Expanding Heathrow Is A Start, But Now We Must End The War On Aviation By Cutting Air Passenger Duty

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

airplane-aeroplane-wheels-chocks-2

–

THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AT CONSERVATIVES FOR LIBERTY

 

With the government’s announcement that Heathrow will finally get a third runway, it is time to end the decades-old war against aviation by slashing Air Passenger Duty too

About this time every year, my Texan wife and I glance at the calendar and realise, with dread, that the time has come to book plane tickets to the States for Christmas. To be clear, the dread has nothing to do with visiting my in-laws, whom I love very much – no, what ties my stomach in knots every autumn is the nagging question of how much money the British government intends to extort from me for the privilege of flying away from this rainy island for a couple of weeks of Texas sunshine.

Every year, Air Passenger Duty – that invidious, regressive, anti-business tax – creeps ever upward. And while the government may deign to excuse certain people from this extortion (children under sixteen were made exempt this year, in a blaze of self-congratulatory glory), for the rest of us APD keeps on inching upward. At a time when falling oil prices should mean that air fares reach historic lows, in Britain at least the cost of air travel is kept artificially high thanks to this ill-conceived tax – by far the highest in the developed world.

And why? Primarily as a sloppy wet governmental kiss to environmentalists, who some time ago decided that nothing poses a greater threat to the Earth than a working class person enjoying a holiday in Florida, or taking a cheap excursion to one of the sunnier parts of Europe. Air Passenger Duty is nothing so much as the collective howl of outrage from well-heeled leftist environmentalists that poor people are forgetting their place (i.e. receiving benefits and being thankful for them) and daring to travel the world as wealthy people did before them.

Remember the leftist credo, everybody: Fashionable celebrities flying private jets to Davos to moralise about carbon emissions made by the rest of us = good. Nasty working class folk flying Ryanair for a fortnight in Lanzarote or a stag weekend in Riga = bad.

Now that the government has taken the painful and very belated decision to proceed with the expansion of London’s Heathrow Airport (something which should have happened a long time ago) there will be inevitable calls for punishing new environmental levies to offset the terrible “damage” that is supposedly wrought when the state takes its jackboot off the throat of the aviation industry. There will likely be calls to raise Air Passenger Duty even further to help pay for this crucial national investment, even though the exorbitant tax already places Britain at a huge comparative disadvantage.

The government must resist any and all calls to raise APD. In fact, there could be few clearer signs that this government is committed to championing UK aviation and supporting the economy through the uncertainty of Brexit than a bold, dramatic cut in Air Passenger Duty from the current level of £13 short haul / £ 73 long haul / £146 premium cabin rates back down to the single digits. When my wife and I connect in Houston or Dallas Fort Worth on our way from London to the Rio Grande Valley, we pay the state of Texas no more than a few dollars for the privilege of transiting through DFW or George Bush Intercontinental airport – and both of those hubs put London’s Heathrow and Gatwick to shame.

At a time when the government is considering cutting Corporation Tax as low as 10% as an incentive to firms to invest, grow and remain in the United Kingdom, we should not be discouraging business executives and holidaymakers (72% of whom come to the UK by air) from choosing Britain by mugging them before they even step off the jet bridge. Cutting Corporation Tax is great, but the government should not forget individuals, who currently labour under all manner of punitive stealth taxes and would greatly welcome the relief. Neither should the government forget the aviation industry, which is every bit as vital as shipping to an island nation, and which for too long has been stymied and suppressed by cowardly politicians who refused to take critical decisions in the national interest.

With the long-overdue decision to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport, the government has finally called an end to years of dithering and inaction and made a necessary decision in support of the economy. But the benefits of this decision could yet be killed in the crib unless Britain also signals its intention to stop being the high-tax, anti-aviation country which prioritises impractical, virtue-signalling environmentalism over necessary infrastructure investment and tax reform.

There is no earthly reason why you or I should have to pay £73 for the privilege of taking off from Heathrow Airport, whether it has two runways or three. And if Theresa May and Philip Hammond are serious about signalling that Britain is open for business then slashing this one small but immensely harmful tax would be a great place to start.

