Credo

The problem with The Left is that they don’t care.

Oh, they care all right about their fellow men - with a few designated exceptions who are beyond the pale - and often do a great deal to improve the lives of those whom they touch. But they are at a stage now in their ascendancy (read ‘hegemony’ if you agree with me that The Left includes the leadership of the Tory Party) where the way things are out in the phenomenal world, as well as the cognitive world, can not exist if they contradict their big picture.

Yes, that reality.

Thanks to David Duff of the awesome Duff and Nonsense, here are a few pieces about Britain, Europe, and the world’s economic prospects, and here’s one I dug up ages ago.

If you can’t be bothered to read them now – it’s a work day and many of you must be busy about your morning devotions or hoping that the antacids are going to be effective today or that The Pill was last night – here are some tasters; taken totally out of context and utterly unrelated to any connections that the writers might have to radical or militant groups:

We can only wonder at the Gramscian genius of those who have carried out this semantic inversion. To want to preserve your parliamentary democracy is extreme; to want to give more power to unelected functionaries is moderate. To consult the people is swivel-eyed; to connive at their disfranchisement is level-headed. To keep your promise of a referendum is obsessive; to break it is sensible. To have kept the pound was xenophobic whereas to have subjected Britain to the chaos now overtaking the euro-zone would have been… oh, you get my point…

This argument is too big, too important, to be reduced to an intra-party row.

And

One of Brown and Darling's favourite wheezes was to hide government liabilities 'off balance sheet' - the same kind of notorious business practice that led to the bankruptcy of the Enron energy trading concern almost ten years ago and Lehman investment bank in 2008.

They did this through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), whereby the government built hospitals, schools and other public enterprises using money borrowed from the private sector which will have to be paid back like mortgages over a long period…..

In all, I guess that the black hole at the heart of the Treasury accounts as a result of 13 years of New Labour fraud and neglect is not far short of £2 trillion, or about £40,000 for every family in Britain.

And

Once the long term casts its chill shadow on present expectations, investors are shocked - shocked - to encounter financial scams that they previously had ignored. Estimates are now circulating in the press that the United Kingdom actually has public debt equal to 150% of its GDP, rather than the 53% figure usually reported, if unfunded pension fund liabilities are taken into account.

That is the future cost of caring for at least part of the United Kingdom's aging population valued in present pounds. The same could be said for California, whose unfunded pension liability might be $450 billion rather than the $50 billion reported, depending on whether one expects the funds to earn 8% a year, as the pension funds claim, or only earn the government bond yield. That is just a complicated way of saying that if the bubble continues forever, everything will be fine, but if it doesn't, everything will go pear-shaped.

And

Contrary to Mr Purnell's assertion, Labour's debt pile-up preceded the credit crunch. As a state, we had become addicted to the never-never. In 2003, the Budget deficit was £28 billion, then £33 billion in 2004, £32 billion in 2005, £36 billion in 2006, £34 billion in 2007 and £43 billion in 2008.

From 2003-2008 inclusive, the Chancellor's overspend as a percentage of the Government's annual outlay ranged between 5.8 per cent and 7 per cent, with the average being 6.4 per cent. In his 2008 Budget, Alistair Darling predicted GDP growth of 1.75-2.25 per cent, yet still planned to borrow £43 billion.

This is a core structural deficit, which has nothing to do with the financial crisis "that began in America", as Mr Brown likes to incant. It was akin to a family with a weekly income of £500 spending £532 every week for six years. At first, the process is not ruinous, but trouble accumulates until something unexpectedly bad happens – then, the finances whizz out of control.

Now, the above doom-mongering is not based on top-secret information: most of it is published by the government and discussed in Parliament though some of it has indeed been sleight-of-hand shifted out of sight. But you don’t have to go to a Whitehall cocktail party disguised as the Ecuadorian ambassador’s wife, break into the Treasury’s state-of-the-art security programme with hacking software from a key card hidden in your powder compact, kick box a couple of beret-wearing security guards unconscious and download the data to a secure CIA server in a safe house in Marseilles to find out where much of these figures are from.

Curiously, great national institutions tasked with looking for, presenting and discussing such weighty matters; such as our national broadcaster seem to be uninterested in all this dry as bones economic stuff.

You might remember the many hagiographical farewell statements by Labour MPs and other Leftie politicians that were allowed to go on uninterrupted since Gordon Brown resigned as Prime Minister – at least uninterrupted by questions like But isn’t this the man whose housing bubble, financial regulation with a light touch and public sector spending spree have laid waste to the public finances and encouraged the once-thrifty British people to get into massive personal debt?

What’s going on here?

