It looks as if there might be no Commons vote, at least today (and therefore this week), on the European Arrest Warrant.
That rather suggests that Labour has come up with an excuse to vote against it, or at least for the front bench to abstain and leave backbenchers to do as they would, most likely go home.
But with everything gearing up towards an Opposition Day motion on the surcharge fiasco before very long at all, we shall be here again, more or less, and the Government will have no way of preventing a Division of the House.
Daniel Hannan has been prominent, which is not something that can often be said of an MEP. The BBC has taken to pronouncing his name HannAn, presumably in order to make it sound less HiberniAn.
Patrick O'Flynn once castigated my "ignorance" on Twitter for suggesting that the Kipper vote would never come out for a candidate called Patrick O'Flynn.
I admit that I was having fun on that occasion.
But Hannan is a much bigger deal. The Radical Right is convinced that he is famous, and in fact he is more famous than Douglas Carswell or Mark Reckless.
It is very telling that, although for all practical purposes Hannan has now left the Conservative Party, he has not joined UKIP. He would immediately expect to be made Leader of it, but that would be highly unlikely to happen.
Out of interest, does UKIP plan on fielding any Kipper candidates next year, or are they all going to be recent refugees from the Conservative Party?
Well, I say the Conservative Party. But the network of Hard Right think tanks, publications, and so on, is not in fact the Conservative Party. Hence the "Lord Who?" remarks about Lord Hill.
"A Peer of the Realm and a Cabinet Minister for whom the European Commission has invented a high-powered position, that's who. But you won't have heard of him, because he came up through the Tory Party. The real one. That you are not in."
Like the SDP, the electoral performance of which they are on course to emulate after comparable levels of media hype, the neo-Kippers are "leaving" a party of which they were barely members to start with. Not only, or even primarily, in ideological term, but in any terms.
And their own essential foreignness is becoming increasingly apparent. As it was put to me only today, in response to Saturday's post about how little time the present crop of right-wingers had spent in Britain in their lives, "Hannan is like Paddington, he comes from Darkest Peru and he has the accent to prove it."
Not just the accent.
That lot believe in their own idea of Britain, not in the reality. They hate the reality. The reality of Britain has no reason to love them. An SDP-like showing in May would be far better than their views deserved. If the media did their jobs properly, then it would be far better than those views would secure at the ballot box.
I understand that if Hannan does leave the Conservatives he would cease to be an MEP and the next name on the Tory list would succeed him. Is this true?
ReplyDeleteNo. Or not unless things have changed very recently. Tory MEPs elected off the lists have become Labour, Lib Dem and UKIP, all while retaining their seats.
DeleteHow right you are. Ask anyone who grew up in Britain what makes them proud to be British and they'll tell you. Hannan and Carswell are wannabes. Both born in 1971, did they grow up watching Grange Hill or Top of the Pops or even Newsnight? No. Is English even Hannan's first language? He likes America so much because it is a Spanish-speaking country.
ReplyDeleteI think that you may be onto something there.
DeleteAnon 16:16 proves the point about the sad products of our dreadful state schools-they don't know any British history before about 1945.
ReplyDeleteSuch people couldn't tell you what was wrong with the European Arrest Warrant or the European Court of Human Rights.
They've never been taught what actually made Britain unique in Europe, from Magna Carta to Habeas Corpus to jury trial.
Like Danny Boyle, they root British identity in a health service because, as Peter Hitchens wrote at the time, they've been cheated of any knowledge of our real history and so "nobody under 40 knows any".
That's what you get from our state schools.
No wonder our Parliament is signing up to a European Arrest Warrant and signing away centurues of British liberty.
As Peter Hitchens wrote "it's our greatest gift to mankind and we don't even know it's ours".
Silly boy.
Delete"That lot believe in their own idea of Britain, not in the reality."
ReplyDeleteAhhhh and what is the reality? A country ruled by faceless, idea-less and hypocritical political eunuchs?
Funny, for a supporter of the Labour Party, you're awfully interested in the ethnic origins of both Carswell and Hannan. Isn't that a bit rich coming from a party that places so much value on multi-culturalism?
Bless.
DeleteI never mentioned ethnicity at all. That is precisely what this is not about.
But you have mentioned in other entries the issue of time spent abroad have you not?
DeleteThat's not ethnicity.
DeleteLike a growing number of right-wingers, they did not grow up in Britain (unless you count term-times at major public schools), and they have very little feel for the place. Their views reflect that.
