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No, they did not serve tea; they did not serve cucumber sandwiches or buns or scones. No tea was dumped into the Channel. There were no hand-made cool signs, as an American correspondent put it; there were no signs or placards at all. In fact, it was, as the slightly amateurish pictures show, an extremely well attended fringe meeting with an enthusiastic audience, most of whom had come running from other meetings, main or fringe, that a party conference provides. Most of them were going on to other meetings or dinners.

As it happens, I am a veteran of packed fringe meetings. There were the early European Foundation meetings, at one of which every fire regulation was broken and the Head of the Commission’s London office, having unwisely left the room, could not be allowed back in as there was quite literally not a square inch of space. “Health and safety” we told him with big grins on our faces and delegates who also could not get in laughed. The Conservatives have always seen themselves as somewhat rebellious as far as the EU is concerned – they laugh at the discomfiture of officials.

Then there were all the Save Britain’s Fish meetings at both Labour and Conservative conferences where the full horror of the Common Fisheries Policy was carefully analyzed and dissected to packed rooms. And what good came of it all? We still have the CFP with successive governments whining about the reform that they are working on. The only sensible policy the Conservatives ever had, was discarded by the Boy-King as soon as he became the leader.

Today’s event proved something unexpected, however. It seems my history teachers who were told to slant everything towards a Marxist interpretation were actually right: the British establishment does have an uncanny ability to mould and remould itself, to include anybody who might challenge them and to co-opt potential oppositions. We have seen this with the blogosphere, that has been converted into the clogosphere plus a few supporting players with those of us who do not want to be inside the tent ever diminishing in importance. Now we see it with a potential tea party movement. Before it could even start, it was pre-empted by a fringe meeting at a Conservative Party conference, addressed by a Conservative politician and presided over by another Conservative politician, Roger Helmer MEP.

The rest is posted on Your Freedom and Ours with a couple of pictures I took.

There will be another, more serious attempt to launch a British tea party movement in Brighton today. Not only, being British, tea will be served (and cucumber sandwiches, I hope) but the whole event is promising to be rather tame and controlled unlike that anarchic, grass-roots colonial movement.

The tea party is being imported into Brighton by The Freedom Association, a national organization, first set up by the McWhirter twins back in the seventies to fight trade union power. It is a fringe event at the Conservatives’ Spring Conference and will be addressed by the ubiquitous Daniel Hannan MEP. Almost certainly, most of the attendees will be Conservatives who are in Brighton for the conference.

All of which makes me hum and ha but I shall go anyway. There has to be somebody there who has not been co-opted by the political establishment. More on this on Your Freedom and Ours.

How many times does one have to keep repeating that? All right, let me clarify that statement. Of course, there is a Europe as a geographical concept – it is a subcontinent of the huge Eurasian continent. There is also such a concept, though it is hard to define, as European culture, which melds into European history and European thought. One gets into serious difficulties with it as European culture and European thought are so varied in themselves.

What there is not and never has been is a Europe as a political concept. There is no such thing as European politics, though there is, obviously EU politics, a completely different concept, often alien to European history and traditions. Therefore, there can be no such thing as a European Tea Party Movement. Not if ever so many people join the group on Facebook; not if Real Clear Politics or Glenn Reynolds write about it.

It would be pointless to talk about tea parties as a political concept in Europe even if such a thing as Europe existed politically speaking. No-one would understand it. In Britain tea party (as in vicarage, for instance) means something quite different; on the Continent it means nothing at all. In fact, history tells us that on the Continent tax or bread riots tend to have further reaching consequences than the American tea parties have done so far.

The biggest problem, however, more or less understood by David Ignatius on Real Clear Politics is that each country’s problems are separate and different, even though they all share the understanding that the government’s role is to spend, spend, spend, an understanding they share with most other countries in the world. One suspects that, like Henry Kissinger, David Ignatius would feel happier if there were one European fiscal authority – easier to draw parallels.

What would a European tea party movement oppose? The European Union? Maybe, but it is hardly the biggest spender; its role in the destruction of the economies of European countries is a little more subtle: it used control and regulation to further integration.

Individual governments? Why would a European movement care about individual European governments? I see no point in going on a demonstration that would demand fiscal conservatism from the French or Greek governments. Let the people of those countries worry about that, as long as we do not have to pay.

All this talk of European this, that and the other or European elites, as Glenn Reynolds writes, comes to the same conclusion: we need some kind of a European political entity, a concept many of us radically disagree with. But the truth is that we cannot have a European tea party movement unless we have a European state, a European government and a European polity. People who support or call for a European tea party go along with the notion of a European state.

Cross-posted from Your Freedom and Ours

I missed out on the Christmas and Hannukah wishes but ought to be in time with the new year ones. It will be our turn to have an election next year (May, I am still saying despite the media hoopla around the word March). It is likely to be an interesting one: we have a government that is more disliked than any I can recall and yet we also have an opposition that just cannot get the support. We also have an electorate that has been seriously angered by all main-stream politicians and has realized, if somewhat hazily, that as long as we are in the EU it makes precious little difference who one wants for. In the last three elections turn-out was extremely low. We do not know what will happen next year. Another low turn-out? Rising vote for the smaller parties like UKIP? It can happen.

The Conservatives are still likely to come back with more seats than any other party but not necessarily with an overall majority. And so what if they do get into government. Remember what Hilaire Belloc wrote about another election?

The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)
Broke – and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

Happy New Year to all.

Happy Thanksgiving to all from this side of the Pond. We are having a Thanksgiving Teaparty by Lincoln’s statue in Parliament Square tomorrow afternoon. Any reader of this posting who will be in or near London is welcome. It will start at 4 and go on till 8 so there will be plenty of time to go on to other events though there will be food.

It occurred to me that what with one thing and another the significance of today’s referendum in Ireland may be lost on many readers of Chicagoboyz. Somehow Ireland, both North and South, have become less important on the other side of the Pond, now that Sinn Fein has been safely installed in the Ulster Assembly. There are, however, other issues at stake.

Let me recap. The Lisbon Treaty is a regurgitated version of the Constitution for Europe, the previous treaty agreed on by the previous Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) of the European Union. The Constitution, a whacking document of several hundred pages that laid down rules for just about everything though, to be fair, many of them had already existed in other treaties, was rejected in two referendums in 2005. The two were in core members of the European Union: France and Netherlands.

There followed a period of flurried activity, led by the Commission, specifically by the ditzy Margot Wallstrom, who is in charge of communications, that is, propaganda. She even set up a blog, which was so dull that even the eurosceptics who kept posting responses to her fluffy pieces, gave up after a while.

The idea was that the EUrocracy would have a dialogue with the people of Europe and find out their opinion. The fact that the opinion had already been given in two countries seemed to be irrelevant. In the fullness of time there was another IGC and another treaty, the Lisbon one, which was, apart from a few unimportant details, exactly the same as the Constitution. Because it was laid out differently, all EU member states were told that this was different and, therefore, there will be no referendums, even though serious constitutional changes were being proposed.

The Irish Supreme Court decided that, according to the Irish constitution, there will have to be a referendum and one duly took place. Well, blow me down. The people voted the wrong way and were told to vote again. The second referendum is taking place today and, naturally, we are all hoping that the Irish will prove to be as recalcitrant as they have been throughout their history.

In the meantime, all but two other member states have ratified. In Germany the parliament had to pass a number of laws to bring the German Constitution in line with the Lisbon Treaty as instructed by the country’s Constitutional Court. In the Czech Republic the treaty has been returned to the Constitutional Court by a number of Senators and the President is waiting for the decision. He is reluctant to sign but will probably have to if the legal decision goes the wrong way. Following that Poland will sign. This, of course, depends on an yes vote today in Ireland. If, on the other hand, the Irish vote no again, we shall have an interesting situation. Will the EU demand a third referendum or will they, as is much more likely, take this treaty off the table, push through as much of it as possible on the quiet and call another IGC to produce another document in a couple of years’ time.

Either way, the whole process has been incredibly painful for the European Union, its bureaucracy and supporters. The gloss has gone completely, the process is no longer inevitable and the nasty bits – lies, bullying and cheating to get their way – are showing.

For any glutton for punishment, I have more on Your Freedom and Ours.

Well, after all, you do not expect Americans to notice that the Second World War began on September 1939 (sort of, if you disregard the real beginning, that is the Nazi-Soviet Pact). After all, it did not hit the United States till December 6, 1941, though there were plenty who had come over to fight with Britain. There is a memorial to the pilots killed in the Battle of Britain in Grosvenor Square, and their names are also listed on the big BoB memorial on the Embankment.

However, here is my posting on Your Freedom and Ours on the start of the war as well as the importance of facing up to the past.

I am immensely grateful to Iain Murray (who is well known to Chicagoboyz, I am sure) for pointing out that it was a Spartan who first coined the phrase “De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est”. Indeed, it was Chilon of Sparta and that makes me feel a good deal better about the fact that I cannot think of single good thing to say of the recently deceased Senator Kennedy.

At first I was not going to post about him though like everyone else I felt nauseated by the paeans of praise, especially those coming from the BBC. Apparently one reporter even had the bad taste to say that the Senator never recovered from Chappaquiddick. Well, no, but then neither did Mary Jo Kopechne or her family.

Over on this side of the Pond many of us recall Kennedy’s support for the IRA, both politically and financially. We have not forgotten his visits here, his rudeness to our soldiers, his interference in British and Irish politics or the help he and his family gave NORAID.

As the day progressed I realized that there might be no mention of Kennedy’s rather curious relationship with President Gorbachev, whom he visited in 1986, allegedly to promote better understanding between the two countries. It would be nearer the truth to say that he went then and at other times and sent messages in before and after to promote his own and his party’s position.

Think of it: a United States senator apparently saw nothing wrong in negotiating with his country’s enemies in order to find the best way of defeating the President and undermine Congress because the government was formed by the other party.

I have more on this over on Your Freedom and Ours. I should dearly like to know how well this is known in the United States.

I am not sure how much of it has made its way across the Pond but there is a bit of palaver going on about the only thing that might interest our so-called representatives in the House of Commons, their remuneration. The trouble with the debate is that nobody can really agree or even understand what it is MPs are supposed to do. We know for certain that they do not do the two things that are definitely part of their job: legislation and holding the government to account. But beyond that it is all a bit muddy.

Here are links to two postings, one on Your Freedom and Ours, in which I discuss (well, rant about) MPs, their claims to more money and their complete lack of responsibility. The other one, on the Conservative History Journal blog, goes back to what Edmund Burke really said to the electors of Bristol when he became their Member of Parliament. It is not quite what many people think.

It comes to something when the Prime Minister of a country that is in the middle of a serious political, economic and, let’s face it, spiritual crisis can think of nothing better to do with his time than to become involved in a stupid Twitter campaign to persuade Americans that the NHS, well-known for its expense, incompetence and low standards (for a rich Western country) is absolutely wonderful.

Coupled with the most extraordinary hysteria that has once again pushed any notion of a real British debate about healthcare as far away from political discussion as possible, this has not been an edifying spectacle.

I have a rant with more details on Your Freedom and Ours. Enjoy.

All of us who can recall our childhood and have had to deal with children ourselves know the scenario. Child whines because everybody has something or other, does something or other, is going somewhere or other. Eventually, the parent, irritated beyond rationality says: “And if all those others told you to jump out of the window would you do it?”. Or words to that effect.

I thought of that again when I read Lex’s links to Megan McArdle and her extremely sensible comment about not wanting the state acquiring a bigger role in healthcare. “Nay, not even if all the other countries . . . well, all the cool countries, anyway . . . are doing it.” Clearly, I cannot intervene in the heated debate about American healthcare and the changes proposed by what seems to be known more and more widely as Obamacare. I do not live in the United States and, therefore, my knowledge is second hand, therefore, inadequate. (Though, I notice that a similar handicap with regards to Britain does not stop various people from commenting with … ahem … varying degrees of accuracy.)

