Alexei Navalny - Patriot

Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison one year ago. Everyone knows the word ‘died’ is a euphemism.

His crimes? Telling the truth. Opposing Putin. Surviving an assassination attempt by the FSB. And latterly, opposing the invasion of Ukraine.

Having the nerve to go back to Russia just when the kleptocracy thought they had got rid of him.

The question even his supporters, let alone his enemies, repeatedly asked of him was “Why did you come back?” On the face of it, it looks like stupidity. He knew he would be arrested. The only issue was, would he be arrested openly at the airport or more quietly?

He struggled to make people understand. He had run for political office. He had toured the country promising to tell the people the truth. His example had encouraged others to make a stand for freedom and democracy. They had been persecuted and imprisoned like him. The bulk of those who supported him were not in a position to leave the country.

But most importantly, he had promised never to desert the people. There ought to be one politician in Russia who did not lie.

And so Navalny went back. And he was imprisoned. And every month a new fraudulent charge was brought against him and new sentences were handed down. He actually found it amusing that he could be accused of committing serious crimes while in solitary confinement. His persecutors could not break him. As long as he lived, his mere existence was a testimony against the regime.

He accepted that the dictatorship would probably kill him. He thought his death would speak louder than his life. In his autobiography, “Patriot”, the last entry in his prison diary was dated January 17th, 2024. In it, he still held fast to a simple philosophy. One day Russia would be free. One day the crooks and thieves would be gone, and his countrymen could breathe free air and flourish in peace.

We all owe it to Alexei Navalny’s memory to hold fast to that same philosophy. Even when the night is darkest and the power of the barbarians seems unstoppable.

Speak truth to power. Always.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/PATRIOT

The Return of Appeasement

At what point should we expect US citizens to start singing “Buddy can you spare a dime” or dancing cheek to cheek?

Do I hear any takers for my Packard 745 or my Buick Marquette?

How about my dad’s old trilby or my grandfather’s fedora?

Forgive me for asking, but it appears the 1930s are back with a vengeance on the western shore of the Atlantic.

We began with tariffs, which, as I already noted, did a fantastic job of ushering in The Great Depression and shutting down large chunks of the world’s economy.

Now it seems we have resurrected Appeasement, the peace at any price policy which gave such encouragement to Nazism and Fascism, resulting in more land grabs and eventually the Second World War. Neville Chamberlain? Ha! Stand aside, loser. You may have invented the idea of excluding the victim from the peace talks, but you wait until you see me carve up the victim and hand over a fifth of their country without even a by your leave. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Hey, all you dictators out there! Just invade your neighbouring peaceful state, commit innumerable war crimes, and then come and talk to POTUS about how you can keep your ill-gotten gains, take time to replace your expended arms and ammunition, and get ready for your next aggression! Because everybody wants peace, right? And making peace is so easy if you give the aggressor everything he wants before the negotiations even start.

You know what? We’ll forget that you and the US both guaranteed the sanctity of your neighbour’s borders thirty years ago. We’ll just take your word for it that you have no more territorial claims. I mean, we know you broke your word twice already in that time, but we’re willing to let bygones be bygones. We’re going to trust you if you promise not to do it again.

And don’t worry about being an indicted war criminal, because we don’t recognise the court that indicted you. Hell, I don’t recognise the courts that indicted me. So we don’t even recognise our own courts let alone international ones.

And don’t worry about our European, Japanese and Taiwanese allies. Who cares what they think? If they want defending, then they should pay 5% of their national income to defend themselves. Like we do. Or don’t? One or the other, I forget which. And we have to defend on two fronts, not just one.

Just oblige me by not moving into the rest of Ukraine before I finish my term, huh? Don’t make me look bad, the way Adolf did to Neville.

Tariffs 2

I am afraid that DJT did not read my little article last week about tariffs. And that’s after me deliberately not entitling it “Economics for the economically illiterate.” I didn’t want to be provocative, you see.

I understand that the executive orders instituting the new US tariffs also contain anti-retaliation clauses. In other words, if the US tariffs are answered by corresponding tariffs against US exports, which is the usual, almost instinctive, reaction, The US will raise tariffs again in retaliation for the retaliation.

Welcome back to 1930, folks. Only, please remember that the last time the world travelled this road, it didn’t work out so well.

Tariffs

I am struggling to understand the sudden enthusiasm in the USA for the introduction of tariffs.

 
Tariffs are essentially a sales tax. It so happens that these sales taxes apply only to goods supplied to the US by other countries, but that does not alter their fundamental nature; a sales tax is a sales tax.

 
When you apply a sales tax to any product, its price rises. It may be that the supplier is able to absorb a portion of the new tax by reducing his profit margin, thus avoiding the need to pass the whole tax on to the consumer, but it will be a rarity for the price to the consumer not to rise at all. If the consumer goes on buying a product that has been subjected to a sales tax, then the consumer spends more on that product. In other words, price rises resulting from tariffs are paid by those who continue to consume imported goods.

These continuing consumers, therefore, must divert a portion of their spending that would have gone on other products to paying the higher price of the imported product. If that alternative expenditure would have been on domestic products, then the expenditure of those consumers on domestic products will fall, and the incomes of those who produce these domestic products will necessarily also fall.

Of course, some consumers will be deterred by the higher price from purchasing the imported good. The volume of imports will probably fall. This means the foreign suppliers of imported goods will have less income with which to purchase US goods and American exports will accordingly fall, along with the income of American workers who produce those exports.

There remains a question of whether domestic production will rise to replace the reduced imports. Domestic production that was able to compete at the previous import price would presumably already be doing so. Domestic production that is now able to compete at the new import price, but was not able to compete at the old import price, is probably going to avail itself of the diverted demand, but, by definition, only at a price that is higher than the old import price. So again, it is the consumer who pays, only he pays extra to a domestic producer rather than paying a tax to his government.

It has long been an accepted economic principle that more trade is generally good, in the sense of raising incomes all round, and that less trade is bad. Trade wars impoverish everybody in the world.
Protectionism may be justified when a foreign country’s government is breaking WTO rules by unfairly subsidising its exports, but if the foreign country simply happens to be better at producing a particular product than you are, then it makes sense to divert the domestic resources currently deployed to producing inefficiently into producing something else efficiently. That way trade will continue to increase and everybody benefits.

I acknowledge that the above outline may be seen as Economics 101 by those who know something about economics. I also acknowledge that I have glossed over problems of transition and restructuring.
However, this explanation was inspired by a vox pop interview in the US, in which a gentleman firmly asserted that tariffs on Chinese goods would be paid by the Chinese government. Oh, yes. And the only thing stopping pigs flying in the USA is that porcine aviation is prohibited by US law.

Be careful with extremist terms

Insofar as Fascism is defined as a totalitarian state apparatus which brooks no dissent or alternative viewpoints, it seems from my side of the ocean that The USA has been in such a condition for many years. What else is a politically-correct cancel culture? Monochromatic approaches to complex political issues, demanding yes / no answers when questions require nuanced judgements, intolerance of any stance which diverges from one's own - all this is the furniture of Fascism, simply going under the name of anti-Fascism.

Any society that is so far polarised as to view a democratic change of administration as an existential threat is already being destroyed from within, and the process needs no assistance from external enemies. Governments of any stripe are seldom good in themselves; they are usually no more than necessary evils, required to save mankind from the darker sides of our own natures. Mostly, democratic governments achieve this modest goal. Other polities frequently don't.

Be careful with historical values

For some reason, I can’t seem to restrain myself from intervening in discussions of UK history being conducted by Americans. My contributions are not always appreciated.

It does seem to me, though, that there is a serious problem of the retrospective application of modern values to the past. The most recent example I came across was a debate over the succession to King Henry I, which resulted in a civil war between Henry’s daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen.


Many participants assume that Matilda was the rightful heir because she was Henry’s only surviving child and named as successor in Henry’s will, thus making Stephen a usurper. Sadly, things are not so simple. There are four principles of succession involved here., as well as other considerations:

1. Primogeniture was more Norman than Saxon;
2. Selection by council of the best man to defend the kingdom had put Harold Godwinson on the throne in the second half of the 11th century, while
3. Victory in battle had made The Conqueror himself king.
4. The power of a king to will the succession was disputed even as late as the 16th century.

