The View from Jaywick, by Dan Casey

Jaywick is the poorest village in England. I am a Labour District Councillor representing it, and I live there. It is within the Clacton parliamentary constituency, where a by-election is being held today.

Jaywick has been the most deprived ward in the country for the last four years. Not one penny has come from central government. Douglas Carswell  has been the MP for the last nine years. The local investment group was brought to the table by the two Labour Councillors.

Carswell has been part of the most uncaring government of our time, and for him to jump ship to UKIP sums him up: blaming everyone but himself. UKIP has done nothing apart from take vast salaries and expenses from the EU while biting the hand that feeds it.

Taking action on GP services, I did not see Carswell in Golf Green Hall when we had two meetings of over 100 upset residents. He was going to secure a new unit in Clacton's Kennedy House, but this did not happen, and people now have to travel long distances for care.

But the classic was "saving the maternity unit in Clacton". All that Carswell did was to lead a march of 30 to 40 people with himself at the front. It was for him. The mothers and expectant mothers walked behind him. 

At Harwich, which is now outside the constituency, there were 250 people, led by the mums. When the mums led 150 people in Clacton, Carswell was not there. It is shameful that he now claims to have saved the day. If, indeed, the units are safe.

The party of which Carswell was part made choices on planning, and what a mess they have made. He voted for their policies, as part of the uncaring lot under whom the rich have grown richer and the poor here have grown poorer. Their doctrine has done nothing for ordinary people.

What do we do for all the people in this County of Essex who find themselves with no job or no home? Carswell wants to stop the immigrants' benefits, thereby putting more people onto the streets. Immigration here has gone up on his watch.

Carswell has now joined a party that does not believe in the EU, yet which has 24 MEPs who take the money but who do nothing for the people who elected them.

Having worked in retail all my life, from the shop floor to group controller with Tesco, if decisions have been made with discussion and debate, then there is no point in coming out of a meeting and throwing your toys out of the pram.

The future of our young people lies in Europe, our main trading partner, as 80 per cent of business people understand. The party that Carswell has joined thinks that we still have an Empire.

Contrary to Carswell's claims, the sea front was not his baby, and I am surprised that his former party has not pointed that out. I wonder why not?

Douglas Carswell is an opportunist who wants to be the first UKIP MP. Can you trust someone like that? No. Can you trust UKIP with our country or our county? No.

A Strong Liberal Voice Is Needed Now, by Ben Myring

The United Kingdom has long had a deep-rooted majoritarian political culture.  Two-party politics has been the norm since the formation of modern political parties.

There have occasionally been splits and recombinations, and even less-frequent cases of parties collapsing and being replaced by new contenders.

But, by-and-large, the adversarial two-party system has remained dominant.

This dominance, so different from most of our continental neighbours, is partly cultural and partly due to an electoral system which has continued to reward the party with the plurality of votes with a majority of Commons seats at most elections.

However, psephologists and other observers have long observed that this would be hard to sustain.

Underlying the two-party system is an increasingly diverse and pluralist population who no longer cleanly divide their votes between two parties.

From a peak of 96.8% of the combined vote at the 1951 election, by 2005 this figure had fallen to 67.6%.

Tony Blair’s clear majority, acquired that year, rested on the support of only 35.2% of voters. By that same year, the third-place Liberal Democrats had reached 22%.

In 2010, the Conservatives under David Cameron achieved – with 36.1% - a higher vote share than Blair had five years earlier.

Yet the first-past-the-post electoral system, combined with a further rise in support for the Liberal Democrats, left the Commons well and truly hung.

The unfortunate Liberal Democrats, compelled by the electoral math to enter a coalition with the party most despised by their activist base, have subsequently taken a serious battering in the polls, often lurking in the high single-digits.

Yet in those same polls Labour and the Conservatives are still only able to muster less than 70% between them.

Instead of returning to a two-party system, the electorate appears to be gaining an appetite for more pluralism.

Smaller parties, most especially UKIP, the Greens, and the parties of the Celtic Fringe, are growing rapidly in support.

While the electorate continue to claim that they prefer single-party rule, they do not appear to be planning to vote in a way that is likely to deliver this.

Current polling rarely puts Labour much higher than 35%.  History suggests that this lead will erode as the election campaign gets underway.

If the Liberal Democrats hold more than 30 seats (as seems likely) and the SNP make the gains that are being predicted (let alone gains by UKIP and others) Labour may well be denied a majority.

The possible outcomes of the May 2015 election are more febrile than ever before.

Sooner or later, the electorate may have to come to terms with the reality of a political pluralism of their own making – coalitions are likely to become a fixture of British politics as much as on the Continent.

Add to this the narrow result of the Scottish independence referendum. It seems certain to result in much greater devolution of power to Scotland, further unbalancing the constitution.

The apparent willingness of all parties to address this creates perhaps the greatest opportunity for radical constitutional reform in British history.

Assuming that the Conservatives do not win then next election outright and implement an ‘English votes’ fix, it seems likely that some sort of constitutional convention – formal or otherwise - may soon be upon us.

The possible outcomes of this are not limited to devolution or even ‘home rule’. Federalism – perhaps with a proportionally elected second chamber – and electoral reform of local government are both on the table.

The party that is most interested in – and has given most studied consideration to – such constitutional reform is of course the Liberal Democrats. 

It may be a case of cometh the moment – an ironic case given the party’s current weakness.

Yet should Ed Miliband find himself with the largest party but short of a majority in May, he might well be tempted to partly delegate responsibility for constitutional reform to the Liberal Democrats in exchange for their support – perhaps thereby avoiding having Lib Dem ministers in every department as per the current arrangement.

