Pirate Laura

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For decades, at least, the Tory Party has liked to be known as the party of Laura Norder. It used to express itself as a demand for the restoration of hanging and flogging, but has more recently manifested as a desire to criminalise more people for doing more things and increasing the punishments for said crimes and misdemeanours, all whilst cutting the costs of law enforcement including both policing and the courts. Sending more people to prison without a commensurate increase in the number of prison places is just one of many logical incoherences in the approach. Releasing people early and delaying sending them to prison in the first place are two of the inevitable results of the government’s failure to understand the consequences of that basic arithmetic by which the PM claims to set such great store.

One of the aspects of their love for Laura which was less obvious in years gone by but has become increasingly obvious under the last three Prime Ministers is that Laura is for other people, not for them. That is to say, breaches of ‘the law’ are to be severely punished if committed by someone else, but ignored or covered up when committed by Conservative politicians. It’s not just the comparatively minor things like ignoring their own regulations on partying during a pandemic, or failing to abide by the laws of the road, it’s also about taking a cavalier approach to the UK’s international obligations and treaties, and being willing to defy courts whose jurisdiction they have formally signed up to. Breaking the law in a “specific and limited way” is still breaking the law.

Sunak was at it again this week, declaring that he will ignore any court ruling which he doesn’t like. He claims to be doing so on grounds of ‘national security’, but he seems to be demanding the unilateral right to make unchallenged decisions as to what national security is and which court decisions might threaten it. It’s hard to find objective grounds for arguing that proper processing of asylum claims from desperate people, in accordance with international rules and treaties, is a threat to national security, but then a feeling of entitlement doesn’t require objective evidence. Indeed, ‘evidence’ is positively undesirable. From the perspective of someone who believes that being cruel to the desperate and vulnerable is what will make people vote for him it might be easy to confuse national security with security of tenure in Downing Street.

It's not an argument that they would accept from anyone else. “I ignored the law on shoplifting in order to prioritise the security of my family” is not a get-out clause that can be found in any law on theft, and would be given short shrift by any judge. But then Tory Laura isn’t the blind-folded figure as which Lady Justice is often portrayed, judging people equally regardless of their position in society. Tory Laura’s job is to keep people in their place, to maintain the imbalance between rich and poor, and above all to prop up the existing order and government. Tory Laura sports a pirate’s eye patch instead, ensuring that she sees only what they want her to see.

Searching for the Big Idea

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It’s barely a month since Starmer told us that his absolute top priority was more spending on defence and weaponry. I noted at the time that his ‘top priority’ seemed to change regularly, and today he’s launched his six key messages for the election. It’s not really surprising to note that defence isn’t one of them. It’s one of those ‘top priorities’ which somehow didn’t make the cut.

The six pledges themselves are a pretty uninspiring collection at best. Two of them – relating to health and education – are England-only pledges, two – on economic stability and anti-social behaviour – are things which any and every party could claim as their objectives and tell us little about the ‘how’, and the remaining two – on setting up new bodies for energy and border security are so lacking in any detail which distinguishes them from the present government’s policies as to be meaningless. Describing the whole package as ‘first steps’ sounds an awful lot like an admission that even his previous unambitious statements are now considered over-ambitious.

Perhaps the most revealing statement of all came from Pat McFadden on the morning media round, who said that, “The only way you’re going to win the next election is by appealing to people who haven’t traditionally voted for you and who have voted Conservative … That is what the difference between losing and winning is, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that”.  With one caveat, I’d even agree with him. It’s no small caveat, though: it is that winning power is more important than having any plan for what to do with it, or any desire to change anything other than whose hands are on the levers of power. ‘Being in government’ has become, in effect, Labour’s only rationale and purpose.

There is, of course, a strong argument for replacing an imploding and incompetent rabble with a united team who can be effective, although I’ll admit to being amongst those who aren’t entirely convinced that delivering austerity competently is necessarily better than delivering it incompetently. Being incompetent in delivering the wrong thing isn’t always a bad thing. They want Tories to vote for them in the belief that they’ll be better and more effective Tories than Sunak’s mob.