There was precedent for a woman to rule (but not necessarily be crowned queen regnant) - most importantly, Aethelflaed of Mercia. However, war was a regular feature of life at the period and female war leaders were rare.


In short, we have to avoid the error of supposing that primogeniture was well enough established to be universally accepted in the early 12th century, and even more so that those who denied it were by definition rebels.

Whodunnit? Richard III, Henry VII or A N Other?

In all the ballyhoo surrounding the "discovery" of bequest of a "chain which was of Edward V" in the will of a distant relative of James Tyrell, there has been a great deal more heat (and impoliteness) than light.

To begin with, the mention of the chain has been known about for several years, and nobody made a fuss before. This is because it cannot offer conclusive evidence either way as to the fate of the Princes in The Tower.

It could have been a false attribution. If there are enough guaranteed pieces of the true cross to make several trees, why should this not be another fake relic?

It could have been taken from a body by a murderer. Murderers do sometimes take souvenirs, though these days at least they tend not to publish the fact.

Equally well, if the princes were smuggled abroad in mufti it would have been a serious giveaway to be found wearing royal jewellery or carrying the same in one’s luggage. To give it to one’s smuggler out of gratitude, or to hand it over to him for safe keeping, would have been the most natural thing in the world.

Ricardians and Henricans can bore each other to tears with this. The press can post as many lurid headlines as they like.

It can and does prove precisely nothing.

How to stimulate economic growth in the UK

 

1. Increase the payroll tax by £25 billion, ensuring employers need to shed workers.
2. Increase the minimum wage substantially, ensuring employers hesitate to hire new workers.
3. Increase job protection rights from day one of employment, meaning if a worker proves unsuitable he can’t be dismissed even though he is costing a firm money
4. Ban new oil and gas production.
5. Set the world a good example by an impossibly early arbitrary target for net zero, ensuring UK manufacturers’ costs are too high to be competitive.
6. Insist that car makers produce more electric vehicles than anyone wants to buy, ensuring closure of car factories
7. Introduce an inheritance tax that will eliminate family farms and ensure productive agricultural land all passes into the hands of financial institutions
8. Do the same for family businesses to ensure that they are also driven out and take all their capacity for innovation with them.
9. Impose a sales tax on private school fees, forcing some school closures, transfer of pupils to the state education system, loss of teachers’ jobs, loss of invisible exports (foreign pupils).
10. Describe all the above as a budget for growth.

After such an intensive stimulus package, you can act surprised and complain that you are not satisfied with the next set of growth figures.

Upon Which Foot is the Shoe?

The USA cannot be miserable at its own majority choice, can it? The Democrats are upset, but they can't, at the moment, claim to represent the USA. In fact, being disabused of the notion that they do represent the USA will, in the end, prove a good thing for some Democrats, as they are forced to recognize that they can't go on simply cancelling those who disagree, and must actually learn to talk to them.

The USA, at least, has the consolation of getting the president that the majority of voters wanted. That is, at least, a democratic choice.

For the time being, on this side of the Atlantic, we are contending with a freak result produced by a defective electoral system, with very little input from the people. (34% of the low turnout vote = supermajority).

I find myself irked by every mention of the word 'mandate' by a Labour minister. UK people certainly voted for change, in that they knew who they wanted to throw out, but who they wanted instead was obscure to say the least. What we are getting now is more partisan than popular.

But we had an opportunity to improve our voting system not that long ago, and we rejected it. It's too late to complain about the rules of the game, but we might take the opportunity to prevent repetitions of this travesty. We won't, of course, because the temporary beneficiaries of a broken system cannot envisage the day when the shoe may be on the other foot.

This is the price we pay for an adversarial party system. Julius Nyerere argued for a one-party state in Tanzania on the grounds that the country lacked the talent needed to waste some on opposition.

 
Loyal opposition, however, which holds the government to account without undermining the state, is an important check upon absolutism. But a loyal opposition has to show by argument why the government has erred, not just throw up its hands in horror.

Aesop's Fable #44: The Frogs Who Desired a King

Some people wonder why the frogs ever asked Zeus for a king in the first place. Were they not happy enough in their original free state? What was so bad about gambolling around in their pond with no-one to tell them what to do?