 

THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AT CONSERVATIVES FOR LIBERTY

 

aviation-airplane-on-tarmac-at-airport

–

Top and Bottom Images: Pixabay

–

Support Semi-Partisan Politics with a one-time or recurring donation:

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

Britain’s Leftist Open Borders Zealots Have Turned Migrants And Refugees Into Political Pawns

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

lily-allen-calais-jungle-child-migrants-refugees-2

–

The migrant crisis is too great an opportunity to ignore for many virtue-signalling members of Generation Me, Me, Me

Brendan O’Neill hits the nail on the head with his latest criticism of sanctimonious celebrity campaigners for open borders, in a piece entitled “You’re so vain, you think the refugee crisis is about you”.

O’Neill writes:

Narcissism runs through the discussion. The question these refugees raise is ‘What kind of people do we want to be?’, says one columnist. The keyword here: ‘we’. On the supposedly pro-refugee side, the game of self-reflection has been intense. Witness Allen’s TV-camera tears when she was chatting to an Afghan boy in Calais, after which the entire discussion became about her. Her image was everywhere. There was a thinkpiece war, some saying ‘Allen was right’, others saying ‘Allen was wrong’. It became about the role of celebrities in public life and whether emotionalism has a part to play in political decision-making, with the migrants reduced to mere objects of our self-reflection, and our tears, not the subjects of their own story.

Then there was Stella Creasy, the self-promoting Labour MP, interviewed in the London Evening Standard, promising to stand up for these child migrants regardless of how much flak she will get (shorter version: ‘I am brave’). The piece was accompanied by a massive picture of Creasy: no image of refugees, just her, because this is about her, not them. Then the story became all about Lineker, after he tweeted his concern for the refugees and was blasted by the Sun for doing so. What is the role of BBC people if not to be morally switched-on, a thousand op-ed scribblers asked, because this is about the Beeb, and the media, and us, not them. Jeremy Corbyn got stuck into the discussion of ‘what kind of people we want to be’ by praising Allen and Lineker for showing ‘Britain at its best’. It was a surreal illustration of the evacuation of substance and seriousness from public debate and their replacement by The Spectacle, largely of emotion: a political leader hailing media representations of sorrow for migrants over anything solid or concrete in relation to the actual lives of the actual migrants.

The media discussion has provided a striking insight into what being pro-migration largely means today: that you – the keyword being ‘you’ – are compassionate. Migrants are latched on to, not because of a genuine commitment to the idea of free movement (witness Creasy saying of course some migrants will have to be kept out), but rather as a means of self-distinction. To be pro-migrant is to be superior to those badly informed Others, who have a name now: Brexiteers. This is why so much of the child-refugee discussion has become bound up with Brexit-bashing. ‘What do we see each morning, post-Brexit, when we look in the mirror?’, asked a Guardian columnist of the child-refugee situation (keyword: ‘mirror’). He says we see a nation ‘hollowed out in terms of compassion’, but of course he means that is what ordinary, ugly, Brexit-voting Brits see in the mirror, not the migrant-loving Brits at the Guardian.

My emphasis in bold.

To be fair, Brendan also accuses many of the most strident anti-migrant voices of the same sin; I do not want to misrepresent his piece. But then Brendan O’Neill and Spiked (bless them) are enthusiastic advocates for completely open borders and the free movement of people everywhere – “it doesn’t matter if they’re kids, teens or adults: the length of their journey and the strength of their desire to live and work on Britain are surely sufficient to grant them access” – an idea rather ahead of its time (not to mention politically toxic so long as such disparities of wealth, culture and values persist).

But Brendan is absolutely right to note that the people of the Calais Jungle – genuine refugees and economic migrants alike – have largely been become political pawns in the ongoing British immigration debate. What matters to many people is how they are seen to talk about the migrant crisis rather than there being found an effective solution – as we saw only this week when Labour MP Chi Onwurah got upset about a poster mocking leftist credulity about migrants posing as refugees, claiming that it was “offensive” when it in no way targeted genuine child refugees.

