Da Esperança

Brazil is a potential market of well over 200 million, and Jeremy Corbyn is by far the British politician closest to its newly restored President Lula. Indeed, Corbyn is arguably Lula's closest political ally outside Latin America. He has a similar relationship with popular liberation movements in much of the world, while the defeated Jair Bolsonaro is politically and personally close to Tony Blair.

Those liberation movements have their faults, as does Lula, and as does Corbyn. But no one in the rising world has ever heard of Keir Starmer, and they would not like him. He is daily less liked even here, now that the money markets have overthrown a Government that had sought to implement his economic programme. He and his supporters deserve the same banishment as the likes of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

For 25 years, since I was a fresher at Durham, types from the City have been telling me that I "would be surprised" at the real political centre of gravity there. I am starting to believe them. Ken Livingstone worked very effectively with it for eight years, his office largely staffed by the Socialist Action whose presence at the same dinner as Jamie Driscoll is today enough to tickle Guido Fawkes.

As Shadow Shadow Chancellor for decades, and then on the frontbench, John McDonnell cultivated all sorts of links that Kwasi Kwarteng and the rest of the Tufties simply never did. They assumed that they had the Square Mile on side, when in fact nothing could have been further from the case. The City might not have liked any of McDonnell's fiscal events awfully much, although it is rarely all that keen on anyone's, but it could and would have lived with them all. It simply could not live with Kwarteng's only one, to the point of forcing first his removal from office and then Liz Truss's.

And nothing could suit British business better than a First Lord of Treasury with a profound understanding of, and close connections to, the rising peoples of Latin America, Asia and Africa, including the popularly elected President of more than 200 million Brazilians. That will never now be Corbyn, and he largely has himself to blame. But it does need to be someone, and soon.

Instead, though, Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, but it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwarteng from Hunt, Rishi Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.

Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Something Far More Cruel

Peter Hitchens writes:

Freda Walker opened her back door to let her cat out one night last January, she let Hell into her home. It came in the form of Vasile Culea. He seems to have sneaked in while she was not looking.

Not long afterwards, he subjected Mrs Walker, 86, and her husband Ken, 88, to a night of merciless torture. He was a retired electrician and former district councillor. She was a retired seamstress. They had come through all those decades, and might have thought they were entitled to a peaceful final few years together. They did not live in some inner-city gang-infested zone, but in the kind of street and the kind of house that millions inhabit.

She was 5ft 2in tall and yet Culea, a fit young man, killed her. She had 25 distinct injuries. Bizarrely, Ken Walker’s later death in hospital was listed as being from ‘natural causes’, despite the fact that he suffered a brain injury during the invasion of their home, and had been beaten bloody, before, or possibly after being tied up and gagged. He never went home from hospital, though he lingered there for seven months. I have my own theory of what he died of, and I would not call it ‘natural causes’, but what can I say?

Culea appears to have been trying to get the couple to tell him where they had hidden some money. He never found it. News accounts of this event stress that Culea was an indebted gambler, supposedly ‘addicted’ to this stupid amusement. ‘Addiction’ is a word used far too often to excuse wilful self-destruction by people perfectly capable of controlling themselves, if they thought it worthwhile. I doubt whether Culea’s ‘addiction’ will trouble him much in the prison which will now be his inadequate punishment. 

The couple, living in an ordinary suburban home in a Derbyshire village, were just respectable, straightforward British people from a generation who grew up when burglary was a rare and major crime, drugs unknown and gambling a minor thing on the edge of society, bookie’s runners, football pools and bingo.

They perhaps had not realised that there has been a revolution since then. They made the mistake of thinking they could leave the back door open for a minute or two while they put the cat out. Derbyshire Police, to their credit more forthcoming than most forces I approach about this, tell me that drug abuse by the killer ‘was a line of enquiry within the investigation and no evidence came to light that Vasile Culea was a drug user’. Well, OK, if they say so.

All I can say about that is that the grotesque fury and savagery of his behaviour is horribly like that of many criminals whose merciless actions are listed on the website ‘Attacker Smoked Cannabis’. This is compiled from hundreds of local media reports by Ross Grainger. Yes, our society has always had murderers and thieves in it, but something far more cruel is now in our midst. Who will put this right?

On Hitchens’s opposition to British Summer Time, I would not be in favour of making it year-round, but his obvious incredulity that anyone would be is because he is 71 and he spent many years abroad. In my 1980s childhood, people of working age were often in bed at nine o’clock and not uncommonly even at eight, especially but not exclusively in the winter. But no one under 50, as an absolute minimum, has lived as an adult in that culture. That is why memories of the experiment from 1968 to 1971 are irrelevant.

Suella In The Cellar

Suella Braverman has been reappointed only in order to sack her again, as the break with the Right once and for all. The answer to its every economic policy proposal is already "Liz Truss", and the answer to its every other policy proposal will very soon be "Suella Braverman".

After Brexit, the Right has no issue that has mass appeal; indeed, even most Conservative voters find its core economic agenda as abhorrent as the City and the money markets do. Most Conservative voters also seriously regard voting any other way at a General Election, if ever, as a treasonable act, and in England as simply un-English. It's over.

Or, at any rate, it is on that side of the House. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, but it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse.

Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng from Hunt, Rishi Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.

Keir Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power.

Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Phoning It In

Pity the poor Russian spook whose lot it was to have to trawl through the fascinating telephone calls and text messages of Liz Truss. But note that an outgoing Prime Minister and his Cabinet Secretary were still able to impose a news blackout so effective that it could make someone Prime Minister who would otherwise have had to have withdrawn.

And ponder why Boris Johnson would have been so keen to have been succeeded by Truss. It was not only that Rishi Sunak had knifed him. It was also that he knew that Truss was likely to fail so completely, and to fall so quickly, that he would soon have stood a good chance of returning to office. Hence her endorsement by the likes of Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg. And hence this.

If Johnson contests the next General Election, then he has still not given up on being Prime Minister again. To his dying day at the age of 89, Ted Heath never did. He refused to retire from the House of Commons until he was a few weeks shy of 85, and even then the dream had not died. He had ceased to be Prime Minister in his fifty-eighth year. Johnson is 58 now. By the way, Heath was the last Prime Minister to have been brought to power by a General Election and then to have lost it by the same means. That defeat was in 1974. 48 years ago.

One day, and probably quite soon, we shall know why Johnson was unable to find 100 MPs to nominate him against Sunak. If he had really had 102, then he would have stood. Sunak had at least 197, out of 357. So Johnson's claim of 102, and Penny Mordaunt's of over 90, could not both have been true. As I say, though, we shall know soon enough.

In the meantime, and forever with any luck, we ought to be free of the views of those who had monopolised economic commentary in this country for 40 and more years, and who finally became the Government that they had always thought that they should have been, only to be deposed in six weeks, which would have been three if the old Queen had not died, by horrified money markets for which they had presumed to speak, but with which they had turned out to have had no affinity whatever. The second sacking of Suella Braverman, the only reason why she has been reappointed, ought to seal that deal.

Alas, there is a potential flaw. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, the only mini-Budget measure than had not been in Truss's prospectus to her party's membership, but it supported everything else that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng from Hunt, Sunak, and all the rest of them. Labour is going into the next General Election as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.

Keir Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Identity Politics

Those who decry the supposed dearth of women in the Cabinet have not asked the gender identity of Ben Wallace or Nadhim Zahawi.