Most of the philosophers who have considered the state of nature concluded that it was a pretty rough and ready state of affairs, in which the strong preyed upon the weak and the weak had no redress because there was no system of justice. Rousseau, by contrast, imagined a noble savage who lived in tune with a natural world that he understood and in which he felt comfortable.

Well the frogs weren’t comfortable, or they would not have asked for someone to be in charge, who could act as a fount of justice.

Now, when Zeus threw a log into the pond, the frogs didn’t realise what they had been given. This was a nominal chief citizen, who wouldn’t actually do anything, but in the name of King Log, the frogs could have organised for themselves an elementary legal system to prevent bullying and exploitation, while in other respects remaining free. They could even have given the log a name: Emperor Claudius, for example, or perhaps Joe Biden.

But no, The frogs were not satisfied. A King ought to do things. A king ought to be able actively to improve the livelihood of the citizens. Well of course, who would not want that? Did no philosopher frog say, “Hang on a minute, chaps, the power to make moral choices may just as easily result in bad as in good?”

And so the frogs discarded King Log, who had been quite a good king, all things considered, and demanded a replacement. Zeus sent a water snake (or heron, in some versions) which began to devour the frogs.

The frogs complained to Zeus that this wasn’t the sort of king they’d wanted at all, but Zeus replied that they must live (or perhaps die) by the consequences of their own actions.

And Emperor Claudius was deposed and succeeded by Emperor Nero.

The Great Society

 

The day the greatness of a country is judged by the transient matter of who happens to in charge of its government will be a sad one for the world.

The capricious Fates may hand over a great country to administration by a lunatic, an incompetent, a hypocrite a fraud, a megalomaniac or a liar. A cult of personality may be built upon any of these shaky foundations, without elevating anything but the image of the leader in the eyes of the credulous.

We know, whenever we see a historically great country currently ruled by a grasping, mendacious inadequate, just which direction the appearance of greatness is flowing.

I find it preferable to remain within the parameters set by Plato. Anyone who would put himself forward for election is unworthy of being elected. The more a candidate desires election, the less suitable for office he is, until you reach someone who is so desperate for power that he should ideally be marooned on some uninhabited island where his arrogance can only damage himself.

Political leaders in general vary in talent on a scale ranging between slightly more intelligent than the desk at which they sit, to, at worst (as we used to say in Yorkshire), as bent as a nine bob note. (This in an era when the smallest currency note was ten shillings).

The quality of a country’s civilisation, society, openness to new thinking, preservation of civil and human rights without the need for compulsion or oppression, make a country great. Its achievements in arts, sciences, literature, philosophy, and the continuing quality of thought; its ability to educate without indoctrinating and disagree without enmity, make it great.

The greater a society is, the less it needs to tell all and sundry about its greatness.

A country cannot achieve greatness without agreement on, and commitment to, fundamental principles. You cannot achieve greatness by alienating a vast proportion of your domestic population. If you can only win an argument by force, suppressing all opposition, then you cannot win an argument.

Anyone who believes that the best way to establish the truth is to burn heretics is not great; he is a fool.

Editors - Angels or Devils?

When you encounter an editor for the first time, you (author) do not know what to expect. You let an editor get away with messing up your work because you want to be published. You know perfectly well that the story you wrote was better before the editor got his hands on it, but because you are afraid of not being published, you grin and bear it. No, it’s not you, it’s me. Sorry.

Then you will come across a fantastic editor who has ideas that can actually improve your work. There are some of these out there. At the very least, they will ask questions like, “Does the protagonist really have to be an Air Force reservist?” Hell, yeah!

At best, they will say, “Why does MacAndrew give the time-travellers his watch?” That was a brilliant question, as I instantly recognized, and my rewrite made the story publishable.

And then you may be unfortunate enough to encounter the editor who wishes he had written the story himself and proceeds to attempt to do so, line by line. By this time, we hope you have found enough spine to be able to say, “My name at the top; my words underneath. Write your own story.” Of course, you lose the sale. It depends on you whether you think it was worth it.

Ageing Wines

I think we should distinguish between changes in quality that occur naturally over time, even if a wine is correctly bottled and stored, and changes that occur because a wine is incorrectly bottled and / or stored. The former is meant to happen; the latter isn’t.

