the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Well that took no one by surprise, did it?

The news that, as ‘The Guardian’ had it,

Six of Change UK’s 11 MPs, including its spokesman Chuka Umunna, and interim leader Heidi Allen, have abandoned the fledgling party after its dire performance at the European elections.

Dire? That’s putting it mildly! For a party that received massive media coverage at its inception, and made pompously grandiose claims about how its formation heralded a new kind of politics and promised to shout its unequvoacal support for the EU, to receive a 3.3% share of the vote at the EU Elections is damn well unequivocal.

No wonder six of them are off, their dreams of sunlit uplands crushed by an uncaring electorate…hang on!

That’s right,….it wasn’t their fault! Oh no, they weren’t duplicitous, self-serving lickspittles and political chancers who’d turned their backs on their parties. It was the publics fault! Yes they’re the guilty ones! Blame them! We gave them a choice, but they chose the wrong choice! The public might think they knew what they were voting for, but we know better. We always know what’s best for them, even if they don’t always know it themselves. That’s why we’re joining the Literal Hypocrites, because we firmly believe in the right of voters to change their mind, based on what they know now, at a national level, it’s at a constituency level where we draw the line. We believe in demoracy, of course we do, everyone does, just not when it doesn’t suit us.

Well that’s a relief, glad we sorted ir out and least said soonest mended, eh? Just admit you were wrong and we’ll say no more about it. There, we’ll make it all better, we’ll pretend like it never happened, shall we? Leave it to us. Or not Leave!

Hang on! You mean to say that the failure or inability of the British government to offer a financial rescue package to British Steel is somehow linked to the European election results? You might have to explain that one to me, before I even begin to considider your preposterous proposition that the EU themselves might be in some way culpable for the 2016 EU referendum result.

This is how. As ‘The Guardian’ noted,

The government clings to its do-nothing approach, justifying its rejection of financial support, a bailout or public ownership of British Steel because these options would be illegal under the EU state-aid laws.

Yet the UK government conjured up billions of pounds to bail out banks through loans, guarantees and an extensive quantitative-easing programme. It brought the East Coast rail service and other lines back into public ownership. None of this was opposed by the EU.

If large parts of this country feel that the EU isn’t helping them, then why, they might reasonably ask, should they help it? I mean, it’s all well and good for the EU to enhance workers rights but that only matters if you have a job to work in. Equally, it’s great that we can live and work abroad, but if your poor and feel dispossessed, then are you going to try and find work abroad when you can’t find it here?  And the flip of that only compounds the problem. An poor and disposed person in Europe might be willing to work for a shockingly low hourly rate, and live in appallingly crowded conditions, because they might reason they’re better off here than there.

And an inevitable consequence of this is the strain it places on health, housing and education of communities whose councils are already suffering 40% funding cut. Another problem of free movement is that it reduces the responsibility of employers to train their employee’s. Why would they, when they can simply get a EU national to do the job and save themselves time and money?

And therein lays the problem why so many in Europe are disillusioned with the EU. The problem is the EU itself, and the perception that it only benefits the already well off, and if the EU isn’t aggressively challenging that perception, well whose fault is that?

So, with a tedious inevitability, here we are again and no, I don’t mean you reading my blog. That’s on you, it was your choice, there wasn’t a gun to your head. I mean newspapers presenting opinion survey results as anything other than complete and utter nonsense. Reading tea-leaves is by comparison a much better way to predict the future, having required the drinking of a cup of tea to do so.

It’s not as if the woeful incompetence of opinion polls to accurately predict the result of the 2015 General Election wasn’t remarked upon. One could easily be forgiven for mistaking the same newspapers that were so thunderous in their condemnation as somehow bastions of moral probity. One could then question how it is that a beneficial amnesia has afflicted these same newspapers as they callously presume their readers will have forgotten as well.

The latest – but by no means the last –example of this utter nonsense was to be found in yesterdays ‘Guardian’, which ran a story based on the results of an opinion poll, and claimed on that basis,

Brexit party tops Westminster election poll for first time

Survey by Opinium suggests Nigel Farage would be 20 seats short of a majority, with Conservatives reduced to 26 MPs

How much support the Brexit party would receive at a General Election can only be accurately calculated from the results of that election, because opinion polls only tells one what a statistically insignificant proportion of the population are thinking. There are estimated to be somewhere in the region of 51 million eligible voters in the UK – whether they’ve bothered to register to vote or not is the subject of another post – and yet typically a survey will ask no more than 4,000 what they think. Therefore an opinion poll has all the evidential qualities of a beauty product advert on television. Actually, thinking about it, they’re remarkably similar. Both get widespread attention, but make huge claims based on not very much at all. I mean, have you ever read the small print on a beauty ad? You’d have to be quick though, as they don’t leave it on the screen for very long, for a very good reason. Typically around 80% of about 150 people agree with some claim, sometimes more, sometimes less.

