Did Kier Starmer Really Win the Election?

I thought on July 3rd that we had an absurd electoral system; I still thought we had an absurd electoral system on July 5th.

But there is something I little UnBritish about complaining about the rules of a game you have gone all out to win but nevertheless lost? Cricket is a silly game and if you say I was out I am taking my bat and my ball and going home. People talk about "British Values", but I would have thought that sportsmanship and not being a sore loser was pretty high on the list of things that we value more than some other nations do.

It is perfectly true that about a million fewer humans voted Labour this time (when it won a Famous Victory) than last time (when it suffered a Historic Defeat). It is equally true that Labour's 33% of the votes equated to 65% per cent of the seats, when the Tories 23% equated to 19%. None of this is exactly news. Corbyn got lots and lots of votes in 2019 because he got massive majorities in a small number of left-wing constituencies but was narrowly trashed in a huge number of more traditional ones. There is no point in competing under a system which counts the votes by constituency, and then moaning that you would have won under a system which counted total votes across the whole country.

Have you ever played D&D with one of those people who says that he if he'd rolled that natural twenty when attacking the frost giant, instead of when he was opening the door to the frost giants cage, he would have killed the frost giant so it wasn't fair that the frost giant squashed his hobbit?

Counting up the total number of votes cast across the whole country is a pretty feeble way of finding out whether THE PEOPLE loved Jeremy more than Kier, or whether the new PM truthfully has a POPULAR MANDATE. One of the things which makes the present system so silly is that voters don't necessarily vote for the candidate they love the mostest -- or even for the party they actually wanted to win. Everyone takes that for granted. The Tories spent the last weeks of the campaign telling people not to vote Reform even if they supported Reform because voting Reform might take votes away from the Tories and let Labour win. The Greens spent the whole of the campaign telling people that it was safe to vote Green because Labour was definitely going to win so there was no danger of accidentally letting the Tories back into power. Reform had a theory since Labour was definitely going to win anyway, you ought to vote Reform in seats where Reform had no chance of winning because if they managed to come a strong fourth votewise, Farage would be the de facto leader of the opposition.

David Cameron, you will recall, opposed proportional representation because he just intuited in his little heart of hearts that it was not the British way of doing things. The main argument for the divine right of first past the post has always been that the people understand it and know how to use their vote. And I think that is roughly what happened. Overwhelmingly people wanted to Vote The Bastards Out, and voted for the Not A Bastard candidate they thought had the best chance of winning .



There are 650 parliamentary seats and some 46 million votes, so a truly proportionate system would give each party 1 seat for each 70 thousand votes cast. It is perfectly true that, under such a system, no single party would have had the magic 326 votes necessary to form an overall majority. However, a Labour/Liberal alliance would have 299 compared with the Tories 156. The Green Party would have brought it up to 345. The Tories and Reform together could only have managed managed 247. I suppose it is possible that the Liberals would do as they did in 2010 and form an alliance with the Tories, making 234 seats, but Labour/Green would beat them on 267. A Tory/Reform/Liberal alliance would clock in 325 votes, but Nigel Farage working with the Liberals really is the stuff of fantasy. It is overwhelmingly likely that under a True PR system, we would have ended up in with a Centrist Labour Government with a Right Wing Tory opposition.



Doubtless, a Starmer administration which had to pay attention to the opinion of some Green MPs and some Liberal Democrat MPs would feel aesthetically different from one where any dissidents and rebels are back benchers from his own party. And a Tory opposition which had to vote with Reform to stand any chance of ever defeating the government on anything would feel different from the one we have at the moment, where some "Tory" MPs are pretty far to the right and others not so much. But we'd be pretty much in the same place we are now.

Some people are horrified by the idea of a coalitions and alliances. They think that it would lead to a legislature permanently caught up in compromise and horse-trading. Some people believe that once there has been an election, the Prime Minister should be allowed to do what he wants and challenging him goes against Democracy and the Will of The People. (Tony Blair often talked as if that was what he thought.) But some people think that a parliament where politicians have to negotiate with other politicians, as opposed to merely hurl zingers at them, might be rather an improvement.

But so far as I know, no-one is proposing a literally proportional system: what they are imagining is some kind of Preferential Voting System or Automatic Run-Offs, where the punters are allowed to indicate their first, second and third choices and second choice votes are reallocated if no-one gets an overall majority the first time around.

Now, this does change things a little bit -- although since most Green voters would put Labour in second place and most Reform voters would put the Tories in second place, not as much as you might think.

I argued before the election that since Starmer is probably less of a bastard than the other bastards; and certainly one of only two bastards with the slightest chance of getting elected, he was the best bastard to vote for, even though he wasn't the best bastard possible. I entirely stand by that analysis. But it would have looked very threadbare under the preferential system. There would have been lots of First Choice Green/Second Choice Labour cards; and a goodly wodge of First Choice Reform / Second Choice Tory ones. I myself would have written a a big 1 by the New Corbyn Idealists party, a medium sized 2 by the Green party and a small but reluctant 3 by the Centrist Labour candidate.

But under such a system, the entire campaign would have been conducted differently. "Don't vote for that lot because the other lot might get in and you hate them even more than you hate us " would have ceased to be such a compelling argument. Parties would have had to spend more time saying "Vote for us because we've got the better policies" and less time engaged in a prisoner's dilemma exercise in which punters have to second guess where the punters in the other booths are putting their crosses.

What I would like best would be a system of Compulsory voting. I am not envisaging Orwellian stormtroopers frogmarching citizens down the road to the polling station. I imagine elections would be more like censuses, with a week or a fortnight before the deadline to get your votes in, small fines for people who don't comply, and sensible conscience clauses for people who think that every time you vote, God kills a puppy. Currently, elections are largely won by the party who most efficiently identify their supporters and persuade them to get off their bottoms and cast their vote. Under a compulsory system, persuading uncommitted voters that you were the best candidate would become a much bigger part of the process.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad system: a system where the incumbents best tactic is to say "A vote for the Far Right will result in too decisive a victory for the Moderate Left." But it happens to be the system we have. And the answer to the question "Did Starmer really win" is "yes, of course he did?"

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Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards!

[I'm still in freeform mode, here]

Of course, in an absolutely perfect world, I would not have chosen to write a provocation about how we had a better class of fascist bastard in the 1970s than the class of fascist bastard we have in the 2020s literally seven days before fascist bastards started rioting in cities across Britain, including my own fair city of Bristol.

It's not the first time we have had rioting in Bristol, but it's usually about something serious, like the site of a new supermarket. 

I was out of town for the whole thing. Perhaps someone could write a surrealist drama about a group of people in a tent in an English seaside town listening to folk music while civil society collapses around them: perhaps it would be the British equivalent of Cabaret. 

I only saw Cabaret, the movie, quite recently, although, weirdly, I knew the title song from Butlins end-of-the-pier shows. Songs about too much pills and liquor were not thought un-conducive the to the hi-di-hi atmosphere. I liked Cabaret very much indeed. 

The little man whose name escapes me who comperes a lot of the Sidmouth gigs was cross about the riots as only an English person can be cross, and said (correctly) that the atmosphere of a folk festival, where there are no strangers, only friends you met in the tent last night and whose names you have totally forgotted, and where wholesome teenagers learn to morris dance and play the squeeze box represents the true spirit of England. Which it does. But trust Martin Simpson to look out into his audience and mention the elephant at the ceilidh -- that everyone present was privileged by virtue of their age and class and most particularly the colour of their skins. There were black performers -- two of my very favourite performers of the whole week were black people -- but vanishingly few black punters. 

I think I mentioned that Martin did Woody Guthrie's song about the Mexicans who died on a plane to Los Gatos Canyon as a protest against the dehumanisation of immigrants. You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane; all that they'll call you will be deportees. 

I don't think that Farage can be directly blamed for what happened; but then I don't think any one person can be directly blamed for what happened. I don't believe in Engrams. I don't believe in Woke Mind Viruses. But I don't believe in Fascist Mind Viruses either. I don't believe in free floating ideas that jump into people's heads and make them disown their parents and throw bricks at policemen. I don't believe that the world is being controlled by a cadre of Jewish Communists holed up in a cave in Frankfurt; but neither do I believe that the world is being controlled by a continuity Nazis from a bar in Argentina. I don't believe in Satan, not in the way that some evangelicals seems to envisage him, at any rate. This is probably the greatest trick he ever pulled.

But I do think that the process that brought us to where we are is bigger than one man and bigger than one party. If Hari Seldon had wanted to produce race riots in 2024, he might very well have started in 1984 by planting the idea of "political correctness" in the minds of nice, mild mannered and not even remotely fascist newspaper columnists and Radio 4 panel show hosts. Ha ha ha you can't say bald you have to say differently hirsute ha ha ha. And so the idea is planted that there are things that They Won't Let You Say. Let the idea fester and grow for forty years. Woke this, SJW that, actually-its-about-ethics-in-game-design, British Jobs For British People, critical race theory, make America great again.  

Is Centrism a counter attack, intended to stop the forty year retreat from liberalism in its tracks? Or is Centrism, which by definition shifts the centre of gravity to the right, part of the Plan? Would a beardy Prime Minister in a cardigan who said "immigrants are nice" have brought the far-right to a stand still, or provoked them into being even farrer and ever righter? Will a sensible Prime Minister in a suit who says "immigrants are a problem, but not as much of a problem as some people think" make the universe less racist in the long run? Are the 2024 race riots the endgame, or are they another small step towards a fascist dictatorship? Or is Hari Seldon doing something much subtler? Perhaps psychohistory tells us that once we have seen the ugly face of patriotism, we will recoil from it and create a Corbynite utopia, in, say, 2064. History is very long indeed.

I don't believe in secret Foundations. I don't believe in memes or engrams. I just believe in Me. Yoko and Me. 

In the 1970s, Irish republicans blew things up on the British mainland with alarming regularity. Mrs Thatcher consistently took the line that these attacks were nothing to do with politics, and were simple outbreaks of criminality. On the one hand, this was a perfectly pragmatic and indeed moral approach. Murder doesn't stop being murder because there is a political motivation behind it. If someone kills innocent people, it is no defence to say "But I honestly believed it would help a political cause I sincerely believed in." Terrorism is, I can say without fear of contradiction, bad. (Never mention Nelson Mandela.)

But on the other hand "the Provisional Irish Republican Army has nothing to do with politics" was a blatantly false statement. The idea of a person waking and thinking "Top of the morning, to ye, to be sure to be sure, I surely would like to blow something up just for the craic, so I'll pretend to be opposed to the partition of Ireland and join an illegal paramilitary organisation, so I will" is beyond far-fetched. The "solution" if you can call it that, to the "troubles", if you can call them that, turned out to be political.

What should we call this month's riots and this months rioters? Our beloved Prime Ministers may god bless him is largely going down the Thatcher route of saying that they are simply criminal thugs. I agree that calling them anything else would give then spurious credibility. Starmer could probably have used the army to quell the unrest, but that would have fed into to the lunatic theory that we were experiencing the first shots of a European civil war. 

But clearly, the rioters are not just criminal thugs, although criminal thuggery certainly occurred. A person may steal a sausage roll during a period of civil unrest without particularly caring what the other civilians are getting restless about.

It is tempting to wonder if what we were experiencing was a very British take on January 6th? You and me and Jeremy Corbyn believe Kier Starmer to be a very moderate socialist; or perhaps even a slightly less conservative Conservative than Rishi Sunak. Some of us think he has betrayed his political principles; some of us think that he is engaged in some very practical political pragmatism; some us think that both of those things might be true at the same time. But hardly any of us think he is a lefty. But if you read the Daily Telegraph (which you shouldn't) or the online hate site formerly known as Twitter (which you definitely shouldn't) you will discover that very many people think that Starmer is a Stalinist, a creature of the hardcore Left, a manifestation of the phenomenon called Woke, and an actual Communist. And if the Woke is literally going to reduce the UK to a nuclear wasteland and a third world shit-hole, then resistance is obligatory.

Elon Musk says that civil war in Europe is inevitable, that the "the present situation" is precisely analogous to that in Star Wars, the Matrix and V for Vendetta, and that is incumbent on people to "join the resistance".

A civil war between whom, incidentally? White people and brown people? The cross and the crescent? The People and the Government? Or is his theory that the woke engram can be defeated with sticks and petrol bombs?

Meanwhile Farage says this kind of thing.

"Remember, of course, he [Kier Starmer] doesn't have much legitimacy any way. The party only got 33.8% of those that voted. Only 20% of the eligible electorate put this man in power. He needs to start listening to the people."

Our electoral system yields wildly disproportionate results. Everyone knows that. But the idea of a "less legitimate" or "illegitimate" prime minister -- and a separate, authoritative "voice of the people" expressed other than through the ballot box, is alarming. It feels like standing in front of a mob of psychotic knights and wondering out loud is anyone will rid you of a particular priest.

What percentage of the eligible electorate voted for your Brexit, Nigel? Can you remember?

There is a story in the Canterbury Tales about how a Jew cuts a Christian child's throat and throws him down a well. So the local people kill all the Jews. There is a folk song, the Jew's Garden, on a similar theme. Some Christian children are murdered: a rumour breaks out that the murderer was Jewish; a mob starts attacking Synagogues and ghettos.

We don't yet know exactly what happened in Stockport. We do know that an unimaginably horrible, and so far as anyone knows, pointlessly motiveless murder took place.

Strict empiricism says that up to now, water happens to have always boiled when we apply heat to it; but that it doesn't follow from this that heating water causes it to boil. We can't definitely say that the murder "caused" the riot. Many things "caused" the riot. But sing "merely pointless criminality" until you raise the roof,  the riot was in some way related to the unimaginably horrible murder. 

The murder happened and then the riots happened is a story; the riots happened because the murder happened is a plot.

"Enough of this madness now. We need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain. Completely and entirely" wrote Laurence Fox, a few hours after the murder. It is unclear how you remove a religion from a country. Is the plan to deport all the people who practice the religion -- or all the people who look as they might -- to some foreign country? (To where? Rawanda?) Are there going to be forced conversions? Will the Muslims have to embrace Christianity or is merely renouncing their current faith sufficient? But what if some people renounced their faith in public and continue to practice it in secret? Something like that happened in Spain in the fifteenth century. Will there be some organisation whose job it is to ask former Muslims tough questions about their new found lack of faith? To have, in fact, an inquiry? I never expected that.

There is a word for "attacking the Jewish quarter because you think a Jew has killed a Christian". I think the word also applies to "attacking Muslim communities because you think a Muslim has killed a white person." I think we should start using that word.

As a matter of face the presumed killer was neither Muslim nor an immigrant, although he did have dark coloured skin. But that is really neither here nor there.

Some right wingers believe in an ethnostate: an England purged of people with dark skin and unusual names. People who think that you are only British if your father and forefathers unto the tenth generation were English. I saw a man on the hate-site formally known as Twitter stating that left-wing comedy writer Armando Iannucci was not British despite having been born in Glasgow. "Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse" he explained. But some right wingers believe in cultural hegemony, in Powell's theory of flags and institutions and churches; in Tebbit's cricket test.

After the murder but before the riots, Nigel Farage released a video podcast. He said that the police described the murder as a "non terror incident"; but that he "wondered if the truth was being withheld from us". He said that he thought this was a "legitimate question".

Legitimate. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

If "legitimate" means "conforming to the law" then "are the police lying to us?" is indeed "legitimate" question. There is not and should not be any law against asking if the police are telling fibs. They sometimes do. There isn't an shouldn't be any law against me asking whether Kier Starmer is a shop window dummy being controlled by an alien consciousness resembling a giant octopus. "Is Kier Starmer an auton?" a legitimate question. But it is also a bloody silly one.  

But if "legitimate" means "conforming to logic", I am not quite so sure. The idea that the police would say that something was not a terrorist attack when something, in fact, was a terrorist attack requires you to believe a whole set of things about the police, and the state, and government, which are not, I think, supported by logic.

Policemen do tell lies. They certainly withhold the truth. That is why twenty-seven year old men are always helping the police with their enquiries; and officers are always pursuing multiple lines of investigation; and suspects sometimes cannot be named for legal reasons. Some secrecy, some withholding of information goes with the territory.

"Are the police lying?" may be a legitimate question. But legitimate or otherwise, I would not have a high opinion of a man who stood in crowded theatre and said "As a thought experiment I would like you to entertain the possibility that the management is withholding information and this building is as a matter of fact on fire."

People on the online hate site formally known as Twitter said "well of course it was a terror incident don't you think those poor kids were terrified?" This is not an argument. It barely even qualifies as a pun. It's on level with the man who says that civilians are subject to naval law because we address judges as "your wor-ship" and that the royal family must all be pedophiles because some gay men refer to themselves as "queens".

But perhaps it would have helped is the police spokesman had said "not a terrorist incident", "not politically motivated" or "not part of an organisation". It turns out they were telling the truth: it was in fact none of these things.

Farage concluded that "something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country". Well: yes and no. Yes, murders are horrible and wrong. But no, unimaginably terrible murders don't happen very often; that is why they are so terrible and so hard to imagine. To draw a general conclusion about the state of the country from one abhorrent event is silly. No-one sensible would look at a single horrible incident of a child being killed by two other children and infer an epidemic of child-on-child violence; and conclude that we need a new political party to deal with it.

Later that day, Farage explicitly framed the rioting as a putative revolution.

"Our country is being destroyed, our values trashed and the public on the point of revolt."

And two days later, he wrote:

"The majority of our population can see the fracturing of our communities as a result of, mass, uncontrolled immigration, whether legal or illegal. Yet to attempt to debate this in the public arena leads to immediate howls of condemnation. A population explosion without integration was always going to end badly. I have said this for many years." 

It isn't exactly clear what "integration" would look like: Farage frequently claims that Reform can't be a racist or right wing party because there are Muslims who support Reform. These are presumably good Muslims, assimilated Muslims; where the Muslims being terrorised by the rioters were bad Muslims, un-integrated Muslims; Muslim Muslims. What's the difference? It can't really just come down to clothes and accent and a preference for spicy food, can it?

But the message is clear. Population explosion without integration. Always going to end badly. I have said this for many years. I said a long time ago that if we let too many people into Britain; and if they didn't immediately start living like British people and doing what British people do then a very bad thing would happen, and now the very bad thing is happening and if we aren't careful it is going to carry on happening and happen even worse and this will be the fault of everybody except the people actually doing the bad thing. One wonders if he ever saw the Tiber frothing with much blood?

Farage is asking legitimate questions. The people rioting against immigrants are expressing legitimate concerns. Starmer is not a legitimate Prime Minister. Fine word, legitimate. The most common meaning, of course, is "a child born to parents who are married" as opposed to one born out of wedlock.

I think the people who keep insisting that their questions and their concerns are legitimate do so because deep down, on some unconscious level, they know that they are bastards.

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Vibes

At school I studied, if that is the word, Sociology. 

 We had a text book. Themes and Perspectives in Sociology by Michale Haralambos. I believe proper graduate level sociologists look on it with some horror. They think it reduces complex research and nuanced theoretical debates into bite-sized bullet points that can be swallowed and spewed up over exam papers. I remember reading an exasperated examiners' report on an A level paper: it said that no matter what question about the Sociology of Education candidates were asked, a large number of them would reproduce Haralambos's chapter about the underperformance of working class school-children from memory. 

Sociology has a reputation for being a "Mickey Mouse" college subject that guarantees a life-time of unemployment. It has now largely been replaced by Media Studies in the conservative demonology. I didn't take it beyond A level: my degrees are in the much more practical English Literature and Medieval Studies.

But in retrospective, O and A Level Haralambos had a good deal to be said for them. It asked questions that it might not have occurred to us to ask: questions where the answers seemed so obvious that we might not otherwise have noticed that they were questions. "Why do humans live in families?" "Why do communities punish wrong-doers, and how do they decide what counts as wrong?" That was the "themes" part. And unlike everything else on the 1980s Comprehensive School arts syllabus, Mr Haralambus encouraged students to entertain the possibility that there was more than one possible answer. That was what he meant by "perspectives". A French Functionalist would say that Society works like a machine; and we can see various ways in which families and prisons keep that machine running smoothly. No, say the German Marxists, Society is a struggle between rich people and poor people (I have never been able confidently to spell bourgeoisie) and families and prisons are techniques for keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. There were also phenomenologists, who, I think, said that "why" questions didn't matter and it was sufficient to just study families and school and prisons in the way that botanists studied weeds; and symbolic interactionists who.... Truthfully, I have never known what symbolic interactionists do. This was all doubtless very simplistic and I am sure that a lot of the time we repeated what the book said without actually understanding it. I seem to recall that Teacher thought that I was being a bit of a girly swot when I actually ordered some Durkhiem and some Wilmott and Young from the library and found out what they actually said. 

English teachers and History teachers also asked us questions of course, important questions like why Hamlet delayed and the identity of Godot and what caused the English Civil War. But they told you the correct answer (purgatory, death and the king, if I remember correctly) and marked you down if you didn't agree with it. We were rather discouraged from seeing actors doing Shakespeare in the theatre in case the Producer confused us by incorporating wrong answers into his production. I was told very clearly that I was not allowed to think that Fanny Price was a sanctimonious prig; because Jane Austen didn't intend me to think that Fanny Price was a sanctimonious prig; and an honest attempt to explain why I disliked the character and found it hard to engage with the book was dismissed as 'waffle.

Note: Fanny Price is in fact a sanctimonious prig.

I expect this is why Sociology -- and in fact Media studies -- are so often mocked by small and capital C conservatives. If you are editor of the Daily Mail or Sky News, you don't want young people asking questions about how media functions and what effects it has on the people who consume it. If you are Minister for Education, you definitely don't want young people asking "What would a Marxist say schools are for? How would that differ from a Phenomenological Symbolgist." Whoever you are, you don't want young people thinking that there are different, equally valid, perspectives on the big questions.

At any rate, that's what a Marxist would say. I suppose a Functionalist would say that it is good for society to have harmless scapegoats and essays in the Times about sociology being a waste of time are the modern equivalent of burning the devil in effigy.

At university, it turned out that there were themes and perspectives in English Literature as well; only there it was called Critical Theory. Critical Theory is another thing small c conservatives think is a bit of waste of time.

In practice, Sociology was one of those those subjects that music teachers and PE teachers gravitated towards, not because they cared about it but because they needed a second string in their academic bow. Geography was the other one. Many of us still believe that it is impossibly to read a map unless you are wearing an Adidas tracksuit with a whistle round you neck. Lazy and disengaged teachers often encouraged students to Express Themselves about General Issues, during the lesson, meaning that those of us who were quite articulate and quite literate ran away with the idea that we were Good at sociology. If you read books outside school, it wasn't too hard to improvise a good essay on whether gender was nature or nurture without actually having read the required chapter of the Big Blue Book.

It was a long time ago, and memory is not always entirely charitable. They literally pulled my old school down a few years ago. 

I am thinking of the occasion when the sociology teacher thought it would be a wheeze to invite a local police officer to address the class on the subject of Crime and Deviancy. I don't know whether the officer in question was a Functionalist or a Phenomenologist; but it is safe to say that he wasn't a Marxist. For all I know it could have been a member of the local Am Dram society, doing a stereotyped caricature of an English Copper for satiric effect. He began by saying that as a policeman he was not allowed to express, or even have, any political or religious opinions, before explaining that there was no crime whatsoever on the Isle of Man or Saudi Arabia because they still chopped the hands of thieves. (Right up to 9/11, the theory that Johnny Muslim and his good old fashioned discipline had got it just about right was very common among people who didn't have political beliefs.) Pausing only to do a bog-standard "never did me any harm" routine, he explained that there weren't any murders in the 1950s when they had had hanging and there wouldn't be any murders today if hanging were brought back. This was in Margaret Thatcher's golden days.

Now, I wasn't having this. We had Done Punishment and Deterrence in the previous lesson. The text book included a graph of the number of murders in possibly Australia. Possibly Australia had abolished hanging for a while, and then brought it back, and then abolished it again; and it was clear from graph that the presence of absence of a hangman had no correlation to the murder rate.  

PC Plod wasn't having me not having it.

Oh, I'm not interested in statistics, he said, you can prove anything you like with statistics.

It may have been Winston Churchill who made the joke about there being three kinds of untruth: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Checks notes: Actually it was Mark Twain, who was quoting Disralli, who may have been quoting the Duke of Wellington. Let's assume it was Oscar Wilde to be on the safe side. A proper mathematician had written a best selling book called "How to Lie With Statistics": I suspect a lot of people who hadn't read it had heard the title. 

"You can prove anything you like with statistics" could be taken as the prime dogma of the populist right. You may have a gut feeling that vaccination doesn't really do any good. You may once have known a heavy smoker who lived to a ripe old age. You may be pretty sure that there have been more traffic jams in London since Tony Blair invited all the Muslims to live there. If your belief system doesn't allow you to count up the number of smokers who get sick; or look at police records to find out if the roads get snarled up more often than they did in the racially homogenous days, then you haven't go anything apart from gut feeling and anecdote to go on. So anything which challenges you gut is suspect.

We're freer and better off since Brexit because I feel freer and better off. And since I am a fan of Brexit, I was likely to feel freer and better off or at least say that I did, regardless of what the facts on the ground happen to be. You tell me the standard of living has actually gone down? Oh, you can prove anything you like with facts.

Populism is ultimately the worship of vibes. 

It is perfectly true that if you generate a sufficiently large quantity of data and spend a sufficient time staring at it, you are going to be able to find some trends and some correlations which back up your side of the argument. I think it was Winston Churchill who said that his opponents used facts as a drunk man uses a lamp-post: not for illumination, but for support. (Wrong again: It was Andrew Lang, the fellow with the multicoloured fairy books. But we can go with Oscar Wilde.)

I am not talking about seeing the result of the chariot race in the entrails of a chicken; or doing computer searches of billion-character Biblical acrostics, But it is highly unlikely absolutely everything is completely terrible and appalling, even after fourteen years of Conservative government; and equally unlikely that everything is uniformly wonderful, even a whole fortnight into the glorious new Centrist utopia. It's the job of Kier Starmer's spinners to find some numbers which make the Tories look bad, and the job of Rishi Sunak's spinner to find some numbers which make them look good.  

So: that is my prediction for 2029. Regardless of what happens in the real world, Kier Starmer will be able to quote figures that prove that Things Have Only Got Better under his premiership. Wages will have gone up, inflation will have come down, health service waiting lists will be lower, children will be better educated, summers will be longer, women will be braver, soldiers will be more beautiful. And we can also be sure that Priti Patel (I assume it will be Priti Patel I prefer to assume the worst and be pleasantly surprised by the marginally less bad) will be able to quote figures proving that 2024-2029 have been an economic and social catastrophe: that ordinary decent people can't afford to put food on the table; that scarcely anyone coming out of tertiary education can read or write, much less do simple arithmetic and that in many towns old people dare not leave their houses for fear of the mobs of cannibal immigrants eating human flesh because they can't afford baked beans, that...

One of the least edifying aspects of the last election campaign were the gladiatorial debates and vox pops in which the Opposition pointed to a health service on the point of collapse and the government said that it was even more on the point of collapse in Scotland where the Opposition were in charge and the government said that the Opposition were in charge in Wales where things were even worse. One side could quote figures that said that waiting lists were coming down and the other side said that they were only coming down because they had gone up so much and the first side said that they were going up more slowly than they would be if the other lot were in power. Most of us mortals don't have the time or the effort to work out if either side is in the right. Probably the truth is that things are quite bad; not as bad as they could be; and better in some places than others. 

 Which is why a certain number of people will always vote for the big orange fellow who doesn't know much about figures but is quite sure it's the immigrants fault. 

It doesn't matter what Kier Starmer achieves: what matters is what people perceive him  to have achieved. 

This is not quite such a cynical remark as it may seem at first glance. If you are a political wonk, then your facts and figures matter a good deal: and if you work in a niche area then an incremental boost to your niche is very important indeed.

 Barak Obama said that nice thing about working at a state or city level was that relatively small actions could make relatively big changes to the lives of specific groups of people. A small change in the rate of tax on tractor fuel can be the difference between staying in business and going bankrupt to a few thousand farmers. 

I get why Labour Wonks go on and on about the fact that, yes, Tony Blair got us involved in a, yes,  futile war, but on the positive side, he put a lot of, yes,  money into nursery schools. And I am not being cynical. (Well, in fact, I am being cynical, but at least I admit it.) If you've actually seen and lived the positives of SureStart then it must have hurt a great deal when people like me said we were withholding our vote over a dodgy dossier and two hundred thousand dead civilians. And it must be really painful to hear the Left use terms like Tory Lite and say that both sides are as bad as the other one. 

Both sides are not as bad as each other. 

I am not rich; but I am definitely not poor. I can't truthfully say I have noticed that prices in the supermarket have gone up. I have noticed that since Brexit and the Pandemic, empty shelves are much more common. Not even the big shops can be relied on to have all the things I want every time I go shopping. I absolutely admit that "since Brexit there are no tinned anchovies to be had at Lidl, not even for reading money" is so much a first world problem that it barely registers as a problem. I have noticed my fuel bill going up. I have definitely noticed that certain Little Luxuries can be indulged in slightly less often. Pre-Pandemic I used to say "I probably shouldn't spend a fiver on my lunch every day, but it's nice and convenient". Post-Pandmeic I find myself saying "Ten quid for a nice coffee and a bowl of soup, I am not quite sure I can run to that." But honestly, in the economic down-turn is mostly something which has happened to other people. (I paid off my mortgage when I came into some money, so Liz Truss didn't directly harm me. There is a wobbly line on the website of my financial adviser, and it seems to be going steadily upwards, although there was a dramatic dip in September 2022. The fact that I have a wobby line to consult may make you challenge my "I am not rich" assertion.)

In the 1970s, we felt that if we called for an ambulance, one would probably come; and if we turned up at a railway station; there would probably be a train;  even if the guard would be officious, the food would be disgusting; and Hattie Jaques would ask me impertinent questions about my bowel movements. I now feel that if I had a heart attack I would be put on a three week waiting list for an ambulance; which would be diverted via Wivelsfield due to leaves on the line, and by the time I got to my destination I would be inconveniently dead.

Five years is quite a long time; if in five years we have a sense that we can trust the health service and the public services again; we will probably think that Starmer is doing an okay job and give him another chance. If he has to go through the numberwang cycle, then the Emperor has already won. 

You can't prove anything you like with statistics. You can only prove the things which the statistic prove. But the difference between a world where Kier Starmer steps down from the Premiership in 2040 and one in which Nigel Farage enters Downing Street in 2029 will ultimately come down to Starmer's ability to generated good vibes. 

This is also true of the nice American lady who is trying to beat Donald Trump. 

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Feedback

Dear Andrew

Here we go! There is not the slightest evidence that our beloved Fuhrer was ever a racist; in fact, he fought racists all his life and trying to tar him with the same brush proves that you are as I have always thought a woke snowflake working for the demise of civilisation. People like you should be locked up. 



Dear Andrew

It is absolutely typical that you would give a moment's thought to considering whether people on the far far away with the fairies right wing have a good point and trying to distinguish different shades of bastardy among the bastards: your attempt to give a fair hearing to [insert name of right wing person in this space] makes about as much sense as trying to get sense out of the ravings of [insert name of anti-vax flat earther here] and reveals that you are as we have always believed a racist. People like you should be forcibly reeducated.



Dear Andrew

Were you not aware that possession of such a book alone was punishable by death?

Dear Andrew

Yes but have you considered that Congressional sub-document plural double ex zeebra shows that in the third quarter between 1896 and 1897 the calories consumed by the average former slave was in the fact nought point nought nought three percent higher than that consumed by an Irishman who lived entirely on peat clippings at the same time and that therefore the only true liberals were the Kappa Alpha Fraternity? People like you should be openly mocked. 

Dear Andrew

I think that you should take the new season of Prime Ministers Question Time on its own terms, as as bit of light entertainment with some pseudo-science thrown in, and not try to read too much into it. People like you should be ignored. 

Dear Andrew

Has it ever occurred to you that you are in fact completely mad? I have a small pink Pangolin named Napoleon and he agrees with me. People like you should join me in Moscow where I we are intending to retreat. 

Dear Andrew

Your tax rebate has been approved for the 2023/2024 tax year.

Claim it here: [Link]

Substantive Digression: Are All Tories In Fact Bastards?

There's a very good story about an elderly Blitz veteran who was caught up in the 2005 London bombings. As he was being taken to hospital, he remarked "Don't worry: I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this!" 

It almost certainly never happened, but it is still a very good story.

I have a book on my shelf by Mr Enoch Powell. When he wasn't quoting the Aeneid at people who probably wouldn't be able to identify quotes from the Aeneid, he wrote some very interesting essays on the Christian Bible. 

One of the essays in the book had a significant effect on my own intellectual and spiritual development. The essay is called Bibliotary. He's writing about Jesus's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Saint Mark, he day, goes to some lengths to establish that Jesus has walked some distance away from the disciples, and that the disciples have fallen asleep. Mark can't possibly know what Jesus said; there were no witnesses. He must have made it up. "The narrative and its truth is not that of history; it is that of poetry, or imagination". At some point, some early Christian imagined that Jesus was reluctant to die and introduced it into the story. The question isn't "why did it happen like that?" but "who imagined it happening like that, and when, and for what reason?"

Never mind if the great man's reasoning is correct. (C.S Lewis thought that the evangelist was recording the first few words the witnesses overheard, just before they fell asleep.) The point is that Powell's essay was the first one I read which showed me that you could have a critical approach to the Bible without being a debunker: that you could be a Christian and still treat the Bible as a collection of texts with a history.

Granted, most of his religious theories are plain wrong. He insisted on the priority of Matthew -- the idea that Matthew's Gospel was written first and that Mark's shorter text is a rather inept summary of it. No reputable scholar would now subscribe to this theory: the battle lines are between those who think that Matthew and Luke independently expanded Matthew and those who think that Luke used Matthew directly. But Powell's essay on what he calls the archaeology of Matthew was the first time I had seen someone putting verses from one gospel alongside verses from another gospels and making informed speculations about why they differ.

He also had a theory, that I could summarise but won't, that Jesus was executed by stoning rather than by crucifixion.  [1]

The book is called Wrestling With the Angel. I have a large print of Jack Kirby's drawing of a super-heroic Jacob wrestling with a Celestial angel above my writing desk. I very much hope that is just a coincidence.

Having this forbidden tome in my collection, I have, in fact, also read the political chapters. Some are better than others. I am very unpersuaded, for example, by the argument that since the Church can't do miracles, it has no right to read into the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand a moral imperative to feed the poor; although I kind of take the point that clergy who think that the main point of Jesus healing the blind man is that National Health opticians are a jolly good idea are stretching their texts.

The essays on nationhood and immigration seem to be coming from rather a different place from "rivers of blood". I don't know whether we should think in terms of clever man who once lost his temper and said some vile things, or a vile man who was good at hiding behind a veneer of scholarship. The Birmingham speech is, of course, indefensible. But the essays I have read seem to be coming from a more intelligible position. 

A country is a group of people with a shared identity: it is defined by it's institutions; flag, Queen, church, literary canon. I would add, though he certainly would not have done, the BBC and the NHS. