBERAL” TORY CONFIRMS HIS ELECTIONS BASED UPON SYSTEMATIC LYING TO THE PUBLIC

Matthew Parris, the former Conservative MP who has made many bigoted remarks about Leave voters, has just published the article below, in which he admits systematically lying to the public throughout his political career in order to get himself elected and also he admits deliberately acting in such a way to undermine popular democracy.

In reading his damning confession it is worth remembering that, not only are there others in the Conservative Party, such as Ken Clarke, Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and indeed Theresa May, by whom I suspect very similar confessions could also have been made, but also there are many within the Labour Party whose conduct I suspect is exactly the same.

This kind of behaviour is wholly par for the course amongst elitist Westminster British Establishment supporters of “Liberal Democracy”!

Here is the article:-

Why I don’t, never have, and never will trust the people – by Matthew Parris (former Conservative MP)

It was late, and a friend and I were left to talk Brexit. He’s a keen and convinced Tory Brexiteer MP but to stay friends we have tended to steer off the topic. This, however, felt like a moment to talk.

The conversation taught me nothing about Brexit, something about him, and a lot about myself and the strain of Conservatism I now realise I’m part of — and which is part of me. Oddly, then, this column is not really about Brexit, but about trusting the people. I don’t. Never have and never will. Our conversation forced me to confront the fact.

My friend knows well enough why I’m a Remainer, but guessed correctly that I’ve puzzled about why he isn’t. I had not quite expected what I heard. He understands business and finance and is good at facts and figures, so I’d supposed his wish for a ‘clean’ Brexit would be all about the economic advantages. He’s a firm believer in individual choice, too, so I had supposed he would dwell on the need to ‘take back control’.

No doubt he holds to these strands of the Leave argument — but talking to me he hardly mentioned the practical benefits of Brexit. No, there was something else that seemed to drive his anxiety that we leave the EU. Otherwise, he said: ‘I just worry about our democracy, respect for our constitution and the effect that a betrayal of the 2016 referendum result would have on the people who voted for me and our party last year.’

He returned to this repeatedly, and I saw that he was sincere. As a democrat, and a Conservative who owed his position in Parliament to a little piece of England that he came from, that he knew, that knew him, and whose electors’ minds and feelings he had come to understand over the years, my friend felt with a quiet passion that he must not break his word to them, must not slither away from undertakings that had been given.

He felt the same about the electorate nationally, the British people’s trust in the Conservative party, and their confidence in politics itself. He felt, in short, conscious of an unseen bond between parliament and people, and fearful of the wider consequences should it be broken.

I did not say much, because I could see he meant it; and what he meant was not really the kind of assertion one can confound with counter-argument or counter-assertion. It was about weighing things and, the scales being within his own breast, the way the scales tipped was for him just a fact, and undeniable.

But for me they tip differently; and for me too that is a fact, and undeniable. I lay in bed that night thinking about this; and my conclusions follow. As I’m not running for office I shall not pull punches.

Tories like me, and I think we used to be in the majority, see good governance as an effort to live with democracy rather than to an effort to live by democracy. It is why we were so chary about referendums in the first place. We are wary of the populace and instinctively hostile to the instincts of the mob. We see the popular will as a sometimes dangerous thing, to be handled, guided, and on key occasions (and subtly) thwarted.

We know, however, that the people’s will cannot be overlooked. We see it as a corrective to the over-mighty and a warning to those who govern not to lose touch with popular feeling. But at the idea that the people should dictate the policies of government on a daily basis, we shudder.

Our kind of Conservatism is either in temporary abeyance, or going permanently out of fashion — I do not know which. Its decline since the middle of the 20th century has been so gradual as to mask its extent over time. At the beginning of that century it was possible for Arthur Balfour to remark: ‘I have the greatest respect for the Conservative party conference, but I would no more consult it on a matter of high policy than I would my valet’ without this being thought anything but wit; today its utterance would end a political career.

When I first went into politics, initially as a researcher, in 1977, it was commonplace among us Tories to see and describe ‘the will of the people’ not as our mentor but as a rock to be navigated. Capital punishment and judicial flogging were very popular with the public. The hanging debate at party conferences was an annual nightmare for our leading spokesmen, but I never heard it suggested, even by colleagues who supported the return of these punishments, that we should bring them back because the people wanted it.

As for colleagues opposed to both, our challenge was to find ways of ducking the issue. Once I became an MP, I did so by voting for the principle and against the practice. This subversion of democracy (in Theresa May’s phrase) caused me embarrassment, but not a second’s guilt. Sod democracy: hanging was wrong.

In the late 1970s, we Tories were painfully aware that popular feeling opposed any confrontation with the trade unions, but we believed this would prove necessary. Our response was, so far as possible, to tiptoe round the issue during the 1979 general election. We succeeded. Among ourselves we talked cheerfully about subterfuge. The Britain of 1979 and 1983 most emphatically did not vote for a massive confrontation with the coal miners. We made sure the electorate was never asked.

Even today, of course, politicians can and sometimes must dodge the popular will, and they know it. But who now dares say these things? And what today we do but no longer dare say we do, tomorrow we may not dare do. Tory paternalism is in long, slow retreat. People like me will stay where we are, increasingly exposed as our friends melt back. But what the heck.

Here is a link to the original article>>> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/12/why-i-dont-never-have-and-never-will-trust-the-people/

Brexit has reopened two constitutional conflicts which must be resolved

In the heats of the Brexit battle between the elitist and undemocratic Remainers and the few Brexiteers in Parliament there is an occasional glimpse of the wider constitutional implications. The article below on the Conservative Home website, which describes itself as “the home of Conservatism”, is such a glimpse and deserves wide circulation.

Those who support what Professor Matthew Goodwin of Kent University is calling “National Populism” will, like me, support unconditionally the idea that our People are the ultimate sovereignty.

Supporters of so-called “liberal democracy” may talk about popular sovereignty, but they want it channelled through systems which prevent the majority of the People’s Will being even expressed, let alone enacted.

A good example of that mind-set is the Right Honorable Ken Clarke MP who regularly says that the EU Referendum was merely an opinion poll, which is only “advisory” for MPs, rather than an expression of popular sovereignty which must be put into effect by the political system to be legitimate. In short you could say that liberal democracy is in effect an open conspiracy against popular democracy!

Once we are clear about that division we populist democratic nationalists can be more focussed and consistent in our attacks on the short-fallings of the British Political and Media elites in their attempts to shelter behind the ornate structures of British Liberal Democracy.

Below is the article. What do you think?

Jonathan Clark: Brexit has reopened two constitutional conflicts which must be resolved

The British have, typically, little interest in constitutional law. Unlike the French, who regularly rewrite their constitution in revolutions or attempts to prevent revolutions, the British tend to assume that little changes and that all is well. Alas, the constitutional problems accumulate nevertheless. Dominic Grieve was right in a recent Commons debate to say that there are areas of the British constitution that need clearer definition. But what exactly are they? Why is the Brexit question so difficult to resolve through the familiar Westminster machinery?

The big issues of constitutional conflict are so fraught because they happen in legal grey areas, in which agreement and definition have never emerged. Today there are two such major areas, though many minor ones.

The first is the question of sovereignty: where does ultimate authority reside? It is many centuries since any significant number of people claimed that it resided with the person of the monarch alone. But the decline of that image was followed by the growing popularity of another, ‘the Crown in Parliament’, that is, the monarch, the Lords and the Commons acting together. This image never went away, but was upstaged by the doctrine of the lawyer A. V. Dicey (1835-1922) that ‘Parliament’ (meaning, increasingly, the House of Commons) was sovereign. Yet from the Reform Bill of 1832 into the 20th century, successive rounds of franchise extension strengthened another old idea, that the ultimate authority lay with ‘the People’, however defined.

From 1973, when the UK joined the EEC, it slowly became evident that the answer was ‘none of the above’: ultimate authority lay with Brussels. Parliament rubber-stamped increasing amounts of secondary legislation from an evolving super-state. In 2019, departure from the EU would remove that layer of command. This prospect inevitably reopens an old debate, which had never really been settled: was Parliament or the People finally supreme? Its re-emergence reminds us that Dicey’s doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was the opinion of one commentator only. That opinion partly corresponded to contemporary practice, partly not.

Today, the tide is everywhere running in the opposite direction. Deference and duty daily fade; the key word everywhere is ‘choice’, and this means the choices of the many, not just the few. The transformation of communications places steadily more power in the hands of a steadily more educated, better informed ‘People’. But this trend has been matched by another, seen across the West in recent decades and at all levels: in increasingly complex societies, the executive has everywhere grown more powerful vis-a-vis the legislature. Political scientists have largely ignored this tide, but it has swept forwards nevertheless. It means that two powerful social forces now collide. Across western democracies, ‘ordinary people’ find means of complaining that they are ignored by elites who ‘just don’t get it’; elites decry ‘populism’ and exalt the opinion of ‘experts’, expressed to within one decimal point in forecasts of outcomes 15 years hence.

This collision reopens a second, equally old, question. What is a Member of Parliament: a delegate, or a representative? Edmund Burke famously outlined the case for the second: MPs, once elected, represent the nation as a whole; they owe the nation their best judgment; they are in nobody’s pocket. But another idea is just as old, and equally honourable: MPs are sent to Westminster by their electors to redress the electors’ grievances, and are accountable to them. Against Burke, we can set another intellectual, Andrew Marvell, MP for Hull in 1659-78, who was paid by his constituents and regularly reported back to them. Understandably, Burke’s high-sounding doctrine proved the more popular among MPs. But after he framed it, his constituents in Bristol threw him out for favouring Irish commercial interests over theirs, and he represented thereafter only his patron’s pocket borough.

Both ideas in their pure form are unacceptable. But how the balance between the two is to be struck can never be quantified or defined, and a crisis like the present makes the impossibility of a definition clear. ‘The People’ voted by 52 to 48 for Leave, and a larger percentage now says ‘just get on with it’; but about five-sixths of the House of Commons are for Remain.

Among Conservative MPs, something under 100 are evidently for Leave; of the other 200 or so, over half are on the Government payroll in one capacity or another, and more would like to be. So profound a dissociation between elite and popular opinion is rare. Worse still, public opinion polls and the growing practice of referenda quantify the problem as never before; the issue is easily expressed in binary terms (Leave or Remain); and the arguments have been fully rehearsed. Other countries show similar problems of relations between the many and the few, but in the UK these are brought to a focus. Since the constitution has failed to resolve them, public debate is full of expressions of elite contempt for the ignorant, prejudiced, xenophobic, racialist populace on the one hand; of popular contempt for the self-serving, condescending, out-of-touch Establishment on the other.

Before 1914, Conservative peers making technical points over a budget were manoeuvred by Lloyd George into a constitutional confrontation that could be memorably summed up as ‘Peers versus the People’. In this clash, the peers could only lose. Now, the Remainers have been manoeuvred into a constitutional confrontation that, if it goes much further, will be labelled ‘Parliament versus the People’. In such a conflict it can only be Parliament that will lose. In that event, the damage would be considerable.

These great questions of constitutional definition are seldom solved; rather, the issues are defused by building next to them a new practice. The present challenge is to accommodate that new arrival in the political arena, the referendum, and to turn it into a clearly specified, moderate, and constructive institution, as it is in Switzerland. Those concerned about daily policy should think again about a subject, once salient in university History departments but now everywhere disparaged: constitutional history.

>>>https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2018/12/jonathan-clark-brexit-has-reopened-two-constitutional-conflicts-which-must-be-resolved.html

Conservative political dishonesty over Brexit

Conservative political dishonesty over Brexit

As I made clear in a previous article I think that many members of the Parliamentary Conservative Party are making the error of thinking that their dishonesty over Brexit is going to be quickly forgotten just like all their previous lies to the electorate. I think that they are making an order of magnitude error in thinking that this is the case. Brexit is the first time that the public had really focussed on a political issue for many decades.

It is perhaps worth recalling that David Cameron of the Conservative Government promised repeatedly to implement the outcome of the referendum. This was not least in the booklet which Cameron used £9m of taxpayers money to print and distribute to every elector in the UK promising to implement the outcome of the referendum. Instead almost immediately after the referendum he and Osborne resigned.

The Conservative Parliamentary Party, after a period of unprecedented backstabbing and careerist manoeuvring managed to choose two candidates for leadership, Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May, both of whom it seems lacked any personal leadership qualities whatsoever.

The forgettable Andrea Leadsom when subjected to some nasty criticism over her comments about having children giving her motivation to do the best for the country, apparently spent the weekend in tears before giving up her leadership challenge (and was ironically rewarded by being made the Minister in charge of waterworks and floods!).

Theresa May was then anointed as Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister on the back of promising to implement Brexit with her opaque slogan of “Brexit means Brexit”. Since then we have been treated to a series of broken promises on top of her longstanding track record of claiming to support reducing immigration to the tens of thousands, when in fact allowing the largest influx of immigrants since Blair swamped us with millions of Eastern Europeans!

Here are just some of Theresa’s whoppers (with acknowledgment to Guido Fawkes):-

“She broke her promises on calling an election and not triggering Article 50 until the UK had an agreed strategy – two decisions that the history books will not look upon kindly. She promised to put Dexeu in charge of the negotiation and make sure a Brexiteer was doing Brexit – that didn’t happen. She promised not to raise taxes – tax rises are coming in the autumn to fund her NHS splurge.

“There should be no general election until 2020.” General election: 8 May 2017.

“There should be no decision to invoke Article 50 until the British negotiating strategy is agreed and clear.” Article 50 triggered: 29 March 2017. Cabinet Brexit strategy agreed: 7 July 2018.

“If before 2020 there is a choice between further spending cuts, more borrowing and tax rises, the priority must be to avoid tax increases since they would disrupt consumption, employment and investment.” NHS spending increase, funded by “us as a country contributing a bit more [tax]” 17 June 2018.

In her 2017 party conference speech May made the promise again: “With our economic foundation strong – and economic confidence restored – the time has come to focus on Britain’s next big economic challenge: to foster growth that works for everyone, right across our country. That means keeping taxes low.”

“I will therefore create a new government department responsible for conducting Britain’s negotiation with the EU and for supporting the rest of Whitehall in its European work. That department will be led by a senior Secretary of State – and I will make sure that the position is taken by a Member of Parliament who campaigned for Britain to leave the EU.” Theresa May takes personal charge of Brexit talks: 24th July 2018.