The seven SNP rebels against gender self-identification are in favour of Scottish independence, so, like Joanna Cherry or the Alba Party, do not vote for them, any more than for Alison Teal, who is a Green. More broadly, Green support for things like a wealth tax and a £15 minimum wage risks leading people into anti-industrial Malthusianism. We need to reclaim our ground. You cannot be a "Red-Green".

Keir Starmer's Pabloism may disturb those of us who are Red-Red, although we have always known about it, but it is only the theoretical systematisation of mainstream middle-class opinion in Britain today. There is no point in pretending that it would strike the residents of Acacia Avenue as anything other than "moderate" and "centrist", if rather highfalutin in its articulation of what was "just common sense".

Eddie Izzard's campaign video is Starmerite boilerplate, so oppose him on that. It is more than enough. He is in favour of gender self-identification, and that is sufficient reason to vote against him, but when has he ever claimed to be a woman? Not to be "based in girl mode", but the words, "I am a woman"? Labour does not have an all-women shortlist at Sheffield Central, and indeed appears to have abandoned the practice, since its aim, that half of Labour MPs should be women, was attained and exceeded at the last General Election.

Not that that should ever have been an aim. At least primarily, equality and diversity should mean economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt.

Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. We who hold these views have never not been cancelled, so we need no lectures on cancel culture from those who have always silenced us but who now bellow that they themselves are being silenced.

Izzard used to say that, "They are not women's clothes, they are my clothes, I bought them." Who could have argued with that? Yet now he calls himself "she". He does not do so as a harmless quirk. To be polite or compassionate, some of us might have indulged that. Male transvestism is one of the most venerable of British, and especially English, eccentricities. But Izzard is using feminine pronouns as a pretext for accessing women's single-sex facilities. Therefore, and however regretfully, we do have to insist against it.

On anything other than gender self-identification, if there is any political difference between Izzard and Rosie Duffield, then she is well to his right. Is the SDP really going to stand aside for a fervently pro-EU MP anywhere, but perhaps especially in Kent? She is an ally, but not even to the extent that Cherry is. She wants Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Yvette Copper, and Wes Streeting to become Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, and Health Secretary. On the gender issue alone, there are those who would vote even for Kemi Badenoch. But they are wrong, and not only because she shows no sign of doing, rather than saying, anything about that issue.

None of that is to deny the sheer physical courage that it now takes to state the fact of biological sex. The trouble around the recent appearance of Dr Helen Joyce at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge should be seen in terms of the fact that the Master, Professor Pippa Rogerson, took her BA in 1983, meaning that she cannot be younger than 60, and after a brief stint at Clifford Chase she has been a Cambridge don for 33 years. She is fortunate that gangs of young men in balaclavas and weighted gloves, which are essentially knuckledusters, have hitherto been quite outwith her experience. Yet such now attend any event featuring an opponent of transgender ideology. Middle-aged women are surrounded by them, followed from the venue by them, and so on. Professor Rogerson is terrified.

A quarter of a century ago, I arrived at a university college that was in a similar state. The previous Head of House had been driven from office and even from the country on entirely false grounds, notably that there was no such institution as the University of Philadelphia, which has since merged into another institution, but which most certainly did exist at the time. During his tenure, the faction in control of the Junior Common Room had, among other things, thrown a brick through the window of his home and then demanded that he apologise. The successor administration of, like him, academic clerics lived in fear, although that did lead it to lash out at peripheral figures far from student power. And those academics were men, frighteningly younger than I am now. They were not 60-year-old women.

As Maya Forstater says, "Sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone." Do not vote for any parliamentary candidate who did not say that, or the Leader of whose party did not say it. If they will lie about something as fundamental and as obvious as this, then they would lie about anything. This motion needs to be tabled in the House of Commons, and put to a division of the whole House: "Sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex." Do not vote for anyone who, being an MP, had not voted for that, or the Leader of whose party, being an MP, had not done so.

Starmer versus Liz Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Rishi Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

In The Same Boat?

My most recent cellmate was an Albanian, or at least that was how he described himself. A lovely young lad, he was teaching himself the days of the week in English from the weather forecast.

But consider how many of those claiming asylum in Britain are from the NATO protectorate of Iraqi Kurdistan, and then consider how very many, ostensibly from the NATO member state and EU candidate country of Albania, may in fact be from the NATO protectorate of Kosovo, which is also the major source of the heroin, prostitutes and illegal guns on our streets.

If Ukraine were also a NATO protectorate, then it would also be like that, only with 20 times more people and 55 times more territory. Already a global centre of the traffic in women, and not unconnectedly of commercial surrogacy, it is already a candidate for EU membership. Thank heavens that Britain is not.

The Wrong Side of the Blunkett

Say what you like about Suella Braverman, but David Blunkett resigned as Home Secretary because he had fast-tracked a visa application for the nanny to his secret child by another man's wife.

Blunkett took the payoff, as Braverman has presumably also done, but he continued to attend Cabinet throughout the five months until he was officially brought back into it as a typically vicious Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He lasted only another five months.

Braverman's terrifying agenda are straight out of the playbook of Blunkett and all the rest of New Labour's bestial Home Secretaries, which is why New New Labour is not opposing them, but only her. The Shadow Home Secretary is Yvette Cooper, one of Blunkett's successors at Work and Pensions, where her legacy continues to be measured in the ever-rising body count from her Work Capability Assessment.

Thankfully, Cooper's once commanding majority is now 1,276, having been 14,499 at the unmentionable General Election of 2017. Thank you, Keir Starmer, for having made it so easy to remove her, as must now be given the very highest priority.

In answer to the question of who would make the better Prime Minister, YouGov now has Neither on 36 per cent to Starmer's 34 and Rishi Sunak's 30, with Starmer's poll rating 17 per cent lower than his party's. Another poll today has Sunak on 39, to Starmer's 38. The Labour vote has undeniably collapsed every time that real votes have been cast during Starmer's Leadership. We are only days into Sunak's Premiership, with two years until the next General Election, which is going to result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Breaking With Braverman

Standing in for Suella Braverman in the Commons today was Robert Jenrick, who was so bent that even Boris Johnson had to sack him. 

But Rishi Sunak has brought back Braverman specifically in order to "have to" sack her, thereby breaking himself, his Government and his party with the ERG and all that, once and for all.

Not long now.

On The Money

George Osborne, Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid are all advising Jeremy Hunt, while Osborne's long-time Chief of Staff and then Evening Standard employee, Rupert Harrison, is on the Economic Advisory Council. We know what to expect.

Yet what is the alternative? Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, but it supported every other mini-Budget measure that even Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. Had the mini-Budget ever been put to a Commons Division, then Labour's whipped abstention would have saved Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng from Hunt, Rishi Sunak, and all the rest of them. While Truss and Kwarteng are unlikely to contest the next General Election, Labour is going into it as the only party that still thought that Trussonomics was broadly, and often very specifically, a good idea.

Keir Starmer versus Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Tiocfaidh ár lá?

This post posits two possibilities. One of them will soon turn out to be correct. All that remains to be seen is which one, although it would be possible for aspects of both to happen together.

The First Possibility

Any affection for Sinn Féin on the part of what is now the anti-austerity Left can be attributed only to nostalgia. But you cannot make peace with no one, so Sinn Féin has always been indispensable to any Executive under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, while no other single party is.

Thus, the IRA Army Council has been exercising in the Six Counties since as long ago as 1998 its claim to sovereignty throughout the 32 County Republic of 1916. Anyone doubting that need look no further than the funeral of Bobby Storey, followed by the decision of the Police that no Covid-19 regulations has been breached.

Storey's coffin was borne to its rest by Gerry Adams, Martin Ferris, Sean Hughes, Gerry Kelly, Martin "Duckster" Lynch, and Sean "Spike" Murray. At any given time, there are seven members of the Army Council. Of the deceased and his six pallbearers, only Ferris was from the 26 Counties. There, however, Sinn Féin might have entered government if it had fielded enough candidates at the last General Election to the Dáil. It will certainly field enough next time.

Handpicked for Leadership by an Army Council that was based almost entirely in what it never called "Northern Ireland", Michelle O'Neill as First Minister would be a detail, since that Council would effectively have been in charge there for 24 years, regardless of how many votes its partisans, who had sometimes included its members, had obtained.

But handpicked for Leadership by an Army Council that was based almost entirely in what it never called "Northern Ireland", Mary Lou McDonald as Taoiseach of what that Council did not regard as the real Republic of Ireland would be a seismic event, effectively extending the exercise of the IRA's claim to sovereignty across the entire territory claimed, and to the means of a sovereign state's participation in international affairs.

Who would need a border poll? Why would the IRA want one? No referendum would ever endorse rule by the Army Council. Once that were established across the whole of Ireland, then the beneficiaries would never wish to give it up, and everyone else would find it practically impossible to make them. That day is now well within sight.

The Second Possibility

The United Kingdom's governing party has no connection to Northern Ireland. The SDLP's MPs take the Labour Whip, and the Liberal Democrats have close ties to the rising Alliance Party. But no one who was even generically a Tory won a seat in Northern Ireland in 2019, and one of their two second places was still 12,721 votes behind. One of their third places was where there were only three candidates, and they did a great deal worse than that in most places, where they stood at all.

It would always have been impossible to have become or remained Prime Minister if you had said that the Union with Scotland was anything other than permanent and nonnegotiable. But it would always have been impossible to have become or remained Prime Minister if you had said that the Union with Northern Ireland was permanent or nonnegotiable. If you doubt this, then cite the occasion on which any Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition ever has said that.

There was no referendum on abortion in Northern Ireland, so it is more of a colony than Gibraltar is. There was a referendum on same-sex marriage in Saint Helena, but not in Northern Ireland. As newly independent Britain sets sail into the world, it has irredentist territorial disputes with at least three other G20 countries. In descending order of emotional importance to Tory England, those are with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, with Spain over Gibraltar, and with the United States (and the European Union) over a United Ireland.

People who would either not regret, or would positively welcome, Scottish independence, would send other people to war to keep the Falklands, although not any other British Overseas Territory. Yes, there was a war over them once. The decidedly longer war in Northern Ireland ended far more recently, but everyone was told to forget about it, so they did. An Army Council comprised of IRA veterans from that period now exercises de facto sovereignty over the Six Counties, which are made to have abortion so that they can be incorporated into a 32 County Republic, just as Gibraltar is strongly encouraged to have abortion so that it can be reincorporated into Spain.

Perhaps Northern Ireland should have a referendum on the Protocol, which is of course a breach of the Act of Union, since that is the point of it? The Yes vote, possibly in every constituency, would indicate quite how middle-class the place was becoming. Like the rise of the Alliance Party, like the resurgence of the Lib Dems in the monied shires of Southern England, and like the vote of those areas to Remain, it would bespeak that the vote was a nice thing to have, but that people who got their way by other means every day did not really need it.

If 60 per cent of the laws to which they were subject were made without the formal participation of their elected representatives, well, those were still going to be the laws that they themselves wanted, because that was how the world worked. See also the imposition of abortion. They have no concept of having no voice but the vote, short of striking, or rioting, or setting off a bomb.

The emerging Alliance electorate was always a very ill fit for the DUP, and vice versa. The DUP's roots are working-class, paramilitary from the start, and above all fundamentalist, a word that is proudly used in self-description by the tiny Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which barely exists in the places that have gone from the UUP, to the DUP, and increasingly now to Alliance. The late Ian Paisley was always surrounded by paramilitaries, they still routinely get the vote out for the DUP, and Ulster Resistance has never even declared a ceasefire.

Yet the presently Unionist electoral bloc in the Six Counties would always hold the balance of power in the Dáil of the 32 County Republic. After a generation of working with Sinn Féin, then working with Fianna Fáil, never mind with Fine Gael, would be a doddle. Indeed, such parliamentary votes, making real the orange stripe on the Tricolour, would more probably be used to support Sinn Féin, which would be a known quantity to the people who were casting those votes.

Sinn Féin now says that there cannot be a United Ireland without a National Health Service. That was long a sticking point for many of us. Independence had kept the 26 Counties out of the Attlee Settlement, and its completion would have deprived the Six Counties of what remained of that Settlement, most importantly the NHS. But no more.

Even the 26 County State has always been under very considerable Protestant influence. Two out of nine Presidents have been Protestants, double the figure that the composition of the population would suggest. One of them had the too perfect upper-class English accent that only Irish and Scottish aristocrats can manage.

Well into the 1960s, more than 40 years after Irish independence, Guinness refused to employ Catholics in any managerial capacity, and it was owned by the dynasty that provided four successive Conservative Members of Parliament for Southend, a town a mere 40 miles from the centre of London. The last one, who had been a Cabinet Minister under Margaret Thatcher, did not retire until 1997 and did not die until 10 years after that.

There is much emphasis on land reform as having allegedly broken the power of the Ascendancy. But in fact the Anglo-Irish Protestants continued to own everything from the breweries, to the banks, to interests such as Merville Dairy, all of which practised frank anti-Catholic discrimination in employment for many decades after independence. No one who was even nominally a Catholic was made Editor of The Irish Times until as recently as 1986, 64 years after independence. And so on.

The last United Ireland, the Kingdom of Ireland and then the whole of Ireland within the United Kingdom, was the only United Ireland that there has ever been, and it was run by Protestants. Those Protestants were considered Irish without complication by everyone, including themselves, until they took the Unionist side, for reasons of Irish self-interest as they saw it, in the early twentieth century. To his dying day, Lord Carson saw Partition as having been a defeat. A Dubliner, he never liked the North.

The only way that a state in Ireland could be run by or for even the ethnically Catholic atheists who now ran the 26 Counties would be to partition the predominantly Protestant counties out of that state altogether, or at least to create a very highly federal system. Something like that was at least as much the reason for Partition as anything else was. But that century is drawing to a close.

With varying degrees of straight-facedness, Ulster Protestants profess to believe that the English are godless, that the English do not know how to fight, and that the English have questionable standards when it comes to keeping clean and tidy. They never, ever cheer for England at anything. All of that sounds suspiciously like the Irish, even before mentioning the fact that they not only live on the island of Ireland, but speak with the heaviest Irish accents to be heard anywhere on that island. They are Irish. Of course they are Irish.

Irish Republicanism was founded by Protestants, and Ulster Presbyterians were once such stalwarts of it that they carried it across the Atlantic, to tumultuous effect. The founders, though, were what would now be called Anglicans, and it is they whom the orange stripe celebrates. They were no more interested in the enfranchisement of their Gaelic, Catholic-cum-pagan tenants and servants than their contemporaries and correspondents, the American Founding Fathers, were interested in the enfranchisement of the "Indians not taxed" or of their own Negro slaves.

The ritual of the Orange Order is also of obviously Anglican rather than Presbyterian origin, and the Orange Lodges opposed the Union of 1801. They said that the uncomprehending English would take one look at Ireland and let Catholics sit in Parliament to keep the peace. It took 28 years, but they were proved right. The Orange Order exists to maintain, not the Union, which is purely a means, but the Protestant supremacy. Look out for that in the rapidly approaching new order.

A Modern Revolutionary Interpretation?

I do not know who is going to come out on top in Iran, but I know that it is not going to be a teenager. There are people behind all of this, and there are people waiting in the wings, as they have been doing since before many of these courageous schoolgirls' parents were born.

The longstanding neoconservative and liberal-interventionist aim has been to install the utterly insane PMOI/MEK as Iran's new regime. That is the weirdest political cult in the world, and it has been in exile since 1981, meaning that it has no constituency in a country of which half the population is under 30 years of age.

Consider how the world turns, since that outfit was headquartered for many years in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where it participated in atrocities committed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard. During the Iraq War, Biden's, Bush's and Blair's Boys bombed the PMOI/MEK into surrender, as part of a deal with Iran to hand over certain al-Qaeda suspects who were of course in any case opponents of the Iranian regime. Oh, how the world does turn.

Opponents of the Iraq War were screamed down as Islamists and revolutionary Marxists due to the presence of a few of each in our enormous ranks. But now the plan is to hand over Iran to the people who really do manage the remarkable feat of being both, yet who were nevertheless closely allied to Saddam Hussein.

The Americans have relocated the PMOI/MEK to Albania, which is now a member of NATO. It also maintains a considerable presence in the France of Emmanuel Macron. And it is allied both to Israel and to Saudi Arabia, with that latter alliance, at least, showing us that its Shia principles are truly worth as much as its Leftist ones.

Breach of Security

Have I Got News for You? has never been the same since it changed to a having a different guest presenter each week, and Prime Minister's Questions is not the same since it changed to having a different guest Prime Minister each week.

Did Suella Braverman take her £17,000 severance pay along with her week off while it all blew over, before returning to work as if nothing had happened? Compare how long points for speeding by a couple of miles per hour hang around, or consider the severity of Universal Credit sanctions, and contrast that with a major and intentional breach of security by the Cabinet Minister with responsibility for it.

Expressing contempt for the whole process by not turning up is a trick that I myself have played. It clearly never bothered the man who had been put upon to chair the proceedings; he had already got me my tutoring gig at Durham, and many years later he signed my nomination papers for Parliament. Still, it does not really do in a Secretary of State, when we are talking about the House of Commons.

Yet what is the alternative? Yvette Cooper is the monster who inflicted the Work Capability Assessment, causing the bodies to pile up and the blood to run in the streets. Labour opportunistically pretended to oppose the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, but it supported every other mini-Budget measure that even Jeremy Hunt, of all people, has felt the need to reverse. True to form, Keir Starmer has professed himself in favour of Braverman's horrific Public Order Bill.

Starmer versus Liz Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Rishi Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Together We Can Achieve Incredible Things

When I was in my twenties, the same man was Prime Minister for 10 years. No one would vote for him now, of course. But even so, he was. On Rishi Sunak's first day, Labour's lead here on the Red Wall has fallen from 40 per cent to 28 per cent. In one day. That would still translate into a very good result for Labour, but it is only the start.

Hit Keir Starmer hard. Operation Elveden. The Horizon Post Office prosecutions. Ian Tomlinson. Jean Charles de Menezes. Spycops. Trying to give 10-year stretches to "benefit frauds" who had merely filled in forms incorrectly. John Worboys. Jimmy Savile. And much else besides. Even Julian Assange, if Sunak really wanted to win.

A brown Prime Minister who stood at the Despatch Box and took on Starmer and his cabal over the Forde Report and The Labour Files would change the game completely. After the Red Wall, let the Black Wall fall, even if only to mass abstention in the first instance.

Starmer versus Liz Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

No General Interest

A General Election about what? Yesterday, Keir Starmer expressed his support for the obscene Public Order Bill; ignore the Greenery in that article, and cut to chase. Today, Rishi Sunak reappointed Suella Braverman to the office of Home Secretary; so much for "libertarian jihadis". Therefore, I ask again, a General Election about what?

Richard Holden was who they put up on Nigel Farage's GB News programme this evening, and now he is on Newsnight. He was one of the first MPs to nominate Sunak this time, as he had been last time. Watch that space. Meanwhile, Labour in North West Durham has not even begun the process of selecting a candidate.

Older Than The Prime Minister

This time tomorrow, anyway. My thoughts are with an even older man, who was supposed to have been Prime Minister by now, and apparently would have been, had it not been for little old me. In his honour, I may smoke a small cigar. Of course, he never stood a chance. No male product of a mixed secondary school has ever become Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister who had been a first term voter in 2001 will owe exactly as much to the Blair Government's messing about with the state education system as does his almost exact contemporary, Angela Rayner. In its own terms, New Labour has failed hilariously.

Speaking of education, which of the correct meanings of "coronated" may be applicable to Rishi Sunak? Has he a crest or a crownlike appendage? Is he girt about the spire with a row of tubercles or spines, as are certain spiral shells? Are his coronal feathers lengthened or otherwise distinguished? Of course, these possibilities are not mutually exclusive. In the course of this afternoon and evening, the news channels have stopped saying "coronated". Mass correction has spared them the consequences of any talk next year of "coronating the King".

Is this Britain's Obama moment? I fear so. Sunak's coronation has been planned for decades. Over the summer, the disappearance of Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl from BBC iPlayer was a track-covering confirmation that, since it was broadcast when he was not quite 21, Sunak must have been handpicked as the generational voice of the haute bourgeoisie when he was still in his teens. The tribal elders of the Tory Deep State had been out in force at his campaign launch. A few hours later, needing 20 votes to stay in the race, he had turned out to be 20 votes ahead of his nearest rival.

It has ever been thus. No one becomes Prime Minister in his early forties by any means than this. There are still those who keep up the pretence that Tony Blair was politically "a late developer", but it is quite some late developer who becomes an MP at 30 and Prime Minister at 43, the age at which David Cameron also attained the Premiership, in his case after a mere nine years in the House of Commons. Sunak has beaten all of that, though. An MP of only seven years' standing, he is all of 42 years old. So yes. Planned for decades. 

Sunak could pay for an entire General Election campaign out of his own pocket and not even notice. Regardless of the result, once he had done that, then he could be Leader for life. A daughter of provincial academia had to go all the way from London to Balmoral, but a Brahmin who is richer than the King cannot be expected to go from London to Sandringham. When you can become Prime Minister without saying anything at all, then the King must come to you.

Get used to this sort of thing. The multinational home and family life is also very Royal. Sunak is richer than anyone else in any room that does not contain his father-in-law. Head Boy of a major public school. Goldman Sachs. Born into the very top of the caste system. Picked out as a generational spokesman on television while he was still a teenager. Oh, yes. Get used to this sort of thing.

Keir Starmer versus Liz Truss could have resulted in a Labour overall majority, but Starmer versus Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Here at North West Durham, where Richard Holden seems destined for great things, the process of selecting a Labour parliamentary candidate has still not begun. The Constituency Labour Party posts Facebook photographs of its "campaigning", but that campaigning is on behalf of no one. It is purely performative, and for the sake of the pub afterwards, like an historical reenactment society.

I am quoting from memory, but his sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, said something to the effect that JRR Tolkien's writing did not belong to the world of literature and the arts, but to the world of people who did things with model railways in their sheds. Make of that what you will, but dear though some of the stalwarts have been to me for 30 years, North West Durham Constituency Labour Party no longer belongs to the world of politics, but to the world of people who do things with model railways in their sheds.

The Left Should Not Be Celebrating

Thomas Fazi writes:

In the days following her resignation, the British media appeared to be united in its verdict on Liz Truss: the 44-day premiership was the shortest and most catastrophic in British history. Support for the Conservative Party has plummeted to its lowest level in polling history; many wonder if the party will ever recover.

Yet we should be wary of resorting to the simplistic narrative of events which would have us believe that Truss and Kwarteng’s attempts to push through a “fiscally irresponsible” tax-cutting free-market agenda spooked financial markets, “crashed the economy”, and ultimately forced them to admit defeat and back down. Things are a little more complicated.

On one level, this is a story about the influence of neo-Thatcherite think tanks. The Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) have both found fertile ground for their ideas among certain Tories in recent years, after being relegated for so long to the fringes of political discourse.

A number of these organisations provided much of the inspiration for Truss and Kwarteng’s agenda — especially with regard to their proposed cuts to high-income and corporation taxes. Mark Littlewood, director general of the IEA, has described how he worked “hand in glove” with Truss to help her set up in 2011 the Free Enterprise Group, a faction of Tory MPs committed to radical free-market economics. Kwarteng was an early member. According to Littlewood, Truss has spoken at more IEA events than “any other politician over the past 12 years”, while her economic advisor and senior special advisor both have ties to the organisation.

But their influence isn’t the whole story. The truth is that Conservative MPs and party members, who are disproportionately middle or upper-class men from the wealthier postcodes in the south of England, tend to hold rather liberal views when it comes to the economy. They’re the ones who voted for Truss over the more interventionist Rishi Sunak.

The problem for the party is that this refurbished brand of free-market economics — or “Trussonomics” — was unpopular among all voters, and especially among the working-class, low-income and northern constituencies that three years ago voted Conservative. These are the ones who voted Tory for the first time in 2019: to get Brexit done, take back control of Britain’s borders, and level-up the country — not to roll back the state, slash taxes on the rich, and cut back public services.

The more controversial measures in Truss’s mini-budget were deeply unpopular: only 12% of voters supported scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses; only 11% supported abolishing the top rate of income tax for high-earners; and only 19% thought it was a good idea to cancel the planned increase in the corporation tax.

It suggests the Tory leadership completely underestimated the extent to which their voter base has shifted to the “Left” on economics. One recent poll, for example, shows that a majority of Conservative voters support public ownership of key services and utilities — including water, energy, rail, Royal Mail, and the NHS. Hoping to compensate for unpopular economic policies with a bit of faux nationalism and cultural conservatism isn’t going to cut it.

So aside from all the conjectures about who really influenced Truss, her downfall highlights a much more fundamental problem: the disconnect between the party’s membership and the sensibilities of the majority of their voters, especially in light of the Brexit realignment. In many ways, the party has become the victim of its own internal logic, much as Labour’s own contradictions — the overwhelmingly cosmopolitan outlook of its members — ultimately prevented Corbyn from adopting a coherent Brexit strategy.

But the sighs of relief and the smug commentaries, especially on the Left, about Truss’s attempted and failed “free-market coup” ignore an equally important development: that Truss’s political project, as unpopular as it may have been, wasn’t defeated by the people — but by the establishment.

The truth is that Truss and Kwarteng, and their free-market ideologues, were also waging their personal battle against economic orthodoxy and its technocratic gatekeepers — the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Office of Budget Responsibility. These hugely powerful and largely unaccountable institutions have always been the guardians of fiscal orthodoxy. First, they helped successive Conservative governments enforce a decade of devastating austerity. And then, ever since the end of the pandemic, they have been calling for a return to austerity in order for the UK to “balance the books”.

Truss and Kwarteng, for all their faults, dared to challenge the orthodox austerity narrative. Echoing Keynes of all people, they hit out at “Treasury thinking” — that is, the obsessions for balanced budgets and fiscal discipline — and spoke of the need to review the Bank of England’s remit.

When asked about how the government was going to tackle the growing debt, shortly after Truss’s election, Julian Jessop, an IEA fellow and one of Truss’s economic advisors, explained: “The Treasury has been too quick to believe you need to start paying the debt down by raising taxes, both personal and corporate taxes,” he said. “Far better to let the deficit take the strain. If tax cuts do mean more borrowing in the short term, I’m completely relaxed about that.”

This approach was made clear as soon as Kwarteng arrived at the Treasury: his first decision was to sack its top official, Tom Scholar, who was considered to be too fiscally conservative and deferential towards the Bank of England. The message was clear: the new government expected civil servants — and indeed the Bank of England itself — to work for the executive, not against it.

Presumably, our free-marketeers Truss and Kwarteng railed against the orthodoxy so that they could cut taxes for the wealthy without having to worry about a rising deficit. And, in principle — and even though morally it’s contemptible — they were absolutely right: an advanced country such as the UK that issues its own currency should have no reason to worry about a rising deficit or debt.

They were also absolutely right, in principle, in reaffirming the primacy of politics over technocracy. Indeed, these are preconditions for the pursuit of truly democratic and economically progressive policies, especially when they threaten powerful vested interests in society. After all, it’s Truss and Kwarteng’s relaxed approach to deficit-spending that allowed them to approve a two-year energy price guarantee worth £60 billion, by far the biggest commitment in the mini-budget.

Challenging the economic orthodoxy, and the technocratic apparatuses that wield the true power in our societies, was the real Truss/Kwarteng sin. This — not the tax cuts, which were trivial from a macroeconomic perspective — is ultimately what brought down the wrath of the entire Transatlantic establishment: not only the Bank of England, the media and legions of orthodox economists, but also, and highly unusually, the IMF and even the US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen.

There’s nothing more anathema to the establishment than the idea that democratically elected governments should have the final say over economic policy, not unaccountable institutions where decisions are taken behind closed doors.

But despite all the hysteria, the reality is that the British economy never “crashed”; there was a small drop in the value of the pound and rise in bond yields — the result of financial markets attempting to profit from the chaos — that was rapidly reversed to pre-panic levels by the Bank of England’s intervention. If anything, the problem was the Bank of England’s announcement that the intervention would be short-lived — possibly to put pressure on the Government.

Ultimately, the government wasn’t taken down by “the markets”, but by its own weakness, since neither Truss nor Kwarteng possessed the intellectual and political tools, nor the popular support, to ignore the hysteria and stick to their guns.

While their political project might have seemed cruel, especially from an economically progressive perspective, there’s no reason to rejoice in its defeat, insofar as it has led to a complete restoration of the economic orthodoxy and technocratic rule, symbolised by Kwarteng’s replacement by Jeremy Hunt — or “Jeremy Draghi”, as his admirers have already dubbed him in honour of Mario Draghi — and then by the Second Coming of Sunak.

The fact that Hunt’s first decision was to completely overhaul the mini-budget’s main proposal — the energy price freeze — by reducing the measure’s duration from two years to six months, while announcing more budget cuts in the near future, which will cause millions to suffer even more than they would have under the previous plan, should cause everyone on the Left to reflect on the wisdom of joining in on the Kwarteng-bashing.

The consequences will be felt for a long time to come, in the form of an established wisdom that democracy ultimately has to conform to what the markets say — or else. We are already seeing this narrative crystallising in claims that the Tories should vote for Sunak because he’s “the man the markets trust”.

This line of thinking is the death of democracy. Which is why the decision to support this bloodless coup will come back to haunt Labour: even if they win the next election (which seems likely), it’ll be the markets and technocratic establishment calling the shots. Not because they’re omnipotent, but because Labour has helped convince everyone that they are.

The Grownups Are Back?

Nesrine Malik writes:

It won’t be Boris Johnson, but whoever the new prime minister turns out to be, they will have been dragged into office by “economic orthodoxy” and its henchmen.

Their mandate is pre-written in the data you have been deluged with about the impact of unfunded tax cuts, from the depreciation of the pound to rises in interest rates, and the untenable upward effect this has had on mortgages and rents. The charts have spoken – an ideological experiment has gone terribly wrong and must be reversed.

But it is a tale of two crises, and only one is being told. Attracting far less fanfare is another set of statistics about cold and hunger. More than a million people are expected to be pushed into poverty this winter. Their slide into deprivation will test an informal support network already stretched to its limit. 

Last week, the food bank charity the Trussell Trust launched an emergency appeal for donations because need for food banks has now outstripped donations. Charities like this, private citizens and schools are mobilising to bridge the gap.

The hole is too large to plug. Half of all primary schools in England are trying to feed children in poverty who are ineligible for free school meals because their parents’ income does not meet the threshold. But there are 800,000 of them. It can be hard sometimes to grasp the scale of the problem through bare statistics, but vivid and haunting details can flesh them out.

Children are eating school rubbers to line their stomachs and dull the ache and nausea of hunger. Others are bringing in empty lunchboxes then pretending to dine on their phantom food away from classmates, too ashamed to reveal that they have nothing to eat.

If these children’s families can’t afford to eat, they definitely can’t afford to keep warm as winter approaches and energy prices rocket. How can children expect to learn with their minds impaired by hunger and cold? Over the past year, reading ability among seven-year-olds from poor families fell at double the rate of those from affluent families, their future prospects receding before they have even begun.

But my goodness, the scenes in Westminster! Kwasi Kwarteng sacked on a plane, Suella Braverman gone for a data breach, reported manhandling, jostling and shouting outside the voting lobby.

And if that wasn’t already enough to drown out the rumble of tummies and chattering of teeth, Liz Truss threw in the towel, kicking off another attention-sucking vortex of new leadership speculation and horse-trading.

“I worry,” Naomi Duncan, chief executive of Chefs in Schools, told me, two hours after Truss resigned, “that the ongoing political turmoil will divert attention.” The solution for her is simple: to give one meal a day to all children based on need, not an income calculation that has long since ceased to be relevant.

It does sound simple, doesn’t it? But the sort of government that tackles poverty, hunger and cold is not the government anyone who matters is clamouring for.

As the emergency intensifies, politicians and opinion makers are calling not for a firefighter to treat this as the crisis it truly is, but for a “grownup” to make those economic charts read better.

“The grownups are back,” declared Liam Fox, after Jeremy Hunt and Penny Mordaunt’s performance at the dispatch box last week. “If Truss cannot quickly sort herself out,” the Sun (of all papers) told us, ‘“the grownups need to get in a room” and “agree a peaceful transition to a sensible figure”.

This trope exemplifies the detachment of both Westminster and Westminster watchers. As the country enters into the winter crisis proper, those at the top are looking for a leader with unspecified technocratic skills who, like a contracted management consultant, will be able to “stabilise” UK plc. It’s not the mouths of children that need feeding, but the markets.

If this new leader must have an ideology, it should be one that aligns with the aim of “fiscal responsibility”, itself a byword for reduced state spending. They must “look like a leader”, and enact whatever callous cuts they have to, preferably while exhibiting suitable regret at having to make “difficult decisions”.

The result of this settlement is a chilling absence of politicians able to articulate the exceptional pain the public is going through. Also absent are any policies that would tackle the cost of living and energy emergency through higher taxes on the wealthy, or an economic stabilisation agenda that addresses the goals not only of those who want to prosper, but those who need to survive.

Even among a fuming opposition there is a sort of bloodless anger. “The damage to mortgages and bills has been done,” tweeted Keir Starmer as if the economic impact is being felt by pieces of paper rather than people. It seems everyone has understood that injecting feeling and channelling the fear and deprivation that stalks people every day disqualifies you from being taken seriously as a politician.

The “adult” approach seems to be keeping the markets happy and achieving abstract “growth”, rather than also prioritising the security of those so on the margins they cannot benefit from that growth; those who will suffer most when the next round of soberly dictated cuts arrive. To include in your economic vision the importance of benefits, subsidies or improvements to public services to the wellbeing of those not able to fully participate in the housing or job market is somehow outside the parameters of acceptable politics.

But it is staying in that lane of acceptable politics that has resulted in our political and social crises. The delusion is that if we try just one more time with someone like Rishi Sunak, a man who flat out complained of funding being “shoved into deprived areas”, the right or right of centre will crack it. 

Despite the fact that this is the tribe which over the past two decades pursued the deregulation agenda of big businesses, allowed working conditions and wages to be run into the ground, slashed benefits, and failed to invest any money saved from painful cuts into, to take just one example, any future-proofing green energy that would have mitigated this winter crisis.

I wonder, even with attention constantly yanked back to the Westminster spectacle, just how many more chances the grownups can get away with when every day another adult or child starts to go without food, or another family bundle themselves up at night instead of putting the heating on. Just how much longer can people put up with a consensus that placates the financial system with an “acceptable” number of losers?

Grownup politics is literally that: disregarding those who do not “matter”, considering the economically marginalised simply as collateral damage, excluding their passions from the cool halls of power and cultivating resignation to ever more suffering. But with their numbers rising and their pain intensifying, that may be about to become an impossible task.

A Crime Against Democracy

Brendan O'Neill writes:

Yesterday was an extraordinary day in British politics. ‘Stop Boris Day’, we might call it. From the political class to the influencer set to the BBC, the cry went up: it cannot be Boris. He’s too disruptive. Too oafish. Too much of a liability. We need a grown-up in charge now. Someone who is sensible and slick and capable of placating the markets. The uniformity of the message was remarkable, and more than a little chilling. I’m struggling to recall the last time that elite opinion, the determination of the professional managerial classes to get what they want, was expressed as nakedly as it was this weekend.

From the right-wing press to the left-wing press, it was all ‘Not Boris’. The Mail, the Telegraph and The Times might all have backed Boris once, but not now. ‘Tory newspapers warn against the return of Boris Johnson’, as the Guardian giddily summed it up. On Saturday, even the Telegraph, Boris’s former employer, went with a frontpage splash that said ‘Sunak races to secure majority of Tory MPs’ next to a pic of Rishi looking dapper and determined. The more leftish view was summed up in the Guardian’s insistence that we must never allow the ‘return of the clown to the political circus’. We need ‘stable, functioning’ politics now, not the ‘prank on the public’ that a second BoJo stint would represent, the Guardian said.