But back to Nigel Farage and his Brexit party. Is he clever or dangerous in the way that so far, there have been no policy idea’s given about what the Brexit party stands for, so therefore everyone can believe it stands for what they believe in. This doesn’t alienate anyone but allows them to project whatever they want.

By doing this, good old Nige, beer drinking, cigar smoking, man of the people Nige, isn’t dangerous. Neither is he clever.

He’s dangerously clever.

And now back to the opinion poll. Have the pollsters massively enlarged the amount of people questioned? And was it conducted using a combination of different interview techniques – face to face, telephone, or online – to give a truly representative sample?

No.

Buried down at the bottom of the article – which has worrying similarities to those beauty adverts – which most people wouldn’t bother to read down to, proved how utterly worthless the survey was the detail that.

Opinium polled 2,005 people online from 28-30 May.

It gets worse. You mean that asking a self-selecting, statistically insignificant sample, unrepresentative of anyone other than themselves isn’t bad enough? No, you don’t mean that….oh you do….they’re paid!

In announcing her candidacy to be the new leader of the Liberal Democrat party, their deputy leader Jo Swinson somewhat self-servingly announced that the country was embracing Liberal values. By that one presumes she means a Liberal Democrat notion of what liberal values are, not actual liberal values in the sense I understand them to be. One of the most important characteristics of that underpins liberal values would, as I understand it anyway, be a respect for other peoples deeply held views. No matter how alien to your way of thinking on the same issue they may be, one should extend them the same tolerance you’d expect them to.

But any reader of this blog will know I am quite scathing about Liberal Democrats, considering them to be neither Liberal nor Democrats., at least in my understanding of those words. This is best illustrated in their support for a second referendum, which essentially sends a message to people who voted in the first referendum to leave were somehow mistaken, that the full implications of voting leave weren’t properly understood. And that they have a right to have something, which not heal but would further widen the divisions in this country. The first referendum comprised a simple question; leave or remain. There weren’t any caveats, no stipulation that might legally bind any leave decision to be confirmed once we knew the precise details of the negotiated settlement. It was a clear message from the British people – well as clear as 51.9% of 72.2%of votes cast can be. Whether or not that’s a sufficient winning margin or not is not the point. What is the point is that we are where we are, and the fact UK is still a member state of the EU can only be seen as a failure of the entire political class to deliver on the expressed will of the people.

Perhaps that’s why the Brexit party did so in the EU elections. Although thinking about it, any party that gains 32% share of a vote in which only 36.1% of the electorate voted is hardly a ringing endorsement. It shows exactly how dire our political landscape is that somehow this is seen as a resounding defeat for anyone other than democracy. How the Liberals can interpret their 18% share of the vote as anything other than average at best is beyond me but then they are the political equivalent of ‘The Gunning-Kruger Effect’.

So Donald Trump has said that Boris Johnson would make an ‘excellent’ Prime Minister. That is indeed some endorsement, although if it be a good or bad one does rather depend on your view of Donald Trump, and the worth you place on his opinion.

You might think him a great communicator, as his predecessor Ronald Reagan was often reputed to be, adept at his use of Twitter and other media to be so. You might also be of the opinion of him as a skilled diplomatic operator, able to both to think strategically and be aware of the possible long-term consequences of his foreign policy aims, effectively negotiate to achieve them. Domestically, you might think he’s been tireless in attempting efforts to heal the many divisions that afflict his country, in order to – to use one of his campaign slogans – ‘make America great again’.

You might also think that an endorsement, carried as it is in a newspaper infamous for its Page 3 image of topless women, is perhaps the perfect metaphor for such.

Francis Urquhart!

Here something you may have missed, from metro.co.uk:

The fate of the UK over Brexit will be decided by around 100,000 people who are predominately male, white, middle-class pensioners. Grass roots members of the Conservative Party will choose the new prime minister whose job it will be to lead us out of the EU.

However, their demographic is ‘entirely unrepresentative’ of the general population based on gender, wealth, ethnicity and their hard-line attitudes against Brussels. Experts say this situation could make a no-deal exit from the EU more likely – but also, paradoxically, there is a higher chance of a second referendum too. The race to be Theresa May’s successor when she stands down on June 7th will be decided by Tory party members rather than the general public.