“Now is not the time for me to set out my full negotiating principles – that will come later.” Not sure people would have inferred two years later.

“I will dedicate my premiership to fixing this problem [housing]…

as Prime Minister I am going to make it my mission to solve this problem. I will take personal charge of the government’s response, and make the British Dream a reality by reigniting home ownership in Britain once again.” We’re on our second Housing Secretary this year, a damp squib of a housing policy and silence from May…

“The Conservative Party can come together – and under my leadership it will.” (sic!)

You can see why Tory members might have quite liked her promises to stay true to Brexit and not raise taxes are disillusioned now! Who isn’t?

Here is a link to the original article>>> https://order-order.com/2018/07/26/theresa-mays-promises-to-tory-members-then-and-now/

ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?

ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?

It is commonplace amongst political commentators that the voting public is not interested in politics and does not spend much time thinking about it. In fact the best example of how this has been explained that I have come across over the years was a commentator who said that the public only see politics out of their “peripheral vision”. If somebody actually manages to get the public to look directly at them then politically that is a game changer.

So this means that the current parliamentary parties of the British Political Establishment and, in particular, the Conservative Party, which I want to talk about in this article, have lived their whole careers, up until the Brexit vote, in at most the peripheral vision of the voting public. This has always meant that as long as politicians are looking as though they are going to say the right things whenever they come into view in the public’s peripheral vision, the public’s gaze flicks away from them and they are allowed to get on with it unchecked.

It is because of this lack of attention that the public does not hold Establishment Politicians properly to account and does not put any serious effort into thinking critically about the politicians that are being elected. This is the situation in which the current generation of parliamentarians have grown up and in which they have developed their careers.

So if, for example, you take Theresa May, she is a politician who has basically been able to get away with lying about what she stands for throughout her whole political career. Thus in order to get selected by the Conservative constituency party, any Conservative MP who is not genuinely a Eurosceptic has had to lie to claim that they are a Eurosceptic otherwise they would not get selected by the predominantly Eurosceptic Conservative Party membership. Once selected, in order to get elected, they have had to continue lying and pretending that they are Eurosceptics, because in most Conservative seats they would not get elected if they said that they were Europhiles.

Theresa May, for example, when she became Home Secretary, on any objective basis she did an appalling job of being Home Secretary. On almost every promise that she and the two Conservative Governments that she got elected but she failed to deliver on almost any of the policies that had been promised. The most glaring of which of course is on immigration, where they were elected on promises to keep immigration down to the “tens of thousands”. In fact, she presided over the biggest influx of mass immigration in the history of England, with, in her last year as Home Secretary, more immigrants arriving in that one year than had come to England in the entirety of the thousand years before 1939!

However whenever the public’s political vision flicked over her, there she was saying that was what she wanted to try and achieve a dramatic reduction in mass immigration. That was enough to satisfy the public so that their gaze moved on and so no critical analysis was brought to bear in holding her accountable for her actual lack of achievement!

This current generation of parliamentarians might have continued to live out their whole political careers just as previous ones had done, without there being a moment where the public would be willing to make any effort to properly hold them to account. That would however have been without the Brexit vote!

As a result of the EU referendum on leaving the EU, the public, for the first time in at least a generation, really focussed on a political question and gave an unequivocal answer based upon the largest turnout that has occurred for decades. The unequivocal expectation of voters was, and is, that the public’s decision would be implemented. This is where trouble has occurred for our dishonest and deceitful Remainer MPs, who had comfortably expected to be allowed to continue making decisions that suited them and their agendas without any proper accountability to the electorate for the rest of their careers.

Theresa May is just one of those parliamentarians who had expected to be able to carry on lying her way out of any inconvenient situation.

It is in that context that she has dishonestly conducted her own hidden Brexit policy which she unrolled to the startled gaze of her Cabinet colleagues at Chequers.

Theresa May’s Chequers’ proposal is not only completely contrary to the public’s expectations following the Brexit vote, but is also directly contrary to Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech about her “red lines” when she was still repetitively chanting “Brexit means Brexit”. Now the public is turning its eyes towards Theresa May and is focussing and so is noticing that she is a dishonest and incompetent Remainer, who is, in Jacob Rees Mogg’s words “a Remainer who has remained a Remainer”. This is despite the public’s vote and despite her pledge to implement it in her otherwise ill-judged General Election manifesto.

This leaves me somewhat torn between two conflicting feelings!

For the country, and as a patriot, I think that what Theresa May is trying to do is a travesty and a terrible missed opportunity, but as the Leader of what The Times newspaper was kind enough to call an “insurgent party”, I cannot help but relish the prospect that the parliamentary Conservative Party led by Theresa May could well be now heading irrevocably in a direction in which the public will clearly see that the leadership of the modern Conservative Party is composed of dishonest, incompetent, and unpatriotic Europhiles.

When the public truly realises what the modern Conservative Party leadership stands for, I think it likely that the public will regard them as unfit to hold Government Office ever again.

It may well be that many of the seventy plus per cent that Professor Sir John Curtice of Strathclyde University has identified as being “Leavers” who have been voting Conservative will decide not to come out to vote for the current alternative Establishment party (i.e. Corbyn’s Labour) but that does not mean that they will vote again for a Conservative Party that has so clearly and now noticeably betrayed the trust that was placed in them.

The purging of the Conservatives from being a Party of Government is the first step required for a reconstruction of our national politics.

We need a politics more in line with the two opinion blocks of real voters. These are for the patriotic, anti-mass immigration, pro-Brexit, pro-traditional values and pro-welfare and NHS nationalists. Against this block is the internationalist, pro-EU, anti-patriotic, liberal values, pro-mass immigration, individualistic cosmopolitan block.

The current mishmash of views is one in which the Establishment parties are at cross purposes with most voters. Most of us like some of what Labour has to say and also some of what the Conservatives have to say but we don’t like all of what either of them have to say. So, at the moment, voters have the awkward and unappetising choice at elections of having to choose between the least worst party, rather than being able to choose a party they actually fully agree with. Changing that ladies and gentlemen would be a reform of our politics well worth seeing!

‘The Times’ describes Leave votes as:- “Xenophobic Insurgents”!

The Times Political Editor describes Leave votes as:- “Xenophobic Insurgents”!

I couldn’t let Francis Elliott, the Times Political Editor, get away with outrageously describing Leave voters as “Xenophobic Insurgents” without responding.

Here is my letter to him:-

Dear Mr Elliott

Re: Times Article, July 18^th:- “Tory turmoil could lead to Far-Right revival”

With respect, your heading betrays the unanalytical nature of your article. You used the smear expression “Far-Right” which is intended to obscure rather than to highlight actual policy positions. You then claimed a “revival” despite the fact that for several decades now there has not really been any patriotic or nationalist challenge to the British Political Establishment Lib/Lab/Con which has dominated “British” politics since the Second World War.

You rightly discuss the likely consequences of the Conservative Party’s destruction of its own creditability over Brexit as either competent or patrioticor honest. It is also true that, if Corbyn’s Labour was to be given a chance at government, Labour would prove to be internationalist, anti-patriotic, multi-culturalist and pro-immigration. This is virtually a checklist of the very things that English blue collar workers most despise. Such a Labour Government would be very likely to complete the divorce between the traditional “white working class” and Labour – a path which has already been trod by almost all of Labour’s sister parties in Western Europe!