In fairness, that last point about relative competence isn’t exactly a controversial proposition. It is, though, a colossal admission of failure by Labour. Not only have they failed to convince people that there is a better alternative, they have given up even trying; and no longer believe it themselves. They are, instead, reduced to peddling the idea that the best future available for us boils down to choosing the gang which will be the least incompetent at implementing policy. As Big Ideas go, it’s more than a little lacking.

Imperial fantasy is a weakness, not a strength

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The Institute of Economic Affairs isn’t exactly famous for being a politically-neutral organisation. It has an agenda which it vigorously promotes, based around the idea that ‘free’ markets are the answer to just about everything. Having an agenda isn’t a good enough reason to reject everything they say, but it’s a pretty good reason for reading what they say with a sceptical eye. They recently produced some research on the economics of the Empire, and it makes for interesting reading. It claims, on my reading of it, that the wealth of the UK is not to any significant degree based on its imperial past nor on the slavery which was a part of that past, but would, in general terms, have accumulated anyway, based largely on innovation and enterprise. It’s a thesis which is not universally accepted, to put it mildly. Other interpretations and analyses are available.

It's a conclusion which some on the ‘right’ of the Tory Party, such as Kemi Badenoch, have seized on, though, to validate their own interpretation of the pros and cons of Britain’s imperial past. But even if, as she wishes, we were to accept the contentious conclusion that the UK benefited only slightly if at all, even the report itself notes that that doesn’t mean that it was a good thing from the point of view of the colonised. As the author puts it, “The implication is that colonialism and slavery were not zero-sum games that benefited the colonisers at the expense of the colonised. It was more like a negative-sum game, which hurt the latter without really benefiting the former”. A shortish blog isn’t the place to develop a detailed analysis of the economic arguments; I’m more interested in the political implications for the way we remember our own history and what it means for identity. As the author himself says, “The reader will have noticed that we have avoided promoting any specific narrative about Britain’s (or any other country’s) history or expressing a view of how that history should be collectively remembered today. A cost–benefit analysis cannot tell us any of that and is not supposed to”. That hasn’t prevented Badenoch from trying to use the report to do precisely that.

For those who want to cling to the traditional British view of history, it is important to their political and historical identity that the Empire should be remembered for the ‘good things’ which it did, rather than the bad ones. For sure, the argument goes, the Empire might have destroyed communities, stolen resources, wiped out languages and cultures, and enslaved populations, but look, we gave them Christianity, democracy and the rule of law, the English language and Shakespeare. And cricket. Those who claim that taking an alternative view involves ‘rewriting history’ are themselves rewriting history because, even if it were to be accepted that those things were indeed advantages, they were never the motivation for the initial colonisation. It’s very much a post hoc rationalisation of a mindset which was based on a desire for conquest and exploitation. Even if the IEA were to be proved right about imperialism not being very cost-effective, that would merely show that the imperialists failed to achieve their aims, not that they were somehow acting charitably.

It's also a very arrogant and ethnocentric view of the world. It assumes that the colonised could not and would not have developed their own systems of law and democracy without having them imposed by the colonisers, and it assumes that the culture, values and beliefs of the colonisers were and are superior to those of the colonised. However, presenting imperialism as having been, on the whole, a good thing is absolutely key to the identity and belief systems of Anglo-British nationalists, and they feel threatened by any alternative view. Their increasingly desperate lashing out at alternative views is a sign of weakness, not strength.

Who's shafting who?

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It would be a very strange political party indeed which managed to somehow contain a Jeremy Corbyn or a Diane Abbott as well as a Natalie Elphicke. Choosing who to keep and who to reject sounds like a job opportunity for another ex-Labour MP. Kilroy-Silk was himself something of an expert in party-hopping as he switched from Labour to UKIP to Veritas, but it’s not his political volatility which comes to mind so much as his short-lived TV game show, Shafted, in which he asked players whether they wished to ‘share’ or to ‘shaft’. That’s the sort of ‘difficult choice’ which ‘Keith’ Starmer insists he needs to make, although choosing to poach one of the allegedly most right-wing members of the House of Commons whilst ditching two of the allegedly most left-wing members doesn’t seem to have caused him to lose a great deal of sleep. When it comes to traditional Labour values and members, ‘shafting’ seems to be Starmer’s default setting.