In the past few weeks I’ve encountered Left-wing people of various stripes dismissing national bankruptcy with a wave of the hand on one occasion and silence and a swift subject change on the other. A couple of them have expressed the certainty that with the Tories in all our jobs will go and one who said they’d never vote Tory and others still have stated the European Union could have been a loose free-trading Federation in line with Britain if only Mrs. Thatcher had negotiated better and another smiling at the possibility of UKIP and the BNP’s vote keeping the Tory candidate from Westminster enough times to prevent Mr. Cameron having an absolute majority: Right-wingers are just a few, powerless cranks on the fringes or (depending whether you’re Liberal or Reformed), secretly running the ConDem coalition to favour Big Business or The Military or Whoever it is that conservatives really work for.

These are good people: the folk who are making Britain work – to the extent that Britain is working at all - in the public and private sectors. These are the folk in charge and with the money time and motivation to effect politics as well as taking part in political discourse.

And yet the facts of the matter become moonshine as soon as political belief comes into play.

Let’s a few of take paraphrases:

‘Oh, bankrupt!’

I’m not sure here whether the fact are held to be irrelevant or untrue, but they could be easily checked, so whatever’s going on here either implies that national bankruptcy is no big deal (perhaps when there are children in Africa starving or whatever) or whether it isn’t going to happen because the wrong kind of messenger is giving the message, but all those noughts that the commentators above are discussing are, well, worth nowt for some reason.

‘I could never in my life vote Tory.’

Again, I can understand a person being soured for a long time by a party’s earlier actions, as in my youth I was by Labour’s previous thorough economic rape of Britain, and as I currently am with the hilariously-named Conservative Party. But the way we are governed really matters in that it has real-world effects and here’s an active, philanthropic, utterly decent pillar of the community (way up the social scale from petit bourgeois me I should point out) stating implicitly that if a formerly disliked and wrong-headed party changed much of its personnel and all of its policies to ones with which such a person could now agree, and even if that party alone subsequently proposed measures clearly tending to the public good and even to national salvation and all the others proposed to continue in folly, then they still would not do so due to that earlier prejudice.

‘…before Cameron’s axe falls on us all.’

Really? I mean, did he ever look at the Tories’ pre-election spending plans? Can’t he at least look for the string of noughts mentioned above and see that little Georgie Osborn’s ‘cuts’ were, with multiple symbolism, intended to be mere pin-pricks: and that’s before the LibDems decided to sign my daughter’s soul into a longer period of debt slavery by producing this grey buffet of economic finger-food and snot-filled pastry cases.

As for the others; read the Treaty of Rome, which, like The Koran, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf can be read in translation so you can see what their authors said, what they did from the start, and compare words and actions to discover how those words were interpreted and thus to understand where we’re all going with this; look closely at the ‘ever-closer union’ phrase as the motor of a movement that Mrs. Thatcher could never have turned around into a mere free-trading negotiating bloc and customs union.

Also look at the EU referendum post about UKIP and, ahem, another Eurosceptic party’s success in keeping Cameron out of Number Ten in his own right.

I don’t suppose for a minute that any amount of factual persuasion – in the sense of asking people of the leftist mind-set to research the facts and think about them, and to compare the names and labels of the parties and their slogans and boasts with what’s actually going on in the world – will change most of their minds much about any of this stuff. One or two maybe, but it’s a lot of prejudice to overcome.

The reason that the Left in all its glory doesn’t care, deep down, about facts you can describe with numbers or demonstrate with eye-witness accounts or by reading original texts, is that long ago the culture war was won by the Left: so much so that its members are unwilling to look contradictory facts in the face, as it were, because the facts tell a different story from their orthodoxy.
Facts such as those above are to be treated as blasphemous because they can show a reality that is heretical.

So: first offenders sent to prison after their first conviction for something minor will surely come out knowing how to burgle homes and offices better than when they went in as old lags show them how in exchange for drugs or sexual favours. Children who are encouraged to order their own learning and provided with enough books and other resources and the minimum of guidance will usually do so and thus not require whole class teaching in specific subjects or the structure of a teacher at the front of the class: they will certainly not major in sand pit and Wendy house if left alone. Immigrants will always import new arts and crafts and music styles and delicious new cuisines and never the home country attitudes that have made migration to racist Hell-hole Britain so attractive in comparison that they’ll risk the violence of armed police and traffickers, suffocation in ships’ inner hulls, containers and lorries, and being trafficked as meat and shark-infested seas.

Life’s like that: it’s not any other way. It just can’t be.