O’Neill also writes perceptively of the “moral thrill” experienced by many of the “let them all in” camp, and indeed you see it coursing through numerous posts on social media, the intent of many seems far more to do with aggrandising the poster than trying to reach a reasonable compromise with those who do not want to let every last person into Britain unquestioningly.

But to his criticism of the political right:

The narcissism of the other side is striking, too. It is hard to believe that these right-leaning observers really believe that 70 young people coming to Britain will have any kind of terrible impact. And yet they demand that the arrivals’ teeth be checked to see how old they are, and furiously tweet photos of the young men with adolescent moustaches and mobile phones as if to say: ‘See! They’re grown-up! They’re dangerous!’ This is a performance of toughness, of security, to match the performance of compassion of the other side. Just as the pro-refugee side sidelines serious debate about freedom of movement and the role of their beloved EU and its Fortress Europe in creating this crisis, so the anti-refugee side dodges difficult questions of what is really causing a sense of insecurity in 21st-century Europe in favour of turning a handful of young refugees into symbols of existential disarray. Indicators, symbols, mirrors – that’s all these people are, to both sides.

I don’t see it that way at all. While some people do demand that Britain stop accepting any further refugees, a majority would be happy, I believe, if the UK government was simply a little less credulous and a bit more discerning about the people we do accept – both as to their age and the validity of their status as refugees rather than economic migrants.

The pictures do not lie – many of those already brought to Britain from the dismantled Calais Jungle camp are clearly adults. Does that automatically mean that they are not deserving of help? No, and I don’t think that anybody serious has claimed otherwise. But if this country is accepting fully grown men who claim to be children, what is to say that other levels of scrutiny which are supposedly taking place – like checking that entrants are not violent jihadists – are any more reliable? If the UK government is squeamish about insisting that child refugee applicants submit to dental tests to verify their age, have they also been reticent to ask whether the people they are ferrying from Calais to Croydon intend to wage jihad from inside their adoptive country? The incompetence we have already seen rightly makes us wonder about the incompetence which is being kept hidden from us.

These are perfectly legitimate questions to ask, and they do not constitute virtue signalling in the same way that the Left have seized on the migrant crisis to portray themselves as saints and the rest of us as sinners. Particularly in the context of the recent bloody history of ISIS using the migration crisis as a cover to slip Islamist extremists into Western countries, a basic level of scrutiny should be one of the first duties of government – yet there is now legitimate cause to fear that this scrutiny is not being applied for fear of causing “offence”, either to the migrants themselves or (more likely) to their powerful left-wing cheerleaders.

And here’s the thing.

Far right-wing rhetoric may be much more unpleasant to the ear than trendy lefty dronings about a borderless world of people holding hands beneath a rainbow. But leftist rhetoric and actions when it comes to the migrant crisis have killed far more people than anything said or done by those who are sceptical of accepting every last economic migrant who fancies a new life in Britain.

It was the leftist cheerleaders of Angela Merkel’s “open doors” policy who encouraged thousands more people to make the treacherous journey across Europe, some in genuine fear of imminent harm but many simply seeking a better life.

It was the leftist campaigners who accused sceptics of heartlessness for wanting to start turning boats back as a disincentive to make perilous the sea voyage who tacitly encouraged many more people to do so, and drown in the process.

And it was the false hope given by leftist agitators that Britain would ultimately accept a trumped-up moral obligation to accept thousands of people already enjoying the protection of France, hardly the most dangerous country in the world, which encouraged even more people to flock to the Jungle and remain there.

And yet we are supposed to believe that open borders zealots and sceptics are equally at fault when it comes to virtue signalling about the migrant crisis? Absolutely not. Exploiting migrants and refugees to burnish their own compassion credentials is the Left’s bread and butter, and it is an emotional comfort blanket whose cost can be measured in human lives.

So let’s not pretend that there is any moral equivalency in terms of blame for the suffering of migrants holed up in Calais. There is none. This is a crisis manufactured by the Left and encouraged by the Left for the benefit of the Left. They own it.