Perhaps the bigger question, given the weekend’s revelations about Elphicke’s alleged attempts to get her ex-husband a more comfortable pillow in his prison cell, quite apart from such minor matters as lobbying the then Lord Chancellor to get him a different court and a more lenient judge, is who exactly is shafting who? Keith’s initial delight at attracting yet another defector has lost some of its shine given the barely concealed delight of the Tories at having off-loaded her. But their own joy in embarrassing Starmer by revealing that she made serious efforts to abuse her position in order to pervert the course of justice has in turn been dulled somewhat as some unkind souls, such as the Secret Barrister, have pointed out that it means that said Lord Chancellor was a direct witness to an outrageous attempt at corrupting the legal processes and chose to do nothing about it at the time because she was on the same side as him. It’s hard to work out which of the players has lost the most credibility. Self-shafting wasn’t an option in the game show, but seems to be a genuine one in real life. Perhaps the show might have gone on a bit longer if it had reflected that reality. Or perhaps not – it didn’t earn the title ‘the worst British television show of the 2000s’ for nothing.

The revelations about the attempted lobbying of judges and ministers suggest that part of Elphicke’s problem was her own bluntness and naiveté. Whilst Buckland appears to have correctly rejected the approaches at the time (even if he didn’t report the attempt at criminality) the idea that the whole system is completely incorruptible is for the birds. Covering up the attempted interference for four years underlines that. It’s more that it doesn’t work in the simplistic way that she assumed it would when she arranged to meet the Lord Chancellor. The Establishment usually does protect its own, but things work more subtly than that. Informal encounters, casual conversations, use of third, fourth and fifth party intermediaries are more normal, but above all, those who are part of the system ‘know’ what is expected of them without anyone needing to tell them. Trying to corrupt the system through a formal meeting was doomed to failure from the outset; the club doesn’t work that way. Then again, perhaps the Elphickes were never really part of the club anyway – if they had been, they would have known that.

With one bound...

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‘Dick Barton – Special Agent’ was a hit radio series which ran from 1946 until early 1951, which means that the final episode was broadcast before I was even born. That’s one of the very few things that I have in common with Boris Johnson. My knowledge of the catchphrase which grew up around it is not, therefore, based on any direct memory, merely the way in which an older generation used it from time to time. Whatever difficult situation the hero was in at the end of one episode, he managed to suddenly escape at the beginning of the next – hence, “with one bound, he was free”. I don’t know whether Johnson is familiar with the catchphrase, but it sounds like the approach to difficult situations on which he has always been able to rely.

There was a story in the Sunday Times this week (£paywall, but summarised here in the Guardian) about ‘allies’ of Johnson (i.e. people who he hasn’t yet betrayed, and who labour under the delusion that he won’t do so in future either) having been engaged in discussions with Farage to mount a cunning plan, under which Johnson would woo Farage to rejoin the Tories and mount a reverse take-over of the party. There are more than a few minor obstacles to overcome first:

1.    Farage has to stand for election – and win a seat

2.    Johnson has to persuade one of the few remaining Tory MPs after the election, in a very safe seat, to give up a £90,000 a year job and disappear into obscurity so that he can stand instead

3.    The central Tory Party have to accept a disgraced former PM and serial liar as a suitable person to represent the party, and the local association have to select him as their candidate for the by-election, despite everyone knowing that he will inevitably bring the party into further disrepute and that he is standing with the express intention of undermining and usurping whoever happens to be the leader at the time

4.    The electorate have to elect said disgraced former PM and compulsive liar as their MP

5.    Once he gets into the House of Commons, he has to somehow persuade a Labour-dominated chamber to set aside his 90-day suspension for misleading parliament, the implementation of which he avoided by resigning before he could be sacked. If he fails, he will presumably be immediately suspended from parliament giving the electors a chance to demand a recall by-election. In that case, steps 3 and 4 above need to be repeated.