And that’s the rub: it’s why teaching unions will never accept parental choice and the BBC will never ask what right a government has to tax sugary drinks to restrict consumption or why it might be harmful to peoples’ lives for Britain to enter into international unions with other economically unstable states: we’re not dealing with a political movement her but rather a religion.

And all that means that we on the Right are in trouble.

You don’t have to allow unbelievers free speech uninterrupted by orthodox counter-comments and interruptions during ‘news’ programmes. You aren’t obliged to hire contrary views when you pick new History Fellows or social studies professors for your university. You don’t have to think about the source and the scarcity of public funds when subsidizing trade union renewal or deciding which non-governmental organisations will receive your generous support for the next fiscal year.

Our rulers are in church, and we must stay respectfully silent.

However it is that we on the Right might seek to build a governing party or coalition, it isn’t going to occur on anything like a level playing field: that possibility died years ago.

Quite how we’re going to get through to the people who alone might one day vote our faithful owners out now that heresy hunting is all but official policy in the media and educational classes, I’m not sure.

Picture from here.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

As if the monsoon of liberalism drowning our political life in it PC sewage wasn't bad enough, even the Catholic Church (the surviving member of Harold McMillan's triumvirate of formidable powers) has the same culture war as the political world: their 'leadership' is rotten to the core with false liberalism and the tone deafness and stupidity in the face of change that typifies the Boomer generation and their acolytes.

Even much of the argument and the invective is the same.

I dare say the good old C of E is just the same.

And there are millions of people out there who hate the destruction or corruption of the old and the good. They'd do something about it and offer help and cash to anyone who promised to use authority to perform the tasks to which it is suited and who would also swear to destroy the falsely gained and cruelly used power of the Political Class with which it seeks to uproot and plough over everything good and old in England.
What a power such people would be, if honestly and bravely led. What a mighty forest they would grow into if only integrity and foresight weren't banned from public discourse.

There really ought to be a name for that kind of thinking, but I just can't put my finger on it right now. I guess we'll have to look forward to the best available deal that can be done with the Liberal Democrats and the BBC.

Meantime, serendipitously, a lovely blog called English Buildings.

Something else to fight Them for.



Picture, hilariously, from here.

Satanic Sunday #2

‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.’

Conservatism 101.

Satan’s words are from Paradise Lost; my character-building slow-reading assignment for October (!), represent as neat a summation of what evil is and why is must be constantly and vigorously fought and, I think, helps to demonstrate why conservatism is the best response to such a mind-set.

The scenario is that Satan’s rebellious angels have just been thrown down into Hell by God’s victorious loyal angels. Even before we get to the part where Satan speaks his famous political aphorism above (a mere 263 lines into the poem), Satan makes it plain that he’s still up for a fight:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; th’ unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.

…

To be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering.

…

And out of good still to find means of evil.

That’s a mere twenty lines after Satan and his refugee army hit the very bottom of the cosmos, and he’s already bouncing back and marshalling the troops for a rematch against Heaven. His army is in utter disarray: beaten disarmed, demoralized and exiled to the worst place imaginable… and still he’s ready to have another go.

So why is this stuff relevant to conservatism?

I first read this poem back in the early 1980s as part of the official reading list for my degree (my actual studies being: girls; cider; and shouting at Lefties: some things are just so much fun that you never find anything better). At that time the Soviets and their British adherents, paid and volunteer; knowing and unwitting, were running a full-time propaganda campaign to disguise the Soviet arms build-up and to slander and libel the West’s reactive rearmament against that. I sat in an English tutorial concerned with the poem and looked about me; there were half a dozen other undergraduates, the tutor, and me. Three undergraduates sported the CND badges and the tutor was well known on campus and in the town as supporting the campaign. Education is supposed to teach you things; things about human nature and the way of the world, right? But when I made the blindingly-obvious and unoriginal comment that Satan was voicing the thoughts and ambitions of the power-hungry the world over and at all times throughout history, I got blank states of puzzlement. Seeking power for its own sake: for the fun of conflict and conquest; for the sadistic joy of others’ obedience; for compliance with and service to The Truth; for the self-esteem of being top dog, regardless of the consequences to self and others, are constants of human nature - seemingly ineradicable. And therefore, I went on, eternal vigilance against such ambitions and the readiness to resist and overcome their aims was a constant necessity of life on Earth. I mean, it’d be crazy to let great big gangs of human beings with this kind of attitude walk around loose and unconstrained in the playground with the realpolitik equivalents of carpet knives and firelighters, yeah?

Then came the little smiles of smug recognition and adamantine rejection.

Well of course this is only a poem... It’s not about real life... And people, unlike angels, are open to reason and gentle persuasion... It doesn’t tell us anything about the real world.