And all of Lily Allen’s tears will not wash away their culpability.

 

lily-allen-calais-jungle-child-migrants-refugees

–

Support Semi-Partisan Politics with a one-time or recurring donation:

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

This Generation Of Politicians Will Not Secure The Benefits Of Brexit

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

brexit-pixabay

–

Four months after the EU referendum, our leaders continue to shrink from the challenges (and opportunities) which lie ahead

As is nearly always the case, Pete North has the best analysis and summary of exactly where we are with our Brexit deliberations – and right now, the answer is rather depressing:

For several months we had the great and the good telling us how important the single market was and how valuable the EU was to the UK. Now that they are tasked with leaving the EU we see that they can barely define the EU and the single market let alone offer an adequate critique as to whether it is right for the UK.

Through successive treaties our parliament has idly signed away substantial areas of policy to be decided overseas with hardly any public scrutiny. It is therefore ironic that MPs now demand parliamentary sovereignty in scrutinising the terms of the exit arrangements when they showed so little interest in what they were signing away.

By voting to leave the EU we have caught the entire system of government off guard to show that is is totally ill-equipped to govern – and those claiming to represent us have failed in their duty to safeguard our democracy. Through forty years of negligence the UK’s trading relationship with Canada is decided not by Number Ten or Westminster. Instead it depends entirely on the Walloon assembly in Belgium.

And therein lies the inherent flaw in the EU design. The DNA is faulty. Introduce democracy and the whole thing grinds to a halt. Take it away and power ends up in the hands of the few. It cannot work and it cannot be reformed yet we have endured decades of politicians telling us otherwise.

One of the most depressing aspects of life post-EU referendum has been watching our national leaders shrink from the challenge of implementing Brexit. I don’t mean that they are all necessarily in denial, or that they wish to subvert the referendum result – but rather that their every public pronouncement suggests that many of them are simply not up to the task which lies ahead. Typically, this isn’t a question of intelligence, but rather a lack of imagination and ambition. And in truth, perhaps it is too much to expect the same politicians used to implementing EU decisions or operating within their constraints to suddenly step up and become adept drivers of a country suddenly without training wheels.

The debate has thus devolved into two rather tiresome strands – the one held by most Remainers, who have become intent on catastrophising Brexit at every turn and seizing upon every scrap of potentially troubling news as further evidence that the end is nigh, and the opposing, buccaneering view which loudly insists that everything can be wrapped up to Britain’s complete satisfaction by March 2019, and sees any questioning of this certainty as evidence of anti-Brexit treachery.

This blog falls down the gap between these two comically exaggerated positions, which is perhaps why I haven’t been writing about Brexit as much as I should have been lately. One can only slap down so much ridiculous establishment catastrophising of Brexit (now the nation’s fluffy kittens are in peril, apparently), while pointing out the need for a transitional arrangement and securing continuity of access to the single market still falls on deaf ears among those in charge, and only feeds the smug (but not entirely false) Remainer assertion that Brexiteers don’t know what they are doing.

And yet a transitional arrangement is exactly what we need, as Pete North explains:

What will become clear in due course is that Britain will need a continuity arrangement that sees little or no change to the labyrinth of customs procedures and regulations that make up the single market. Neither Britain nor the EU can afford to start tinkering under the hood of long established trade rules. The sudden collapse of CETA at the hands of a Belgian provincial assembly shows just how dysfunctional the system is.

If anything is inflicting damage on the UK it is not Brexit but the overall uncertainty over what Brexit looks like. This in part down to those media vessels determined to make Brexit look like a catastrophe and in part down to those politicians who have not bothered to plan for the eventuality. We are four months on from the referendum and key ministers are still struggling with basic terminology.

Brexit is by far the biggest and most ambitious thing that this country has attempted in decades – frankly, since the Second World War. It demands painstakingly extricating Britain from a web of agreements and schemes of a complexity befitting an organisation which still seeks to become the supranational government of a federal Europe. But to make it even more complicated, we will wish to maintain many avenues of cooperation after leaving the EU’s political union, meaning that a slash and burn of laws will not do – hence Theresa May’s much over-hyped Great Repeal Act.