As for the BBC, I felt like I was watching a party political broadcast for Ready for Rishi on News at Ten last night. The political editor Chris Mason might have tried to conceal his ideological bent, but he failed pretty miserably. He talked about Boris’s psychology and how he loves to be at the centre of attention. I’m sorry, is this news reporting or psychoanalysis? But this time round Boris fell flat, we were told. Yay! So it’s a ‘coronation’ for Rishi Sunak, asked Reeta Chakrabarti with a glowing smile? It certainly looks like it. Settle down, establishment – your boy’s going to win.

None of this should distract from the fact that Boris is a bit of a screw-up. His camp seems to have overstated his ability to get the backing of 100 Tory MPs, the threshold for standing to be the leader to replace Liz Truss. And the people pointing out that Boris has a lot hanging over him from the last time he was in charge of the country – including an investigation into whether he lied to parliament about all those lockdown parties in No10 – are right. Boris appears to have fluffed it himself. We didn’t actually need the political, media and cultural elites to go hell for leather to Stop Boris – Boris stopped Boris by not being much cop.

But the fact that a vast swathe of the establishment did want to stop Boris remains striking. And the reason they wanted to stop him is just depressing. Fundamentally, it’s because they think we’ve had our fun with populism and it’s now time to return to normalcy. It’s the ‘grown-ups’ we need back in power. The adults. ‘The grown-ups are back’, as Tory big-hitter Liam Fox said about Jeremy Hunt and Penny Mordaunt when they took the reins from Truss in the final troubled days of her premiership. Now they’re hoping for more such adulting from Rishi: he’ll be ‘sensible’, ‘calm’, ‘competent’, all the headlines say. Be still, my beating heart.

Boris had to be stopped because the managerial elites want to restore the politics of managerialism. That’s the long and short of it. In their eyes, Boris embodies the vulgarities of populism. He gives voice to the ill-educated throng’s desire to ‘disrupt’ establishment politics. (For some of us, the problem with Boris is that he didn’t represent our desire for democratic disruption nearly well enough.) Sunak, in contrast, is ‘the sensible choice’, the grown-up choice. Even the Sun thinks it might now be time for the ‘grown-ups’ to agree a ‘peaceful transition to a sensible figure’.

That term ‘grown-up’ gives me the creeps. You see it in political discussion all the time these days. ‘The adults are back in the room’, they said when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took power from Donald Trump. Now media outlets are saying ‘the grown-ups do need to be seen to be in charge’ about the potential Sunak era. The implication is that populism, whether of the Trump or Boris or Brexit variety, is childish, infantile, the wish of publics who do not understand the real world. And what we need in its place is realism, delivered by sensible managers. ‘At least under managerialism you have a manager’, as one article on Sunak says. Never mind that ‘the adults’ in the US have overseen such calamities as the withdrawal from Afghanistan and surging inflation. Or that grown-up Rishi hardly made a great fist of managing the economy when he was chancellor. Doesn’t matter. They’re not populist and therefore they’re good, they’re grown up.

What the elites want is for politics to be boring again. They’re openly saying it. Sunak is the man we can ‘trust to make politics boring again’, says an editorial in City AM. ‘Britain may find that the best option is the most boring and sensible one’, says one observer. There really are people out there who would rather politics was dull than overly democratic. Pallid rather than populist. ‘Boring’ is really a euphemism for re-insulating political life from the excitable desires of the public. The problem with Boris is that he’s not boring enough, and that makes him a liability.

A more serious issue underlies all of this – the question of who’s really in charge of the country. Right now, it seems to be ‘the markets’. Virtually everything you’ll read on Sunak will say that he’s the man who can calm the markets. He will ‘regain market confidence’, says the New Statesman. He will be a more ‘reassuring figure’ for the markets than Boris. ‘Markets are calling the shots’, declares a headline in Bloomberg, and it really seems they are. Former chancellor George Osborne said on TV this weekend that ‘There is someone else with a vote in all of this, and that is the markets’. ‘We don’t have to wait for a General Election for them to have a vote’, he said. They’ve voted, and they’ve picked Rishi.

And there you have it. We don’t need a General Election because the markets have chosen our PM for us. They’ve cast their ‘vote’ and apparently it carries more weight than the votes cast by millions of Britons for Boris in December 2019. The markets trump the masses, the barons of capitalism trump the workers of the Red Wall. You can call that ‘boring’ if you like – I call it a crime against democracy.

This Nasty Measure

Peter Hitchens writes:

One of the lasting legacies of Liz Truss’s miserable political career is the punishment without trial of Graham Phillips, the unloveable video-blogger who operates mainly in Ukraine and Russia. She was in charge of the Foreign Office when it imposed sanctions on him.

If anyone has criminal charges against Mr Phillips, then they should pursue them. If he is then found guilty by a proper court, with a jury and the presumption of innocence, then that will be just and I will not object. But Mr Phillips has been punished without any semblance of a trial. His offence appears to be that he has expressed the wrong opinions about the Holy Sainted Republic of Ukraine.

He struggles to get any response out of the Foreign Office to his appeals against his treatment. The sanctions prevent him from receiving payment for work or from paying bills. So the law forces him to break the law and become an outlaw debtor.

And here my praise goes to Islington Borough Council, who had summonsed him for not paying his Council Tax. But when I told them that Mr Phillips was banned by law from paying that tax, they wisely and mercifully withdrew the summons. Not everybody, I suspect, will be so understanding.

Now that the minister responsible for this nasty measure is about to spend much more time with her family, perhaps the FO, which still has some decent people in it, might think of withdrawing this nasty, arbitrary and un-British decree.

The Right Time

What an old trouper David Tennant is. The whole series had been planned around Rishi Sunak, but tomorrow's Coronation Street will be up against his actual coronation. So here we are.

It has never been more important to make the case for the levelling up that is made possible by permanent withdrawal from the Single Market and the Customs Union. That has never been more important, both in this Parliament, and with a view to the coming hung Parliament. If Keir Starmer looked good, and he never has to a lot of us, then that was only by comparison with Liz Truss.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Here at North West Durham, the process of selecting a Labour parliamentary candidate has still not begun. The Constituency Labour Party posts Facebook photographs of its "campaigning", but that campaigning is on behalf of no one. It is purely performative, and for the sake of the pub afterwards, like an historical reenactment society.

I am quoting from memory, but his sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, said something to the effect that JRR Tolkien's writing did not belong to the world of literature and the arts, but to the world of people who did things with model railways in their sheds.

Make of that what you will, but dear though some of the stalwarts have been to me for 30 years, North West Durham Constituency Labour Party no longer belongs to the world of politics, but to the world of people who do things with model railways in their sheds.

Just Keep Going

Strike fear into your heart by merely reading the words, "Liz Truss's Resignation Honours List." And put in Boris Johnson or whoever you pleased, but the forces that brought down Truss, and which brought down Johnson the last time, are determined to have Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt as Prime Minister and as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in either order. They would just keep going until they had got it.

You thought that, if the spooks and the securocrats had not got there first, then a Corbyn Government would have been brought down by the City, the money markets, the Bank of England, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, the International Monetary Fund, and the President of the United States. Perhaps it would have been. But it would have planned for the attack. To your mind, what has just happened has been as if a Corbyn Government had been brought down by the unions in a General Strike.