Even then, twenty-five years ago, the culture wars were so advanced in their victory over us that so-called ‘students’ were prepared to state in front of their question-setting and Final exam-marking tutor that the meaning of words in literature don’t have anything to teach us about mankind or the world we live in.

So, assuming that evil can in large measure be (very, very roughly defined) as the willingness to exert power over others against their will or welfare, and regardless of suffering to self or object, how do the various kinds of political though deal with this issue?

Where are we now?

I wouldn’t start from here. The situation-based belief systems argue that such issues would pose little or no threat to the good life if only the external situation were changed. For socialists of the non-Marxist sort, power itself need not be corrupting or harmful if only the society is arranged in certain ways that allow people to meet their material wants and to satisfy their psychological needs. A fairer and more equal distribution of goods and opportunities by the State and law would either dissolve such bullying ambitions or weaken their power to do harm to others.

I don’t see how a more equal division of the spoils of production (even disregarding the lower and poorer quality of goods and services that is likely to occur under redistribution) would necessarily protect a child from his obsessive and possessive mother’s urge to exert absolute control over him, for example. Even if everyone had a nice little house and fifteen K a year and went to a bog-standard comprehensive, wouldn’t such authorities that were willing and empowered to enforce such material equality be willing and able to drill down into family lie and interfere before breakfast, lunch, and dinner and likely do as much bureaucratic harm as such whining harridans? They do it now; why not after the election of True Labour? Now, in international relations, even if equality of some sort were arranged nationally, what is to stop outside, unequal regimes from attacking and re-dividing the equal society? George Orwell posited an army of a socialist Britain still wearing the Lion and the Unicorn of its uniform buttons but that good man had never seen sixty years of the social worker mentality being in charge of almost everything – and so he never observed how an obsession with kindness and fairness takes the sense of danger and fear of ‘the other’ out of a culture. Wishful thinking is inherently bred into people in such a polity – and martial caution is bred out. Witness the almost total absence of fear amongst the equalitariat that an apocalyptic loon who’s joyously anticipating the End Times is well on his way to having The Bomb. Satan’s attitude doesn’t give a stuff about day care centres, The Paper Bag Princess, or the ready availability of affordable contraception – one way or another he wants to rule your hippy arse, Crystalglow Moonchild, and no messing.

And what of the equality officials themselves? I know of one public official in an impeccably equalitarian and redistributionist bureaucracy whose personal feuds have led to numerous unjust disciplinary proceedings against clearly blameless minions; to suspensions on full pay; and to the non-delivery of services to the organisation’s pitiful ‘customers’ against the will of Parliament and of great waste and cost to the taxpayer. But the very bureaucracy that was set up to provide these services is being used to do great personal harm to the professionals concerned and to squander scarce resources. The bully is unconstrained, having a major ‘in’ with the governing authorities of the organisation concerned – she’s untouchable.

Equality is not enough.

Libertarians tend to look at our present situation of massive government regulation of economic and personal life, of high taxation and State-created poverty, and look for a world in which governmental power is severely reduced or abolished, and in which, therefore, most people will be freer and also richer and therefore more able to fulfill their personal wishes. Well, I’d like to be freer and richer and good luck with that, my friends; we’re three elections from any chance of a government even aiming at what libertarians want, I think, and with the mandate to do something about it. But even if a minimal state came about, it is difficult to imagine that it again would survive outside interference from the usual sort. I’ve read Devil’s Kitchen describing a libertarian foreign policy for Britain that involves home stationing of armed forces only, and a big navy to protect trade convoys; thus cheapening our defence needs, keeping ourselves to ourselves and our properties overseas, and not interfering with others’ ways of life. Let them get on with it. Splendid isolationism. No more Iraq wars. No Afghanistans. Except that evil is greedy – it wants it all. Devil’s Kitchen’s scenario doesn’t take into account the global ambitions of this mind-set. I wonder which ports our convoys will be allowed to dock in, and to offload what goods and to take aboard what commodities if this happens? I can scarcely imagine a more defenceless polity to inhabit than one in which we let Satan’s thoughts run amok- unconstrained and unanswered by arms.

And what of the bullying and power within institutions of freedom? Much lessened though they may be compared to the horrors of the Gulag and Madrassa and the concentration camp, still some consequences of freedom hurt.