The initial reactive change after bottling is mostly due to the oxygen present in the headspace, which is the air between the wine and the cork. When that oxygen is used up, only very small amounts will be able to seep through a cork in a bottle that is stored correctly, on its side. Change will now be gradual.

More air will get in if a synthetic cork is used, which is why you don’t see such corks in expensive wines that are meant to be laid down for ageing.

None will get past a screw top, which is why you see screw tops on wines sold young which rely on retaining their initial fruitiness rather than being allowed to develop character by ageing.

“Gone bad” may, however, be the result of excessive ageing. I once laid down a case of an already very nice Vouvray (white) that was expected to be perfect in another four years. I then forgot, and left it eight. The result was considerably worse than I’d started with – vin très ordinaire indeed!

Had it been a half-decent red (the only kind I can afford) I might have got away with it because the best drinking age for these is significantly older than whites. It is however a matter of taste, since the character of the wine is changing all the time and you need to discover the character that you like best, or rely on experts to tell you what you ought to like best. Of course, if you don’t have a cellar, you can only buy the wine at an age when somebody else has decided it’s satisfactory for sale anyway.

If an old red looks brown it may well be on its way to vinegar, but it may still have value to people who like to look at old bottles rater than drink their contents.

Only marginally relevant, but single malt whisky is usually aged in the cask, not in the bottle. Hence when it is bottled, they stick on a label saying “12 years old” rather than “2012” because its still considered 12 years old, even if it takes you a couple of years to drink it. This is not to say it won’t change in the bottle, but that’s not meant to be the object of the exercise. If people find some Islay single malts undrinkable, it’s most likely because they bought a heavily-peated variety when they didn’t mean to. All such bottles should be donated to someone who is more likely to appreciate them.

Me, for instance.

"The Plot" by Nadine Dorries - A Review

I understand why Nadine Dorries’ book “The Plot”, an account of the machinations that removed two UK Prime Ministers from office without recourse to the electorate, should have received a poor overall average rating from reviewers.

We all think we know what happened to Boris Johnson. We think we know what happened to Liz Truss.

Many wanted to believe that Johnson was a liar who believed in one rule for others and another for himself, because they opposed his policy on Brexit and wanted to believe that made him a bad man. The mainstream media certainly made sure that every last ounce of bad publicity was squeezed out of Partygate.

Many believe that Truss crashed the economy, because the media told us so. That she contrived to do this while UK economic growth was topping the G7 in two out of three post-Brexit years can be quietly brushed under the carpet. The left assured us that the economy had been crashed and, unlike the right, they never lie.

So a book aiming to set the record straight is immediately faced with a wall of opposition from powerful people and from general perception. It’s surprising, in the circumstances, that it should make it into print at all.

Then, naturally, it will be read by a lot of people determined to pick holes in it, as well as downvoted by people who haven’t even read it. I mean, who wants to be told that they have been played for fools and that our cherished democracy can be twisted to achieve personal ends, no matter what the public wants?

I cannot claim an open mind. I always suspected that Johnson was brought down by Remainer desire for revenge on the man who personified Brexit. I couldn’t quite work out how they had done it, or how quite so many turkey-like Conservative MPs had been persuaded to vote for Christmas.

I did always think that the Partygate fuss was blown way out of proportion when Currygate was a more serious case of the same sort, and largely ignored. I never expected The Privileges Committee investigation to be unbiased, and was unsurprised when it wasn’t. What I didn’t grasp was that the media would swallow wholesale the nonsense being leaked from Downing Street, or that the leaks themselves were part of an orchestrated programme and not merely random.

“The Plot” makes no pretence of impartiality. Nadine was part of Team Boris, and proud of it. But she was a cabinet minister and in a position to know a great deal more than the average reader, as well as to see the frantic paddling beneath the surface that marked the apparently serene progress of the swan of state.

I found this book an enthralling read. For me, it supplied the missing pieces in a puzzle I couldn’t quite solve.

No doubt others will dismiss it as just another conspiracy theory. And we all know that nine out of ten alleged conspiracies are really just SNAFUs.

On the other hand. We do have to remember that the tenth one really is a conspiracy. And it suits the interests of conspirators if everyone believes that the tenth was just a SNAFU, too.

What's the problem with the ECHR?