The anomaly of the UK State is that it is a unique, unfair, unequal and illogical mishmash of nations. This constitutional anomaly has to be sorted out before England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland can become fully normal modern democratic nation states.

If in the process of sorting this out our politics can shed our grandiose “Legacy Parties” and replace them with a modern party structure where policies chime with the various blocks of ideological opinion rather than cut across them – as our current ones do – then so much the better. Whether that amounts to “fertile ground for xenophobic insurgents” well that is – “hard to know”! I will leave you to resolve your own loaded question!

Yours sincerely

Robin Tilbrook

Here is Mr Elliott’s article

Tory turmoil could lead to a far‑right revival

Leave voters’ sense of betrayal over Brexit and fear of immigration create the perfect conditions for a new protest party

Our views on race, immigration and Brexit are full of contradictions. But taken together, this jumble of prejudices and ideas is about to change the shape of British politics.

The return to dominance of the two main parties, which saw Labour and the Conservatives share around 80 per cent of the vote, was one of the most surprising consequences of the referendum two years ago.

It left many in the centre ground pining for a new party. But it now seems likely that it’s on the right, rather than on the middle ground, that a new force will appear.

In three recent polls, Ukip has seen an uptick at the expense of the Conservatives. It could be the first sign of the governing party’s electoral coalition unravelling as voters react negatively to Theresa May’s Brexit compromise agreed at Chequers.

Although Ukip is the current beneficiary, the moribund party riven by factionalism looks no more able to revive itself than the Liberal Democrats. Prepare for a new organisation entirely.

At first sight, immigration doesn’t appear to be a factor in the discontent felt by voters. The number of Britons identifying immigration as the most important issue has declined steeply since 2016, while the number identifying Brexit has risen on a similarly striking gradient. But taken together, concern about immigration and the delivery of Brexit mark those who feel disenfranchised by the Westminster establishment, and explain the outrage felt by some voters towards Mrs May’s Chequers plan. It is an uncomfortable truth that just over a quarter of respondents in a recent British Social Attitudes survey said they were “very” or a “little” prejudiced towards people of other races.

Brexiteers react with fury to any suggestion that race played a part in the vote to leave the EU. They are also the first to suggest that a betrayal of the referendum result will unleash an ugly populist backlash.

Nadine Dorries, the Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire, is the latest to sound the alarm. “The Chequers deal has disenfranchised voters,” she tweeted this week. “People tell me . . . that it was the ‘last straw’ and if a charismatic figure stood heading a new party they would vote for him/her. Sounds like we could be heading for our very own Trump/Macron/Robinson.”

She was criticised for appearing to treat Tommy Robinson, former leader of the far-right, anti-Muslim English Defence League, as a mainstream politician. Robinson was jailed in May for contempt of court and his appeal against his sentence is due to be heard today. As Ms Dorries later made clear, her tweet was a warning, not an endorsement.

But Robinson’s anti-migrant creed has no shortage of high-profile supporters. Here is Donald Trump, speaking alongside Theresa May after their Chequers summit last week, on the damage the president believes migration is doing to the cultural fabric of Europe: “I just think it’s changing the culture. I think it’s a very negative thing for Europe. I think it’s very negative,” he said.

“And I know it’s politically not necessarily correct to say that. But I’ll say it and I’ll say it loud. And I think they better watch themselves because you are changing culture. You are changing a lot of things. You’re changing security.”

Sam Brownback, the US ambassador for international religious freedom, is reported to have warned Sir Kim Darroch, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, that “if Britain did not treat [Tommy] Robinson more sympathetically, the Trump administration might be compelled to criticise Britain’s handling of the case”.

Mr Trump’s son, Donald Junior, has tweeted support for Robinson. A US think-tank, Middle East Forum, helped to organise a rally in support of him in London and sent a Republican Congressman, Paul Gosar, to speak in his support.

Robinson is just one possible candidate to lead whatever replaces Ukip as the repository of protest votes, powered by alt-right cash. Generation Identity, an Austrian nationalist movement, is hovering at the political fringe. With slickly produced YouTube videos and clean-cut provocateurs, it is waiting to leap on any grievance in Britain that can serve its narrative of an apocalyptic clash of civilisations.

It is worth imagining what British politics will be like if Mrs May does, after all, squeeze a version of her Chequers compromise through Brussels. For most of the period between March 29, 2019, when we formally leave the union, and the next general election in 2022, Britain will be paying its full dues to an organisation over which it has no control. What’s more, every politician other than Mrs May will have a vested interest in stoking discontent over the terms of our departure. It is probable that she won’t even be in No 10 to defend it four years from now.

If this isn’t fertile ground for xenophobic insurgents, it’s hard to know what is. For the Tories, it could get even worse. Those now urging a delay in our departure next March are ignoring one large obstacle. If we are still in the EU, Britain must take part in elections to the European parliament next May. These polls are already causing great anxiety in Brussels, where the Commission fears they could return a majority of Eurosceptic MEPs from across the member states, with fatal consequences for the federalist dream.

Senior ministers say that Brussels will find a way to refuse any request to extend our negotiating period because it fears that Britain’s participation in the Euro-election would only inflame the Continental populist revolt.

Just as likely, they know that the Conservative Party would suffer an almighty drubbing in such a poll because it would be outflanked on the right by a populist nationalist party offering a “real Brexit”. That day of reckoning may simply be postponed until the next general election. By then, Labour may find itself in a corresponding bind to the Tories, if a new centrist party ever gets its act together.

The outcome of that election will be determined by which of the two main parties suffers most from the unravelling of forces responsible for their current dominance.

Here is the link to the original article>>> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-turmoil-could-lead-to-far-right-revival-thw8slrq5

DAVID DAVIS TRIGGERS CABINET MELT-DOWN

Whilst the fall-out from David Davis’ resignation has captured the headlines, I thought one of the most interesting articles about David Davis was written by his friend Paul Goodman, the Editor of the Conservative Home blog site.

Mr Paul Goodman was previously the Conservative MP for High Wycombe and has been given the editorship of Conservative Home after its founder, Tim Montgomery moved to. I think it is significant that Mr Goodman’s career has not been one where it seems that he has ever been a key decision maker and that, I think, is significant in reading his article.

The article is written as a friend and admirer of David Davis and also someone who thinks that David Davis’ method of making decisions is rational and principled, rather than the approach of someone who doesn’t find it naturally easy to make decisions and is therefore seeking a crutch for his lame decision making process.

Below is the article. See what you think.

“Davis resigns. My part in his downfall

It is possible that you are right and I am wrong,” David Davis writes to Theresa May in his resignation letter. The phrase was in a draft that I saw just over a month ago on the evening of June 6. Earlier in the day, he had been asked, after delivering a speech at RUSI, whether or not he would resign if the Prime Minister did not offer a date by which, in the event of a Brexit deal, the backstop arrangement over the UK-Ireland border would end. “That’s a question, I think, for the Prime Minister, to be honest,” he replied. This was less of an evasion than a confession. The Brexit Secretary was trying to think through, using the logic tree methods that he loves to deploy, what to do for the best – and what the range of outcomes of a resignation might be. He hadn’t made up his mind what to do.