What to do about a fashion industry that persists (freely and unconstrained apart from ‘voluntary codes’) in portraying ultra-thin and often under-age models as beautiful, and thus encouraging anorexia and bulimia? The decisions of models and young girls and women alike to starve themselves are free and voluntary. The fashion houses that use and celebrate ultra-thin models as beautiful and worthy of emulation use their imagination and justly acquired property freely and without coercion, and of course their critics are free to argue that it’s all a dangerous fantasy and a confidence trick played on women. But it’s still power, and still people are freely taken in and hurt by that power. Unintended consequences can be malign and deadly, and good intentions on the road to Hell end in the same place. Idealised freedom of the pure libertarian kind is the will to not-power.

Freedom isn’t enough.

Who: whom?

It’s an HR problem. For Marxists, the urge to power is no problem. It can achieve great success and great improvements in the world, only if it’s used properly. ‘Properly’ has a specific meaning here: it needs to be enacted by the right people and at the right point in history will assure this, and all will be well.

Likewise the supporters of aristocratic rule.

Likewise absolute monarchists.

Likewise fascists.

Plenty of room for, and evidence of, Satan’s opinion throughout history to prove my point there.

Choosing the right people isn’t enough.

Absolute deniers.

People just aren’t like that (any more.) Liberals of all sorts tend to take the position that power-hunger, greed for office, and the determination to dominate are personal matters that can be softened or eradicated altogether by circumstantial changes or appeals to folks’ better natures. It is only the constraining institutions of social life – bullying family structures, economic inequality (again), or economic freedom (again), or beliefs in religion, or nation, or theories of human nature or the market or sexual supremacy or whatever, that lead people to dominate and do harm to others. Take away the structures and re-educate the beliefs out of people in a rational and kindly way and you’ll eradicate Satan’s will to power.

Have these people never been in playgrounds?

Our species derives from a meat-eating savannah and scrubland primate that has hunted and gathered in small family groups for millions of years; variously fleeing from and in turn menacing predators and competitors for game and forage, and the instincts that allowed us to do that are unlikely to go away after a mere 12,000 years or so of settled living. The instincts to reproduce and to have one’s children especially favoured; to survive by impressing one’s own will on others around oneself; to be first in the scrum to eat the prey are old. Fifteen minutes a day of Rousseau and sixty of Sesame Street just aren’t going to dig that deep into our complex natures.

Teaching people right from wrong isn’t enough.

So where am I going with this meandering collection of truisms, platitudes, massive generalizations, incomplete arguments, probable non-sequiturs and likely enough straw men?

‘The problem of politics’ is often expressed by formulae like; goodwill is limited, or altruism is constrained… and therefore how do we deal with our species’ imperfection in communal life?

The one single answer is that there isn’t just one single answer.

Belief systems that go off on one track alone or principally on one track – hunting after equality, or freedom, or king making or remaking ordinary human beings into better creatures not only often misunderstand what we are (which itself is damnably complicated), but of course ignore all the other things that can possibly go wrong other than their own favoured Source Of All Evil.

They all pretty much fall at the first fence in that specific constitutional arrangements or prescriptions for personal improvements might - just - address the obvious manifestations of Satan’s ambition, but they also let it in the back door (through ignoring unpolitical kinds of bullying) or through the front door in the form of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

And there’s always another Satan along in minute or a decade.

In the days when our rulers treated their countries and the people in them as property to be snatched and hoarded and passed on to their own descendants there was always some overseas marriage to consummate at lance-point or some local land deal to seal in blood, if the Turk or the moors didn’t haul you off from Cornwall or Sussex into slavery first. When the Christian religion became the battlefield the people of these islands had to figure out the right form of communion using little ships, brass cannon and pikes. And then came the blasted republicans; rebelling in American and threatening our trade on the Continent and shooting us in the back in Ireland – some of it turned out just fine, but some turned into a 200-year bloody grudge down to today and some warped into a crazed proto-dictator or late-era Caesar or cut-price Bourbon – take your pick. And then when he was dealt with there came diplomacy and colonial wars (and you might paint us as the villains sometimes then as we weren’t always gentle) and then Prussian militarism segueing into nationalism and later into something that made Prussian militarism seem like cricket by comparison, and fascism and communism staring us down throughout the weary Twentieth Century with a side order of Feinian horror, and them when the Soviets went away the Religion of Peace raised on victory in Afghanistan and oil money decided to have a bash in the airlines and oilfields and mill towns of the world, and none of that could have been appeased or halted or slowed much by good housing, a thorough grounding in the classics, a hearty round of the National Anthem or lower marginal rates of tax. No matter how often we think we've sorted it all out and can get the spare room fixed up and the poor fed, some evil swine always comes along with a better idea of what to do with our time and the contents of our arteries and the rest of our children's lives. There just plain is no single cure for the reasons that Satan through humanity attaches to his hunger for power and taste for blood.

