The Boy Parris Done Good

Matthew Parris writes well, not in the Champions League category with the Boy Liddle of course, but nevertheless he's got a good engine. All of which has made his recent peevish articles denigrating those of us who voted Leave rather tiresome. However let us put that aside (as I am sure we will all shortly manage to do as the embarrassing realisation dawns that the world has not come to an end) and applaud his return to form - Blair/Chilcot - an article in which a bit of realpolitik intrudes on the whinnying grandstanding of the chatterati. He clearly can't stand Blair (sounds fair enough to me) but puts to the sword the sanctimonious claptrap of shitbags such as that oaf Salmond.

Trump v Clinton is about to wind into full swing. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Should The United Kingdom Remain A Member Of The European Union Or Leave The European Union?

That is it, the question that will confront those of the enfranchised who choose to visit the ballot box on 23 June. In a display of rare reticence OG has thus far kept his powder dry, bar the occasional condemnation of samples of the multifarious cant and highlighting of some (rare) decent journalism. But you can only escape my ministrations for so long and today I will try to explain where I have got to and how.

Let us first make crystal clear what this is not about for me – economics. Or rather it is not about the false promises of either side in this vile campaign as to what continued membership or Brexit will mean for the UK. Here’s the unvarnished truth – no one knows what will happen, any more than they knew what was going to happen last year – how’s that forecasting going lads? David Cameron and his dissembler in chief, Gorgeous George Osborne, have continued the good work of those prize shits Blair and Brown in suborning our once reputable civil service so that we are presented with economic ‘facts’ signed-off by the Treasury based upon contrived assumptions and presented in terms of deceitful formulae (GDP per household anyone?). Bollocks, to put it politely.

No the clouds have parted and what it is about for this spectator/participant is the desirability of the preservation or otherwise of a democratic nation state, most particularly the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And in fact the answer to this conundrum has transpired to be easy – I have no title to use my vote to dispense with democracy. I hope I can convince you that mine is a moral stance.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the good old state has pressures enough from within even before we get to the question of the EU and that elusive and mistreated beast sovereignty. It is clear that a vocal minority of Scots no longer have any wish to be aboard the three hundred year old ship. A disgruntled minority of the English would gladly wave the ingrate Scots goodbye as they disembark. That is for another day.

The campaign has been an unedifying joke – the Remain team lining up behind Cameron’s wanton dishonesty and willingness to say anything to win, while the Brexiteers wail ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’ and conspicuously miss a series of open goals. Pitiful. Anyone for ‘democratic deficit’? It seems not.

Define your terms. By the nation state I refer to a state that conjoins the political entities of statehood to the identifying entities of a nation, that is to say mechanisms of governance accepted (more or less willingly) by a people of shared inheritance, most obviously the geographical inheritance of a nation race. This definition gets a little frayed around the edges (not least the Scottish edges) but I take it as proven that there is still a majority population that both feels British and wishes to be governed as British.

I also take it as given that most of that British polity would think themselves (in so far as they think about these things at all) governed under universal suffrage by a sovereign parliament. And this, for me, gets us to the core of the referendum question. Because (and with profound apologies to Joni Mitchell) I’ve looked at sovereignty from both sides now, from give and take, and still somehow, it’s sovereignty’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know sovereignty at all. Or perhaps I do. The news is this: a surprising proportion of our legislation (perhaps as much as half, though there is no reliable way of measuring legislation – you could I suppose just weigh the printed matter) emanates from the EU. It is not scrutinised or amended by our ‘sovereign’ parliament. Not a problem you might say, because there is a European Parliament which includes our elected MEP’s. That would have some weight were it not for the fact that the EU Parliament has a consultative role only, not a legislative one; it is not sovereign. The sovereign bodies are the Commission and the Court and we don’t get to vote for those. As Tony Benn said (and we’ll hear more from him later) if you can’t change the man who makes the decisions, you’re not living in a democracy.