It probably gets boring being the European Court of Human Rights. 

I mean, it’s not as much fun as being the Chinese Court of Human Rights, is it? There just isn’t enough to do.

So you have to think of new human rights, such as the right to be protected against climate change, or the right to be put up in a five-star hotel if you are an illegal immigrant / economic migrant, but not if you are a homeless indigenous person. 

Before long, you’ve made yourself the government of Europe! Who knew it was so easy to take over from elected governments?

Wasn't Scottish independence supposed to be the price for Brexit? Why then did the SNP poll badly?

I think the first thing to grasp is that Brexit fundamentally altered the case for Scottish independence. You have to remember that Scotland voted for the UK to remain in the EU, not for Scotland to remain alone if the rest of the UK left.

When both Scotland and the rest of the UK were in the EU, there would have been no customs border between the two, even after independence. After Brexit, for Scotland to rejoin the EU would have meant a customs border applicable to two thirds of Scottish trade.

It would also have precluded continuance of the UK Free Travel Area, since there is free movement of people inside the EU and the FTA would have negated any UK policy to control immigration. Obviously, the UK would not allow this. (Ireland was able to remain in the CTA because as an old EU member it was not obliged to join Schengen; new members are obliged to join).  In other words, Scots could no longer expect to move south freely in pursuit of economic opportunities.

New members of the EU (including Scotland) are also expected to have managed their own currency competently for two years and to commit to joining the Euro. As an old member, the UK had an exemption. Scotland has no currency of its own, nor any separate central bank. Using sterling as a foreign currency would be possible, but would not qualify Scotland for EU admission.

New members of the EU are expected to achieve a fiscal deficit target that Scotland would need about ten years of austerity to achieve, according to the Wilson Report. This would be particularly acute if the UK immediately cut off Barnett funding, stopped military expenditure in Scotland, and declined to continue the currency union, all of which would have been perfectly legitimate.

Thus, it was improbable that an independent Scotland could make a swift return to the EU, and independence would mean standing alone for at least a decade.

In spite of this, the SNP continued to agitate for independence and to neglect the day job of actually running an efficient devolved administration. The results eventually became too obvious to ignore.

Additionally, after the coalition with the Greens, the SNP began to pursue a whole agenda of politically correct policies which did not resonate with the Scottish electorate at large.

To this you have to add the impact of various scandals. The burdens accumulated until they could no longer be borne.

But I think you are wrong to see the Labour Party as pro-Brexit. Starmer was one who campaigned for a second referendum, and is still not trusted to not make unnecessary concessions to the EU in trade negotiations.

In short, Brexit did not figure highly in the list of reasons for voters abandoning the SNP.

The UK General Election

It does seem remarkable that 2019 was Labour’s worst GE since 1932 and interpreted as a public desire for a changed Labour Party. Getting even fewer votes in 2024 than in 2019 produces Labour’s best result ever and is interpreted as a mandate to implement change in the country.

I fear that Apathy is now the largest single party, polling better than 40%. Put that together with two thirds of those who did vote getting not only a government they didn’t vote for, but one with a huge majority, and overcoming the sense of powerless and disillusion among the electorate will be the hardest change that Labour has to make.

Will a Starmer government try to rejoin the EU?

I am among the first of those who would not trust Keir Starmer to put the interests of the UK before the rose-coloured spectacles view of the EU. He was a leader of those who sought a second referendum in defiance of the 2016 verdict of the people. He is, therefore, among those who know better than the people; in other words, no democrat.

There is a significant and influential body of thought that determinedly regards Brexit as a disaster, despite the absence of any evidence for that judgement. These people don’t need evidence; it would only tell them things they prefer not to know. It is enough, for them, that they wanted to stay in the EU and the people decided otherwise. They are resolutely blind to the facts: that the UK’s exports to the EU have already recovered to pre-Brexit levels, that the UK economy has grown faster than Germany since Brexit, and that we are attracting much of the foreign investment that might have been expected to flow to the EU, because we are less concerned to protect existing producers and their status quo methods from new technology and competition. In short, the effect of Brexit is too small to detect in the context of the aftermaths of Covid and Ukraine.

