What Hope?

Trooping the Colour? The King's Official Birthday? But as the arguments for First Past the Post and the arguments for Proportional Representation are both rubbish in their own terms, meaning that the case for change has not been made, so the arguments for retaining the monarchy and the arguments for replacing it are both rubbish in their own terms, meaning that the case for change has not been made. 

Just as under the supposed Holy Grail that is the Single Transferable Vote, every Taoiseach has been the Leader either of Fianna Fáil or of Fine Gael, so neither Ireland, nor France, nor Germany, nor Italy, nor the United States, nor anywhere else, is the classless and incorruptible republic that Britain would supposedly become. But no one looks at the Kingdom of First Past the Post and sees stability. The arguments on both sides are rubbish, so the case for change has not been made.

Three times that I have heard, Richard Tice has said on television that Nigel Farage ought to be the President of Britain, a view that Farage has not disavowed. Nor, however, has Farage ever expressed it, making George Galloway the only notable politician to say out loud what we all know that any politician means when calling for an elected Head of State. George is apparently so trivial as to be excluded from televised debates, less than four months after he was apparently so dangerous that his election to Parliament caused the Prime Minister to make an emergency statement from the Downing Street lectern.

Seeking re-election for the key Labour target seat of Rochdale, George is being opposed by a leafleting campaign in the name of registered charity number 1013880, Hope Not Hate, at least two of the trustees of which are Labour parliamentary candidates, one of them a member of the party's National Executive Committee. The leaflet is libellous, so I am not putting it up. But it looks like an old school Labour one.

Hope Not Hate objects equally to all of criticism of the war in Gaza, criticism of the war in Ukraine, support for Brexit, opposition to gender self-identification, opposition to unrestricted immigration, reservations about the cashless society, resistance to mass surveillance and to the criminalisation of protest, criticism of the official approach to climate change, and criticism of the official approach to Covid-19. That list is not exhaustive, and it would not be difficult to predict the additions to it. That is the package, to be taken as a whole or not at all, and prepare for the consequences if you chose not to take it.

Gentlemen, are you tired of being only moderately successful actors or comedians? Then declare yourselves transwomen, and feel your careers hurtle into the stratosphere. Ladies, do you fancy a bit more prominence than you had attained through academia or the worthier sorts of journalism? Then make names for yourselves as gender-critical feminists, and watch the new platforms build themselves.

But it is people whose intersection of sex, class and generation matches the gender critics' perfectly, and who are usually the same colour as well, who expel pro-ceasefire students, who send in thugs to give them a beating, who connive to revoke their visas, and so on. All while driving out or keeping down the gender critics, and while marching with those who threatened them with extreme violence. Yet the gender critics cheer on those expulsions and all the rest on #MeToo grounds, even though the mass rapes on 7 October have gone the way of the 40 beheaded babies, and of the baby in the oven.

Of course, we have been here before. 100,000 military age males had not been murdered in Kosovo. The attacks of 11 September 2001 had not come from Afghanistan; the suggestion that they had done so is the only 9/11 conspiracy theory that has ever done any active harm. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Therefore, those weapons were not capable of deployment within 45 minutes. Saddam Hussein had not been feeding people into a giant paper shredder. He had not been attempting to obtain uranium from Niger.

A genocide had not been imminent in Benghazi. Gaddafi had not been feeding Viagra to his soldiers in order to encourage mass rape. He had not intended to flee to Venezuela. It was not an undisputed fact that Assad had gassed Ghouta. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were not dead, as announced on the front page of The Times on 12 March 2018. And 40 people in Salisbury had not required treatment for nerve agent poisoning, as claimed by The Times on 14 March 2018.

The people who talked of mass rapes were the people who had peddled every single one of those lies while insisting at home that all rape allegations were true by definition and that any conviction rate below 100 per cent of complaints was therefore self-evidently incorrect. Instead, believe those of us who never believed any of them and who, not unconnectedly, have never taken that view.

My own record is particularly strong. I disliked the still unarrested Russell Brand when that got me abused hysterically by those of my contemporaries who thought that Blairite politics made them the cool kids, and who have never grown up to this day, even if they have changed their tune on him. While I am sure that I could stand no more than a few seconds in the company of Andrew Tate, I cannot imagine that the United States would allow a white liberal American citizen to be treated as he has been, and I have said from the very start that I would not be surprised if little or nothing ended up coming of this.