Now let’s be clear, living in a democracy is not the only option but in western terms it is the one unstintingly endorsed in public utterance by the bien pensant. Now proclaiming oneself to have undemocratic leanings might be an amusing dinner party gambit but it wouldn’t be the tone to take if running for office. Democracy is the perceived ‘given’ of our constitution. And yet, ironically, fudging the issue of democracy is the great achievement of the EU. Since its foundation it has never had democratic goals. Quite the contrary, it was the passionate brainchild of internationalists who rated the assertive nation state as the harbinger of war. Its huge administrative machinery is the weapon of mass suffocation by which nation states are quietly euthanized for their own good. Ask the Greeks. And I simply do not buy the arrogant patrician assurance that the EU can be reformed by the actions of good men. We have been hearing that tune for four decades. It never happens.

History is partial, so here’s mine. The rise of the nation state had been a four hundred year project. It is not historically inevitable but it was the dominant model in the technologically stunning twentieth century during which armed empires crumbled and were replaced by empires of influence. In that twentieth century we saw two World Wars, a near calamitous Cold War, various proxy wars and vile local pogroms. Universal suffrage was a twentieth century gift (at least in the West) but with it came a problem – people have a tendency to daftness, prejudice, nationalism and plain selfishness and betray an unholy cocktail of these influences when they vote. Perhaps democracy isn’t the answer after all. Thus do benign clever people conclude that the polity needs to be protected from itself. Technocracy is the answer – a system of governance where decision-makers are selected for their technical skill. By whom? By other experts of course. This is the hinterland and history of the EU: a deliberately constructed monolith of political and economic management whose very design attempts to resist the tectonic shifts inherent in that venal and dangerous chimera, democracy.

But isn’t a little trade-off of democracy an acceptable price to pay for decades of peace, prosperity and cheap holidays? Actually no. I’m an old cynic but, do you know what, I rather like the tenor of democracy. For me it is the tenor of individual liberty – a liberty in which the freedom of your fist ends just short of my nose. It is not the tenor of collectivism and prescribed decencies. I admire Bernard Levin, a commentator who despised accommodation with the undemocratic left or right and who concluded as long ago as 1979, ‘That there is no such thing, in the long run, as a state which is both collectivist and democratic.’ The EU (‘le Grand Projet’) has wrapped itself in the soft woolly blanket of peace and soothing internationalism and that disguise is enough for a lot of well-intentioned people. Take for instance the assembled hordes of knee-jerk liberal luvviedom, our unimpeachable artists and actors, who have thrown the weight of their rectitude behind le Projet. Never let the facts get in the way of a nice sentiment. Perfectly decent politicians have also been conned. Look at the admirable and dignified William Hague who has bought hook, line and sinker the Foreign Office canard that the technocrats are our sort of chaps and can still be reined in. Newsflash – they stopped listening years ago.

How do I assess our increasingly desperate Prime Minister (and his sinister side-kick, the Chancellor) in all of this? Is he deluded? Of course he is, like everyone possessed by a messiah complex. As with Blair, so with Cameron – he knows, absolutely knows, what is best for us and he must do anything to keep us from self-harm. That includes shameless lying. The lying is not confined to the Remain campaign but it is most abject coming from the Queen’s first minister.

I’ve started so I’ll finish. This liberty, this democracy, what do they look like? With apologies for my own inadequacies I will quote Bernard Levin at length. The argument for freedom is ‘not to be understood in terms of material betterment’ alone. Much less, might one add, when the ‘truth’ of material betterment is manifested by Gorgeous George’s dodgy dossier.

This is not an argument (though it has often been used as one) for telling the poor not to mind their poverty. It is an argument for believing that only as individuals can we hope to realize our full potentiality, and that anything which denies or restricts that realization denies salvation itself. “If you wanted to put the world to rights”, asks Solzhenitsyn’s Nezin in The First Circle, “who should you begin with: yourself or others?” And Evelyn Waugh put it even more neatly in a radio interview, part of which Ronald Harwood incorporated in his stage adaptation of Waugh’s autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Asked “You have not much sympathy with the man in the street, have you?”, Pinfold replies:

You must understand that the man in the street does not exist. These are men and women, each one of whom has an individual and immortal soul, and such beings need to use the street from time to time.