The story of how I know so is as follows. The previous day, he had texted me: “are you around tomorrow evening”? This was unusual. I am a friend – having voted for him not only in the leadership election of 2005, but in the previous outing of 2001, shortly after being elected as an MP for the first time, and working briefly as his PPS. But messages of that kind don’t come every day. “Yes, if wanted,” I replied. “Which I seem to be.” “Dinner?” came the reply. “I could use some advice.” This is not a request I’d ever had from him before by text – or perhaps in any other form – and the terse terms expressed an unusual urgency. So it was that the next evening we found ourselves chewing his choices over, almost literally, over Albondigas and Pisto Madrileno upstairs at Goya’s in Pimlico.

Three main issues emerged. The first was the backstop. It was already known that he hadn’t been happy about its terms at the time when agreed, because he feared that, once the UK was in it, the EU might never let us out – thus trapping us in the Customs Union and Single Market, at least in part, in perpetuity. His conviction that the Government must find a route map to escape it, and that he might resign if one wasn’t forthcoming, wasn’t exactly a secret that day: his arrival at our small table was preceded by a frenzy of tweets from fellow political journalists speculating on what he had said at RUSI. He had sent me a text earlier: “Running late. On my way”. “Don’t resign before you arrrive,” I replied, to which the half-joshing answer came back: “nip and tuck, I reckon”.

The second issue was delay. Davis feared that if the Commons wasn’t presented with a detailed trade proposal in the autumn, it would vote the deal down, projecting the Government and the country into unknown and unknowable political territory. Hence the urgent need to get a move on: get a proper customs policy – the stand-off over agreeing one was helping to tick the clock down – get a broader approach agreed and a White Paper published; get back round the negotiating table. That he had spent only four hours since Christmas negotiating with Michel Barnier had been well reported. The bleeding obvious had gained less traction: that, until or unless the Government had first closed its divisions, there wasn’t much to talk about.

Which brings us to the third point. Someone had been regularly back and forth to Brussels on the Governent’s behalf, but it hadn’t been the man who Theresa May appointed to undertake the task: it had been Olly Robbins, her Europe adviser. Whatever one thinks of this decision, it may well be that, when the history of this Government is written, that the Prime Minister’s reliance on her adviser will be a pivotal part of the tale. Robbins was May’s Second Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. He was sent to DexEU as its first Permanent Secretary. He and Davis didn’t get on. So he was moved to Downing Street and his present role. The decision to use a civil servant as an emissary, rather than the politician appointed with an express brief for Brexit, has had consequences.

The long and short of it is that there was a feedback loop, in Davis’ view, between the wrong way of making decisions and what he saw as the consequence – namely, wrong decisions. He also claimed that the Prime Minister hadn’t been straight with him. This charge is set out in the resignation letter he sent yesterday evening, which refers to “the progressive dilution of what I thought was a firm Chequers agreement in February on right to diverge…the unnecessary delays of the start of the White Paper…the presentation of a backstop proposal that omitted the strict conditions that I requested and believed that we had agreed”. The implications of all this for others were infinitely more important than they were for me. But it may be worth mentioning that they pulled in different directions.

As a friend, I wanted Davis to flourish. As an editor, I wanted a story. As a Conservative, I wanted the best for the Government. As a Brexiteer, I wanted the best for Brexit – and, by extension, for my fellow citizens. Such were the conflicting pushes and tugs. For what it’s worth, I told him that if he really felt that he had to resign…well, then, he would have to resign. This doubtless wasn’t the most scintillating advice ever offered a politician, but for better or worse it was the best I could do. “Reckon it’s 50.50,” I tweeted afterwards. But I felt that the logic of the position leaned towards him quitting: if you can’t trust your boss, what other option do you have? At any rate, the decision went the other way. He had a long meeting with May the next day and, in short, decided to give her a second chance.

On the backstop, I felt he lost – that gaining a date by which the Government wanted a replacement was useless. More broadly, I thought he won. In those meetings, the Prime Minister agreed to get a move on with the White Paper and to set a date for a Chequers summit – which sets up an irony: Davis thereby gained the meeting that propelled his resignation. You will have noticed that he went dark over the weekend, in the aftermath of the Chequers agreement. I wrote on Saturday that he and four fellow Brexiteers, plus others in Cabinet up to a point, spoke out against what I call the Prime Minister’s new Brexit Minus Minus Minus proposal – which, whatever else may be said for it, isn’t the Canada Plus Plus Plus ideal which enthuses him.

He told me on Saturday that he was off to Silverstone yesterday (nice for some). He sounded dispirited. I asked him again if he would resign – it had become a staple opener to our conversation, rather as one might say: “great weather, don’t you think? – but, by now, the boy-who-cried-wolf factor had kicked in, at least for me. In retrospect, the warning sign was there: elliptical reserve was a better guide to the future than public agonising. And perhaps I had forgotten that he has a track record of quitting on principle. He said that he “might be busy” yesterday evening. “These resignation letters take a long time to write,” I replied – believing, wrongly, that one wouldn’t be forthcoming. “Well, I already have a work in progress…”, his text shot back. It was signed off with a smiley sporting a halo.

Saint to some, sinner to others: we will get both takes, and everything in between, today. Mamma mia! Here we go again. I repeat the most objective summary of which I’m capable. “There is no shortage of marmite politicians at Westminster, but Davis makes most of them taste like blancmagne. His friends’ take is that he is principled, brave, strategic, a deadly campaigner, highly intelligent, a lost leader, loyal to a fault…and occasionally exasperating. His enemies’ view is mostly unprintable. What can be written of it once the expletives are removed are such words and phrases as: egotistical, boastful, unreliable, opportunistic, a plotter, not a team player. There are quite a few of those friends and even more of these enemies – a fair number of whom are his fellow Tory MPs.

It may that the waters close over Davis with a quiet plop, that May appoints Michael Gove to replace him and sends Rory Stewart to Defra, and that life carries on much as before. This is doubtful, to put it mildly. Davis suggests in that resignation that the Prime Minister has been tricksy with him, and Downing Street will now feel obliged to trash his reputation – and with interest. As we have seen, it will not be short of an audience. More to the point, the cry is already up: who’s next? My successor in Wycombe, Steve Baker, has already gone. Like Davis, neither Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Penny Mordaunt nor Esther McVey ventured into the studios this weekend to defend the policy that the Foreign Secretary has compared to a dollop of dung.

Will he “do a Heathrow”, as it’s known in the trade, today? But how can he now cling to office? And – as Mark Wallace asked last night, as he burnt the midnight candle – “bluntly, will May get the chance to appoint a replacement at all?” We are in full-parade-40-letters-bells-and-whistles-country. The 1922 Committee meets to be addressed by the Prime Minister this afternoon. These occasions usually star loyalists called early to praise the Party leader – after which those present warn of the dangers of a Corbyn Government (quite right too), denounce the media…and leave to brief their favourite journalists. This evening, it may be different – and not just in the sense that the meeting will be followed, with superlative timing, by the annual ConHome Parliamentary reception.