Any significant reform is likely to result in a much more pluralist political system than the one we have now, and that may provide the basis for a restoration of Liberal Democrat fortunes.

Certainly a strong liberal voice is needed now, when both Labour and Conservatives are tempted to implement authoritarian schemes in the name of security, and the Conservatives threaten to undermine the hard-won system of human rights and wider international law.

Regardless of the outcome of 2015, there are few signs that a two-party system will be restored. The underlying sociological foundation has changed.

It’s time our political culture and institutions caught up.

Theresa May and the Return of the Snoopers' Charter, by Loz Kaye

This year's conference season has seen the parties laying out their stalls for 2015's General Election.

Given her attitude to civil liberties it should probably come as no surprise that Theresa May's contribution has been to vow that a future Tory government would reintroduce the “Snoopers' Charter”.

Once again the Conservatives are angling to strip us of liberties and privacy in the name of the war on terror.

We have already had this debate during this parliament.

The Communications Data Bill (dubbed the Snoopers' Charter) was intended to further extend already existing powers to retain information on our communications.

In other words, who all of us phone, email, text, location data and much more.

It was rejected as disproportionate, and after all significant obligations already exist for telcos and ISPs to retain this data.

The rejection of the ever further eroding of our rights to a private life has clearly rankled. Politicians have cynically seized every opportunity to try and press for the widening of the scope of mass surveillance powers.

Each time there is a new atrocity the argument is made that the Communications Data Bill would be a way of preventing it.

Former Home Secretaries queueing up to use the appalling murder of Lee Rigby as a justification for the Snoopers' Charter without a shred of evidence that more intelligence would have made a difference was a particularly nauseating example.

Yet again we have Theresa May at the Conservative Conference saying that we are facing a  “crisis in national security”.

The specific justification made each time for further powers is that there is a declining ability of the police and security services to monitor phone and Internet use. Home Secretaries are presenting this as if it's an upgrade to do with the rapid change of technology and the way that we communicate.

Yet we know from the Snowden revelations that it is simply not the case that our capabilities have fallen behind, quite the reverse.

The myriad alphabet soup of surveillance programmes – PRISM, TEMPORA, XKEYSCORE and the rest have an unprecedented reach.

For example GCHQ's ability to tap in to the transatlantic fibre optic cables has in secret allowed it to access to vast streams of sensitive personal information.

The Guardian compared the sheer volume to being equivalent to sending the entire British Library 192 times each day. This is hardly a diminishing capability as Theresa May claims.

All of this took place without proper public debate and under an oversight regime that GCHQ lawyers themselves described as “light”.

It's preposterous of the Home Secretary to claim that we “risk sleepwalking in to a society in which crime can no longer be investigated”.

This is clearly just pre-election jockeying for position to be able to accuse the Liberal Democrats  of “outrageous irresponsibility” for not backing the Snoopers' Charter.

In fact she of all people must be aware that far from preventing mass surveillance, the LibDems have allowed it to continue in government.

This is shown by their craven backing of shoving the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act or “DRIP “ through parliament in a matter of days.

The latest justification for blanket powers is the rise of ISIL. Yet the alarming success of these extremists shows the failure of massive blanket communications interception.

ISIL has grown up, apparently been operating oil refineries and command posts, UK citizens have left to fight in the Middle East, under the all seeing eye of what Edward Snowden described as “the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history”.

Either the US and UK have not actually been able to make sense of the vast streams of data, or we have and not known what to do about it.

The key dishonesty of all those who argue for further invasions of privacy is to confuse monitoring all of us with monitoring where it's required.

Limiting our collective liberty is no guarantee of our security, far from it.

Theresa May hoped for British values prevailing and winning the day in her speech.  The British values I want to see prevail are preserving liberty and private life.

I welcome that debate for the General Election.

Loz Kaye is the Leader of the Pirate Party UK.

"An Empty Populist Pledge", by Clive Peedell and Louise Irvine

Reaction to David Cameron's pledge of 7 day a week GP access from National Health Action Party co-leader Dr Clive Peedell and London GP, Dr Louise Irvine.

NHA co-leader, Dr Clive Peedell said:

"This announcement illustrates the chaos within the Coalition. The PM says he wants to tackle the causes of ill health yet his Chancellor announces cuts to the incomes of the working poor creating greater poverty the leading cause for ill health.

The PM supported the Health & Social Care Act which divested the Secretary of State for Health the responsibility for providing a health service yet here we have politicians deciding where scarce resources are best spent without any economic analysis in the public domain.

The announcement he should have made was to abolish the NHS market and reinvest the billions currently wasted on bureaucracy in frontline services whilst simultaneously tackling the determinants of ill health."

NHA's Dr Louise Irvine, London GP and prospective parliamentary candidate for SW Surrey, the seat of Jeremy Hunt said:

"This is utter nonsense. It is an empty populist pledge. Many of the pilot schemes that he claims have been a success haven't even got off the ground, so where's the evidence that they are effective?​

£100 million cannot even begin to make up for the loss of funding to maintain existing GP services never mind extending them to 7 days.

£100 million is about £2/person/year. For an average GP practice of 6000 patients that means an extra £12000 a year. For that the practice would have to be open 60% longer than currently (from 52.5 hours to 84 hours a week) and pay doctors, nurses and admin staff to be there. That would be approximately 1500 extra hours a year - £8 for every extra hour opened. That would not even pay for a receptionist for the surgery never mind the medical staff to provide the service.

This is a bad joke and shows how disdainful the Tories are of ordinary people and their health services. Instead of recognising and tackling the real crisis in general practice - not enough GPs, £1 billion of funding cuts to GP services over past 5 years and a recruitment crisis where young doctors are not choosing general practice and older ones are retiring early - Cameron is pretending that if you give a measly £100 million that will somehow sort the problems in general practice.

The real issues that people are concerned about are not 7 day opening but actually being able to see a GP in a reasonable time, and for the GP to have long enough to really deal with their problems properly.

Indeed, with the rate of practice closures and threatened closures, for What is needed is a reversal of the decline in percentage of NHS funding spent on general practice, bringing it back up to 11%, and the resources should be invested in more GPs with smaller patient lists so they have more time with their patients. Increasing average appointment time from 10 to 15 minutes would make a great improvement to the patient experience and quality of care.

That is the kind of proposal that would make a real difference, not Cameron's populist posturing. But that would take real money - and Cameron would rather give tax cuts to the rich than invest in our NHS."

After the Scottish Referendum, by David Lindsay

There is no West Lothian Question. The Parliament of the United Kingdom reserves the right to legislate supremely in any policy area for any part of the country. It never need do so and the point would still stand, since what matters is purely that it has that power in principle, which no one disputes that it has.

If an English Parliament, or “English votes for English laws”, would be so popular, then put it to a referendum of the people of England. It would pass in the South East, although I only suspect that, just as I only suspect that it would pass by far less in East Anglia and perhaps also in those parts of the South West that were not too far south and west.

Whereas I know with absolute certainty, as do you, that it would not obtain one third of the vote anywhere else, that it would not manage one quarter anywhere beyond the Mersey or the Humber (or, I expect, in Devon or Cornwall, either), and that it would not scrape one fifth in the North East, or in Cumbria, or, again, in Cornwall. If anyone doubts this, then bring on that referendum.

As for Labour’s needing Scottish MPs in order to win an overall majority, certain grandees of the commentariat need to be pensioned off, or at the very least to have their copy subjected to the most basic fact-checking by editorial staff.

In 1964, fully 50 years ago, MPs from Scotland delivered a Labour overall majority of four when there would otherwise have been a Conservative overall majority of one that would not have lasted a year.

In October 1974, MPs from Scotland turned what would have been a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party into a Labour overall majority so tiny that it was lost in the course of that Parliament.

In 2010, MPs from Scotland turned what would have been a small Conservative overall majority into a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party and with David Cameron as Prime Minister, anyway.

On no other occasion since the War, if ever, have MPs from Scotland, as such, influenced the outcome of a General Election. In any case, with the Government committed to the Barnett Formula, there cannot be any such thing as exclusively English legislation, since it all has knock-on effects in Scotland and Wales. What “English laws”?

The grievance of England, and especially of Northern and Western England, concerns cold, hard cash. What, then, of those who bellow for an English Parliament to bartenders who cannot follow everyone else and leave the room? They fall into two categories. There are the Home Counties Home Rulers. And there are those wishing to live under the Raj of the Home Counties Home Rulers.

On the one hand are those from the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. Their definition of England is the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, or at least a certain idea of that area. Give them something for that, and they would be perfectly happy, at least until the votes started to be tallied up. Everyone gets a vote. Even the people whom they have bawled out.

On the other hand are those from everywhere else. Their definition of England is also the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, or at least a certain idea of that area. Although they are often professionally “local” to elsewhere, especially in Yorkshire but also in pockets of other parts of the country, the basis of their political position has always been that they were a cut above their neighbours.

That made them Conservatives until recently, and it increasingly makes them UKIP supporters. That is who the UKIP supporters in the North and elsewhere are. They were never Labour. That is also the context for the fact that there has been a UKIP MEP in Wales for some years and that there is now a UKIP MEP in Scotland, too.

They may never have elected an MP or even a councillor in their lives, or they may live in the only ward or constituency for miles around where their votes ever elected anyone. But enough MPs were returned from elsewhere to make Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister. That suited them down to the ground.

Quite wrongly, since it would be run by Labour as often as not, they see an English Parliament in the same terms. Their more numerous and concentrated brethren elsewhere would deliver them from the rule of their neighbours. It is very funny indeed that those brethren think that they are those neighbours.

In 1993, 66 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht, far more than the number of Conservatives who did so. Yet there were far more Conservative than Labour MPs at the time. Of those 66, at least three campaigned for a Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum, including that campaign’s chairman, Dennis Canavan.

While it is true that several of those from Wales went on to be among the strongest opponents of devolution, the 66 also included the late John McWilliam, one of the first campaigners for a North East regional assembly.

So much for the dissolution of the United Kingdom as some kind of EU plot, and I write as an inveterate social democratic Eurosceptic and Unionist. If anything, the pressure for that dissolution is a reaction against the effects of Thatcher’s Single European Act, of Maastricht, and of the Stability Pact to which we are pretty much adhering despite not being in the euro. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership looms large.

If there is one group of people to be avoided at all costs, then it is the ones who go on about some EU map with England divided into regions. If anyone had paid any attention to them, then the toothless and Tyneside-dominated regional assembly would have been set up in the North East, purely and understandably in order to spite them.

City regions are what used to be called metropolitan counties, which Thatcher abolished because she did not like Ken Livingstone. No, that never did make any sense. But that was what she did. Similarly, many unitary authorities bear more than a passing resemblance to county boroughs. These things have to keep going around and coming around, in order to justify the salaries of the people who write the research papers.

But since city regions are now to be revived under that name, whatever powers are proposed for them must also extend to a body covering each of those 40 English ceremonial counties which are neither Greater London, nor the City of London, nor any of the former metropolitan counties.