And that’s just Pride – merely one of the Deadly Sins against which our culture once taught us to fear. What of the others? What of Sloth: how to deal with benefits couch potatoes and trust fund drones and their opposites and counterparts; Stakhanovite corporate workhorses ignoring their families because of Career or suicidal Japanese students going for impossibly high grades at exam-time? Or Anger: how to manage it in the body politic to avoid vendetta, lynch-mobs and genocide without degenerating into appeasement of the Great Dictators or the passive acceptance of mediaeval dhimmis averting their eyes as the Sultan’s men ride past their crumbling and legally unrepairable churches or synagogues?

We don’t all live today like homo ergaster on the one hand or Neil Armstrong on the other. Nor are we all like Chairman Mao or Mother Teresa: not all of us all of the time, and some of us none of the time. Over the millennia since agriculture was discovered and the settled dwelling in fixed communities that it made possible, billions of people have discovered millions of ways of living together without reverting to cannibalism at one extreme and suffering under absolute tyranny at the other. There are a lot of problems and a lot of cures for those problems.

This is why philosophies like conservatism that take the well-mixed compost heap stance to political and social life score over the single-thrust type.

Mix and match and accept that circumstances alter cases and admit to yourself that change is the only constant, and that panaceas are mythological and you still might go wrong, but do otherwise and you will always go wrong, eventually.

Yes: we need freedom to discover new ways of living, but no; we should be unafraid to adjust for those who will be trampled or left behind. Yes: the individual is a moral creature and a unit of intelligence and a proper recipient for consideration and expensive help sometimes, but no; without family and society he’s pretty much a rogue hunter much of the time. Yes: nationhood is a collective defence and gives a focus as to how large problems can be solved, but no; it should not be treated as the sole or overwhelming political goal. Yes: the free ownership and disposal of property can conjure up all kinds of wealth and opportunity, but no: when it concentrates naturally it can become as much of a pestilence as rank poverty. Yes: the family is a mainstay of and orderly social life and a conserver of property, but remember also feudalism and honour killings.

There is nothing so lovely and charming that human beings can’t make a weapon or other curse out of it, but also there is little that is so vile that inspiration and hope can’t be founded on its horrors – from the slow torturing to death of an innocent man to the lengthy starvation and slaughter of half a people. There is no single thing that can keep Satan and his terrible companions at bay forever. No country; no religion; nor sum of money nor language nor marriage nor single book of truth that serves us at all times and in all ways to live together without warring amongst ourselves forever.

When it comes down to it, if we want to solve stuff, we’re left pretty much with human beings – human beings who can imagine and anticipate Satan…and his converse.

But what the hell do I know? I’m only human.

Private Jones-716

Well, there's a silly man, by damn!


No post from me yesterday as I was travelling down to stay in the capital city of my ancestral homeland – a city that even to today is kept remarkably clear of Zulus.
I was a little surprised that it was not awash with camp Cybermen and extremely well dressed bachelors. Can it be that the BBC has somehow given a false impression of something? Surely not. Such a thing’s just not possible.

And then on to a tourist trap culturally parallel to an Ewok’s bottom to meet Tiny Northwester…Who is now rapidly making it plain that she is in fact merely Small Northwester. Who knows where the time goes? Fatherly heartbreak.

Little bit of politics, but Small Northwester’s mother and stepfather seemed utterly convinced that David Cameron is the bee’s knees (I prefer a canine metaphor, as you will know, without “dog’s”) and will set the country to rights. The Mark One Mrs Northwester, utterly certain that we need Mrs. Thatcher back, enthused about Davey Boy as if he was the Once and Future King, risen from his Avalonian tomb to deliver Britain at its hour of greatest need. Now Mk 1 Mrs. N is no fool, and her husband is a smart cookie, and so I was pretty much dumfounded by this. I know that country-dwellers have a reputation for, um, no-frills thinking, but even Wordsworth sussed out the French Revolution eventually.
Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, or what comes from reading The Times these days, or perhaps it’s that they don’t have the internet up there is the hill country and so they absorb their factoids from the MSM only. Wanting Mk 1 Mrs. N to be right, and knowing that she’s not is not exactly a new experience to me, but I never thought the government of the country would be so plain and glaring a subject of disagreement. But that’s the joy of divorce – the longer you’re divorced, the smarter you know you’ve been. I’m sure she thinks the same thing too.

The central premise of House of Dumb (essential reading for conservatives who would rather not make great big silly kippers of themselves) is that really quite clever people can manage to act stupidly according to daft levels of reality-denial and wishful thinking. Conservatives aren’t immune.
Thank the Lord she does believe in safe breaking distances and buying big, chunky, safe cars.