Like most of the rest of us, Davis likes to believe that his heart follows his head – all those logic trees; all that rational exposition – but sometimes, as for the rest of us too, it’s the other way round. “I don’t know how but I suddenly lose control / There’s a fire within my soul,” the song goes on. I have given the best account of what has happened that I can but, just as it is partial, it is also limited. There is sometimes a mystery to our decisions – a momentum that may suddenly drive them that we cannot fully explain. On the one hand, I am with my old friend. I think he was right to resign, and believe the new policy is a stinker. On the other, I believe that to hold a leadership contest now, with the Brexit negotiation still in place, would be narcissistic self-indulgence – not to mention an act of electoral self-harm.

It would be the greatest irony of all, would it not, were Davis’s resignation to kick-push a domino of effects which bring about the very opposite of what he wants: the collapse of the Government; the postponement of Article 50; the kicking of Brexit into the long grass – from which, buried deep, it never emerges? But what I think scarcely matters. Perhaps all that’s to be done is to follow the trail of what happens next. On Friday, a Government source warned “narcissistic leadership dominated Cabinet Ministers” to back the Prime Minister or “their spots will be taken by a talented new generation of MPs who will sweep them away”. We are about to find out whether or not that is true – and who will or won’t be swept away. One more thing, David: whatever you do, don’t call another bloody by-election.”

(Here is a link to the original >>> https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2018/07/davis-resigns-my-part-in-his-downfall.html)

David Davis is someone who has previously said that he supports an English Parliament and considers himself to be English. He is therefore potentially supportive of the English Nationalist Cause. However I do think it is interesting to see that he needed to discuss his decisions with friends and needed a rationalised decision making process.

Although I do not for a moment suggest that David Davis would ever have been a rapid fire decision maker that history shows Napoleon to have been. Napoleon’s willingness to make decisions was such that he positively refused to reverse them, even when it would cause unnecessary deaths, as in his famous refusal to countermand an order that he had already given on the battlefield:- “Order plus Counter Order equals Disorder!”

Instead of such ruthless and incisive decision making what we get any glimpse of in this article is of a somewhat muddled decision making process by David Davis who clearly means well and is nice but probably wouldn’t be, if this article is telling us the whole story, a good choice for supreme command.

After all what could be worse than being commanded in battle by a General who wants to be NICE to the enemy?

What is Theresa May’s real Brexit battle plan?

In a middle of a battle it is often impossible for any onlookers or most participants to understand the plans of the commanders on each side. That is even more the case in a political battle where all sides puff out stories like chaff out of a Second World War Lancaster Bomber to confuse the political radar of opponents and often also of supporters!

In the case of Brexit, this is a complete reversal of the British Establishment’s foreign policy in the last 40 years. This means that it is the most significant reversal of British foreign policy in almost the entire careers of all the parliamentary participants – so the chaff deluge is huge!

Brexit is also a direct challenge by the voting public to the British Political Establishment. Which is part of the reason why the Remain elite have got themselves into such a state of hysterical denial over the situation.

At the centre of the conundrum as to what is happening is of course Theresa May. All those who have met her and know her, whom I have met, have assured me that she is not especially intelligent and certainly not any sort of an intellectual. She is however apparently very devious and controlling. I cannot do anything better than quote the article that I quoted in our Spring Conference on the 17^th September 2016 when Theresa May had become the new Prime Minister and new Leader of the Conservative Party.

Here is what I said at conference about this:-

“Let’s turn now to the Conservative and Unionist Party.

They have emerged from the EU Referendum on the surface undented but let’s just look beneath the surface.

The Conservatives have pretended for all my adult life (and I know that I am getting on!) to be a mainly Eurosceptic led Party. That was exposed in the referendum, by most of their Ministers and MPs, as a downright lie!

In contrast apparently about 60% of their ordinary members and supporters voted to “Leave”. Also the Conservative Party’s elite Establishment shenanigans have now given their Party a replacement Remainer Leader and the UK a Remainist Prime Minister.

Theresa May, according to Jonathan Foreman, is apparently a vengeful and obsessive micro manager.

Jonathan Foreman is an editor and writer based in London. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute for the Study of Civil Society and a frequent contributor to the Sunday Times and Saturday Telegraph.

In his article “Theresa May is a failed Home Secretary and a bad choice for PM (http://reaction.life/theresa-may-failed-home-secretary-bad-choice-pm/) published in “Reaction” on the 2^nd July he wrote and I quote:-

“In the run-up to the 2015 election one of the handicaps David Cameron had to finesse was the fact that net migration to the UK was three times as high as he had promised it would be. Remarkably, none of the opprobrium this failure provoked brought forth the name of Theresa May, the cabinet minister actually entrusted with bringing migration down. Then, as now, it was as if the icy Home Secretary had a dark magic that warded off all critical scrutiny.

The fact that her lead role in this fiasco went unmentioned reflects Mrs May’s clever, all-consuming efforts to burnish her image with a view to become prime minister. After all, Mrs May’s tenure as Home Secretary has been notably unsuccessful. Its abundant failures include a succession of derelictions that have left Britain’s borders and coastline at least as insecure as they were in 2010, and which means that British governments still rely on guesswork to estimate how many people enter and leave the country.

People find this hard to credit because she exudes determination. Compared to many of her cabinet colleagues she has real gravitas. And few who follow British politics would deny that she is a deadly political infighter. Indeed Theresa May is to Westminster what Cersei Lannister is to Westeros in “Game of Thrones”: no one who challenges her survives unscarred; the welfare of her realm is a much lower priority than her craving for power.”

Foreman also wrote that:-

“The reputation for effectiveness that Mrs May enjoys mostly derives from a single, endlessly cited event: the occasion in 2014 when she delivered some harsh truths to a conference of the Police Federation. Unfortunately this was an isolated incident that, given the lack of any subsequent (or previous) effort at police reform, seems to have been intended mainly for public consumption.

In general Mrs May has avoided taking on the most serious institutional problems that afflict British policing. These include, among other things, a disturbing willingness by some forces to let public relations concerns determine their policing priorities, widespread overreliance on CCTV, a common propensity to massage crime numbers, the extreme risk aversion manifested during the London riots, and the preference for diverting police resources to patrol social media rather than the country’s streets.

There is also little evidence that Mrs May has paid much attention to the failure of several forces to protect vulnerable girls from the ethnically-motivated sexual predation seen in Rotherham and elsewhere. Nor, despite her proclaimed feminism, has Mrs May done much to ensure that the authorities protect girls from certain ethnic groups from forced marriage and genital mutilation. But again, Mrs May has managed to evade criticism for this.”

Foreman continues:-

“When considering her suitability for party leadership, it’s also worth remembering Mrs May’s notorious “lack of collegiality”. David Laws’ memoirs paint a vivid picture of a secretive, rigid, controlling, even vengeful minister, so unpleasant to colleagues that a dread of meetings with her was something that cabinet members from both parties could bond over.

Unsurprisingly, Mrs May’s overwhelming concern with taking credit and deflecting blame made for a difficult working relationship with her department, just as her propensity for briefing the press against cabinet colleagues made her its most disliked member in two successive governments.

It is possible (Foreman says), that Mrs May’s intimidating ruthlessness could make her the right person to negotiate with EU leaders. However, there’s little in her record to suggest she possesses either strong negotiation skills or the ability to win allies among other leaders.”

So if that article is right, Ladies and Gentlemen, Theresa May may well be the Conservative’s version of Gordon Brown.

In any case she and the Conservatives also are locked in, by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, into having the next election in May 2020 by which time both they and she may be hugely unpopular! This will be especially true if she doesn’t fully implement Brexit.

This is also a risk for us all because she is a classic backroom EU operator. It was Theresa May after all who was the main driver behind the gay marriage campaign and she used the EU’s systems to force this through not only here but also in other countries too.

It does appear however that Theresa May may have more of a sense of humour than the seemingly totally humourless Gordon.

After all she and her team had made her leadership rival, Andrea Ledsom, turn on the waterworks and surrender her leadership challenge in tears and blubbing, having usefully knocked every other Leaver out of the running.

Ladies and Gentlemen Theresa May has appointed Andrea Ledsom as the Minister in charge of waterworks and floods at DEFRA!

I ask you has Mrs May got a sense of humour or what?

There is also the fact that the EU referendum showed that there are basically two main types of people who are Conservative MPs (except for a small and usually totally uninfluential number of mavericks).

These two types are either Liberal Globalists or Liberal Europhiles. Neither of these two types care a hoot for England! Both of them also actively hate the very idea of English nationalism. This means that the Conservatives too have ruled themselves out of being the party for England.”

So it was to me rather doubtful that when Theresa May said in part of her tedious mantra that “Brexit means Brexit” that she necessarily meant us to understand what she was thinking. I wondered whether that was simply a smokescreen to deflect criticism or analysis of her position.

Given that she had a parliamentary majority before she called her unwise General Election it seemed to me likely that in doing she wanted to reduce the influence of Brexiteers so that she could do whatever she wanted to do with Brexit, which I felt was very likely not to be what anybody who really supported Brexit would want.

I thought some corroboration to this suspicion was given by Jeremy Hosking as reported in this article in which he said that he thinks she is deliberately trying to sabotage Brexit. Such an approach certainly seems to be consistent to what we know of her character.

“Tory donor: Brexit ‘incompetence’ is a ploy

No 10’s rejection of funds for Eurosceptic candidates shows it wants to keep EU ties, claims financier

The Sunday Telegraph
20 May 2018
By Christopher Hope CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

GOVERNMENT “incompetence” over the Brexit talks is part of Theresa May’s strategy to keep Britain tied to the European Union, a top Conservative donor claims today.

Jeremy Hosking, a City financier, alleges that one of Mrs May’s aides frustrated his attempt at last year’s general election to donate hundreds of thousands of pounds to Tory candidates under a “Brexit Express” campaign. In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Hosking said: “Those who think the Government is vacillating or making a mess of Brexit due to incompetence are wrong.

“It is part of a strategy. It’s going to plan and the inference from the experience of Brexit Express is that the Prime Minister herself is probably implicated.”

His accusation comes a year after Mrs May’s disastrous election manifesto launch, which commentators said contributed to the Conservatives’ failure to win the election outright.

Mr Hosking has donated £375,000 to the party over the past three years and he offered to give £5,000 to 140 Brexit-backing Tory candidates to fight pro-Remain candidates at the last election through “Brexit Express”.

However, he claims some of the donations were blocked by Fiona Hill, who at the time was chief of staff to Mrs May. Eventually Mr Hosking was able to donate just £376,000 of the planned £700,000 to the candidates.

He said: “Brexit Express’s offer was spurned by the Conservatives.

“It was made as difficult as possible to contact the constituencies that had been (easily) identified, let alone give Tory candidates the money. It was indicated to us by high-ranking party officials that the roadblock to our £700,000 Conservative Party donation lay within No 10 itself.

“We were allowed to assume the blocker was Fiona Hill, Theresa May’s chief of staff [who has now departed]. The layman’s presumption that the purpose of the last election was to strengthen the position of the Government externally in the exit negotiations is therefore false. The real purpose was for the Government to face down its core of Brexiteer MPs internally.”

A Conservative Party source could not comment on the detail of the claims. However, they pointed out that a “large amount” of the donations was handed over. The source added: “He [Mr Hosking] has been a good and very generous donor to the party and there were issues from our side. Everyone who wants to donate to the Conservatives is very welcome to.”

A spokesman for 10 Downing Street declined to comment. Ms Hill was sent details of the claims by The Sunday Telegraph but did not comment.

Unfortunately there is very little that any of us, who are not within the inner circle of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, can realistically do about this situation It may therefore be worth considering what her position will be if Brexit is actually betrayed as suspected. In this respect I cannot do better than quote the opinion of one of the key architects of the Brexit vote, Dominic Cummings:-

“On the referendum #25: a letter to Tory MPs & donors on the Brexit shambles

Dear Tory MPs and donors

I’ve avoided writing about the substance of Brexit and the negotiations since the anniversary last year but a few of you have been in touch recently asking ‘what do you think?’ so…

Vote Leave said during the referendum that:

1) promising to use the Article 50 process would be stupid and the UK should maintain the possibility of making real preparations to leave while NOT triggering Article 50 and

2) triggering Article 50 quickly without discussions with our EU friends and without a plan ‘would be like putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger’.

Following this advice would have maintained the number of positive branching histories of the future, including a friendly departure under Article 50.

The Government immediately accepted bogus legal advice and triggered Article 50 quickly without discussions with our EU friends and without a plan. This immediately closed many positive branching histories and created major problems. The joy in Brussels was palpable. Hammond and DD responded to this joy with empty sabre rattling which Brussels is now enjoying shoving down their throats.

The government’s nominal policy, which it put in its manifesto and has repeated many times, is to leave the Single Market and Customs Union and the jurisdiction of the ECJ.

This requires preparing to be a ‘third country’ for the purposes of EU law. It requires building all the infrastructure and facilities that are normal around the world to manage trade.

This process should have started BEFORE triggering A50 but the government has irretrievably botched this.

Having botched it, it could have partially recovered its blunder by starting to do it afterwards.

No such action has been taken.

Downing Street, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet have made no such preparations and there is no intention of starting.

The Cabinet has never asked for and never been given a briefing from responsible officials on these preparations. Some of them understand this and are happy (e.g Hammond). Most of them don’t understand this and/or prefer not to think about it. It will be trashed in the history books as the pre-1914 Cabinet has been for its failure to discuss what its military alliance with France actually meant until after it was too late.

The few ministers who try to make preparations are often told ‘it’s illegal’ and are blocked by their own Departments, the Cabinet Office and Treasury. The standard officials device of ‘legal advice’ is routinely deployed to whip cowed ministers and spads into line. But given officials now know the May/Hammond plan is surrender, it’s hardly surprising they are not preparing for a Potemkin policy.

The Treasury argues, with a logic that is both contemptible and reasonable in the comical circumstances, that given the actual outcome of the negotiations will be abject surrender, it is pointless wasting more money to prepare for a policy that has no future and therefore even the Potemkin preparations now underway should be abandoned (NB. the Chancellor has earmarked half of the money for a ‘no deal’ for the fiscal year after we leave the EU).

Instead, Whitehall’s real preparations are for the continuation of EU law and the jurisdiction of the ECJ. The expectation is that MPs will end up accepting the terrible agreement as voting it down would be to invite chaos.

In short, the state has made no preparations to leave and plans to make no preparations to leave even after leaving.

Further, the Government promised in the December agreement to do a number of things that are logically, legally and practically incompatible including leaving the Single Market and Customs Union, avoiding ‘friction’ and changing nothing around the Irish border (as defined by the EU), and having no border in the Irish Sea.

The Government has also aided and abetted bullshit invented by Irish nationalists and Remain campaigners that the Belfast Agreement prevents reasonable customs checks on trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Read the agreement. It does no such thing. This has fatally undermined the UK’s negotiating position and has led to the false choice of not really leaving the EU (‘the Government’s backstop’) or undermining the UK’s constitutional integrity (‘the EU’s backstop’). Barwell promised ministers in December that the text did not mean what it plainly did mean. Now he argues ‘you agreed all this in December’. Whenever you think ‘it can’t be this bad’, the internal processes are always much worse than you think.

Parliament and its Select Committees have contributed to delusions. They have made almost no serious investigation of what preparations to be a third country under EU law should be and what steps are being taken to achieve it.

A small faction of pro-Brexit MPs (which also nearly destroyed Vote Leave so they could babble about ‘Global Britain’ in TV debates) could have done one useful thing — forced the government to prepare for their official policy. Instead this faction has instead spent its time trying to persuade people that all talk of ‘preparations’ is a conspiracy of Brussels and Heywood. They were an asset to Remain in the referendum and they’ve helped sink a viable policy since. A party that treats this faction (or Dominic Grieve) as a serious authority on the law deserves everything it gets. (I don’t mean ‘the ERG’ — I mean a subset of the ERG.)

All this contributes to current delusional arguments over supposed ‘models’ (hybrid/max fac etc) that even on their own terms cannot solve the problem of multiple incompatible promises. ‘Compromise proposals’ such as that from Boles which assume the existence of ‘third country’ planning are just more delusions. It doesn’t matter which version of delusion your gangs finally agree on if none of them has a basis in reality and so long as May/Hammond continue they will have no basis in reality.

You can dance around the fundamental issues all you want but in the end ‘reality cannot be fooled’.

The Government effectively has no credible policy and the whole world knows it. By not taking the basic steps any sane Government should have taken from 24 June 2016, including providing itself with world class legal advice, it’s ‘strategy’ has imploded. It now thinks its survival requires surrender, it thinks that admitting this risks its survival, it thinks that the MPs can be bullshitted by clever drafting from officials, and that once Leave MPs and donors — you guys — are ordering your champagne in the autumn for your parties on 30 March 2019 you will balk at bringing down the Government when you finally have to face that you’ve been conned. Eurosceptics are full of shit and threats they don’t deliver, they say in No10, and on this at least they have a point.

This set of problems cannot be solved by swapping ‘useless X’ for ‘competent Y’ or ‘better spin’.

This set of problems cannot be solved by listening to charlatans such as the overwhelming majority of economists and ‘trade experts’ who brand themselves pro-Brexit, live in parallel universes, and spin fantasies to you.

This set of problems derives partly from the fact that the wiring of power in Downing Street is systemically dysfunctional and, worse, those with real institutional power (Cabinet Office/HMT officials etc) have as their top priority the maintenance of this broken system and keeping Britain as closely tied to the EU as possible. There is effectively zero prospect of May’s team, totally underwater, solving these problems not least because they cannot see them — indeed, their only strategy is to ‘trust officials to be honest’, which is like trusting Bernie Madoff with your finances. Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.

Further, lots of what Corbyn says is more popular than what Tory think tanks say and you believe (e.g nationalising the trains and water companies that have been run by corporate looters who Hammond says ‘we must defend’). You are only at 40% in the polls because a set of UKIP voters has decided to back you until they see how Brexit turns out. You only survived the most useless campaign in modern history because Vote Leave killed UKIP. You’re now acting like you want someone to create a serious version of it.

Ask yourselves: what happens when the country sees you’ve simultaneously a) ‘handed over tens of billions for fuck all’ as they’ll say in focus groups (which the UK had no liability to pay), b) failed to do anything about unskilled immigration, c) persecuted the high skilled immigrants, such as scientists, who the public wants you to be MORE welcoming to, and d) failed to deliver on the nation’s Number One priority — funding for the NHS which is about to have a very high profile anniversary? And what happens if May staggers to 30 March 2019 and, as Barwell is floating with some of you, they then dig in to fight the 2022 campaign?

If you think that babble about ‘the complexity of the Irish border / the Union / peace’ will get you all off the hook, you must be listening to the same people who ran the 2017 campaign. It won’t. The public, when they tune back in at some point, will consider any argument based on Ireland as such obvious bullshit you must be lying. Given they already think you lie about everything, it won’t be a stretch.

Yes there are things you can do to mitigate the train wreck. For example, it requires using the period summer 2019 to autumn 2021 to change the political landscape, which is incompatible with the continuation of the May/Hammond brand of stagnation punctuated by rubbish crisis management. If you go into the 2022 campaign after five years of this and the contest is Tory promises versus Corbyn promises, you will be maximising the odds of Corbyn as PM. Since 1945, only once has a party trying to win a third term increased its number of seats. Not Thatcher. Not Blair. 1959 — after swapping Eden for Macmillan and with over ~6% growth the year before the vote. You will be starting without a majority (unlike others fighting for a third term). You won’t have half that growth — you will need something else. Shuffling some people is necessary but extremely far from sufficient.

Of course it could have worked out differently but that is now an argument over branching histories for the history books. Yes it’s true that May, Hammond, Heywood and Robbins are Remain and have screwed it up but you’re deluded if you think you’ll be able to blame the debacle just on them. Whitehall is better at the blame game than you are, officials are completely dominant in this government, ministers have chosen to put Heywood/Robbins in charge, and YOU will get most of the blame from the public.

The sooner you internalise these facts and face reality, the better for the country and you.

Every day that you refuse to face reality increases the probability not only of a terrible deal but also of Seumas Milne shortly casting his curious and sceptical eyes over your assets and tax affairs.

It also increases the probability that others will conclude your party is incapable of coping with this situation and, unless it changes fast, drastic action will be needed including the creation of new forces to reflect public contempt for both the main parties and desire for a political force that reflects public priorities.

If revolution there is to be, better to undertake it than undergo it…

Best wishes

Dominic Cummings

Former campaign director of Vote Leave”

(Here is a link to the original>>>https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/23/on-the-referendum-25-a-letter-to-tory-mps-donors-on-the-brexit-shambles/amp/?__twitter_impression=true)

Cummings’ letter is particularly interesting considering that the leading commentator on voting patterns, Professor Sir John Curtice, has recently pointed out that now it is 70% of the Conservative Party’s electoral support that are Leave voters.

If the Conservative Party betrays the Leave vote they will also reveal, what many patriots have long known, that the Conservative Party is not a genuinely patriotic party.

The Conservative Party elite is part of the globalist establishment and thus fundamentally hostile to nationalism or patriotism. It will therefore be good for the political prospects of genuine patriots and nationalists if the Conservative Party wrecks itself on Brexit!

Hertfordshire English Democrats Supporters Club

Not Left, Not Right, Just English!

Category Archives: Conservative

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