Despite all the accumulated evidence that I might be wrong, despite that loutish yet enfranchised idiot behind whom I sat at the cricket recently, despite my own economic interests (I’ve made my pile and the status quo suits quite nicely) I still trust the people. All the people, making manifest their views in a representative democracy. And neither the people nor their representatives may take it upon themselves to give away the gift of democracy bequeathed to them.   That gift had been hard-won by our betters. This was Tony Benn (a man who could be unmatchably wrong on the detail but was never wrong on the principles) speaking in the Commons at the time of the Maastricht Treaty debate:

If democracy is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights.

So this is where I stand. I stand for the nation state as the viable vehicle for democracy in the sceptred isle. I was endowe for my lifetime with public rights and I have the opportunity now to reclaim the portion of those rights carelessly given away by my representatives. It is our imperative to cherish those rights and to hand them unalloyed to those who succeed us. I am not persuaded that there is even the remotest of possibilities of preserving those rights within the European Union. Others disagree – they are, I believe, at best deluded, at worst mendacious. 

    

The Ghost

The novels of Robert Harris are not great art, but who cares? What they together constitute is a body of bloody good professional writing. They are way beyond the capabilities of production of most mortals, not least production line students of creative writing. So there.

The Ghost attracted a deal of attention because of the perception of it as a roman a clef on the Blair governments. Yes, Harris was a friend of the Blairs and a Labour fellow traveller but there are key divergences from the real Blairs. Harris did nothing to dispel the notion that these changes were made to avoid litigation but the truth is that there was never going to be any allegation of libel - both Blairs are good enough lawyers to know that any such action would have been catastrophically counter-productive, and Harris himself is surely canny enough to have indulged the conjecture as a means of promoting his book. Certainly it is a touch his narrator (a jobbing ghost writer) would have appreciated.

What we have here is a book a little bit about modern global politics, but not so much as to be tedious. On this level, it is bloody good.

What we have here is a book a little bit in the thriller genre. On this level it is bloody good.

What we have here is a book a little bit about the process of writing. On this level it is bloody good.

So, in short, what we have here is a bloody good book. The sort that should be studied in creative writing classes.

A few interesting facts to toy with as you read this, they may elevate the fun: Blair (like Harris) went to Oxford; the fictional PM Adam Lang is a Cambridge man - in fact the last Cambridge PM was Stanley Baldwin and these sorts of things matter to Oxbridge types; the PM's wife and femme fatale Ruth Lang is an Oxford gal - this is a good joke because the real Cherie Booth is an LSE alumna and, quite properly, nothing winds up an LSE graduate more than being assumed Oxbridge. Just ask my dad.

Did I mention - bloody good book.

First Principles

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Isn't that good? Don't you wish you'd coined it? I do. But, beautiful and properly intentioned as it may be, it is also provides the self-righteous foundation for the American gun lobby. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions indeed (of which a little more below).

All of which is my roundabout way of trying to find a work-around (is that what the tech guys call it when you neatly circumvent a problem because you can't be arsed to suffer the full rigour of fixing it?) for my own frustration at the current charade being played out on the European political stage. We once again find ourselves in that most invidious of positions, namely favourably citing the Guardian - Cameron farce .   