This week's TUC has made it clear how much trouble a left-wing Government might expect from important sections of the union bureaucracy. But everyone on the Left has always known that. We have all been trade unionists forever. The Hard Right think tank circuit, on the other hand, is full of people who either failed in the City, or have never been anywhere near it.

And here we are. The existing rates of income tax can never come down, nor will the rate of corporation tax ever be able to do so once its impending increase had come into effect. Now we need to reframe the debate away from tax for austerity and towards tax for investment, since the tax is going to be levied no matter who was in office. For that, we are going to have to get rid of Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, and all that trash.

Starmer versus Truss could have ended in a Labour landslide, but Starmer versus any other Conservative Leader will end in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Here at North West Durham, the process of selecting a Labour parliamentary candidate has still not begun. The Constituency Labour Party posts Facebook photographs of its "campaigning", but that campaigning is on behalf of no one. It is purely performative, and for the sake of the pub afterwards, like an historical reenactment society. I am quoting from memory, but his sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, said something to the effect that JRR Tolkien's writing did not belong to the world of literature and the arts, but to the world of people who did things with model railways in their sheds. Make of that what you will, but dear though some of the stalwarts have been to me for 30 years, North West Durham Constituency Labour Party no longer belongs to the world of politics, but to the world of people who do things with model railways in their sheds.

La Vista, Baby?

I always said that Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg had endorsed Liz Truss because she would be so easy to remove at and as the Restoration. Boris Johnson won the last General Election, so no one could possibly suggest that he lacked a mandate to be Prime Minister, and he is already streets ahead in terms of nominations by Conservative MPs. The likelihood that more than one candidate might garner 100 of those is deliberately remote in the extreme. What would happen if no one managed it?

Keir Starmer versus Truss could have ended in a Labour landslide, but Starmer versus any other Conservative Leader will end in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Here at North West Durham, the process of selecting a Labour parliamentary candidate has still not begun. The Constituency Labour Party posts Facebook photographs of its "campaigning", but that campaigning is on behalf of no one. It is purely performative, and for the sake of the pub afterwards, like an historical reenactment society. I am quoting from memory, but his sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, said something to the effect that JRR Tolkien's writing did not belong to the world of literature and the arts, but to the world of people who did things with model railways in their sheds. Make of that what you will, but dear though some of the stalwarts have been to me for 30 years, North West Durham Constituency Labour Party no longer belongs to the world of politics, but to the world of people who do things with model railways in their sheds.

At The Behest

Suella Braverman has been sacked on the orders of Jeremy Hunt. I have never had tofu, but I may try it tonight in celebration.

The Phoney War needs to end. Labour is rubbish, but Liz Truss is so awful that it would still beat her by a mile. Except that it is obviously not going to be Truss at the next General Election.

The Conservatives need to move on to whoever it is going to be, so that we can all get on with the process of two merely rubbish parties fighting each other to a hung Parliament, with all the opportunities that that would present.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

Fracking Useless

We all know that the Government is rubbish, but if you want to see how rubbish the Official Opposition is, then consider that a straight Opposition Day Motion against fracking would have provoked a significant Conservative rebellion under any circumstances, never mind the present ones.

Instead, though, Labour has put down something that could be twisted into a Motion of Confidence, and no Conservative MP wants to lose the whip right when those MPs, alone, were engaged in the hour-by-hour contrivance of a new Prime Minister.

A Good Try?

Liz Truss was asked an easy, planted question about Rugby League, but she read out an answer about football. She is beyond embarrassing.

Yet Truss was more committed to the triple lock than Kim Leadbeater had been on Politics Live. Keir Starmer had not asked about it, having devolved that responsibility to the SNP. 

Even Truss can outflank Labour from the left. For that matter, so can even Ian Blackford.

Not Hiding Under A Desk

Enjoy it, but not too much. We never voted for the City, the money markets, the Bank of England, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, the International Monetary Fund, or the President of the United States.

We are now governed by something called the Economic Advisory Council, created yesterday out of thin air. If there is an Economic Advisory Council, then what is the Treasury for? And look who is on it. Imperial protectorates and Indian princely states had British advisers whose advice had to be taken, and our nominally sovereign little colony of BlackRock and JP Morgan is in much the same position.

Without a manifesto commitment, Labour farmed out monetary policy. The Liberal Democrats forced the creation of the OBR. And now, from the Conservatives on their own initiative, has come this. Yet on none of those occasions have the salaries of the First Lord of the Treasury, of all other Treasury Ministers, and of all senior Treasury civil servants been halved, as in each of those cases they should have been.

Jeremy Hunt was a mainstay of the Austerity Coalition, and never forget that it was the Coalition. He devastated the National Health Service. While the lifting of the cap on bankers' bonuses remains, there is now a stated threat to the triple lock on such state retirement pension as there is in this country. So much for stimulating growth.

But what is the alternative? Wes Streeting is in politics at all in order to privatise the NHS in England, and the Labour Party is ruthlessly rigging parliamentary selections in favour of candidates who would nominate him for Leader on the strength of his having done so. Still, imagine that it opened its selection process at Liverpool West Derby and no one except Ian Byrne applied. Would you apply against him, against the Hillsborough Law, against the Right to Food? Similarly, who would apply to come no higher than fourth at Islington North against Jeremy Corbyn?

If Emma Dent Coad, champion of the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, is so objectionable, then how can she even be a member of the Labour Party, much less the Leader of the Labour Group that this year came within a very few votes of taking control of Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council? If, as is rumoured, some excuse were to be found to suspend Diane Abbott from the Labour whip just before the next General Election, then who would dare to seek the Labour nomination from which she had been excluded and then walk the streets of Hackney North and Stoke Newington? If Abbott were indeed to be so treated, then black London might plausibly and reasonably take to the streets in no uncertain terms.

After all, the Forde Report, The Labour Files, the treatment of Apsana Begum, the ennoblement of Ruth Smeeth, the refusal to longlist Maurice Mcleoad at Camberwell and Peckham (the blackest constituency in the country), the presence of only three black male Labour MPs to the Conservatives' four, the failure to select a black candidate for any of 36 held or winnable seats where there were vacancies, the ongoing stitch-up of Sedgefield for Alan Strickland of Haringey Development Vehicle infamy, and Keir Starmer's own record as Director of Public Prosecutions, are among the numerous reasons to recognise that a Government headed by Starmer or by any of his supporters would pose an existential threat to, among a host of others, black people in general, black men in particular, Muslims, Palestinians, and anything up to half of British Jews. Any Government would pose an existential threat to disabled people if it included either or both of our vicious old blood enemies, Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper.

Here at North West Durham, the process of selecting a Labour parliamentary candidate has still not begun. The Constituency Labour Party posts Facebook photographs of its "campaigning", but that campaigning is on behalf of no one. It is purely performative, and for the sake of the pub afterwards, like an historical reenactment society. I am quoting from memory, but his sympathetic biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, said something to the effect that JRR Tolkien's writing did not belong to the world of literature and the arts, but to the world of people who did things with model railways in their sheds. Make of that what you will, but dear though some of the stalwarts have been to me for 30 years, North West Durham Constituency Labour Party no longer belongs to the world of politics, but to the world of people who do things with model railways in their sheds.

While Starmer versus Liz Truss may or may not have resulted in a Labour landslide, Starmer versus Hunt or Rishi Sunak will result in a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.