6.    He then needs to persuade Farage to swap parties and join the Tories, despite Farage’s visceral opposition to many of Johnson’s policies on issues such as net zero

It’s quite a list. Even the scriptwriters for Dick Barton might have at least cavilled at the scale of the single bound which was necessary to extricate the hero from that predicament. The real killer for the cunning plan, though, comes after all of that, because one of the two men would then need to agree to play second fiddle to the other. And that is beyond the limits of anything which might be remotely credible. Yet it seems that there really are people in the Tory Party who seriously believe that this is their party’s way forward after the forthcoming trouncing. Dick Barton was, of course, the product of fantasy. It’s a fact which seems strangely relevant here.

Straws, not life rafts

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There was some mystery a few days ago as to whether and where the PM voted in Thursday’s elections. Given that he splits his time between his constituency and London, he is legally entitled to register to vote in both places (although given his party’s dogged pursuit of Angela Rayner for possibly registering in the wrong one of her two addresses many years ago, it’s reasonable to suppose that they’re not over-keen on admitting to that fact).  And he’s even entitled to vote in both places, as long as it’s not a parliamentary election, although he probably wouldn’t be exactly enthusiastic about owning up to doing that either.

Given the choice of admitting that he voted for the London mayoral candidate, who’s known mostly for her tweets praising Enoch Powell and displaying a not-exactly-subtle thread of anti-Islamic feeling, or admitting that he voted for the North Yorkshire candidate, who was a News Editor at the Daily Star when it compared his immediate predecessor to a lettuce, I can understand his wish to avoid telling us that he voted for either, let alone both. Even Sunak can work out that there’s no right answer to the question, ‘Which did you vote for – the alleged racist or the lettuce-lover?’. To the extent that one can trust the veracity of anything broadcast by GB News (spoiler: not a lot), it has subsequently claimed that he voted by post for the lettuce-lover. It was obviously one of those ‘tough decisions’ that politicians are always telling us need to be made.

No party is immune to the possibility of putting forward ‘eccentric’ candidates at election time, and vetting candidates is a particularly difficult issue at local government level where the number of candidates involved is so high. Mayoral candidates are, however, much fewer in number – there were only 11 up for election on Thursday – and they are much higher in profile. Selecting two out of 11 for which the party leader might be embarrassed to admit having voted is quite an achievement, even for a party in terminal decline.

But we can’t simply ignore the local election candidates just because vetting them is so difficult. Apparently, one of the bright spots for the Tories last week, according to them, was retaining control of Harlow council by the narrowest margin of a single seat. It was achieved, though, by including a councillor under investigation for anti-Islamic remarks. His exact status is currently unclear, but it appears that he was suspended whilst being investigated and somehow unsuspended in order to stand as a Tory candidate even though the investigation had not concluded. Whether he will even be eligible for membership of his party’s group on the council is as clear as mud. Depending on an individual in that position to portray the result as a ‘bright spot’ has a certain whiff of desperation about it.

Their biggest bright spot of the night was, of course, retaining the mayoralty in Teesside. They also came surprisingly close to doing the same in the West Midlands. The common factor between both of those results was that the Tory candidates did everything they could to distance themselves from their party and its leader, preferring not to mention either unless they really had no choice. As a result, some of the less dim Tory MPs may well conclude that their best chance of being re-elected is to pretend they’re not Tories, so it’s a tactic we will probably see repeated later this year at the Westminster elections. It might, though, turn out to be an extrapolation too far. More of a straw at which to clutch than a life raft.

New complex systems of maths

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There are different approaches to the subject of mathematics, and it is possible to posit a number of wholly consistent alternative systems which produce some results which everyday life might consider to be more than a little strange. Back in my sixth form days, I was somewhat taken by the hyperbolic form of non-Euclidean geometry, in which the sum of the angles in a triangle varies according to the size of the triangle – with the extremes ranging from zero for an infinitely large triangle to 180 degrees for an infinitely small one. It’s of limited practical use in daily life (where we are, in cosmological terms, close to being infinitely small), but none the less fascinating for that.

