Month: May 2024

An end as it began

And so ended the 2019-2024 Parliament. It began as the Boris Parliament, full of energy and promise. It achieved its greatest feat, forcing Brussels to agree terms for a trade treaty, and then collapsed in Covid and all that followed.  The Borisiad declined from a triumph to a farce.

It ended as it began; not in energy or exuberance – all quite the opposite – but in that it achieved very little indeed in the four years after the Brexit triumphs.

The 2019 manifesto was a short, encouraging document, with promises aplenty – most wise or at least good-hearted, and some that should never have been suggested. Looking at the scorebook at the end, has anything been done?  Do we have lower taxes? Do we see deregulation? Have the boats been stopped? Have they done away with inheritance tax? Has waste been tackled?  None of these.  Even the repeal of Section 40, a one-line reform promised in two succeeding manifestos, only just got in under the wire on the last day of the parliament. If it takes six years to pass one line of legislation, something is very wrong.

The time since 2020 was marked with timidity. When the courts knocked policies over because the law did not permit them, they barely changed the law, leaving in every proviso that neutered action, and running scared of Sir Keir’s disapproval. It is as if the whole of Parliament has been suffering from long-Covid. Well, now it has died of it.

We can only hope that if Labour win a swingeing majority, as seems most likely, they will prove as impotent in the face of the Blob as have the Conservatives. Otherwise, the nation is really in trouble.

I hate to say ‘I told you so’, but this blog certainly did, back in 2019. Perhaps the title ‘The Last Tory government?’ seemed pessimistic, but it proved to be correct.

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Books

The dawn in Persia

I cannot tell what is happening in Iran:  we have to remember a world before instant communications and all-probing media, but in Media and Persia the men and women in the streets and villages are not unmoved by the crash-site in the forested mountains of Azerbaijan. One channel shows mourning and prayers – another shows rejoicing and near-revolution. One should not portray an incident as a generality, but mass-media know no other course.

Where are the reports, carried in the Indian press, of fireworks being set off in celebration or anticipation across Iran?

Even in Central London, with more cameras and journalists than in the whole of the Persian-speaking world, we see only selected snapshots – the weekly mass of seething hatred that fills the streets each weekend, without the counter-protest that greets it – nor less the far vaster mass of people who want no part in a fight in which we are not involved. Nor did they portray the spontaneous celebration by Persians in exile that took place on Sunday night outside the Iranian Embassy.

The Persians are a great and ancient nation. Their culture has survived and developed through many conquests and tragedies. They are a people of humour and inventiveness, who can take a joy in life when not beaten down by their rulers – who are unworthy to govern such a people.

Before Rome was founded, Persia was ancient. Shapur II reminded the Romans that his forebears ruled lands as far west as the Aegean coast (which he claimed as of right) and deep into Centra Asia they still ruled. Millennia have passed, empires rises, glittered and fallen, but the nation of Iran in its wide diversity of tribe and tongue remains. Those who sit on a borrowed throne in Tehran are a mayfly in comparison with the age of the nation. They will be feeling uncertain.

What the future holds, no one can tell.  For the Persians, it is a very long future, and I wish them well.

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Books

Shoot for the Moon

What vision is there against the dull conformity which lulls Conservatives in office into impotent respectability?

Hope is empty without a tangible reward at the end.  We can hold out the hope of increasing prosperity, but it is abstract, when voters deserve a visible moonshot goal.

When in power, Conservatives might enable the nation to thrive and grow in wealth, and prove it with statistics, but our opponents will deride it as no more than a game with figures (while happy to drink in the new prosperity and use the new resources to destroy it). It is easy to deny the sight of our eyes by showing only those who have not achieved the promised happiness.

We soon get used to the new advantages, and wail when any dip happens – as we have after the lockdown recession. We are collectively and individually far better off than when Gordon Brown was driven out of office, but that is not how it feels. No – national prosperity feels no more than an abstract statistic, unless there is something tangible.

Blame is easy – see how Brexit has been blamed for everything; largely for the consequences of not departing hard enough from EU standards. It is the equivalent of demanding that the surgeon reattach the burst appendix because the peritonitis has not cleared yet.

To gain the love of the voters, it is not enough for a government to do the right thing and not enough even to achieve the right thing:  there must be a solid goal; a shiny thing to dangle in front of their eyes that can only be achieved if prosperity reaches a certain level.

We might have had Boris’s Ulster tunnel, but the lockdown ruined that prospect. We might have had all the levelling up to get the North booming (although government spending seems to be the best way to ruin a town, so maybe not).

Look at the Moon:  Britain should have got there first, if the promise of the Victorian Age had continued. No nation on earth could equal us. Now the common feeling takes the opposite view, so parochial have we grown, and self-hating in opinion-forming circles.