I will not rehearse again my personal conclusion that the EU is a con. A well-intentioned and liberal con but a con nonetheless. Good intentions alone don't rescue these things - The Russian Revolution was well-intentioned and we ended up with the Warsaw Pact. Simplistically (very, but work with me) we can characterise certain types of British politician to have played on the Euro stage as follows: good men for whom their experience of war made them blind to the connivances of continentals who actually rather despised the British (Edward Heath); good men whose experience of the same war left them untrusting of compromised euro-socialism (Benn); hugely clever but mildly bonkers men who feared an unstoppable social democracy (Powell, Redwood); true believers who rather fancied an unstoppable social democracy (Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Peter Mandelson, Heseltine, Ken Clarke); those who believed that they could control it ie. the 'better in than outers' (Thatcher during her premiership, Major, Blair, Cameron); quasi-bigots (Farage); sane and principled opponenets (Shore, IDS, Hannan).

All of this is confusing and, in its way, nicely fascinating to anyone with a curiosity about constitutional politics. And God knows I like a nice abstract debate but the trouble is that this has long since encroached into the territory of actually bloody mattering. And (there it is again the OG's stylistic quirk of starting a sentence with a conjunction - this was frowned upon when he did it at junior school but, hey, he's a rebel) what really irks is that the current main players on the stage think that most of us don't matter in this discussion and that our views need neither be countenanced nor cajoled. Because here's the news you smug bastards (and here I'm really talking to Blair and Cameron) - I am already persuaded that you are better equipped than I to lead, that representative democracy is the best way we have come up with. Further (and more immediately important) I am persuadable that, despite everything, the EU might be refashioned to the advantage of civilisation. However I will not be persuaded when you: 1- fashion a slim wish-list of 'demands' to put to the technocrats and recent converts to democracy who constitute the growing EU franchise; 2- inevitably fail in your meaningless attempts to get anything from that shopping list and then; 3- most odious of all, spin it as some sort of progress. I've thought this over (seriously, it cost me sleep last night - that's how sad/engaged I am) and sorry Prime Minister, your performance yesterday was a heap of contemptuous bollocks. There is occasionally a place for contempt. As it happens PM I rather think that you are on the right lines when your temper betrays you and you show contempt for the risible Jeremy Corbyn but, being selfish here and I suppose immodestly crediting myself with some sensibility you doubt I possess, I assert some standing in all of this. You can't put the genie back in the bottle - thanks to the vision and sacrifice of others I have a vote and a semblance of education. Stop patting me on the head and asking me to trust you. I no longer do.

Back to where we started. 'That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.' Governments of where? What is a viable/practical nation state? The UK? Scotland? The whole of Europe?

Governments derive 'their just powers from the consent of the governed'. But is the consent of Europe as a whole, to be binding on the UK if the UK disagrees? Is Scotland to be bound by the rest of Britain? Is a wealthy London to be held in check by an under-performing 'Northern Powerhouse'? Spain/Catalonia? It goes on and on. Simple it ain't. But worthy of serious discussion? Yes. By all of us.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 Amen to that. Kindly note, my masters.

Return Of The Grumpy Old Man

For various reasons I have been well disposed towards my fellow men of late. Even, to a degree, Saint Vince of Twickenham, who got jeered by Luddite muppets at a public sector trade union conference the other day. Wake up and smell the coffee lads. You used to bark on about 'comparability' with the private sector. Two way street me old fruit. If you would like to know what pension poverty is, take a look at what Standard Life have done with my pissy little pot. This is my problem, not someone else's and that is the moral of the story.

But now a few things have pissed me off. Most tellingly I have injured my calf muscle again. This is part of some kind of divine conspiracy against my triathlon efforts. It is neither fair on me nor on the larger sporting public. As I have said before - will this setback prevent me from competing (this term is used broadly) in Yorkshire on 19 June? Will it bollocks.

Intolerance. Stupidity. Asininity. These have been bugging me as well. Perhaps because I don't pay enough attention, it has only recently come to my notice that the city authorities in New York have legislated to outlaw smoking outdoors - Central Park for example is a smoke free zone. Now there cannot be any earthly pretence that this is a health measure aimed at the effects of passive smoking. This is an example of a shrill and unpleasant minority imposing its prejudices on everybody else. May this law fester and poison the Big Apple as assuredly as did Prohibition. I can do no better than quote my old hero Simon Raven who wrote this in an Introduction to the re-issue of Alms for Oblivion:

Raven - brilliant and bitter

The cry, 'If I can't, you mustn't', had some trace of justification, however sullen and unlovely the sound of it. Nowadays we hear instead an even less lovely cry, 'If I don't want to, you mustn't' ie. 'It is just possible that I am, after all, missing out on something of value which you have been shrewd enough to detect and I haven't, and that wouldn't be fair and equal, now would it?' Once upon a time, however strong and righteous you considered your message, you scorned to become a pest: in 1998, however trivial your grievance, you find yourself encouraged and even 'morally obliged' to to become not just a pest but a pestilence.

In that same Introduction one finds the following example of Raven's brilliant acerbity - about the sad death of a woman and the shameful hysteria it triggered - the public egged on remember by a shamelessly lachrymose Prime Minister,

Who would have imagined that a flighty, pea-brained princess with an addiction to publicity should become a cult almost in the degree of sanctity?

Louis de Bernieres accurately describes depression as a state of estrangement from oneself. As it happened it was in the year of Diana's death that I had my first brush with the black dog. The events after her death meant that not only was I estranged from myself but also from the country I had loved. And I would be so presumptuous as to suggest that this is not just my problem but a problem for rather more of us. Because goodwill greases wheels and there's precious little of it left. No man is an island? Look around you.

As You Sow

Another proud day for the British body politic. Blair appears before the Iraq Commission and makes a spirited defence of his conduct which amounts to what we all suspected in the first place, that he knew best, that he still knows best, that there are times when men of destiny such as he have to act for the global good. He's not bullshitting you know - he genuinely believes this stuff. Blow by blow account at Iraq Enquiry

Meanwhile back on earth the Downing Street Director of Communications resigns because the publicity about what he might have known when he was editor of The Geriatric Wankers' Weekly is preventing him from giving the required '110%' to his job - Coulson Goes - Leaving aside the puerile drivel involved in stating that any job can require more than 100% effort (one had rather hoped that only footballers went in for this sort of crap) we have the distasteful sight of a man losing his job for something he denies he did (with Ed Milliband lobbing in some sanctimonious tripe from the sidelines) because of the malign hold our gutter press has over public sensibilities. Irony of ironies, this is the lynch-mob mentality which Coulson and his tribe have created in the first place. In a development you really couldn't make up I read that one of the celebrities taking legal action against Coulson's former organ is the parasite's parasite Max Clifford. If ever a legal action deserved to be ruled a nil-nil draw with each side bearing its own huge costs, this must be it.

And yet there is more. Alan Johnson comes across as a thoroughly decent sort of bloke, so of course he has lasted about three minutes as shadow chancellor and retreats to the back benches to rescue what is left of his dignity. Johnson Quits In his place comes the snarling Ed Balls to take on the oleaginous George Osborne. Another scoreless draw would seem the best one can hope for. Just to top it all Coulson's resignation is cynically timed to coincide with Blair giving evidence. These knob heads never learn do they.

Still, look on the bright side. I signed my tax return today and according to that I am due a small refund. Let joy be unconfined as I prepare to kick-start the economy with my £330.  I bet I'll make a better fist of it than successive governments. 

.... Are Brilliant Mark V

Angela Carter. Danielle (a very wise young woman of my acquaintance - a point I mention by way of boasting that I do actually know some young women) told me an age ago that Carter was brilliant. I did not initially act on this information but the degree syllabus eventually left me with no choice in the matter - well God bless the reading list is what I say. Oh and God bless Danielle whose advice I will henceforth heed. Carter's is writing so good that it leaves you breathless and envious of its sheer bloody audacity. Read anything of hers but make sure you don't miss Wise Children which is very,very funny. Wodehouse funny (yes that good) but with lots of shagging.