See also Cardinal Pell, Julian Assange, Alex Salmond, Ched Evans, and the victims of Freya Heath, whose conviction was merely set aside on a procedural technicality. You need a visa for Spain these days, and Mason Greenwood secured one to enable him to be loaned to Getafe, so that recording was provenly false. For the second time, in fact, since if it had been genuine, then the Crown Prosecution Service would have proceeded with what would therefore have been an open-and-shut case against him. I delight in his progress as Manchester United's enormous African fanbase loans its affections until justice be done. It looks as if it very soon will be.

This has nothing to do with liking anyone. The beatification will presumably be the occasion of a Papal Visit to Australia, but if possible I shall be in Rome for Cardinal Pell's canonisation. To keep Assange's work going, then I would die in his stead. While I am opposed to the marrow of my bones to the political cause to which Salmond has devoted his life, I expect that he and I would get on. But I doubt that Evans or Greenwood and I would find much to talk about. I know that Heath's victims and I would have more than enough for a very heated discussion indeed. I have already said what I thought of Tate and of who Brand used to be, as he himself broadly says these days.

Likewise, and like Jeremy Corbyn, I dislike Hamas with the intensity of one who knows a lot more about it than, say, David "raping babies" Lammy. Lammy is particularly deplorable in his apparent ignorance of or disregard for the demonisation of nonwhite males as sexual predators, as in the cases of Greenwood and possibly Tate, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a report that it is also highly critical of Hamas, has found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces.

The #IBelieveHer case for the genocide of Gaza is a case that several of those making it have made for every previous neoconservative war, and most of them for at least one. Those of a certain age have dusted down the file of lurid allegations that they deployed against working-class white men during the Satanic panic of the Thatcher years, and which have been levelled, practically word for word, against every designated enemy since. At best, they raise no objection to the same treatment of racialised communities in Britain, who are today's Enemy Within, which is why that status will very soon be enjoyed again by the working class in general and by working-class men in particular, insofar as that has ever ceased to be the case.

But to point out any of this would be Hateful Not Hopeful, as so many other things would be and are. With flagrant illegality, the kitchen sink is being thrown at the one Hateful Not Hopeful septuagenarian who was seeking to retain his one seat out of the 650 in the House of Commons. Imagine that someone of that mind were to attempt to become the Head of State.

The Reclaim Party has been republican from the start because the monarchy had failed to do any of the things that its proponents said that it did apart from arguably bringing in tourists, because of the opinions of the then Heir to the Throne, and because Laurence Fox wanted to be President. Reform UK shows increasingly republican tendencies on the first of those grounds, because that Heir is now the King, and because Farage's fans want him to be their Donald Trump.

Only the absence of a vote has kept the King from becoming one of those Shire Tories who had gone Green. His late mother was not in fact politically neutral, and nor is he. But we would never be allowed anything better. If we played our cards right, then we might be in with a chance of taking at least some control of the Royal Prerogative.

Previous Governments have handed over jaw-dropping amounts of power to the Deep State, having of course been installed for the purpose. These people clearly never wanted to run the country. Again, that was why they were put in by the people who did. For example, while each generation presumably produces an obvious Astronomer Royal, why hand over the power to appoint Regius Professors, or certain Oxbridge Heads of House, or the Poet Laureate? Never mind the judiciary? Or 26 members of Parliament? And how entitled is the Liberal Establishment in the Church of England, to presume the right to appoint those 26 legislators over the rest of us?

But those powers have never been legislated away. Almost nothing in Britain ever is quite abolished or repealed. It falls into prolonged desuetude, but it is still there. Corbyn would have made full use of the Royal Prerogative; there are no republicans in possession of the powers of a Medieval monarch, and that would have been even without mentioning the restoration of democratic political control over monetary policy. The surrender of that had not been in the Labour manifesto in 1997, was the right-wing media and thinktanks had long advocated it; Gordon Brown was right that in those days he could never have got it past the Labour Party, but Simon Heffer praised it to the skies on that week's Any Questions?. Disgracing Eton and Oxford, Boris Johnson also showed tendencies in the direction of actually governing the country as Prime Minister. So the Deep State had to get rid of the pair of them. But if we were on our guard against such Hate, then there may yet be a glimmer of Hope.