As Pete points out, it is highly ironic that sulky Remainers are suddenly so interested in having Parliament examine every aspect of the secession deal (with the more juvenile characters, who clearly know nothing about negotiations, expecting to be briefed in advance) when over several decades they blithely signed away powers to the EU with barely a second thought, and certainly no real public debate.

It makes the Remain camp’s current favourite attack line – Brexiteers wanted to return decision-making power to Parliament, so why won’t they let Parliament have a say?! – especially cynical. But the argument is wrong anyway. “Returning powers to Parliament” is a handy catchphrase, but it is a glib one, always favoured more by eurosceptic MPs than the general public.

The current anti-establishment rage currently roiling Europe and America shows that political leaders have become too distant from (and unresponsive to) the people, no matter the level of power. Therefore, returning powers to the Westminster parliament is not enough – we need an end to British over-centralisation and the devolution of power back to the counties, cities, towns and individuals.

Sadly, the chance of meaningful constitutional reform taking place in Britain any time soon continues to hover around zero. And rather than Brexit being the catalyst for such change, as this blog once hoped, it now seems that an intellectually and imaginatively challenged political elite will hide behind the complexity of Brexit as an excuse to avoid doing anything else of substance. One can easily foresee a situation in a decade’s time where Britain is technically outside the EU but stuck in an increasingly permanent-looking halfway house, with acceptable access to the EEA but with none of the later work to move towards a global single market even started.

Would this be good enough? Well, Britain would be outside of the political structure known as the EU, which was always the base requirement – so if one is happy to shoot for the middle and accept the bare minimum then yes, it might have to do. But it would be an appalling failure of ambition, when there are real opportunities to improve the way that international trade and regulation works and to revitalise British democracy through wider constitutional reform.

But to realise great ambitions requires there to be half-decent leaders pointing the way. And looking at the Tory “Three Brexiteers” and the dumpster fire that is the Labour Party, one cannot help but conclude that great leaders – even just competent heavyweight politicians – are in short supply at present. Do you really see Boris Johnson’s name featuring in a future Wikipedia article about the great British constitutional convention of 2020? Or Theresa May’s? Jeremy Corbyn or Hillary Benn’s?

Do I regret my decision to campaign for Brexit? No, never. The European Union is offensive to any proper sense of democracy, or to the notion that the people of a sovereign nation state should decide and consent to the manner in which they are governed. Being rid of the EU (and hopefully helping to precipitate that hateful organisation’s eventual demise) is a solidly good thing on its own. But Brexit could be so much more than it is currently shaping up to become.

And perhaps this is the most damning thing of all about the European Union: the fact that 40 years of British EU membership has slowly turned the nation of Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher, Hugh Gaitskell, Tony Benn, Barbara Castle and Peter Shore – men and women of principle and substance – into the nation of Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Chuka Umunna, Diane Abbott and Owen Smith.

A nation simply does not bounce back from that kind of decline in the space of a few years, and the more that our contemporary politicians carry on about Brexit the clearer this becomes.

Assuming that Brexit goes to plan, it may not be until the next generation of political leaders come of age (at the earliest) before we can finally take full advantage of our newfound freedom.

 

European Union - United Kingdom - Britain - Flags

–

Top Image: Stux, Pixabay

–

Support Semi-Partisan Politics with a one-time or recurring donation:

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

Adults Migrants Posing As Children Make A Mockery Of British Asylum, But Pointing This Out “Offends” The Left

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

syrian-child-refugee-poster-parliament-house-of-commons-chi-onwurah

–

Leftists do not scream “that’s offensive!” out of overwhelming, saintly concern for the supposed “victims” of free speech. They do so as part of an authoritarian ploy to shut down unwanted discussion and mockery of their own sacred values

One does not need to see the dental records of some of the people currently being brought to the UK from the soon-to-be-demolished Jungle refugee camp in Calais to know that a number of those migrants (for who can say whether most are genuine refugees?) are not, as they claim to be, under the age of eighteen.

