UK Politics

Farewell, Civil Liberties

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Theresa May - David Cameron - Conservative Party - Civil Liberties- Free Speech

 

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'” – David Cameron, 2015

Pick your poison.

What’s worse? A Labour government that ruins the economy and condemns millions of people to lives of hard subsistence, bleating all the while about how fair and progressive they are, or a Conservative government promising semi-competent handling of the economy but itching to trample away our precious few remaining civil liberties now that they are no longer restrained by coalition?

Britain voted for the latter on May 7 this year, and on balance this was probably the right choice in the short term. But with David Cameron back in Downing Street and Theresa May re-confirmed as Home Secretary, anyone remotely concerned about civil liberties and jealous of their existing freedoms will need to organise to stop them being steamrollered in a flurry of quick legislating while this Conservative majority government is still in its honeymoon phase.

The fact that David Cameron could utter such words as the head of government of a western country is absolutely appalling, and only reconfirms everything that this blog and many others have disliked about the current Conservative Party leadership for some time.

Gone is any sense of small-L liberalism, trusting the people to know and do what is best for themselves and their communities. And in its place comes a heavy-handed, hawkish paternalism, made all the more offensive by the patronising tone in which it seeks to assert control over our lawmaking.

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Labour Party Leadership Contest: Anyone But Chuka

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

 

If the Labour Party choose former Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna to be their new leader, they will make perfectly clear that they have no intention of learning the lessons from their defeat, and they will fully deserve another electoral humiliation in 2020.

It really is that simple. Chuka Umunna is not necessarily a bad person – in many ways he was one of the few truly competent performers and articulate voices in Ed Miliband’s team of losers – but the mere act of his installation as the successor to Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan and Kinnock would be enough to permanently alienate many of the voters who spurned Labour this May.

This blog has watched for years as the Labour Party gave up any pretence of offering Britain a real, coherent ideological alternative, and instead became a moralising, virtue-signalling talking shop, run by and on behalf of their London-based, upper middle class clerisy.

They may still regurgitate the language of standing up for the working man, the poor and the vulnerable – when they are in public. But behind closed doors their love of the EU, heavy handed regulation, bloated public services and open door immigration with no effort to up-skill the domestic workforce to compete made quite clear that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party was very much in it for selfish reasons.

Take Chuka Umunna’s leadership announcement video, posted to YouTube today. Delivering his remarks from Swindon, where the Tories increased their majorities in both local constituencies, Umunna said:

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Post-Election Left Wing Hate Watch, Part Two

Samuel Hooper17 Comments

Bankers Toffs And Tory Scum - General Election 2015 - London Protests - Downing Street

 

Long before the first votes were cast in the 2015 general election, this blog was warning that Labour’s arrogance and sanctimonious moralising was likely to cost them any chance of forming a new government.

One can almost forgive them their arrogance. After all, so commonly heard is the left wing worldview and so widespread is the belief that right wing ideas are inherently selfish and lacking compassion that many Conservatives – including some very prominent figures – have been forced to radically adapt their messaging to this most inhospitable of climates, sounding more like Diet Labour than the Conservative Party of old.

Even in the aftermath of David Cameron’s victory, many members of the public are still too afraid to openly admit that they voted Conservative or UKIP, for fear of the inevitable social backlash that would result: painful real world consequences for holding perfectly normal, middle-of-the-road political opinions.

But it isn’t just young and intemperate activists – the kind who scrawl obscene graffiti on a war memorial during the VE Day celebrations – who are now giving Labour a reputation as a party of sore losers. Take the case of Matt Woodruff, the mild-mannered owner of a garden centre in East Sussex, whose smarmy anti-Tory message, scrawled on his shop’s blackboard, was posted on Twitter and quickly went viral.

The Guardian reports:

The owner of a small garden centre in East Sussex whose anti-Tory blackboard went viral on social media says he has no regrets, despite admitting it could put him out of business.

Matt Woodruff, the owner of Woodruffs Yard in Lewes, said he was moved to vent his political views on his shop’s blackboard after the Conservatives took the local seat that had been occupied by the Lib Dem former Home Office minister Norman Baker.

The sign proposes a “Tory tax” of 10% on any customer who voted Conservative as one of the “‘tough’ decisions I need to make to ‘balance the books’ under your preferred government”.

The sign also says Ukip voters should “shop elsewhere”.

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Westminster Must Brace Itself For The Arrival Of The Tartan Tea Party

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

2- SNP - Scottish National Party - General Election 2015 - Tartan Tea Party - Nicola Sturgeon

 

When parliament reconvenes, an astonishing fifty-six Scottish National Party MPs will take their seats in the House of Commons.

