The influence of someone like Oliver Kamm is extraordinary when one considers that most people have never heard of him, that almost no one in the population at large shares anything remotely resembling his views, and that the only even vaguely notable thing about him is his moderately famous uncle. Much the same may be said about, for example, Stephen Pollard. Even Ed Vaizey or Michael Gove, though an MP, is an astonishingly consequential one for somebody so recently entered into the parliamentary fray. Let's just say the words "Denis MacShane". And so one could go on.
We are living under a junta which goes by such interchangeable names as the Henry Jackson Society, the Euston Manifesto Group, "the Centre for Social Cohesion" (which is in fact the mere person of the otherwise inexplicably ubiquitous Douglas Murray), New Labour, the Cameroons, the Orange Book Tendency, and so forth.
The self-aggrandised and utterly unaccountable power of the Jacksonites and Eustonites (Kamm, Pollard and MacShane are of course both, even on paper) is eye-watering. Will Kamm and Pollard go to prison for their flagrant criminal harassment of Neil Clark? Will they even be charged? The answers to these questions will establish, once and for all, whether the Jacksonites and Eustonites have made ours a mere second world, or a full-blown third world, country.
That junta has been electorally irremovable, as such things are.
Until now.
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It's going to get worse. As if the existence of the Electoral Commission were not bad enough, we see moves towards state-funded parties and a second chamber "elected" from closed party lists. Oh, and compulsory voting, just to rub our noses in it.
ReplyDeleteNo prizes for guessing who will be on whatever committee decides which parties can and can't have funding. And no prizes for guessing who'll be on the party lists or (even more importantly) behind drawing them up, whether or not party members themselves. All roads lead from Cambridge to Euston and back again, you know.
Quite. Welcome to the old East Germany, never the worst Eastern Bloc country (like that's saying much), but still ghastly, and kept that way largely because ostensibly separate parties which merely appeared to embody different political traditions (liberal, Christian Democratic, even ex-Nazi, as well as Marxist), and which certainly appealed to different sections of society accordingly, contested sham elections which were incapable of changing anything because all of those parties were really exactly the same, and were even being run as a single organisation.
ReplyDeleteAs things stand, try and imagine Britain in 10 years' time and tell me, in all honesty, that things would not be frighteningly far advanced down that same road.
Hence the alternative and antidote: the British People's Alliance.
Kamm doesn't even publicise himself beyond his blog these days. He's just like you: a blogger. Only not as good.
ReplyDeleteIs this delberate secrecy, or has he actually been banned from things like Comment is Free because of his criminal campaign against Neil Clark? I hope so, and I suspect so. Whereas Neil is once again being published there, in the New Statesman and abroad. Quite right too.
Yet Kamm remains one of the most powerful men in the country, elected by and answerable to no one. And what does he live on, since he now has no job? I think we should be told. But I know we won't be.