Catwoman: hostile, yet global

The "hostile environment" policy is a straightforwardly awful idea from straightforwardly awful people with straightforwardly awful consequences for the designated victims. But it also seems to form part of a wider agenda which is also awful, but not in quite such a straightforward way.

Exhibit A: 2012: Theresa "Catwoman" May "chooses her words with feline delicacy" as she tells her adoring Telegraph fanbase that "We're going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception":

Exhibit B: The sidebar of immigration stories which appears next to that same Telegraph interview. Nestling in among the stories about migrants rioting in Calais, swamping the country, stealing our jobs by working too hard, or being gypsies, there's an intriguing article headlined "New VIP visa service for wealthy foreigners", next to another pic of the kitten-heeled dominatrix:

Taken together, the two articles make very interesting reading:

...soon, she insists, [net migration] figures will fall, as restrictions on student and working visas are reflected in the statistics. “We are seeing the number of visas issued going down, but there is a lag between those and feeding through into the net migration figures...”

...Today though, her focus is on those who are in Britain illegally, and her language becomes uncharacteristically vivid. “The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration,” she declares....

...Ministers are creating a new visa system for global business leaders amid concerns that moves to tighten immigration rules are deterring “high-value” individuals from overseas.

Around 100 wealthy foreigners will initially be invited to join a new “bespoke” visa service which the Home Office said will ensure their passage through the UK border system is “swift and smooth.”

Members of the “GREAT Club” will get a personal “account manager” at the UK Visas and Immigration service to deal with their travel plans. The manager will arrange visa services “tailored to each individual’s needs at no extra cost”, the Home Office said.

Personal account managers for oligarchs, a Kafka-style bureaucratic nightmare for the "lower value individuals" from the Windrush and the EU who settled here under the mistaken impression that this was a country ruled by decency and fair play, rather than a private club where the rich and powerful get to shove everybody else aside as they push their way to the front of the queue.

If you ever wondered what sort of hybrid abomination will emerge from the apparently contradictary goals of creating a "global Britain"* which is simultaneously a "hostile environment" for those guilty of being insufficiently British, and insufficiently rich, these two articles paint a vivid picture.




*Again, sorry Northern Ireland - blame the people who came up with the phrase "global Britain." Although it looks as if you'll be getting your revenge on the "global Britain" mob, as their misty-eyed Empire 2.0 fantasies are shredded on contact with your border with the Irish Republic. It's a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls "the shear where uncaring reality meets uncompromising ideology". Or, as sombody once tweeted, rather magnificently, "there are unicorns as far as the eye can see. And many of them are eating cake":

“That’s not my Brexit! Its trade is too encumbered by tariffs.” pic.twitter.com/Fc1HssMZ3X

— Mike K (@mpk) 19 April 2018

Wake me up...

... I'm having this really disturbing dream where Ukip have turned the whole UK into a creepily unfunny, racist 1970s sitcom and put Jim Davidson in charge of the Foreign Office:

UK government guide advises people being deported to Jamaica to fake Caribbean accent to avoid attention

Wait a minute ... that was no dream...

The Windrush scandal is Theresa May’s creation, borne of an innate inability to equate ‘immigrant’ with ‘person’. It’s a hefty accusation, I know, but it makes sense of almost everything she’s done since 2010. Lying about a cat; Go Home vans; subsuming Ukip; EU citizens as cards.

— James O'Brien (@mrjamesob) April 17, 2018

Welcome to my nightmare.

Boris and Vlad's PR agency

Is this what Mrs Mayday meant by a "red, white and blue Brexit"?

Both Sanni and Wylie have also confirmed that the harvested information has been shared with Kremlin linked entities.

These could include the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St Petersburg, accused by Robert Mueller and the US Supreme Court of manipulating the Trump vote in the US.

With a budget of approximately $1.25 million, the Internet Research Agency is mostly funded by Oligarch Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, linked to the three state run TV networks in Russia and known by the Russian media as “Putin’s Chef.”

Prighozin, who held clandestine meetings with Robert Mercer in the Virgin Islands during the Trump Presidential Campaign, also has a major interest in Wagner Group, the corporate mercenary army implicated in war crimes in Donbas, Crimea and Syria.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned, together with his daughter Yulia and a British policeman, in Salisbury this month using a deadly nerve agent developed by the Russian military.

A source close to Skripal has said he was investigating the collusion between the Internet Research Agency, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL.

Roger Cottrell.

Having already photoshopped an image of Corbyn onto a red Kremlin background and - purely fortuitously - softened the outline of his cap to make it look like a fur hat, I presume that the BBC, in the interests of balance, will now be giving Boris, the Vote Leave Commissar, a similar Russia-themed graphic makeover?

What d'you mean "Nyet"?

Hmmm ... It's almost as if the British establishment will let a chap get away with almost anything, so long as he attended Eton or Marlborough.

Two games, two bloody difficult women

Ken Clarke did Theresa May a huge favour back in 2016, when he was overheard saying to a colleague, "Theresa is a bloody difficult woman, but you and I worked with Margaret Thatcher." First, he made himself look like a sexist throwback, while giving Mrs May a bit of free feminist credibility to appropriate in the spirit of #nastywoman, or "Nevertheless, she persisted."

Second, in a more specifically Conservative context, namechecking May in the same breath as Margaret Thatcher must, for many Conservatives, have sounded like the ultimate accolade. If they had any doubts before, the children of the Thatcher revolution probably shelved them at the prospect of Maggie 2.0 going forth to slay the Brussels dragon with one swing of her mighty iron handbag.

I'm no Conservative, and certainly no fan of Margaret Thatcher, but even I can see how Clarke's careless comparison must have burnished May's reputation at a critical time. After all, Thatcher fans can point to the negotiating record of Bloody Difficult Woman 1.0 and say "look, she went to Europe and got us our rebate." And they'd be right. That actually happened.

Of course, since the Tories booted up Maggie 2.0, AKA the Maybot, the new model has failed to extract any similar concessions from Europe. Disappointed Thatcher fans will probably put this failure down to her lacking the conviction and resolve of the original Iron Lady, but at this point, I'd start to disagree with them.

Yes, Margaret Thatcher negotiated some meaningful concessions from Europe where May, playing an even higher-stakes game, has so far failed. But I don't put May's failure down to personal deficiencies. Rather, I think that she's playing a different game to the one Thatcher won and, in this new game, the odds are stacked against her and the House almost always wins:

Here’s the idea: two-level game tactics, in which you reduce your win-set with a view to maximising the chances of your preferred option carrying the day, work if everyone prefers staying together over not finding a solution. This is known as a battle of the sexes game: John wants to go to the football game while Mary wants to go to the theatre, but both want to do something together rather than go alone. A battle of the sexes game is about the unequal distribution of outcomes when both want to cooperate. So, as long as the UK is in the EU, being a slightly recalcitrant member works in its favour because the rest of the EU wants a deal more than no deal.

While it works well as long as the UK wants to remain an EU member, the two-level game tactics backfire when you are negotiating leaving the EU. Drawing red lines when you don’t want to cooperate anymore is massively counterproductive, even if you negotiate among equals but certainly if the other party controls the process. Since there is de facto no second level anymore – the UK has had its Brexit vote and, as Theresa May reminds us almost daily, Brexit means Brexit – the UK no longer is able to use that as a way of forcing other EU member states to inch closer to its preferred outcome. It is, indeed, much simpler to negotiate opt-outs during forty years of membership than opt-ins when leaving the EU.

Thatcherites are, I think, wrong to put May's failure down to a lack of bloody mindedness. As far as I can see, she's got enough of that to be either praised for her resolve, or damned for her stubbornness, depending on your point of view. What she doesn't bring to the table is a deterrent. When Thatcher negotiated her rebate, her negotiating partners gave ground because they had a relationship to save. Mrs May has not only filed for divorce, but has said, repeatedly, "Divorce means divorce."

It reminds me of that bit in The Life of Brian, where a high priest, or some such cleric, is sentencing an old man to be stoned to death for blasphemously uttering the name of Jehovah. When the old man accidentally blasphemes some more, the cleric says "You're only making it worse for yourself!" No longer having anything to lose, the old man replies "Making it worse?! How could it be worse?! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!" In the end, the cleric himself ends up being stoned, but I guess it's a bit late to remind the vicar's daughter that some serious self-examination is generally recommended before casting the first stone:

"Unfortunately I'm too much of a weed to punch a woman..."

"... that's why I have a little man to do it for me."

Yesterday evening that good friend of the violent and racist far-right, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, spoke at University of the West of England Law Society. During the meeting one of his supporters punched a woman in an unprovoked attack. A video clip that shows the Rees-Mogg supporter attacking a woman is here: Rees-Mogg supporter’s punch.