However, I do know something about that argument of all the other countries … well, all the cool countries having something and, therefore, we must as well. In Britain we have had to put up with that inane argument over and over again as step by step we surrendered all that made the British legal, political and constitutional system not only different (not unique because other Anglospheric countries have developed along very similar lines) but much better.

Adversarial parliamentary democracy where debates are out in the open and subjects are, indeed, kicked about? No, no, no, must not turn health/education/name-your-subject into a political football. Look how they do it on the Continent. Well, how they do it is to make decisions behind closed doors and call it a consensus.

Adversarial legal system? Not what they have in other countries. Well, not in the cool other countries where we like going on holidays. We should have a procuratorial system, too. Don’t want to be left out of the game.

And so on, and so on. Yet the answer is so simple: our system is different from those other cool countries’ because it has grown differently over many centuries; it also happens to be considerably better. That’s it.

Tomorrow I shall go to London Library and collect my reserved copy of “The Forsaken” by Tim Tzouliadis, the tragic story of American workers who went to the “new paradise”, that is the Soviet Union in the early thirties and what happened to them. (Hint: it is not very pleasant.) After that, I shall have to read “Spies”, the latest in the revelations about the far-reaching Communist network in the United States of the thirties and forties. I have already read with great glee the revelations about I. F. Stone.

It would be awfully nice if at some point we could have a few revelations of that kind here and not have to rely on the Americans to give us the information. But what with our libel laws and paranoid secrecy, which makes it impossible to get hold of important documents, I cannot see that happening any time soon.

Meanwhile, I have re-read “In Denial” by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr about historians trying to wish away documents and evidence about Communism and its agents. Not only re-read but wrote about it on the Conservative History Journal blog. I’ll be glad to hear American reactions.

I am going to be early for once and wish a happy July 4 to all of you guys on that side of the Pond. I know things seem tough at the moment but I, for one, have great faith in America and in the Anglosphere in general. Even those unpleasant manipulations by the EU and President Sarkozy will not defeat the latter and, as for the former, you have had bad times before. So, have a good time and on with the motley.

My first reaction to the news that the Prince of Wales will be going to the D-Day celebrations after discreet negotiations and a “change of heart” on the part of Presidents Sarkozy and Obama was that he should not have given in but treated that bunch of self-publicists with the scorn they deserve.

I was wrong and the Prince was right. The three narcissists have already shown themselves to be puny and contemptible and the day is not about them but the veterans who will be glad to have the Prince there to represent the Royal Family. It is good to be generous and to place emphasis where it belongs.

Once again, Royal Family 1: Politicians 0. And that is how it should be. Let’s just hope the Prince will not go with President Obama to Dresden where the latter will almost certainly apologize for America (and Britain) doing their share in defeating Nazism.

Cross-posted from Your Freedom and Ours

As Lex, probably wisely, decided not to have any comments on his posting about No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor I thought I would put up a link to my own posting on the subject.

May I just add that there is no need to worry about Her Majesty: she will survive this snub and continue serenely on her way. The last politician who thought he could supplant her in people’s hearts and minds was Tony Blair. Ha! That’s all I can say, to quote Bertie Wooster. Ha!

Someone sent me an e-mail with the text of Oliver Cromwell’s speech to the pesky House of Commons in 1653. This was the Rump Parliament, the remnant of that inordinately long Long Parliament and Cromwell decided that they had outsat their welcome. He marched in with some troops, seized the Mace and said:

“…It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

“I command ye, therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. You have sat here too long for the good you do. In the name of God, go!”

And they went. One can’t help feeling that there is place for a Cromwellian action now for all sorts of reasons, not just the highly entertaining saga of MPs getting caught with their hands in the till. I hope that he will reappear in time to ban huge Christmas celebrations as well.

For the nth time this morning I received an e-mail this morning, asking me to sign a Number 10 petition that demands Gordon Brown’s resignation. This time I wrote back to say that there will be an election next year and this is called democracy.

I understand the petition is being promoted by Guido Fawkes but he does not need any links from me. The whole story shows how little even people who apparently exist within the political circle understand the workings of a state, a government or a body politic, namely this country’s.