In many cases, the obvious body already exists. Where it no longer does, then that raises the question of why it no longer does. And where, as here in County Durham, the legacy of the last Government is such as would leave that body unbalanced, with existing local government responsibilities for part but not quite all of its area, then that, too, would be called into question. Leading to the restoration of the former district councils.

This promise of significant devolution to rural communities might go some way to making up the support that Labour has been too lazy to build up during this Parliament by properly opposing cuts in those communities’ services, and by selecting strong local campaigning candidates, with or without prior party allegiance.

Whatever the conurbations are getting, as well they might, then so must the counties. The loyally Labour old coal and steel belts of County Durham, South Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire are among the places that will need to be convinced that our, as often as not Conservative or Lib Dem, urban neighbours quite deserved all of this city regions carry on.

At the very least, we are not having the powers of our own local authorities transferred to them. In fact, since we are fairly populous, we may reasonably demand that whatever they got, then so should we. At least that money and those powers would always be under the control of members of Ed Miliband’s own party.

Will Devo Max really be opposed only by implacable Tory ultras? What about implacable Labour ultras? Or implacable Lib Dem ultras? Labour MPs for Scotland hold the Scottish Parliament in extremely low regard, and they did so even before it fell under the control of the SNP, as it did quite some time ago now.

Labour MPs for the North of England have spent an electoral generation voting powers to Scotland and to Europe, to Wales and to London, to Northern Ireland and to the judiciary, to everyone but themselves or their constituents. It is not as if Scotland has proved loyal to Labour in the way that the North very largely has.

All these years after devolution, Lib Dem MPs see that the Highlands and Islands are the only part of Scotland among the 11 parts of the United Kingdom that are poorer than Poland. Although Cornwall and Devon are both also on that list, as well as both being among those nine out of the 10 poorest parts of Northern Europe which are in this country.

Bringing us to the Barnett Formula, which has been elevated to the status of an article of the Constitution, but which in fact has never had any force of law. Lord Barnett has long been on record that it was only ever supposed to last for one year. It is an outrage against social democracy and even against basic justice, being not remotely needs-based.

The canonisation of the Barnett Formula imperils the Union by raising serious questions among the Welsh about why they should bother with a State that treated them so shabbily. Heaven knows, it does no good to the poorest people in Scotland. Their condition is as abject under Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon as is that of their counterparts under David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith.

Labour MPs for Wales and the North of England need to band together with Lib Dems for Wales and the West Country, and indeed for the North of Scotland, so that, perhaps even joined by Plaid Cymru and undoubtedly alongside all parties from Northern Ireland, they might propose a long-overdue replacement, based on need and organised through direct funding to localities without reference to the Nationalist nomenklatura in Scotland.

The areas of Scotland that would benefit most from such a new approach are those which suffer most as a result of the old one. Outside the rural Lib Dem strongholds, those are mostly the areas that return devosceptical Labour MPs to Westminster. As much as anything else, this offers the possibility of taking Holyrood seats from the SNP, by correctly presenting it as the party that hordes money away from the communities that need it.

Devo Max will pass. In order to force these concessions in the course of that Bill’s parliamentary progress, there should be 200 votes against it at Second Reading, perhaps even 250, and possibly even 300. There ought to be. But will there be? If not, why not?

The parts of the United Kingdom that are listed as one or both of poorer than Poland and among the 10 poorest places in Northern Europe are West Wales and the Welsh Valleys, Devon, Cornwall, Durham and the Tees Valley, Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire, Lancashire, Northern Ireland, East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, the Highlands and Islands, and Merseyside. There are of course many other very poor places in this country.

All MPs for those areas should vote against any legislation that would give the force of law to the Barnett Formula. Likewise, all MPs from the 40 shire counties of England, but perhaps especially from the old coal and steel belts, should vote against any extension of the powers of the Scottish Parliament without devolution not only to English MPs en bloc or to city regions, but also directly to those county areas.

On Possibly Coming Round to Votes at 16, by David Lindsay

I am still not convinced about lowering the voting age. We are being bounced into it because 16 and 17-year-olds have voted in the Scottish referendum. But my mind is no longer entirely closed to that change itself.

I remember what it was like to be a politically active Sixth Former. It is not an experience that I shall ever forget. No one who was one could ever imagine that it was, is, or will ever be normal.

Even a superbly well-educated 16-year-old is still a 16-year-old. Lowering the voting age even further might pose a very serious threat to democracy, since no one seriously imagines that the opinion of a 16-year-old matters as much as that of his Head Teacher, or his doctor, or his mother. Why, then, should each of them have only as many votes as he had? Thus might the process start.

Harold Wilson probably thought that he might gain some advantage from lowering the voting age. But the Sixties Swingers hated him (that is largely forgotten now, but it is true), and they handed the 1970 Election to Ted Heath instead.

If there had been a General Election, as was once widely expected, in the spring of 1996, then, having been born in September 1977, I would have been able to vote in that Election, even though I would still have had a couple of months of school left to go.

But by then I had been free for more than two years to walk out any time I liked. I would have been so free even if the school-leaving age had been raised to 18, as is now going to happen.

Lowering the voting age to two years below the school-leaving age would literally be giving the vote to children: to people whom we, as a society, had decided were not yet capable of deciding for themselves whether or not they wished to leave full-time education.

It is still well within living memory that most people left school, and went straight into taxpaying work, a full seven years before they were entitled to vote. Now, we propose that people should have the vote two years before they were able to leave school.

If anyone doubts quite how monolithically middle-class our political culture has become, then consider that it has almost certainly never occurred to the proponents of lowering the voting age that even 21 was ever attained before leaving full-time education, never mind a third of one’s life to that date after having done so.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

With the introduction of individual registration, I suspect that the proportion of the extremely elderly that remained on the electoral register would be hardly, if at all, higher than the proportion of those all the way up to the age of about 25.

Of those registered, if 16 and 17-year-olds were able to be so, then I strongly suspect that a higher proportion of them would actually exercise the franchise than of the over-90s, who are also a very small cohort overall.

I have seen the way in which candidates press the flesh in nursing homes when there is an election coming up. Some of the residents know exactly what is going on. Others are decidedly confused. Others again hardly know Christmas from Tuesday. 16 and 17-year-olds would be very much the same.

(By the way, I am wholly unshocked by the practice of activists filling in postal voting forms on behalf of the institutionalised elderly who ask them to vote for those activists’ candidates. If that did not happen, then those electors' clearly expressed preference would go uncounted.)

Like a lot of my vintage, I see one third of bus passes used to commute, for much of the year from and to homes heated by the Winter Fuel Allowance. But then I consider that there will be none of those things for us, even though the people now coming into them no more fought in the War. They were no more on this earth than we were while the War was being fought by anyone.

In my more mean-spirited moments, I ponder that people who “worked all their lives” were paid to do so, and ought not to have spent it all, as of course many of them did not, with the result that they are now loaded.

Or I ponder that they have not in fact “worked all their lives” if they have retired a mere two thirds of the way through the probable length of their lives.

I make no apology for seeing no War-like debt to be repaid to those whose formative experiences were sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, full employment, cheap housing, student grants, public ownership, municipal services, the explosion of mass consumer affluence, and the felt need to demonstrate against another country’s war because this country was not waging one.

However, I believe in full employment, cheap housing, student grants, public ownership, municipal services, and opposition to American wars of liberal intervention. I am by no means averse to the finer things in life. I fully recognise that few are those who could really manage without their bus passes or their Winter Fuel Allowances. I support the principle of universality to the very marrow of my bones.

No, the question is one of balance, plus the perfectly simple writing into the legislation of a ban on jurors aged under 18 or 21, as there is already a ban on jurors aged over 75.

Balancing generational interests is as important as balancing class interests, or regional interests, or urban and rural interests, and so on. Only social democracy can do those. Only social democracy can do this.

The sheer size of the ageing Baby Boom is such that the democracy in social democracy might require a modest reduction in the voting age. While that case has not yet been made sufficiently convincingly to justify the change, I am less and less decided that it simply never will or could be.

The Prototype Neoconservative Military Intervention, by David Lindsay

It is a very strange thing to commemorate the centenary of the start of a war, rather than, as is usual, the centenary or other anniversary of its end.

The First World War was a Liberal war, the prototype neoconservative military intervention far more than the usually cited Second World War was. Why, throughout the First World War, Britain still had a Liberal Government. It stood alongside the French Radicals against the German National Liberals.

British Liberalism, French Radicalism and German Liberalism were not, and are not, exactly the same thing. But there was, and there is, a pronounced family resemblance. And they all have the same enemies, just as they did a hundred years ago.

The principle of National Liberalism, of the singular mission of a particular Great Power to conform the world to the Liberal vision even by the force or arms, was not in dispute. The only dispute was as to which Great Power had been entrusted with that mission.

But there was a Germany before Unification, and even as part of Unification Germany had to retain many decidedly pre-Enlightenment features. There was a France before the Revolution, and anyone may still see all manner of aspects of her. We all know about the United Kingdom and her predecessor-states.

In the end, of course, only one Great Power, and arguably only one political entity at all, has ever been founded specifically as the Liberal one, expansionist and interventionist accordingly. It is not mine.

In Defence of the Experts, by Fergus Butler-Gallie

“We have not overthrown the divine right of Kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.” So goes the famous quotation from Harold Macmillan.

It cannot be said, alas, that the current Prime Minister has followed much of his Etonian forebear’s advice in other areas.

Don’t sell off the family silver, being a start. Macmillan meant this with regard to the privatisation of gas and other utilities, but it could just as easily be said of the Royal Mail.

But, in this disdain for expertise, we can see a distinct similarity between the government of today and that of half a century ago.

The disdain for expertise then, as evinced by Macmillan’s quotation, had very different reasoning behind it than the disdain for expertise we see in the coalition today.

Macmillan was exhibiting (or, more likely, affecting) a distaste for ‘expertise’ as an example of bourgeois meddling.

For him, as with many other self identifying Disraelians of the time, the near-sacred bond between ruler and ruled could do without the opinions of white-coated ‘new men’ fixated with numbers and statistics.

How times have changed.

Arguably, the very reason why many, across the political spectrum, hold expertise in such disdain is precisely because they often can’t be valued in terms of numbers.

To the minds of many political commentators, many politicians and, arguably, many amongst the general public, if something or someone cannot be ascribed a distinct, empirical value, then it must be worthless.

This is often expressed in our political sphere in terms of ‘accountability’.

Because a member of the House of Commons has an exact numerical majority by which they can measure themselves, and because business leaders have empirical profit margins by which they might be measured, and shareholder targets to meet, they are held to be ‘accountable’, and therefore implicitly better placed to give their counsel than those who do not.

This fetishisation of empiricism in politics exists across the party divide. The opinions of those without a self-assigned numerical value measured in either votes or shares, have consistently been sidelined by the all three major political parties.

For instance, when Alan Johnson sacked Professor David Nutt his justification was clear: his opinion, as an elected official of a government with an ascribable majority and so on, trumped Professor Nutt’s advice.

So it has been also with Govian education reform. The non-experts, be they government ministers or parents with enough numerical wherewithal (read: money) to set up Free Schools, must trump the considered opinions of teachers with the expertise of experience.

It is curious, in a post expenses scandal world, where trust in both elected politicians and big businesses is inordinately low, that we as a society should chose to make the numerical hard fact of an elected mandate or an annual turnover the most important considerations in deciding whether someone ought to be listened to.

This has been clear recently in the continued fractious relationship between successive governments and the House of Lords.

As a result of the recent government reshuffle, for the first time in history the leader of the Upper House of Parliament will not sit in the Cabinet.

On 28th July the Lords passed a motion condemning this, tabled by Baroness Boothroyd, considered one of the finest Commons Speakers of modern times.

The response was immediate. Politicians and journalists took to Twitter to condemn such ‘navel gazing’. 

Stewart Jackson, the Conservative MP for Peterborough denounced it as an “unelected/unaccountable” body (note the elision of the two) just debating “their own powers and influence”.

The Lords were accused of being “out of touch” for daring to debate what actually constitutes an unprecedented constitutional change.

The implicit line followed by all within the political bubble who took it upon themselves to criticise was that, because they are unelected, the Lords have no right to comment.

That a global expert on the constitution such as Lord Norton of Louth, or any number of former ministers with years and years of experience behind them, have no right to discuss the implications of marginalising the Upper House of Parliament, whereas a man who owes his seat to 33,973 people in North Oxfordshire does. 

When Thomas Carlyle critiqued Benthamite Utilitarianism, he warned that it would reduce “the infinite celestial soul of mankind to a kind of balance for weighing hay and thistles on.”

He identified the dangers of a world whereby only numerical value is considered to be important.

We aren’t quite in thistle weighing territory yet.

But the concept that only those with a discernible numerical value, be that of a majority or sizeable annual turnover, have the right to pass comment and partake in the formulation of policy is a worrying trend that appears to be garnering support across the political spectrum.

I would humbly suggest that things ought to begin swinging back the other way- here’s to the (semi) divine right of the experts.

Our Christian Coronation, by Philip Benwell

A talk given at the House of Lords on Wednesday 23rd July 2014, by courtesy of The Lord Stoddart of Swindon:

Late last year an organisation called the National Secular Society announced that, through lawyers, it was petitioning the European Court of Human Rights to rule that the next Coronation to be held in the United Kingdom be, in effect, a state investiture so as to be more in harmony with Europe.

In a November 2013 statement to the media they said: “Britain’s current investiture of a monarch with such overt religious associations is an anomaly within the context of the rest of Europe.”

However, the coronation of British kings is not at all like the secular state installations of European monarchs because its thousand year old Christian Coronations are not merely a formal appointment but a Christian consecration of the monarch creating a communion between the Monarch and God and between the Monarch and the People.

The words of Dr Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of York at the coronation of King George V, expresses this sentiment very clearly.

He said "The King comes not alone to his hallowing. He bears his people with him. For the national life, as well as for its representative, this is a day of consecration ....”

The Coronation is a time when all subjects of the Queen, whatever their country of citizenship, are brought together, united in a common purpose, to welcome the crowning of their King.

It is something that belongs not only to Britain but to all those countries who have as their sovereign the monarch of the United Kingdom.

The anointing is the central act of the religious ceremony and includes the Blessing and Consecration.

In the twenty-six monarchies left in the world today (other than possibly the Vatican), only the British monarchs are anointed and consecrated with sacred oil at their coronation.

What Europhile secularists fail to appreciate is that Britain is a Christian nation with a Christian monarchy which is sanctified before God and the people with a Christian Coronation.

Indeed, the British peoples are, despite our materialism, Christian and British societies in every sense, for even though we may not go to church, even though we may not pray or even though some may deny the very existence of God, the entire fabric of our being is based on the teachings of the Bible and the practices of Christ, whether we may admit to it or not.

In times past we absorbed the rituals of the Druids and other pagans but never lost sight of the laws of God.

For a thousand years or more, peoples from other lands and faiths, including the Moslem, have been welcomed into our society.

We do not demand that they be Christian, but we do expect them to respect our Christian laws and our Christian traditions.

Whilst so many may tend to dismiss the European Human Rights action as something that would never happen, I point to the words of the British High Court judge who recently said he believed that even though Britain had signed a special protocol as part of the Lisbon Treaty which was to ensure that the EU Charter of Rights would not be enforceable in Britain, the EU law had unintentionally been incorporated into British law anyway due to years of European interference in the law-making functions of the British Parliament.

Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption, has recently warned that the European Court of Human Rights exceeds its legitimate powers, usurps the role of politicians and undermines the democratic process and Court of Appeal judge, Lord Justice Laws, had said that the UK Supreme Court has accorded “overriding force to the notion that only Strasbourg’s rulings on the convention are “definitive” or “authoritative'.”

In any event, it is accepted that the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, is compulsory and binding for all 47 member states of the Council of Europe.

Did not Aesop wisely say so very long ago “We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction?”

Therefore, whatever happens as far as this challenge is concerned, it is an indication that there are people out there who want to destroy our way of life; who want to eradicate forever our Christian and biblical heritage; who want to take our kings away from God and make our shared monarchy a secular institution which would be more acceptable to the European Union, and thus to bring it one step away from oblivion.

I therefore travelled to the UK from the other side of the world as a person bloodied in the fight to protect our shared Crown to bring a warning that you must never ever take any movement against the monarchy lightly.

A warning never to be complacent whenever our shared Throne is under attack.

A warning never to allow complacency, to dismiss out of hand anything that has the potential to grow, to nurture and then to become a threat.

Philip Benwell MBE

(National Chair – Australian Monarchist League)

The Rise of Zombie Culture, by Ian Oakley

In my self-appointed role as cultural critic of The Lanchester Review, I have been musing of the general malaise of Western civilisation.

It not just the dire economic performance of the USA, Europe and Japan over the last twenty years (compared with, say, South Korea and China in that same period), but it can be seen in wider culture. 

Whereas American culture helped destroy the Soviet Union, today Western culture is all over the place.

In almost every art form, the centre ground of culture is crumbling.

In films and theatre the middle ground has disappeared to be replaced by dumb blockbusters at one end, rehashing old films endlessly: how many reboots of Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, and on and on, do we need?

While at the high art end, it is esoteric. Apart from the cultural in-crowd, nobody knows what is going on and nobody else cares.

It is not just films, though, but even documentaries. We used have landmark series, such as The Ascent of Man and Civilisation.

But now, we get Jeremy Paxman presenting a series about the First World War, which he clearly knows nothing about, and endless documentaries that seek to divide culture, such as The Art of Women, whatever that even means.

Why does this matter?

It matters because it is out of the rich culture of the West that innovation and progress come.

It is not just the technical knowledge, which the Chinese and Indians have in huge amounts, that produces the mobile phone and the drone. It is the riches of a free, vibrant mass culture.

As an example, when most people in Britain know only of Big Brother as a reality TV show, it does not fill you with confidence.

As with a lot of things wrong in the West, as well as a lot of what is right, this all began in the 1960s.

The cultural zombies of that era refuse to die. This was brought home while watching the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury on TV in 2013.

Someone I was watching with turned to me and said, ‘Why are those zombies singing?’

Why, indeed?

Some Reflections on the Spanish Civil War, by Ian Oakley

If the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 is recalled in Britain and in our celebrity obsessed, narcissistic culture, then it is not recalled much; it is mainly for the artistic impressions that have lasted, whether it is Hemmingway, Orwell or Picasso.

The Spanish Civil War still has lessons for the world today.

The first, and most striking, is the involvement of outsiders in the conflict, on both sides.

There were the famous International Brigades on the Republican side. But there were also Italian and German forces on the Nationalist side.

The modern equivalent has to be the Syrian Civil War. The idealistic young Muslims from Birmingham and London going to Syria are echoing the socialist and communist youths of Britain in the 1930s.

On the other side-in both senses-you have Iranian forces dying for Assad just as the Italians and Germans were.

The Germans in particular saw the conflict as a training ground for the future; Britain meanwhile was tying itself in knots over non-intervention.

Although I cannot help but note that Anthony Eden certainly had a more central role in international diplomacy than William Hague does now.

This is in part because Britain was more diplomatically significant, but also Hague’s dreary management consultant approach to foreign affairs seems particularly ineffective, whereas Eden was making his reputation at this point.

The second striking fact is that there was no monopoly on murder and brutality. Summary executions were used on both sides, in huge numbers.

While most decent people wanted the Republic to win, there was no guarantee a democratic, peaceful Spain would have emerged.

Just as in Syria today the only man left who thinks Assad’s defeat will lead to a wonderful, peaceful democratic country is the millionaire Middle Eastern ‘expert’ Tony Blair.

The one feature of the war that does not seem modern is the vast difference of ideologues that were on display in the Republican areas.

There were the official communists, backed by Stalin but with a moderate political programme. There was the POUM, anti-Stalinist communists. There were the socialists, there were the anarcho-syndicalists, and there were the Basque and Catalan nationalists.

In our modern world, where the political debate in the West has been reduced to whether we want a full bloodied form of capitalism with the wealth getting most of the benefits, or a system where they get slightly less, the diversity and energy of these rival idea is striking.

For a brief period, most of the ideas were at least tried, even if only briefly.

The lasting impression is the true horror of Civil War: families divided, the mass of suffering and destruction, only punctuated occasionally by acts of heroism and kindness.

Spain is currently going through huge economic pain.

But just as Spain survived the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, so it will survive its current problems and emerge a stronger nation.

Feminism, Boobs, and Petitions, by Thomas Bailey

Feminism is a pretty hard topic to write about, for everyone. It’s even harder for a teenage boy. Particularly one from a public school where the ‘macho man’ stereotype still thrives.

Last year I wrote a blog about the No More Page 3 campaign and why we should all support it and, following its publication, a number of my male friends began to question my sexuality.

I know, I was surprised too: I was completely unaware that feminism and homosexuality were linked in the teenage mind. Apparently so.

But it’s not just guys who get ridiculed for their feminist beliefs: we all do.

Whether it’s fighting for the right to vote or trying to prove that ‘boobs aren’t news’, the feminist movement has been laughed at, mocked and often ignored since it started. There’s even an organisation out there trying to prevent equality for women.¹

The whole idea of misogyny and ‘anti-feminism’ completely and utterly bewilders me. What is it about feminism that angers so many people? What on earth is wrong with wanting equality?

In my mind, everyone should be a feminist, and I use the word here to mean somebody who wants equality amongst men and women. If you are not a feminist, then you must be delusional.

There is no rationale behind the belief that women are inferior and shouldn’t have equality. If you genuinely think there is, please do enlighten me.

So why do so many shy away from the word ‘feminist’? Why do some people actually believe that “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians”?²

It’s pretty clear that feminism has a bad rep. In fact, when people say they are feminists a common reaction is: “So you hate men?”

There are a number of reasons for this, but this is the main one: there are a few (and I mean very few) feminists who actually do have a problem with men, and sadly these are the feminists that get into the news.

It is this same kind of skewed thinking that leads many members of the public to believe that all Muslims want to implement Shariah law in the UK and behead all non-Muslims: because there are one or two extremists, and unfortunately they tend to make the press, giving a bad name to anyone who associates themselves with the same label.