In fact, one barely needed a functioning brain to correctly predict that a number of enterprising military-age males might seek to game the system, claiming to be both children and refugees when one or both assertions are entirely false (current figures show that two thirds of “child” refugees challenged by Home Office officials turned out to be adults).

As Peter Hitchens notes:

I confess I was rather looking forward to the arrival of the alleged ‘children’ from the Calais migrant camp.

Leftists have an oily habit of stretching the definition of this emotional word. It helps them make the exaggerated claims of suffering, by which they so often achieve their political aims.

I fully expected to see square-jawed, muscled, hairy young men of military age, and I have greatly enjoyed the embarrassment of the soppy idiots who spread and believed the propaganda about them.

Of course it’s possible that they are all really 12, and have been terribly hardened by war and suffering. But if that is so, how come they are in a crime-ridden camp in France, which exists purely to besiege our borders and launch illegal attempts to cross them?

Nobody ever asks how the inhabitants of this camp got there, because the answer in almost all cases is that they were trafficked there by well-paid crooks. What responsible parent would put an actual child in the hands of such people, notorious worldwide for their ruthlessness?

And why are we supposed to be so tear-stained that these people are stuck in France? France, the last time I looked, was one of the most civilised countries in the world. It is not a war zone. Nobody starves there. There are schools. Many fashionable British liberals own houses there. The quality of the coffee has gone down a bit in recent years, but that is no reason to stow away in a lorry or climb a 15ft fence so you can move to Tottenham or Slough.

And with so many transparently post-adolescent people being dutifully shipped across the English Channel and ushered into Britain by a credulous Home Office, it does not fall beyond the bounds of reasonable political humour to joke about the way in which British immigration and asylum rules are being so nakedly and egregiously flouted (the photo captions in this Daily Mail piece are some of the best political comedy this month).

Unless, that is, you are a thin-skinned Labour MP whose metro-leftist ideology demands that anybody and everybody who demands admittance to Britain is immediately and unquestioningly allowed in. For in such cases, joking about octogenarian “children” being rescued from the perils of France is not mere political banter – it is inherently racist for a start, and worse, it is highly offensive and triggering to those leftist MPs whose ideology and motivations are being mocked.

The Mirror reports:

A Labour shadow minister has been left upset after someone stuck up a “highly offensive” child refugees joke in her shared kitchen in Westminster.

Chi Onwurah shared the A4 sheet on Twitter after it was found this morning in the room she shares with Labour, Tory and SNP MPs.

The message mocked refugees after pundits and Tory MPs questioned the age of arrivals in Britain who said they were under 18.

It showed an old man with the message: “Just £3 from you could clothe and feed this 12-year-old Syrian child for a week”.

Highly offensive, really?

Who, exactly, does Chi Onwurah think is offended by this poster? Genuine child refugees from Syria? None of them have visited the House of Commons kitchen, or had an opportunity to see the offending poster. Genuine child refugees will have far more pressing cares and concerns on their innocent minds than a poster which mocks people who are clearly above the threshold of adulthood but trying to pass themselves off as children.

No, the only people “offended” by this poster are the virtue-signalling, bleeding heart lefties who are currently puffing themselves up with over-conspicuous compassion for people who already enjoy the shelter and protection of a safe and very pleasant country (France) because their metro-leftist ideology calls them to undermine the nation state at every turn and defy national borders wherever they exist.

And as even the MP herself emphasises to us, the main takeaway from this event is that Chi Onwurah, not any refugee or person directly connected to the migrant crisis, was left “upset” by the incident:

In other words, Onwurah – who, as an MP, is an immensely privileged and powerful member of society – was left distressed because somebody challenged and mocked her worldview in the form of a poster. That’s what we are invited to feel upset about, really. Not the genuine child refugees themselves. Screw the child refugees. Screw the adult refugees posing as children, for that matter. No, what really matters here is that a virtue-signalling Compassion Olympian like Chi Onwurah encountered some unexpected pushback against her leftist worldview, and promptly fell to pieces as a consequence.