Jacob Rees-Mogg - what a gent.

A less impeccably well-mannered chap would probably have slipped the fellow a few guineas to horsewhip the impertinent harridan. There's breeding for you.

__________________

Update - we seem to have a possible ID on the gallant pugilist who took it upon himself to defend our weedy overlord from the monstrous regement of women. The assailant's photograph seems to resemble one Paul Townsley, "a martial arts instructor from the Bristol area who has shared his support for Rees-Mogg in a change.org petition to have Rees-Mogg replace Theresa May as PM":

Interesting, if true. Whether or not the identification proves to be correct, I have no doubt the ever-chivalrous Mr Rees-Mogg will be swift to condemn the white-shirted ruffian who turned a peaceful, if boisterous, disagreement into a vulgar brawl by raising his hand to a lady in anger.

__________________

Update 2 - It seems that Rees-Mogg superfan Paul Townsley was the agent provocateur responsible for the scuffle. The only detail still unresolved is whether Townsley lashed out in a purely private capacity, or whether the Milksop for North East Somerset had engaged Mr Townsley's services as a bodyguard, in order to protect himself from being challenged by nasty women and other horrid proles who might make him blub. 

Come to think of it, there is another mystery here. Namely, why the Prime Minister is allowing herself to be pushed around by a self-declared weed like Rees-Mogg. Go on, Theresa, you could take him, easy. Here, I'll hold your coat. Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

The special relationship

Racist pillock who called Africans "piccaninnies" with "watermelon smiles" supports racist pillock who called African countries "shitholes."

The USA and the UK. Two countries divided by a common outrage.

The sincerest form of flattery

Here’s an idea: let’s abolish the wheel. Let’s escape the tyranny of the circular device, and spend the money saved on axles, spokes and hubs on — oh, I don’t know — the National Health Service (NHS). Let’s take back control of rotation! But wait a minute. This can’t be done overnight. We shall still need some means of transporting ourselves and our goods until we have formally renounced the wheel, but before we have agreed on a new device. There’ll probably need to be an “implementation period” in which we remain “aligned” with the existing circular format.

Then, when we’ve finally got rid of the old system — let freedom ring! — we’ll need a new, bespoke mechanism. What we’ll want is our own round component that rolls around an axis; an independently designed disc that turns reliably to enable easy movement. Something that gyrates smoothly along the ground. I wonder what we should call it.

Matthew d’Ancona, in a piece titled "Theresa May’s new Brexit campaign is a mirage", published in the Gulf Times, where they presumably know a thing or two about mirages.

What seems to be going on is a reversed version of the branding exercise that a certain discount supermarket does when it wants to make its cheaper own-brand products look as close as possible to their popular branded equivalents, without actually crossing the line into outright counterfeiting:

Alcafé Gold Roast is a work of fiction. Any similarity to other brands of coffee, instant or gold, is purely coincidental.

But where the discount retailer wants its own products to look just like their almost-identical equivalents, the Brexit Delivery Team want their product to look completely unlike the thing they're desperately trying to duplicate in excruciating detail:

Government: "We are proud to announce an innovative new form of circular component, intended to rotate on an axle bearing."

Every Reman and Leave voter who's still awake: "It's a wheel, isn't it?"

Government: "No, it's totally not a wheel. Our old wheel was blue, with yellow stars on it. This is an entirely novel type of component - look, it's red, white and blue!"

Still, at least the government has found an excellent way to unite the whole country - simultaneously patronise and disappoint everybody who voted to leave the EU and everybody who voted to stay. Anyway, good luck trying to get your novel innovation past the patent office, guys.

Conservative home and away

Daniel Hannan raised a few eyebrows this week when he used a Consevative Home article to vent about his fellow Brexiteer, Arron Banks. According to Hannan, it was the official campaign, Vote Leave, wot won it. In contrast, Hannan called the Arron Banks-funded Leave.EU campaign a "hapless and hopeless" "wrecking operation" which did nothing to help the Leavers win, but only functioned "as a vehicle to promote himself [Arron Banks] and Nigel Farage."

There's a perfectly rational reason for Hannan's attack. The media are delving into where Banks got the money that propped up Ukip and, along with the Electoral Commission, are looking at allegations  that officially separate pro-Brexit campaign groups illicitly colluded to share money and resources in order to breach campaign funding limits. The main reason for the article is to distance Hannan and his fellow Vote Leave Tory Brexiteers from the dodgy-looking geezers of Ukip and Leave.EU.