Valerie Solanas³ referred to men as walking dildos, and this kind of misandrist belief goes against the fundamental stance of feminism: that men and women are equal.

Just because one or two radical feminists express their all-men-are-bastards beliefs does not mean that all feminists hate men.

Trust me, I don’t hate myself; I hate patriarchy.

And that’s another problem. Some feminists actually end up being sexist themselves. In an effort to dispel patriarchal ideals and beliefs, some feminists of the past have claimed that men are inferior.

Obviously, this approach isn’t going to work either, and, in fact, is rather counterproductive. Feminism is fighting for equality, not matriarchy.

In my view, the various nuances and sects of feminism should be ignored and replaced by one single maxim: that people should not be judged and subjugated due to their sex.

The failures of feminism in the past and the stigma attached to it ought to be forgotten.

People should decide for themselves what they believe ‘subjugation’ entails, and whether they believe that things like porn or different punishments for men and women are sexist.

These topics have always and will always divide opinion. However, what should not divide opinion is the drive for equality that ought to be at the centre of the movement.

One particularly controversial topic is Page 3 of The Sun.

First printed in 1964, The Sun is a national tabloid newspaper that has an average daily circulation of 2,409,811 copies.

In 1970, The Sun had its first model standing nude on one of its pages. It seems almost ludicrous to me, for a number of reasons, to have a topless woman in the UK’s most-read newspaper. The No More Page 3 campaign agrees.

I personally have few problems with so-called ‘Lad’s Mags’ (although they too are going out of fashion), but the fact that The Sun thinks it is legitimate for a national newspaper to display these images is what alienates me: it is on show for the whole country to see.

Anybody could be reading The Sun anywhere, and young boys and girls are therefore likely to be exposed to nudity from a very early age.

Now some may argue that it is the parents’ duty to protect their children from this exposure; but is that realistic if, for example, there is a man sitting next to your child on a train, ogling at the bare breasts on page 3?

The fact that The Sun is a newspaper makes men feel it is acceptable to look at nude pictures in public places, where they would be very unlikely to read Nuts or Zoo. There are more appropriate places for sexualized images.

One of my other problems with page 3 is this: it is incredibly embarrassing for our country.

To have more-than-soft porn accessible in a newspaper in the twenty-first century makes me feel almost humiliated to be English.

We are one of very few countries to still cling to outdated institutions like page 3 and, in my view, it ought to be withdrawn.

Moreover, the message that page 3 sends to society is certainly not a good one: that women are simply sex objects and images for men to gawk at. If feminism is about equality, then page 3 contradicts its fundamental thesis.

For me, these are the three most convincing arguments.

The reason that the No More Page 3 campaign has caused such controversy is that many people mistakenly believe that the petition is calling for a ban.

No More Page Three is not the first attempt to challenge page 3. In 1986 Clare Short MP put a bill forward in the House of Commons explicitly asking for page 3 to be banned, saying that it is a “phenomenon in Britain’s press”.

She received huge amounts of ridicule from the public saying she was “jealous” and indeed many MPs at the time sneered at her in the House of Commons, making rude and unpleasant personal remarks.

Given the enduring right of freedom of the press, Clare Short’s proposed bill never became law.

By contrast, the No More Page 3 campaign is simply calling for Dinsmore and Murdoch to reconsider the whole idea of page 3, in the hope that they will realize how unbelievably outdated and damaging it really is. 

The campaigners are not trying to ban it, but only suggest to Dinsmore to “drop the bare boobs from The Sun newspaper,”⁴ albeit rather imperatively.

So why don’t we just have a boycott of The Sun? Well, it wouldn’t work.

The fact is that nobody (or very few people indeed) who has signed the petition actually reads The Sun on a regular basis.

The campaigners may know people who read it, or their partners may read it, but very few Sun readers have signed the petition, and this is because they have no problem with page 3. If they did have a problem with it, they wouldn’t buy it and they wouldn’t read it.

That is one of the reasons why many people argue that this petition is flawed. Perhaps it is trying to take something many Sun readers like away from them? If they want to get rid of it, then they should simply stop buying it. 

This is perhaps the main reason that I am unsure about the petition: the majority of the supporters are likely to be middle-class women who read papers like The Times and The Guardian and who have only read The Sun once or twice in their lives.

It therefore seems a bit unusual for page 3 to be taken away by people whom it affects far less.

Nonetheless, I still disagree with page 3 and the message it sends, and for that reason I have signed the petition: not in the hope that it is banned, but in the hope that readers of The Sun and supporters of page 3 realize how outdated and inappropriate it is.

For me, that is the most important thing: that the readers themselves begin to support the campaign.

Yes, I support the campaign. No, this does not make me homosexual. Yes, I do like boobs. But there’s a time and a place, and until nude women are taken out of national newspapers, there can never be true equality.

The fact that there are versions of Nuts etc. for females makes me less worried about magazines of that sort. 

However, when the pages of a national newspaper are filled with images of important men in suits adjacent to images of topless ladies, something is clearly not right. This is not equality.

For that reason, to be a feminist means to oppose page 3.

Thomas Bailey

www.tombaileyblog.blogspot.co.uk

1.    The organization STOP ERA, now known as Eagle Forum, is an anti-feminist group in the U.S. that lobbies against equal rights for women.

2.  Marion Gordon "Pat" Robertson, a former Southern Baptist minister, generally supports conservative Christian ideals, and presently serves as Chancellor of Regent University and Chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network.

3.   Valerie Solanas was an American radical anti-feminist, made famous by her assassination attempt on Andy Warhol.

4.     The petition, set up by Lucy Holmes, can be found on
        www.change.org.