Demanding that the elected Prime Minister resign through petition is on the level of saying that because 1 million people of whatever provenance marched against the war in Iraq, Tony Blair and his Cabinet should have changed their foreign policy.

People have every right to march and proclaim their point of view; they have the right to say that a war is not done “in their name”, whatever that might mean. But an elected government has the right to ignore that and, in any case, many of us can say that they were not marching in our name.

There is, furthermore, something distasteful from the point of view of a liberal constitutional democracy (of the kind we do not really have in Britain but would like to have) that political changes should be pleaded for in a petition to the strong man at the top.

While we are on the subject of elected government, let me deal with another canard, that Gordon Brown was not elected to be Prime Minister of this country. No he was not and neither is anybody ever. We do not have a presidential system and elect parties. The leader of the party with a majority (or, if there is a hung parliament, which there might be next year, the one that can form a majority) is asked by the Monarch to form the government. It is up to the party to decide who that leader is and, inevitably, we the voters have to take into account whether we like their choice or not.

If a Prime Minister resigns between elections the party in power chooses another leader who then becomes PM. If Gordon Brown is not the rightfully elected Prime Minister of this country then neither were Winston Churchill in 1940, Anthony Eden in 1955, Harold Macmillan in 1957, Alec Douglas Home in 1963, James Callaghan in 1976 or John Major in 1991.

It was, admittedly, very foolish of the Labour Party to bow to Brown’s paranoia and nominate him as leader without an internal party election. That was, however, an internal problem and, I have no doubt, the party will pay for it. As things stand, Labour is on track to losing the next election and I predict an extremely bloody civil war afterwards. The silencing of all opposition to Gordon will, undoubtedly, be brought up.

So what have we got? A highly unpopular government that did none of the good things it promised to do back in 1997 and managed to destroy the country’s economy, oppressing the wealth-creating private sector and increasing the bloated leach-like public sector. The mess is now so horrendous that even if the Conservative leadership were considerably more intelligent and talented than it is, one doubts they would be able to deal with it.

Gordon Brown goes from one messy situation to another, one disaster to another, one scandal to another. The Government is flailing around, exhibiting all the signs of a dying political entity.

If it goes on like this, it will most certainly die at the next General Election, which will be, as we predicted over and over again on EUReferendum, next May. Brown was not going to the country at any one of those dates helpful political pundits proposed – he was going to go to the wire and that is what he will do.

It doesn’t matter how many people sign that petition – the only thing that matters is how many people will put a cross against the various Labour candidates’ names and how many will put a cross against other candidates’ names.

This is called democracy. Live with it. And stop pestering people to sign stupid petitions.

Cross-posted from Your Freedom and Ours

Without agreeing with everything he said, I am an unashamed admirer of George Orwell’s, though my favourite writings are not the two famous novels but his various political and literary essays. I find that there is nothing more annoying than watching people reduce this hard-headed and strong-minded writer to mush.

The guilty party in this case is the National Film Theatre, an institution that shows many excellent and entertaining second-rate films from the past, which is good; it also provides notes of unsurpassed silliness that are examples of soggy-left and thoughtless political consensus.

I have lost track of the number of times some American producer, director or actor who had a highly successful career in Britain, on the Continent or, even, back in the United States has been described as being a blameless, liberal victim of “McCarthyite witch hunts”, with complete disregard of the difference between the Senate enquiry that was not in the slightest interested in Hollywood and the House Un-American Activity Committee (HUAC) and equally complete disregard of the fact that most of those “innocent” victims were, in fact, Communists who had preferred to lie on orders from the Party. Nor do we get any explanation as to who, if anybody, actually prevented these people from working in Hollywood studios.

Now it is Orwell’s turn to be dragged into this morass of half-truths and double-think. (He would have understood it very well and railed against the sogginess and dishonesty.)

In April the NFT will be marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of “1984” with films about Orwell, as well as a showing of the famous 1956 version with Edmond O’Brien, the less well-known 1954 TV play with Peter Cushing and the 1984 film with John Hurt. Fine. But what do the notes in the recently sent out programme say?