Research has confirmed that 70% of party members are male and 97% are white British. The average age is 57, although over 40% of the group is aged 65 or above. Members are concentrated in the southern half of the country with six out of ten living in Eastern England, London, the south east and the south west.

Before adding,,

Some 86% of them fall into the ABC1 category, used by researchers to describe the top social grade.

And if that doesn’t make you want to share a bath with a toaster, this might,

Politics professor Tim Bale told Metro.co.uk: ‘The average member will be a man, in his late 50s, will be white British, will live in the south of England and be comfortably off. ‘They are certainly more comfortably off than most people and certainly not representative in terms of ethnicity. ‘In the UK some 15% of people come from ethnic minority backgrounds whereas only 3% of those in the Conservative party do.’

Tory MPs are now queuing up to throw their hats into the ring and a leadership contest is set to start the week commencing June 10th. MPs will hold a series of secret ballots to whittle down the candidates to two. This final pair will be put to a postal vote of the wider party membership and the winner declared the new prime minister, probably by the end of July.

Membership costs £25 per year but it is too late for anyone wanting to join in the process for this time.

That last line is highly revealing, both about who the Conservative want as members and also who they don’t want. Only someone affluent , so ‘comfortably off’ as to be relatively unscathed by the worst effects of successive government’s austerity agenda would have enough disposable income to join. It cost me £3 to be able to join the Labour party ias a supportern order to vote for Corbyn, and when he won – to nobody’s surprise – I joined as a full member. How much of a member I feel I am now is a moot point, but at least the eligibility criteria to vote wasn’t predicated on wealth.

Basically, the new Conservative leader and PM will be chosen by people who one imagines mix within their own narrow social sphere and therefore their life experience and opinions gained from that will be equally narrow too. I mean, I could be wrong but something tells me I’m not, Anyway whatever they decide, they won’t have to live with it for long.

Talk about putting the con into co

One of the problems I have with putting Boris Johnson on trial for misconduct in public office, is not that it sets a dangerous precedent, one that allows those with the means to seek legal redress of some perceived political grievance. Nor is it because it – and the legal challenge by Gina Miller again about Brexit– is a frankly undemocratic way to settle these disputes.

No for me the problem is more fundamental, much simpler. We all know politicians lie, and even when they don’t, we think they do. We know they play around the notion of truth as if it were a political ‘Stretch Armstrong”. Ever since we’ve attained some healthy – and well deserved – skepticism for whatever politicians say, we’ve treated what they claim at election time with a dose of salt large enough to cause one serious health problems. That’s why I have more than serious doubts that anyone who read the claim on that bus actually believed £350 million a week going to be spent on the N.H.S if we left Europe. As soon as it was revealed, the doubts as to its veracity were aired. In fact as I recall, the main reason the claim received the publicity it did was precisely so it could be thoroughly discredited.

Which it was so many times and so comprehensively proven to be untrue in such a short space of time, I find it hard to credit anyone with the stupidity to still believe it to be true. One has to question the motives of whoever thought that this was in any way a matter for a court to rule on, and allowed it to proceed this far. The person who bought this mockery to trial, crowd-funded it.

Of course he has. Apparently he’s well on the way to raise the £500,000 needed to pay for it. Being a private prosecution it could of course be stopped by the C.P.S at any time, but for now, at any rate, it is in the public interest to proceed. But how a claim that will kill no-one be allowed on such arbitrary grounds, when a claim that helped cause an illegal war, that led to countless deaths, helped create ISIS and des-stablised the region, and was proven by a government inquiry to be false, how is the perpetrator of that fraud not on trial?

Try crowd funding a trial for Tony Blair for war crimes.

Maybe it’s just me, but the timing of the current allegations about anti-semitism that have dogged the Labour Party does seem highly coincidental to those wishing to denounce Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. I mean, he came to the Labour leadership against all odds about three years ago, and before then any allegations of anti-semitism in the Labour Party were not given as much prominence in the media as they are now. In all probability incidents of anti-semitism have taken place but, as I asked yesterday, when does not liking someone because of their words and deeds become discriminatory?