It’s not uncommon for me to be more than a little harsh on the extent to which Sunak and his not-so-merry men are mathematically challenged, as a result of watching them struggle with some very basic arithmetic. Perhaps I’m being unfair; perhaps they’ve just developed a hitherto unknown version of mathematics, in which things which make little sense to most of us are actually part of an internally consistent system of logic which the rest of us are just too stupid to comprehend. This was reinforced today by the sight of some Tory spokesmen apparently trying to tell the world that yesterday’s round of elections was, in fact, a huge success for the party. The fringe elements have gone further: the falling number of votes ‘proves’ that the public at large has an appetite for even more extreme policies. It’s a strange equation they’ve developed in which people who refuse to vote for increasingly extreme policies can somehow be brought back into the fold by adopting even more extreme policies. Absolute success is thus equivalent to an absolute lack of votes; only when no-one at all votes for them will they feel fully vindicated. They might even have once possessed a mathematical proof of their theorem, which they’ve emulated Fermat by losing after scribbling something in the margin.

It's an interesting conjecture although, like non-Euclidean geometry, it’s of rather limited practical use to anyone else. On the other hand, my old favourite, Occam, might suggest that the simpler solution might be a more appropriate conclusion to draw. They really are just not very good at maths.

Compasses aren't easy to come by these days

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The last Prime Minister but one seemed to believe that rules were for everyone else, but that someone who would be world king should feel no obligation to abide by them. That sense of entitlement was coupled with a sense of utter shamelessness; no matter how egregious his behaviour, he simply ignored all criticism and carried on regardless. For most of his life, it's an approach which worked. Being ashamed of nothing and willing to ignore all criticism meant that most problems eventually ceased to be newsworthy, even if people kept muttering darkly about them from the sidelines.

Whilst Wales’ new First Minister isn’t in the same league as Boris Johnson, his approach to the large donations received from a convicted environmental criminal seems to be modelled on that used by Johnson – ignore it and hope it will go away. Sooner or later, he assumes that his critics will simply give up – they don’t have the votes in the Senedd to force him to do anything, as long as his own side continue to vote the right way, despite the obvious misgivings harboured by some of them. The opposition parties will presumably continue to make their repeated demands for an investigation, although it's far from clear what the point would be: what would actually be investigated? The First Minister himself has repeated, what is beginning to seem like endlessly, the mantra that ‘no rules were broken’ and nobody seems to have any clear contrary evidence of any breach of any rules, whether rules laid down by the law, the rules of the Senedd, or the rules of the Labour Party.

The complaint, however, isn’t that he behaved in a way contrary to any rules, but that his behaviour was unethical and inappropriate, something which anyone capable of feeling shame might see as being far worse. It is, though, something which is much harder to ‘investigate’. Whilst the feeling that it was indeed both of those things might be near universal outside his own immediate circle, whether behaviour is considered ethical or not is ultimately a subjective issue rather than an objective one. For those – a group which presumably includes the First Minister – who believe that ethical behaviour is simplistically defined as doing no more than avoiding any breach of rules, his behaviour cannot be considered to be other than entirely ethical. For those who expect that people who would lead or govern us should be expected to possess a moral compass of their own (and know how to use it), abiding by ‘the rules’ is never going to be good enough.

Given the ethnic background of both the First Minister and the current Prime Minister, the old adage about the colour of pots and kettles seems singularly inappropriate, but in an outbreak of what one might instead call ‘Comparative Hypocritical Immorality and Pomposity Syndrome’, the PM who happily accepted either £10 million or £15 million (his oft-demonstrated inability in basic arithmetic prevents him from knowing which, but he’s well and truly had his CHIPS either way) from a racist and misogynist has demanded an investigation into a FM whose willingness to accept tainted money from a criminal has so far been limited to a ‘mere’ £200,000 (although that limit hasn’t, so far as we know, as yet been tested by any higher offer). Is Brexit to blame for the current shortage of moral compasses, or is there some deeper problem at work?