So it’s back to the land of whippets and ferret-juggling ex-mill workers for me today, through bank holiday weekend rain and traffic, and so to a proper-sized computer for my clumsy paws to rant on, rather than this borrowed laptop.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the bank holiday weekend, and with a bit of luck my online pessimism won’t spoil it at all.
Front rank, fire!

Must try harder

I’m no good.

My Foreign Policy Views
Score: 5.34

Political Spectrum Quiz


My Culture War Stance
Score: 2.78

Political Spectrum Quiz

I don’t know whether I’ve mellowed out or merely been exhausted by chronicling events in Britain’s first online Right-wing culture festival, but when I went to My Doubts and took the Political Spectrum Quiz I was shocked.

Shocked.

I scored okay on Foreign policy – well into neo-con range - and that was fine.
But on social conservatism, I scored pretty damn low.

I was hardly above the cultural liberal/conservative line at all.

What’s the point I wonder in making a personal ideological odyssey from privatize-the-lot natural rights libertarian anarcho-capitalist and trying to justify all kinds of erosions of traditional morality and the British way of life and upturning the constitution and then changing into a to fire-breathing upholder of traditional social structures and (somewhat modified) common decency …if it looks like now I could get along fine with the editor of The Economist or George ‘Two Brains’ Osborne?

This is terrible. I mean, I know it’s supposed to have been weighted according to nationality so that English conservatives would be to the left of American conservatives, and perhaps Scottish conservatives to the left of us, and French conservatives just a frog’s whisker and two showers a year from being indistinguishable from French communists, but this is ridiculous.

There I was happily turning into the kind of lardy middle-aged grouch that I despised in my idealist Objectivist-Rothbardite could-have-been-outthought-by-yeast youth; going with the flow, girding up my loins against hyper individualism and growing a pair of scrutons, getting some Burke in, with smatterings of the Good Doctor and, damn it, it turns out that I’m a wet.

So, even nationally-weighted for UK scores by your actual Americans I’m still a pinko-Comsymp faggot on social conservatism.

I wonder if that’s because I answered, for example, questions about sexual morality as very important (and they are as any taxpayer who is bringing up children’s kids for someone else will tell you : let alone an inner-city rape victim from two to ninety), but left it as "neutral" in the "how much does this matter" axis – mainly because either I didn’t think that an objective can be achieved at all or that it should be left until the longer term.

So maybe the quiz would have rated me higher on this one if I’d implied I’d agitate for banning or more strictly controlling abortion…when I put a higher priority right now on getting the economy sorted out before we all have to support ourselves by foraging for nuts roots and berries: or reverting to cannibalism.

Granted, the American Right starts from a higher place than we do and they tend to have more can-do that we UK gloomycons have (but remember what happens when it mutates into yes we can), and proper conservatives conserve what they already have available and the Cousins have a lot more liberty, for example, to protect - like these chaps bearing arms in the Presence of The First Emperor whilst protesting against the planned nationalization of the human bodies in the Body Politic.

Cool. At least we’re not quite so pussy-whipped about race as they are. Yet. Nobody even seems to have thought of warning me about the N word here, for example.

Or maybe it’s just a meaningless quiz that gives off inaccurate, quite untrue and downright insulting results like that lousy survey I did from Playboy once.

However, I’m not prepared to risk seeing myself as a slack-jawed limp-dick caponservative so I needto dry myself out a bit and thank goodness, I can always go over here to find something to confirm my every curtain-twitching bourgeois suburban instincts – and I don’t even have to bear arms to do it. Even if I wanted to.

Or I could just go to work.

And in the meantime, some fine art…

δημοκρατια

Ranting Stan forces my hand, and so I must get my own electoral reform fantasy in sharpish.

Democracy is extremely hard to define in a nutshell…

An elected second chamber will make us less democratic - not more.

The final thing is an effective check and balance on the elected government - which is where the second chamber comes in. It is, of course, impossible for there to be an effective check and balance on an elected government if that second chamber is elected too. People keep trying to tell me that they manage it in other countries - such as the USA - but this simply isn't true.

The Lords does sterling work - and did even better before Tony Blair’s partial-birth ‘reform’ - in part because its members weren't dependent on day-to-day popularity as Commons MPs are (and as they have to respond to), and other aspects of partisanship.

The hereditaries never feared for their seats (except during civil wars, of course) being there by right; nor did the Law Lords or the bishops who are there ex officio. There were and are party hacks, of course, and direct Prime Ministerial appointees, but with the cross-benchers and non-appointees, there are still a lot of people not under the partisan thumb.