Yes, anti-semitism is a problem, but it is a problem that is exists in wider society and, like most other forms of discrimination, until society as a whole learns to deal eradicate it, it’s highly unrealistic to expect a small group of individuals from exempt from those biases. Of course, someone guilty of a hate crime needs to be named and shamed, but again when does a frank and robust exchange of views become threatening and bullying behaviour? Who decides if something is hate speech or an ill advised mode expression? Who decides on opinions, on how people felt about what was said? Who judges this, and what are their criteria?

Anyway, it won’t be me. I was once accused of staring at someone in a ‘racist manner’.

One would be forgiven for thinking that Jeremy Corbyn was trying his hand at stand-up comedy when, in announcing his support for a second referendum on Brexit, he expressed the hope that, in so doing, Labour would help unite the country. There are quite a few problems with this.

First of all, as I’ve noted on this blog before, as a way of convincing traditional Labour voters in Wales and the northern heartlands that Labour is listening to them and as impotent as decisions made in the Islington and Westminster echo chambers, supporting calls for a second referendum isn’t the way to it. By having a second referendum or whatever formulation of weasly words it might pass itself off as, it will alienate the very Labour voters who voted for Brexit in the first place and who Labour are hoping to attract back

Secondly, the divisions that were exposed in the country by the first referendum and present Brexit debacle are incredibly unlikely to be healed by having a second referendum. If the EU elections have taught us anything, it is that the divisions that were present in the first referendum are just as prevalent now as they were then. Possibly more so, as possibly the abject failure of the government to deliver on the referendum result and Labour’s inability to offer a sensible, coherent and above all consistent statement of its views exacerbates the very problem it creates. Indeed the mother of all parliaments has been a right mutha.

Thirdly, supporting calls for a second referendum, it might be seen as a panicked response to the collapse of the Labour vote in the EU elections and nothing more. Say what you will about the Brexit Party and the Lib Dems, at least they both had a clear message that separated them from each other and the two main parties. This gave voters who supported either position a home for their vote. As various commentators have observed, what the electorate needed was clarity, and suddenly discovering at this late stage that a second referendum is needed is nothing short of the very worst political opportunism.

Fourthly, in supporting calls for a second referendum, Corbyn may have needlessly created problems for Labour from which they may never recover. Namely, what should be on the ballot? It’s all well and good to call for something, but much harder to decide how to answer that call. The problems Labour has had with dealing with allegations of anti-semetism will be as nothing if it has to deal with what is, and what isn’t on the ballot. And they think after all this internal wrangling, an answer will agreed on fast? It makes me think of what my Irish uncles would say to me when I was being stupid, “Will you ever stop acting the eejit  and cop on at all?”

This morning saw the final nail to rammed home into the coffin that is my Labour party membership. I, like so many others, joined the Labour party in the immediate aftermath of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, imbued with a feeling of hope that finally the Labour party would reengage socialism again. After the complete and utter destruction that Tony Blair wreaked on Labour in the mid 1990’s to make it electable, Labour increasingly saw itself not so much as an instrument to help bring about positive social change for the many, but to win elections by making it almost indistinct from the Conservative Party. No wonder then, when Mrs. Thatcher was asked to name her greatest political success, she replied “Tony Blair.”

So the election of Corbyn as leader indicated a new kind of politics, and so it proved to be, just not in the way I’d hoped. As a backbench MP he’d never been a great orator, but that didn’t matter, because it wasn’t because of how he was saying what he what he was saying more that he was saying it. He defied the party whip, abstained or voted against Labour governments, although to be fair, they were Tony Blair version of a Labour government, so the blame wasn’t all his. But it does make it rather difficult when your leader to call on Labour MP’s to show loyalty when he wasn’t overly encumbered with it previously.

So fast-forward to this morning. It wasn’t the news that,

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched a formal investigation into the Labour Party over allegations of anti-Semitism.

As bad as anti-Semitism is, unless someone is calling you anti-Semitic names, sending you anti-Semitic social media messages or being explicitly anti-Semitic, how do you prove it? I mean, I know that I’m on very thin ice here, not being Jewish, but not wishing to excuse anything away, but how do you prove anti-Semitic intent or religious hatred?

Anyway, best I quit whilst I’m ahead and let you know what it was that finally did it for me. It was this,

Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to support a second referendum on any Brexit deal after the Labour leadership came under overwhelming pressure to halt the exodus of its remain voters who backed pro-EU parties at the European elections.

A craven betrayal of Labour voters who’d voted to leave the EU, a pathetic and cowardly attempt to staunch the losses suffered in the EU elections, and to appease the elements Labour calling for a second referendum. By so doing, he’s proven himself to be just as focused on winning elections by abandoning principles as Tony Blair!