I suspect that Starmer might be emotionally akin to those recusants who still write tediously repetitive letters to The Times to explain (without evidence) that Brexit has failed, the editors who unaccountably continue to publish them, and those columnists who take the same view. I really only read this stuff to remind myself of the proverb about those who will not see. I really should change my newspaper, but I keep hoping they’ll grow out of this.

Fortunately, the facts will interpose between even the most rigid EU ideologue and the behaviour suggested by the questioner. There is, of course, no way back to the series of exemptions that had already made our position within the EU peripheral years before we decided to leave. The UK is now a third country, like any other, and would need to follow the protocol for new members.

The opinion polls that suggest there is majority public support for rejoining the EU take an enormous hit as soon as respondents are informed that joining as a new member means replacing the pound by the euro and accepting the EU’s ridiculous one-size-fits-all monetary policy.

The numbers take another hit when people are informed that free movement of people would be reinstituted.

And that the EU would be allowed to resume their destruction of British fish stocks.

And that we would have to undo all the bilateral and multilateral trade deals that we have achieved since Brexit and throw away the opportunities that they offer.

The UK would also have to reverse the repeal of 1,000 EU laws that it has already achieved and pass thousands of new ones that the EU has promulgated since we left. While leavers deplore the UK government’s lethargy in scrapping economically-damaging left-over EU legislation, from the EU’s point of view we have failed to keep up with their relentless passion for minutely-detailed regulation and bureaucracy and have become deplorably lax.

And do remember that the national veto has not existed in the vast bulk of policy areas since the Treaty of Lisbon, no matter what some EU enthusiasts seem to believe. If the EU passes a bad law, you still have to enact it unamended. In effect, our parliament is reduced to a rubber stamp.

But, of course, that means our mollycoddled politicians would be able to give up their pathetic attempts to think for themselves and resume the comfort blanket of blaming the EU for every badly-judged new rule instead. So we can’t say that nobody would benefit. The politicians would be paid to do nothing.

And you thought they were pretty good at that already? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

Identity Politics

 There is an unfortunate tendency in the UK to import social movements from the US, where society, and history, is very different.

Amongst these tendencies has been the substitution of identity politics for community politics. Instead of everyone uniting for the common good, this philosophy incites competitive victimhood amongst arbitrary groupings, focussing on what divides society (or can be made to divide it) rather than on what unites us. The foolish assumption is, that all people sharing a particular common characteristic are the same and have the same problems, needs and complaints.

The secondary, even more insidious, message is that non-members of the said arbitrary group have historically cherished enmity to its members and continue to discriminate against them today.

I cannot speak to the relevance of such thinking to The USA, though it seems to me that it can hardly be constructive anywhere. I do believe, however, that having crossed the Atlantic and found themselves largely irrelevant to British society, such movements have focussed on exaggerating any problems that can be found in order to justify their own continued existence.

Moreover, by taking the sort of public protest action that creates maximum annoyance and irritation to the uninvolved general public, they are succeeding in creating, by way of backlash, precisely the problems against which they supposedly protest.

I am reminded that, over a century ago, Booker T. Washington pointed out what one might today regard as the beginnings of the race relations industry. There were people, he said, who made it their business to complain about problems, but did not actually want them solved, because the problems provided them with influence and income as protesters.

An Election is Announced

(With acknowledgements to Sydney Carter's "Down Below".)


Well you’re working in the dark, when you vote
Not like walking in the park, when you vote
All the bastards lie to you
And you ‘ates ‘em through and through
And they won’t do nowt fer you, when you vote

Oh, they say that things will change, when you vote
Over policies wide-ranged, when you vote
But the fact is you’ll be caught
And your hopes will come to naught
And the only change is short, when you vote.

Oh, they say they’ll turn the page, when you vote
It’s the start of a new age, when you vote
But it’s goin’ to piss you off
When some new throats starts to quaff
And it’s new snouts in the trough, when you vote.

There ain't nobody to trust, when you vote
Cos the bleedin’ systems bust, when you vote
They’re supposed to work for you
But there ain’t one as ‘as a clue
And the truth cannot break through, when you vote.

But we’ll all just go along, and we’ll vote
By the nose be led 'eadlong, ‘til we vote
Then we find the bright new way
Looks a lot like yesterday
And the bastards get to stay, when you vote.