2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s classic dystopian vision of Britain.

…

In Orwell’s re-imagining of British life in the year 1984 the nation has become Airstrip One, a subsidiary of Oceania, one of three global superstates engaged in relentless warfare against one another. London is a fetid, near-derelict metropolis dominated by the monolithic buildings of the ruling Party, its slums battered by rockets fired from enemy states. The collective memory of life before the wars has been all but obliterated by the Party which shapes and monitors the lives of its workers while keeping the disorderly ‘proles’ in a state of controlled ignorance.

Dystopian vision? Re-imagining of British life? Is there not a word missing here, one beginning with the letter “c”? Orwell was not writing a dystopian vision and, while he was re-imagining life in Britain and, to some extent, warning about governments grabbing too much power, he was describing a very precise society.

The shortages, the denunciations, the Inner and Outer Party, the re-writing of history and throwing articles about unpersons into the memory hole, the biographies of imaginary shock workers and, above all, the permanent enemy Emmanuel Goldberg, obviously the figure of Trotsky – these are all aspects of Soviet society, of Communism. Clearly, as far as the NFT and its meandering, never-stepping-out-of-the-box programme organizers, Communism is just one of those unpleasant episodes that have to be thrown down the memory hole. Otherwise the left-wing vision of the world might be polluted.

(Astonishingly enough, this evening I heard an excellent talk given as introduction to Fritz Lang’s “The Testament of Dr Mabuse” by the writer and cinema critic Philip Kemp in which he openly equated Nazism and Stalinism. There were some murmurs in the audience but I could not make out whether these were noises of approval or of people getting the vapours. In my experience, this is a first for the National Film Theatre.)

This is based on a posting on Conservative History Journal blog

After all, I am becoming involved in this discussion and a posting might be preferable to responses on the discussion forum. This is cross-posted from the BrugesGroupBlog, which I run in parallel to my work on EUReferendum. As I explain elsewhere on it, the intention had been to make this blog a part of a structured research programme but that is not going to happen. So, it continues as a more or less personal political blog until I set up another one as part of a network Richard North and I envisage.
On EUReferendum my colleague, Richard North (often referred to by me as the boss) and I have expended a very large number of words on the Geert Wilders affair. It would, therefore, be seemly to call a halt to the flood and so I shall (albeit temporarily) as soon as I have discussed a couple of related issues.

My colleague has already written about the Conservative Party’s ridiculous reaction but there have been some developments there as chronicled by ToryBoyBlog, a.k.a. Conservative Home.

At first the Conservatives, laughably known as Her Majesty’s Opposition, kept quiet on the matter of a Dutch parliamentarian being stopped from taking up an invitation by two members of the House of Lords to explain his political views because another member of the House of Lords, who is waiting to be sentenced for dangerous driving that resulted in a death, was threatening violence. The threats were unlikely to have turned into reality but that is a separate issue. They were made. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been intriguing to read complaints on the right about the Democrats and their supporters blaming the Republicans for the financial mess, when, they argue, so much of it was the Democrats’ fault what with bad legislation, pressure on banks and refusal to agree on any kind of control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How is it possible to be that cynical and for the populace to be that credulous?

I suppose we shall not know just how credulous the populace is until the results start rolling in on November 4 – 5 but I could not help thinking back to the 1945 General Election in Britain, the one that Churchill’s Conservatives so shockingly lost. 

There is a great deal of rather vague historical rationalizing along the lines of people wanting a new order and the war democratizing the British society to an extent not known before. This rather clashes with what we know about the fifties but let that pass. There may have been a feeling that something new was required after a war of that magnitude, though the feeling did not last. 

What is far more rarely discussed is the dishonest Labour Party campaign that focused on the issue of “guilty men”. In not very subtle terms this was a campaign that blamed Britain’s unpreparedness for the war and, indeed, the fact that the war even happened on the Conservatives who had refused to rearm in the thirties, thus finding themselves unable to stand up to Hitler in 1938 and fighting a losing battle in 1939. After he had lost the election Churchill added his own version of the tale, which was substantially the same as the Labour one. Read the rest of this entry »