This is – oh, how best to put it? – completely and utterly pathetic. This blog has sympathy for anybody desperate enough to traverse the continent of Europe and then rot in an improvised camp in Calais just to try to reach our shores. That sympathy does not extend to wanting to throw open our borders to anyone who seeks to abuse the asylum process to have their pick of safe European destinations – that’s not what asylum is for or how the system is supposed to work, and the nation state ceases to mean anything if everyone who fancies a life in Britain can claim one – but there is great sympathy nonetheless. And I back that concern and sympathy with action where I can, with charitable donations to appropriate organisations seeking to provide relief to genuine refugees.

But this blog has absolutely no sympathy for Chi Onwurah. I hope that with time and extensive therapy, the MP for Newcastle Central will manage to recover from the immense personal trauma of encountering a poster which contradicted and mocked her own personal worldview. It is truly a calamity of monstrous proportions, verging on torture, for a leftist MP to accidentally behold a poster which scorns her own personal belief that every last migrant seeking to gain entry to Britain is a legitimate refugee from the Syrian conflict, or that everyone who claims to be a child is actually under the age of eighteen. We may as well be honest – the person who put up this poster in the House of Commons tea room effectively mentally waterboarded poor Ms. Onwurah. There is simply no other way to put it.

And yet call me crazy, but this blog would sooner feel sympathy for those genuine refugees who have undergone untold sufferings on their voyage to Europe than for an MP who (shock, horror) experienced indirect mockery in the House of Commons – an unheard of and unprecedented indignity, I’m sure.

But this is how the modern Left operates. They have weaponised victimhood and offence-taking to such an extent that the target of any supposedly “offensive” speech no longer even has to be the victim group currently being exploited for political gain. Now, it is an equal crime to “offend” the leftist advocates of that victim group. Insulting Chi Onwurah is like insulting a vulnerable child refugee herself, according to this ridiculous mindset. To offend against a leftist white knight is to offend against their beneficiary.

The Mirror article concludes:

Directing her comments at whoever posted the image she said: “It’s a communal area, not everybody shares your sense of humour.

“There are many things I get angry about but I’m not going to force that on my work colleagues.

“I don’t think it’s funny. Not when you see what people have been through coming from Syria.

“People often share jokes but this is a communal area and I and others shouldn’t have to suffer what you think is funny.”

Ms Onwurah said her researcher took the poster down, and she was unlikely to make a formal complaint if it broke the rules because she had already highlighted it by making it public.

Again, we are invited to feel sympathy for and rend our garments in solidarity with Chi Onwurah, who has seen refugees from a distance, rather than with the refugees themselves. It is her trauma we are supposed to care about, not that of the migrants and refugees in Calais. The self-involvement of Onwurah’s complaint would be hilarious, were it not quite so sickening.

From her fainting couch, Onwurah writes that she should not have to “suffer” the sense of humour of the person who erected the poster, despite also conceding that other “people often share jokes”, seemingly without arousing her ire. In other words, Onwurah effectively sets the bar for offence within the Palace of Westminster at the low level of her own easily-triggered sensitivities.

And yet Onwurah actually believes she is being magnanimous by not reporting the incident to the House of Commons authorities (who presumably have an HR policy ready to go, just waiting for the moment when a Labour MP was triggered by a satirical poster). Onwurah clearly believes that it is perfectly within her legal and moral rights to summon the authorities and have them crash down like a ton of bricks on the head of the perpetrator – and that she is showing mercy to the perpetrator by not doing so.

Ultimately, Chi Onwurah’s complaint asks the British people to be more concerned that a home-made poster violated the safe space for leftist groupthink that is the House of Commons communal areas than we are about the plight of genuine child refugees stranded in Calais.

Leftists like Onwurah are aghast that a harmless poster mocked and contradicted their worldview, and have no compunction about assuming the same language of frailty and victimhood as the people they so ostentatiously affect to help, even though we can say with cast iron certainty that No Refugee Was Harmed In The Making Of This Poster.