Belly pork. Once unfashionable and reassuringly cheap. Now de rigueur (no matter how many times you look at it that word looks like it's spelt wrong) and a bit pricey. Used to eat it a lot when I was a student. Nothing wrong with a bit of fat. Years ahead of my time of course. My next prediction is a fad for Dundee cake and instant custard, which I used to have for pudding every night until the cake had run out and I would go home and get Grandma to make me another one. Sadly my dealer died a few years ago. Proud Yorkshirewoman my Grandma - knew what she liked and liked what she bloody well knew.

Old films. This of course is a bit of a generalisation but what the hell, they're better than new films. It's a matter of soul and style. I can't put  a date on when old films stop and new ones start, which rather gives the lie to my argument. How about 1960? If that's the case smart-arse how do you explain The Godfather? Or M*A*S*H? Or Hoop Dreams? Or Toy Story? This is a post I wish I'd never started. What I will do is put in a word for Now Voyager (1941) - melodrama has its place in the pantheon but is it ok for men to cry? The new man Overgraduate thinks it is but he's rather a weed when all is said and done and hopes the rugby club are not reading this.

Red wine. Another sweeping generalisation there but I've had a couple of glasses and it doesn't half aid the creative process. In that regard it works far better than white wine. On the down side it gives you a worse head-ache. One's life is bedecked with such problems. No doubt Hemingway felt much the same.

Snow. A contentious one this because the currently fashionable response is to curse it and also to bemoan our inability to carry on doing whatever it is we do as soon as it is inconsiderate enough to fall. But work with me here - it looks lovely, particularly from the window of my edge of the countryside middle-class redoubt. I'm looking at it now. God bless us one and all.

The Republic of Ireland. If a country is to go bust it should do it with a certain degree of style and a marked lack of self-pity. The Irish way is so much more dignified and proper than the Greek. As for the benighted Euro, well I've been singing this song for ages - the question of a single currency is not one of economics it is one of politics and above all sovereignty. That he kept us out of it will be Gordon Brown's monument. That he wanted in should be one of Blair's. One does wonder what those twin buffoons Heseltine and Clarke make of the present fiasco. There's no fool like an old fool.

Amateur dramatics. Recently finished a brief run as the pater familias in Little Women. This was a very small role and one I made a solid attempt to cock up but all was alright on the night(s). Perhaps the most reassuring thing about it was the young cast, several of whom were uniquely hopeless in rehearsal but blithely assured us they would be fine in performance. The young were right and we old gits need not have worried. I'll be back for more if they'll have me.

Sideshow Bob. A great comic creation. It stands to reason that I would like The Simpsons because I am after all a man of taste and discernment, but when Bob is in town the comic ante is upped. Kelsey Grammer's finest hour. True aficianados will also appreciate Bob's brother Cecil. The two are here shown together in a tender family moment after Cecil springs Bob from prison.

Finally, red wine. Oh, done that already. Say goodnight Sooty.

I Haven't Changed My Mind But

The Overgraduate is a critic of both Blair and Obama. There is a whiff of piety about both which is off-putting. But today I find myself in agreement with both. In this I seem perhaps out of step with the general populace so that much at least is reassuring.

The Divine Blairness first. Today it has been announced that all royalties from his memoirs, not to mention the £4.6m advance, will be donated to the British Legion. Good for him and shame on the moaners who have been so swift to bleat to the media about how this is nothing more than 'blood money.' No doubt they would have had something else to say if he had quietly pocketed the money. Dodgy war, nice gesture.

Obama next. Yesterday he spoke out in favour of the right of American muslims to build a mosque on ground they own at ground zero, the site of the fallen twin towers. What he actually said was that it is no business of the federal government to intervene in such plans provided no planning or local laws are contravened. Spot on. As a test of the rightness of his comments we need only apply the Sarah Palin test - because if she agrees with you then you are probably wrong. On this occasion she has condemned her president so for once he deserves my support.