Despite having gained their 56 MPs on a vanishingly small 4.7 per cent of the national vote (as compared to UKIP, who achieved 12.6 per cent of the national vote but only 1 MP), Nicola Sturgeon is claiming some kind of mandate to influence government and oppose Evil Tory austerity.

This is mostly hubris. The SNP will be sitting on the opposition benches, which means that they actually get to sit things out for the next five years, spectating rather than playing some kind of deep and meaningful role in government – that particular dream died the moment that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party self destructed north and south of the border.

But though the SNP landslide is largely thanks to irrational voting by Scotland – a collective hissy fit from a nation who increasingly consider themselves more enlightened and progressive than their southern neighbours, demanding higher government spending paid for by anyone but themselves – there will naturally be an impact on the way that Westminster operates.

In terms of accepting the new reality, this piece from Alex Massie in The Spectator is right on the money:

The referendum taught us that Scotland is a place beginning to dream bigger things; yesterday’s results confirmed that. The SNP’s victory is a reminder that trust is the most valuable commodity in politics. Because the SNP are trusted – rightly or not – to put Scotland’s interests first they are forgiven their sins, contradictions and inconsistencies. They are held – fairly or not – to a different standard than that applied to other parties. There is little point in whining about this; it is just the way it is.

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Post-Election Left Wing Hate Watch

Samuel Hooper24 Comments

Tory Protests

 

I am angry. So angry. And I will take that anger to the streets when I can. I promise this. Because I’ll be mostly okay under a Tory government; I have a job, a home and a wonderful network of family and friends around as support. But I didn’t vote for me. I voted for society. Tory voters did not. Tory voters could not give a shit about anyone but themselves and their wallets. And I hate each and every one of you for this.

– Gareth Bundy, blogger and moralist

 

As this blog has noted, furious rants like this are not unusual among left wing activists. They were frequent before the election, and they have only increased in tone and volume as the Left lick their collective wounds after an unexpectedly heavy defeat.

So long as they remain the preserve of crusading online moralists such as Gareth Bundy – or the people who, in their sickness, deface a London war memorial – this is not really noteworthy. The problem is that many non-activist Labour supporters, normal people who have marinated in the same left wing groupthink since at least 2010, quietly concur with the anti-Tory hysteria currently consuming the Left.

Used to hearing anti-austerity arguments and accepting them uncritically, it is taken for granted by many people that conservative ideas are inherently selfish and evil, and that people who vote Conservative (or, god forbid, UKIP) are heartless monsters, idiotic dupes at best and eager participants in a genocide of the poor and disabled at worst.

This is not to say that left wing ideas are not misrepresented, attacked or ridiculed by those on the right – they often are, and one certainly finds comments section bores and internet trolls of all political stripes. But at the moment, it is a particularly acute problem for the British left, because so much of the angry, activist hyperbole is accepted as truth by society and the popular culture. Of course Labour want to help the poor. Of course the Conservatives only govern in the interest of their rich friends.

The truth is never that simple. There is good and bad in everyone, and in most political parties – but many on the left do not want to see this. While those on the right tend to see their left-leaning fellow citizens as misguided or naive, the Left are increasingly inclined to view conservative ideas as inherently evil.

According to this blinkered mindset, someone can only possibly support the Tories out of a selfish concern for their own wallet or business prospects, certainly not because they believe conservative policies might actually do the most good for the most people. This is particularly ironic given the fact that many Labour policies consist of nothing more than conscience-soothing exercises in money-bombing intractable social problems, failing to tackle the root causes and trapping millions of people in lifelong dependency.

Besides, the Conservative government whose victory plunged the Left into such a deep depression is hardly truly conservative at all, having enthusiastically adopted the language and many of the policies of the left in their desperate bid to stay in power.

Universal benefits and free perks for even wealthy pensioners? Check. Support for nationalised healthcare? Check. Run down national defence to prop up bloated but protected social spending? Check. Support Britain’s continued membership of the EU (as David Cameron does)? Hell yes!

But so common is the perception that the Tories are the “nasty party” – and that conservative policies are inherently regressive, embraced only through personal selfishness – that the Conservatives could only win their election victory by dressing up in Labour Party clothing. And still people who were planning to vote Tory were so hesitant to admit their preference that the polls consistently failed to predict the scale of David Cameron’s eventual victory.

The Labour Party can make a serious, good faith effort to understand the nature and scale of their defeat, or they can retreat into the angry denialism favoured by some of their most ardent supporters – and as they did in 2010 when they chose Ed Miliband as their leader. At present, there are few encouraging signs that the British Left will take the higher road.

Far easier to just keep shouting “Tory scum, off our streets!”