"There have been technical investigations into both Leave and Remain on compliance issues. But it’s Banks who is attracting the most fevered speculation about where his money came from. No proof of wrongdoing has been found, but the lurid nature of the accusation is being used to suggest that Leave won improperly.

To repeat, Banks’s outfit was not Vote Leave, or even an ally of Vote Leave...

...As far as the Electoral Commission’s investigation goes, Banks is as entitled as anyone else to the presumption of innocence. Being a boastful, belligerent man-child doesn’t make you a Russian agent."

In other words:

"You can't prove he did anything (we hope), but even if you find out that he did do something, he's got nothing to do with us. Move along, nothing to see here." 

So far, so Mandy Rice-Davis.

But the string of insults about the "hapless and hopeless" campaigning of the "boastful, belligerent man-child" reminds us that this is deeply personal, too. It's also the latest round in a long and bitter feud of easily-bruised egos taking place in the exclusive bubble inhabited by millionaire political donors and the politicians who court them. It's been going on at least since Banks stopped giving money to the Conservatives and started funding Ukip, but really came to a head when William Hague said that he'd "never heard" of the former Tory donor, causing Banks to increase his donation to Ukip from £100,00 to £1 million out of spite, or wounded self-importance.  For the careerists in the Conservative family, the political is personal.

It's a bit like watching members of a highly dysfunctional family plotting and squabbling over which one of them is going to inherit the family house. Only they're all so intent on making sure that no other sibling gets the house that none have noticed that the house itself is on fire. From the perspective of an observer on the other side of the pond, the flames engulfing the family mansion are only too obvious:

"The world recently commemorated the centennial of the Russian Revolution, which resulted from the flagrant incompetence of that country’s ruling class in confronting a moment of overwhelming national crisis. The barricades are not yet out in the streets of modern-day London, but a certain sense of déjà vu is appropriate. At the least, we are likely witnessing the slow-motion suicide of the Conservative Party, and, conceivably, of British conservatism more broadly defined.

In the British case, the crisis involves the nation’s referendum vote in June 2016 to withdraw from the European Union. Opinions may differ about the virtues of Brexit as an idea—I opposed it—but once it was decided, most everyone agreed that the process of extraction had to be implemented with great care and single-minded dedication. The actual response of the Conservative government has been deplorable to the point of unforgivable—inept, slipshod, insouciant, and ignorant of even the basic realities of law and process."

Philip Jenkins, writing for The American Conservative, was just getting into his stride there. Just wait until he gets down to the nitty-gritty of the "victory" Vote Leave and Leave.EU are both claiming credit for:

"After the referendum, Theresa May emerged as prime minister with a firm commitment to the principle “Brexit means Brexit.” Accordingly, she chose leading Brexit campaigners for key positions, including Boris Johnson as foreign secretary and David Davis as head of the new department in charge of exiting the European Union (DExEU) and chief negotiator of withdrawal. Liam Fox carries responsibility for international trade, which includes negotiating new agreements outside the old EU framework.

Painfully early, it became apparent that none of this Gang of Four had a clue of what they talking about in relation to Europe, nor did they understand the basic principles by which the EU worked. It is not so much that they approached the key issues wrongly—they did not even perceive them as issues. Throughout the referendum campaign, Brexiteers had trivialized the question of future relationships with the EU, suggesting that these would easily be decided in high-level summits within weeks rather than years. There was therefore not the slightest need to prepare detailed negotiating principles. As Johnson explicitly stated, the new British relationship with Europe would be exactly what it was at present, although omitting some of the features he found unpalatable, such as unrestricted EU immigration.

When Britain invoked Article 50, no government figure grasped the implications. Until quite recently, Johnson and Davis mocked the notion that Britain might have to pay a penny for the divorce bill. (The British government is now admitting a liability of some tens of billions, a sum that will definitely increase.) When the reborn Irish Question finally surfaced in their minds, Davis presented a vision of an invisible border made possible by as-yet undeveloped high technology, a prospect that has been commonly derided as magical thinking. Oh, and remember those vast new trading empires outside Europe, with all those lucrative deals being signed almost immediately? There’s no sign of any movement in that direction."

Come to think of it, my analogy of a dysfunctional family squabbling over the inheritance was altogether too kind. Vote Leave and Leave.EU arguing about who won the referendum are more like a pair of arsonists both wanting all the credit for burning down the house. "It would never have happened without me!", boasts box of matches guy. "But he was hapless and hopeless!" counters can of paraffin guy, "I was the one who did all the heavy lifting!" While all around, law-abiding folk shake their heads and wonder how anybody can be so thoughtlessly delinquent as to claim credit for replacing a perfectly good house with a useless pile of blackened, smouldering timbers.

Blue planet in crisis

Doubts around Theresa May’s leadership trigger sharp falls in Sterling: sea turtles "concerned."

Probably just another headline/image pairing mismatch by Google News's algorithm, although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to hear that even marine reptiles in the far-off Pacific are shaking their scaly heads in disbelief at the sheer magnitude of the British government's omnishambolic implosion.

Predators, scavengers and parasites

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Swift! thou shouldst be living at this hour.

The most interesting thing about the Spreadsheet of Shame isn't the identities of the various alleged gropers, harassers and adulterers (it's easy enough to find an unredacted copy if you really care). What's worth your attention is the wider ecology, the food chain which supports both the alleged sex pests and the people who compiled the spreadsheet. Like the mis-selling of payment protection insurance, the whole situation is best seen as a system for turning a bug (people being mis-sold a useless product) into a feature (the profits made by the "Have you been mis-sold PPI?" industry). In this case, the bug is sexual misbehaviour and the feature is the ability of a party machine to discipline and control party members.

Appropriately enough, people who use their power and influence to sexually coerce others get called "sexual predators", which is as good a label as any for their place in the food chain. You can pick your own label for the folk who use the predators' misbehaviour for their own advantage. Possibly "scavengers", although I think "parasites" works better, because parasites can weaken their hosts, control their behaviour, or  kill them (I don't think that party bosses literally kill politicians, but I'm sure they've occasionally killed political careers by leaking the damaging details they have on the personal lives of uncooperative MPs).

I do wonder whether there's much of a moral difference between the list-keeping parasites and the predators. For example, if we assume that terms like "inappropriate", or "handy" extend to include activities that the law would define as sexual assault, then who's worse, the assailant, or the person who knows all about the assault, but lets the assailant continue getting away with it, so long as they remain politically cooperative? Tough call.

Although I don't think this sort of thing technically counts as blackmail, it looks pretty damn close. As I understand it, to prove blackmail you need to establish four things. The blackmailer must:

1. demand something from the victim (in this case, political cooperation)
2. use menaces (legally, "menaces" can include physical threats, but could simply be threats to expose secrets)
3. make an unwarranted demand (coercing somebody into voting for something they don't believe to be right sounds unwarranted to me)
4. intend "to make a gain for himself or another or have intent to cause a loss to another."

When it comes to the last test of making a gain, or causing a loss, it's my understanding that the law only covers the gain and loss of money or other property,  not the gain of something more intangible like political control or power (source). So I don't think this is legally blackmail, but three out of four ain't bad and it's certainly morally dubious. If the suspected activities are abusive or coercive, the list-makers should be going to the police, in order to protect actual and potential victims. If the compromising activities were legal, consensual, but just very embarrassing, then applying pressure might not be illegal but it seems like a coercive abuse of power.

The sexual misbehaviour of MPs doesn't concern me much, unless it tips over into coercion and assault, (in which case, throw the book at 'em), but it's a bit of a joke to imagine that I live in a representative democracy when the misbehaviours and quirks of our elected representatives are weaponised to bully them out of voting according their conscience and judgement. Even the suspicion that this is going on degrades our politics - actual liars and crooks can feel at home and flourish in a low-trust environment where people suspect that any of their representatives might be acting under the influence of coercion (and also "not technically" bribery - don't forget those promises of future promotion and peerages for the more obedient boys and girls).

If only it was as quick and easy to pull the plug on this real house of cards as it was on its fictional counterpart.

When I said "enemy" I meant "friends", obvs

For Christ's sake,  Philip, it's Boris who's in charge of the diplomacy! Just remember that and everything will be fine...

Prime Minister threatens to "strangle Foreign Secretary like a dog"...

... is what I call a headline. But handed this juiciest of sound bites on a silver platter, the BBC's James Landale boringly opted to title his think piece, inspired by the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards,  "Can Theresa May resist temptation to mock Boris?" (the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind "no" - see Betteridge's law of headlines).

Purists might object to my abuse of scare quotes around an indirect quotation, but I reckon my paraphrase is about as accurate a reflection of the substance of Mrs May's hearty banter as the stuff you'd see in most headlines:

But it was what Mrs May said about Boris Johnson that struck me most. Picking up on his reference to Lady Heseltine's aggressive Alsatian, the prime minister looked directly at her foreign secretary - I was directly in the eye line - and said: "Boris, the dog was put down... (pause)... when its master decided it wasn't needed any more."

Touching though it is to see a shared love of canine asphyxiation bringing the Europhile Lord Heseltine and Mad Mrs Brexit together in perfect harmony, I thought there was something far more revealing in Landale's piece.

@realDonaldTrump

"Theresa May should not back Boris Johnson. He'll cheat on her like a dog & she should choke him like a dog"

No, not even the bit where The Boris (another politician who knows words and has the best words) predicted that Brexit would be a "titanic success" (presumably with a Celine Dion ballad of its very own). No, this:

Now every government has a court jester and Boris Johnson will never be able to escape that title. But his role in this government is crucial. He is there to convince the international community that Britain is not turning its back on the world post Brexit, that Britain has a positive role to play in global affairs.

And to do that he needs to be taken seriously. Many foreign politicians and diplomats that I speak to tell me they are pleasantly surprised when they meet the foreign secretary for the first time. 

They talk of the man behind the caricature - the cultured, over-educated intellectual who often speaks a bit of their language and who can be thoughtful when he is not gripped by banter.

The problem is that many others - who have not met the foreign secretary in person - often still see him as a kind of upmarket Nigel Farage, a Eurosceptic clown with clout. 

If you thought that The Boris was just a racist assclown, talking incontinent drivel, you'd be wrong. It's actually much worse than that. The Boris is apparently a grown-up man, capable of tying his own shoelaces, passing the port in the correct direction and swapping amusing anecdotes and quotes from Virgil with foreign ambassadors over trays of canapés, Ferrero Rocher, or whatever the hell it is they graze on at fancy diplomatic soirées. The Boris is only pretending to be a racist assclown, talking incontinent drivel, because he thinks this will win him the support of the common people, who he clearly views as easily-distracted bigots with short attention spans.

I suppose we should be grateful for gossipy, privately-educated establishment journalists like James Landale for twitching back the curtain and giving the rest of us a tantalising little glimpse of the sheer contempt in which our cynical, manipulative "betters" hold plebs like us.

The expendables

If you believe what Arron Banks says, the insurance tycoon and Tory-turned-Ukip donor has almost run out of patience with the 'kippers. He says he's unhappy with the poor quality of their current leadership contenders, who apparently don't live up to the high standards of freaking lunacy demonstrated by his preferred candidate, Raheem Kassam, alumnus of Brietbart's School of Bullshit and Wingnuttery.

If you still believe the word of a Brexiteer, you may also be interested in corresponding with an entirely trustworthy Nigerian gentleman, currently in possession of a large fortune, which he's only too happy to entrust to your safe keeping, just as soon as you've given him your bank account details.

Personally, I don't believe a word of it. I think it's got less to do with the calibre of the leadership candidates than with the fact that Ukip has outlived its usefulness. The referendum's over. The next election will probably be in 2020.* If (God help us) Brexit happens, it's the Conservatives who will deliver it, not a squabbling bunch of punch-drunk fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists with one MP to their name.

Ukip were useful so long as there were voters to be hoodwinked and and an "anti-establishment" bandwagon to be ridden. But now it's not about voters any more. It's about legal red tape and the urgent need to bypass Parliamentary scrutiny and how much public money will be needed to bribe the bankers and the motor manufacturers and any other group of firms we can't afford to lose, to stay where they would have stayed anyway, if we'd taken the simple precaution of not expressing our frustrations through an irreversible act of eye-wateringly painful self-harm.

If Brexit was the pet project you bought, then I'm pretty sure you'd want to give your support to the people in government who can make it happen, which is why I think Banks is probably just going to be the first of the ex-Tory backers who created Ukip to give up on them, now that the Conservatives have become suffiently Ukip-like to do Brexit.

I suspected that something like this was about to happen, but I still might be proved wrong - in fact, I hope I am wrong. As somebody who never voted for Brexit, I'd far rather see Banks, Sykes, Wheeler and the other moneybags behind Brexit waste their money by throwing it at a flaky, divided fringe party, rather than propping up the finances of a government with the power to make the looming catastrophe actually happen.




*I don't believe that Theresa May is in any hurry to go to the country, despite the opposition's current problems - even Mrs "Brexit means Brexit" knows that some seriously unpopular unintended consequence of Brexit might pop up at any moment, which is why she's so keen to trigger Article 50 before too many people turn against the thing she's declared it her sacred duty to deliver.

One nation

Theresa May's one nation Conservatism is a funny old thing: 

"Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public. They find their patriotism distasteful, their concerns about immigration parochial, their views about crime illiberal, their attachment to their job security inconvenient."

Rhetorically, she's standing up for the broad mass of "ordinary folk" against a terrible elite who keep oppressing them with their merciless liberalism.

First, there's something a bit dodgy about the assertion that patriotism is something that the "common" people do and elites only sneer at - it shouldn't have taken a great deal of thought to come up with examples of distasteful flag waving by unarguably privileged members of the elite. Do you, by any chance, remember this guy, Theresa?

You might counter that The Racist Floor Mop wasn't the sort of authentic working class hero patriot May was praising, but just a cynical politico who thought that the proles, like like those famously "cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies", would be easily distracted by a bit of patriotic rah-rah. I couldn't possibly comment.

But there are plenty more examples of patriotism among the definitely-not-downtrodden. The sort of folk who can afford a holiday cruise aren't exactly living from week to week on zero hours contracts, yet on some British cruise liners, you can roll up to the bar when the ship is due to pull out of port, grab yourself a Pimms,  and join in a bit of flag-waving in a "sail away" knees-up event to a pumping soundtrack of "Rule Britannia" and sundry other patriotic tunes.

And speaking of patriotic tunes, I don't expect that many of the smartly turned out flag-wavers who join the chorus of "Land of Hope and Glory" at the Last Night of the Proms come from rundown sink estates:


But, rhetorically at least, May's Conservatism is all about solidarity and inclusivity and definitely not about one group of people looking down on the other lot. So remember, working class, people like us definitely don't look down on people like you.

But don't you worry, aspirational middle classes - we're going to open lots of lovely new grammar schools, so your precious darlings won't have their grades pulled down by those nasty, disruptive poor kids.

But don't you worry either, proles hard-working families - the grammar school system won't condemn your kids to a second class education. We can definitely promise that when we divide schools into ones that the well-coached children of the sharp-elbowed middle classes can get into by passing an exam and ones with no entry requirements, people are so not going to look down on the schools that you don't have to pass a test to get into as somehow second rate, because ... reasons.

Like I said, Mayist one nation Conservatism is a funny old thing, the funniest bit being how surprisingly similar it is to old-fashioned divide-and-rule.

Britain's Olympians meddle

No, I didn't mean to write "medal." Some people have been having great fun imagining what's being discussed by the Olympian intellects attending today's Cabinet Brexit thought shower. Here's my favourite so far:

@DavidAllenGreen TM:"What Brexit learnings can we take from the success of our Olympians?"
"Start with four years' careful preparation?"

— Graham Smith (@cyberleagle) 31 August 2016

And there's plenty more where that came from. Again, via Jack of Kent.

Leave it to Beaver

"Britain torn between blatant racism or insidious racism" writes John Shafthauer at The Canary, proving the folks at the Daily Mash haven't completely monopolised the art of the pithy spoof headline.*

Good to see that reports of satire's death have been greatly exaggerated - at least it's a bit more to the point than spray painting a Vote Leave poster to read "Vote Beaver":

Mind you, it may not have been the most incisive satirical comment ever, but the priceless look on Angry Vote Leave Man's face does make the graffiti'd comment worthwhile. And I suppose even the beaver angle does have satirical possibilities:

Speaking on behalf of Vote Boris Leave, Boris Johnson has claimed that "If the people of Britain vote for Brexit, everyone will definitely get a free beaver." In reply, David Cameron mocked the Leave camp's failure to meet its own "no ifs, no buts" pledge to increase net beaver migration to more than the "tens of thousands."

The vote to decide the next leader of the Conservative Party whether the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, or remains a member, will be held on June the 23rd.

* Update - although I think the Mash might just have raised the bar with "Britons demand to live in medieval village surrounded by a wall." Maybe I'll leave that sort of thing to the professionals in future...

None the wiser

 I don't understand what these people are playing at:

Ukip leader Nigel Farage has urged the Leave campaign to focus on immigration rather than economics and trade. "If we debate economics and trade, we can go round in circles for weeks and the public will be none the wiser," he said.

It comes after a "shaky" week for the Out campaign, says The Guardian.

The Week

The specific bit I don't understand is this. They want people to vote to get out of the EU. So we can assume that they've already got the votes of the True Believers who are going to vote leave in the bag - where else are those people going to go?

Then Outers have a few days when they make fools of themselves and the country with borderline racist comments about the President of the USA and suggestions that Dominic Raab (AKA "Who?") knows more about how US trade policy is likely to pan out then the actual President of the USA.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that after such a shaky week, full of ridiculous drivel that could only be swallowed by the truest, most fanatical, most uncritical of True Believers, while frightening off the undecided, that they might decide to focus on the sort of issues that would attract floating voters, widening their appeal, rather than on a narrow core-vote anti-immigrant strategy, which seems like the last thing they need right now?

But there's no mention of the sort of issues that might possibly win over a wider coalition of people with doubts about the EU. They could, for instance, have mentioned the catastrophically mismanaged Eurozone (we're not in, but it hardly gives you confidence in EU institutions), the democratic deficit, the shameful pandering to the increasingly despotic Turkish president and TTIP. But, no, it's the same old narrow appeal to the Ukip / Tory Eurosceptic base.

It's almost as if they don't want to win. Which is fine by me.

Back to basics

So John Whittingdale dated a dominatrix and a porn star and organised some parliamentary "research" trips to lap dancing clubs? As scandals go, it's not exactly the Panama Papers - what the guy got up to between the sheets is surely more of a "private matter" than a Prime Minister, whose family stuck its wealth in an tax-avoiding offshore trust, lobbying to block regulation of tax-avoiding offshore trusts.

But although it's not important, the Whittingdale Affair is at least entertaining. Anyone with a long enough memory to remember how John Major's "back to basics" campaign was brought down by the sexual antics of his ministers, has just got to love the fact that John Whittingdale is a member of the Cornerstone Group, a collection of Conservative MPs who have chosen to dedicate themselves to "traditional values."

The Cornerstone Group has chosen itself a motto - "faith, flag and family" - which sounds horribly like something out of Franco-era Spain, so I reckon that if we're looking at a return to the Nineties with a spot of Back-To-Basics hanky-panky and tabloid mockery, it really couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of people:

Cruel and unusual

This is how replacement flesh unit work and pensions secretary, Stephen Crabb has voted on Welfare and Benefits:

• Consistently voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms (which Labour describe as the "bedroom tax")
• Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices
• Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability
• Consistently voted for making local councils responsible for helping those in financial need afford their council tax and reducing the amount spent on such support
• Consistently voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits
• Almost always voted against spending public money to create guaranteed jobs for young people who have spent a long time unemployed

The new unit should feature equivalent functionality, but has an unusual modification:

He was known to have taken interns from Christian Action Research and Education (CARE), an organisation which co-sponsored the “Judaeo-Christian” event ‘Sex and the City: Redeeming sex today’ in 2012.*

The £50-a-head conference included talks on “mentoring the sexually broken” from speakers including Jospeh Nicolosi, president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality and author of books on how to clinically “treat” being gay.

The modification should enable the new unit to operate seamlessly with the startled owl responsible for programming the human sub-adults:

Error. 409 Conflict.



* or 2009, according to the leaflet still up on the Anglican Mainstream web site. Or was the first event so popular it came back in 2012?

Museum to spit on Thatcher's grave

In a shocking act of apostasy, the Victoria and Albert Museum has wilfully insulted the holy relics of modern Britain's most venerated saint, the Blessed Margaret of Grantham. After initially suggesting that the relics be reverently sold off the to the highest bidder, in respectful accordance with the sacred principles of Thatcherism, the faithless backsliders are now blasphemously suggesting that the saint's garments be publicly displayed before the unworthy eyes of the laity.

The dissembling museum authorities have cited the false and heretical doctrines of inclusivity and the public interest to justify this vile insult.

True believers will recognise their words for what they really are; beguiling lies, intended to trap the unwary. Heed not the honeyed words of these satanic tricksters, who seek only to destroy the faith in the holy relics and to deny Her true and devoted acolytes the opportunity to touch the garments that once veiled the divine body and be overpowered by the touch of their saintly power.

Instead, demand the trial, arrest and exemplary punishment of the culprits in the museum administration and pray that the Holy Market takes pity on their wretched souls.

It's what she would have wanted.