Voters all ask, when they see the shiny things in America – why can’t we have nice things too?  It makes us look rubbish.

Actually, much of America is a bit rubbish too: it just doesn’t look that way in the films. They do even so have the luxury of unlimited land that so amazed Adam Smith. They do have many shiny toys that we would baulk at paying for:  the astounding resources and power which the United States brought to bear in the War have not shrunk, while our army dwindles for lack of money; and where Americans send rockets into space daily, we have none. Maybe it is all funded by the astounding United States national debt – one thing we can never envy them for – or maybe it is just that our government since 1945 has been bankrupted by foolish priorities and sabotaging its own tax-base.

In 1945 the world lay at our feet. America whisked Werner von Braun and a V2 across the Atlantic, but we had V2s and Frank Whittle, and our own boffins made their own research – far in advance of what the Americans achieved at the time. There it stopped:  all available tax-money was spent on nationalisations and an unsustainable welfare state. The state wasted its substance and the once mighty empire declined like the petty Greek states, while Rome rose in the west.

We are better now, but the past decades and the pettiness of politics have predisposed many in the nation to feel small and declining. Brexit showed the division, and resulted in the narrow triumph of the patriots and optimists against the pessimists and deriders. Now Conservatives must give the nation something to strive for.

Decline, economic and social, will set in after the election, according to all the polls. Insurgent Tories must hold out in the dark time not just statistics but also a hope they will back.

Look at the Moon. The cost of a manned mission would barely touch the billions wasted on HS2 or the unused track-and-trace system. The technology is there, with British firms at the forefront. Astronauts and a capsule can be hurled into orbit (separately if necessary) by a private company – and the leading company doing this is owned by a British man (or at least a South African, which is essentially the same) – then put on enough Δv and it’s off they go.

We cannot claim the first voice spoken on the Moon (which was spoken by a scion of a Cumberland reiver clan) but if the next to come bears the distinctive timbre of a British officer, that would do more than anything to boost our confidence.

We cannot launch an official British expedition across the void of space with government finance as tight as it is, but promise us this as a reward for prosperity to come, and that is a vision we can grasp.

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Books

Fiction:

Unwarranted acts

In a Body Politique, if the Representative be one man, whatsoever he does in the Person of the Body, which is not warranted in his Letters, nor by the Lawes, is his own act, and not the act of the Body, nor of any other Member thereof besides himselfe: Because further than his Letters, or the Lawes limit, he representeth no mans person, but his own. But what he does according to these, is the act of every one: For of the Act of the Soveraign every one is Author, because he is their Representative unlimited; and the act of him that recedes not from the Letters of the Soveraign, is the act of the Soveraign, and therefore every member of the Body is Author of it.

But if the Representative be an Assembly, whatsoever that Assembly shall Decree, not warranted by their Letters, or the Lawes, is the act of the Assembly, or Body Politique, and the act of every one by whose Vote the Decree was made; but not the act of any man that being present Voted to the contrary; nor of any man absent, unlesse he Voted it by procuration. It is the act of the Assembly, because Voted by the major part; and if it be a crime, the Assembly may be punished, as farre-forth as it is capable, as by dissolution, or forfeiture of their Letters (which is to such artificiall, and fictitious Bodies, capitall,) or (if the Assembly have a Common stock, wherein none of the Innocent Members have propriety,) by pecuniary Mulct. For from corporall penalties Nature hath exempted all Bodies Politique.

But they that gave not their Vote, are therefore Innocent, because the Assembly cannot Represent any man in things unwarranted by their Letters, and consequently are not involved in their Votes.

If the person of the Body Politique being in one man, borrow mony of a stranger, that is, of one that is not of the same Body, (for no Letters need limit borrowing, seeing it is left to mens own inclinations to limit lending) the debt is the Representatives.

For if he should have Authority from his Letters, to make the members pay what he borroweth, he should have by consequence the Soveraignty of them; and therefore the grant were either voyd, as proceeding from Errour, commonly incident to humane Nature, and an unsufficient signe of the will of the Granter; or if it be avowed by him, then is the Representer Soveraign, and falleth not under the present question, which is onely of Bodies subordinate. No member therefore is obliged to pay the debt so borrowed, but the Representative himselfe: because he that lendeth it, being a stranger to the Letters, and to the qualification of the Body, understandeth those onely for his debtors, that are engaged; and seeing the Representer can ingage himselfe, and none else, has him onely for Debtor; who must therefore pay him, out of the common stock (if there be any), or (if there be none) out of his own estate.

If he come into debt by Contract, or Mulct, the case is the same.

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Books