And that really tells you everything you need to know about the self-involvement, decadence and moral bankruptcy of the modern Left.

 

chi-onwurah-mp-2

–

Bottom Image: Chi Onwurrah / Twitter

–

Support Semi-Partisan Politics with a one-time or recurring donation:

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.

For Five Bucks, You Can Micromanage Donald Trump’s Campaign

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

donald-trump-campaign-donation-fundraising-email

–

Having previously crowdsourced advice from his supporters to prepare for Donald’s oh-so-successful television debate appearances, the Trump campaign is now letting supporters dictate where and how to spend their own financial contributions

What to do when your presidential candidate is a dud, mired in scandals and battles largely of his own making, with just two weeks left to turn things around?

Well, if you are running the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, apparently you ignore the polls (or stubbornly look at only the most unrealistically hopeful interpretation of them) and then crowdsource critical decisions about the allocation of scarce financial resources to any old Joe Bloggs who happens to be on your email list.

Semi-Partisan Politics happens to be on that list, and because I am such a (cough) critical supporter of Donald Trump, utterly central to his White House ambitions, we are invited to send Donald some cash and then throw a dart in a map of the United States to decide where that money gets spent.

The Trump campaign’s latest fundraising email reads in part:

Over the past month, polls have shown us winning Iowa, Ohio, Maine, Florida, Nevada, and North Carolina. If we maintain our leads in those six states, we can reliably claim 266 electoral votes. Hillary can claim 193. But we’d still have 4 electoral votes to go.

Polls show us close in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. Winning just any one of those states would lead us to victory.

In light of recent polling, this is an, uh, optimistic take on Donald Trump’s prospects. The latest election forecast at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog currently gives Hillary Clinton an 86.2% of victory against Donald Trump’s 13.8%, while Trump is banking on holding states like Arizona, which polling shows may be trending blue for the first time in decades.

But nonetheless, Kellyanne Conway (or the person pretending to write as Kellyanne Conway for the sake of this fundraising email) sees multiple paths to victory – so many, in fact, that she wants to turn the Trump campaign into a “choose your own adventure” story where every supporter has a chance to influence the story themselves by taking charge of key decisions:

We are currently executing a highly costly early voting push and get-out-the-vote operation to ensure identified Trump supporters make it to the polls before Election Day. We are also planning a $140 million-dollar ad blitz in battleground states to lead us to victory.

Samuel: with just 15 days left, we have a few paths to win. But we’ll need your continued support.

Because you’ve been such a critical supporter, you’ll also be able to share your preference on which state we should invest your contribution in.

Please make a contribution of $100, $65, $50, $35, $15, or $5 to help us stay on track to win just 15 days from today.

Of course, the Trump campaign has form with stunts like this, having previously crowdsourced advice from Trump supporters about what issues the candidate should raise and how he should act during the televised presidential debates. Because of course there is no better way to reach out to wavering, undecided voters with concerns about Donald Trump’s temperament than having him loudly shout a medley of the loudest, most divisive catchphrases which get the base clapping along like seals.

If the Trump campaign is actually serious about following the amateur advice of ordinary supporters when it comes to sensitive matters like the allocation of campaign resources, then they really are giving up. While such a gesture may sound nice and democratic in theory, in the world of professional politics it makes no sense to delegate critical strategic and tactical decisions below the level of the people who run campaigns. Ideas and policies should absolutely flow upward from the grassroots and inform policymaking. But political campaigning tactics should be left to the pros – otherwise what do they get paid to do?

Maybe all of the polls will be wrong, and a combination of smug and/or unenthusiastic Democrats staying at home on polling day combined with Trump’s resonance with people who do not ordinarily vote will power him to victory. Perhaps. But from an outsider’s perspective, this is starting to look like a campaign which has already given up.

That 13.8% chance of victory might, if anything, be a little generous.

 

pop-art-donald-trump

–

Support Semi-Partisan Politics with a one-time or recurring donation:

–

Agree with this article? Violently disagree? Scroll down to leave a comment.

Follow Semi-Partisan Politics on Twitter, Facebook and Medium.