May I make a suggestion, going right back to the origins of democracy itself: ancient Athens?

Keep the existing appointees, hereditaries and ex-officios as they have their own freedoms and small power bases in different ways, and there should remain a core party structure and Government representation in the Upper House, and this would continue to bring variety and experience and a core of organisation and careful research to the upper chamber... and then draw the rest by lot.

Draw - say - nine individuals from the electoral rolls of each Commons constituency and allow no exceptions or defer service only on health or military service grounds as per jury service. Plug them into the internet at home and oblige them to log onto Parliament's websites, and force them to log onto and vote on Lords debates. Allow a bare minimum of twenty hours' activity per week (which might include posting text or video at each or some of the debate's sites - you could have online debates leading up to the vote where chamber-based peers could debate with their online counterparts in the country.)

Then it's up to them how they’re swayed, what they think and how they vote, and in which debates, if any, they choose to be most highly involved. Their actual votes could be kept secret, and their identities if they so chose.

They would, by dint of randomness, be representative of the public at large and therefore be seen as legitimate, and they also need not be specialist professional parasites:

They wouldn't be under the party whip.

They wouldn't need to chase state or special interest funding to be elected.

They wouldn't need to make empty, untrue or harmful election promises.

They'd already be living outside the Westminster bubble and so less likely to be so narrow-minded as to miss the point every single time.

Lots of girls would get in despite the worst efforts of the party selection committees (a particular problem with the Tories) and they wouldn’t have to abandon home, family, and sanity to do their parliamentary duty.

The political parties would really, really have to work hard to attract their support.

They’d know that they’ll have to go back to the real world of crime, debts, mortgages and having to make a living very soon.

They could respond quickly to emergencies - thanks to their variety and independence (OMG! ‘Diversity’ for real!) - without having to wait for a party line to evolve or to be imposed, and amend or delay legislation accordingly.

You’d probably get social conservatives in despite the libtard hold on the parties because such people would still have to live right close to the communities that the elected politicians variously invent, discover and bribe, and either herd or are herded by.

Carol Vorderman might be chosen without having to be nice to David Cameron who is totally unworthy of her.

I’d keep the territorial nature of Commons elections (look, I’m a conservative, see?), and the party structure and the first-past-the post system, and the Commons’ monopolies on finance and originating bills, because all that works, but force them to really, really work hard to persuade an invigorated Lords to accept their legislation.

Give them terms outside the electoral cycle - say two or three years, so as not to necessarily go along with temporary or trivial electoral fads that might pack the Commons for five years (as 'Tory sleaze' and MPs expenses did and the deaths of Diana or Jade or specific acts of terrorism or treachery might have).

They’d not be a mob – but they would be swayable by media and prejudice, family and friends, but also safe from the oppression of public meetings or enraged constituents.

Pay them one-and-a-half or twice their last year's bottom line per annum to make it worth their while and to overcome the inconvenience of disrupting their lives, (doleys to get £120 per week plus rent and council tax paid, Richard Branson to get £120,000,000 or whatever, businessmen and teachers double their previous years’ scores of thousands.)

No expenses, ever.

Pensions to consist of one year’s Lords remuneration per year’s satisfactory service paid as lump sums into the investment of their choice and none to be drawn for ten years after service ends. This last is to prevent the tendency to approve legislation aimed at making a fast buck on the Stock Market; but rather to prejudice them in favour of long-term overall good economic policies, if they are capable of such a thing.

This would maintain the perspective that having different standards of livings in Parliament might bring – instead of the present everyone starts on £60K and works their way up herd mentality. (Do pigs herd? Flock? Shoal?)

Let the majority of the Lords worry about paying for the gas and the mortgage in the near future – but not too soon to be intimidated by their responsibilities.

You’d get your special-interest pleaders and influence-brokers for sure (but it would be legal and open to view because they’d have to declare their interests) voting per Big Business or the unions or churches or established or fringe parties or ‘community groups’ – but I think you’d likely get something representative of the nation as a whole with some measure of comfort and security, but not too much, by not providing them with a permanent and publicly-funded career with repeat electability and repeat corruptibility.

Think of all those multiple-term US Democratic Senators who’ve helped to usher in The One with all His faults, and our very own Happy Troughers from safe-seat Valleys smeg-holes or Home Counties mini-Reichs.

Repeat as necessary to keep the compost heap of the nation fresh and vigorous.

So what do you think, peeps?

Put the Peepul in charge of overseeing the pols without transforming the Peepul into a permanently rich and comfortable class of brand new bribable pols?

Might something like this keep Britain’s ancient constitution alive and kicking and yet curb our cowardly custodes?