Come on, David, fess up - the real reason you are so obsessed with the origins of Hannan and Carswell is because, deep down, you are deeply inecure about the fact that you aren't really as British as you'd like to be yourself. Outsiders are often the most reactionary snobs and xenophobes: and you are no exception, dressed-up in your cheap cufflinks and faux accent.
DeleteYou think the fact that you watched Grange Hill as a kid gives you the right to mock Englishmen born in colonial Africa. And you do toy with the racist issue of ethnicity, as Ultimo Tiger suggests, which is a rather bizarre position to hold for someone who comes from a mixed-race family and an island in the Atlantic Ocean. You think that watching Grange Hill be compared to those British people who have generational roots going back centuries in the same town or village - people you no doubt envy and resent. That is insulting to their heritage. You insult us.
Stop pontificating on matters which do not really concern you and which you don't understand! And, if you have any honour, you might consider apologising to those people you are mocking bcause of their origins - origins connected to a complex colonial history that you clearly do not understand.
You are a deluded individual, whose main purpose is to provide amusement to those of us who read your blogs during bored moments in our "watching a car crash" kind of way. Your belief that you coulda-shoulda-woulda been an MP were it not for your rivals is laughable - were it not so pitiful.
Fess up. Stop pontificating. Stop the comments about people's origins. Stop insulting the British people. Show some humility. Isn't that what your Catholic faith (such a "British" creed, that one, by the way!) teaches you?
Try and make peace in who you really are and what you are: no doubt a decent bloke deep down, with non-British origins who has an amateur and obsessive interest in British politics and parliamentary gossip, but unfortunately an over-inflated notion of his own importance, which leads to a nasty and bitter streak towards other people on a certain newspaper blog and in a certain party - something which has been noted by most people in Westminster and Fleet St, who dismiss you as a crank...
But you still didn't actually win that council seat, did you? I would have done, and you know it. Ho, hum.
DeleteAnyone who says "fess up" has no cultural links at all to this country. Speaking of links, those on Mr. Lindsay's beautiful shirts are the most elegant I have ever seen. He is the perfect English gentleman and he grew up in England. Obviously having distant British ancestors but growing up in Kenya or Peru does not give people a sense of this country as anyone reading Carswell and Hannan can see. They want to abolish the NHS, the BBC and everything, they haven't got a clue. Did Mr. L. ever have any education outside Co. Durham?
DeleteNone. From playschool to MA, the whole lot was here in the County Palatine.
DeleteThe miners' and steelworkers' progeny who taught me would have had kittens if they had read the words "fess up".
They still would, since I am only aware of one who is dead, and a magnificent funeral he had, too.
Anonymous 12:58 went to the same secondary school as I did, at almost exactly the same time. But it has always struck me that no one seems to have thought him worth bothering to teach the finer points of the English language.
He is digging up a very old and dry bone about my background. He and the then Government Chief Whip may have been able to use it as a weapon back in 2003, but the consequences of that are best left undiscussed.
His continuing Blairite support for Carswell-Hannan schemes such as NHS privatisation is also striking. Nor has he their excuse of being essentially foreign in cultural terms. His lack of any feel for this country is a fault rather than merely a failing.
I cannot imagine anyone feeling more effortlessly British than you, that's why you're so comfortable with social democracy. Only people who don't feel British, who want Britain to be somewhere else usually in their heads, have radical right-wing views. Most Tory and Ukip voters love the BBC and NHS, want to re-nationalise the railways, and all that. It's the weirdo Anglo-American neither one thing nor the others, the people from distant stock who grew up between public school and abroad, people like that, who don't.
DeleteNo one on earth feels more effortlessly British than a St Helenian.
DeleteIt is half of the other side of my family that is now SNP, although only, like everyone else, because of the extent to which Britain has been made less British over the last 35 years by people whose upbringing, and therefore whose way of thinking, was essentially foreign, but who, unlike many people in that position, could not see or understand that that was the case, insisting instead that somehow they spoke for the real Britain.
But I grew up entirely here. That is what defines my sensibility. As you say, the Radical Right just does not have that. It is made up of people desperately trying to tell people who do how we ought to see ourselves and our country.
But we don't. We just don't. For the perfectly good reason that, unlike them, we understand the place.
That's why they like Israel so much, it is based on abstract ideas and distant ancestral connections with no feel at all for the local culture, Jewish or Arab. Like the way they see Britain.
Delete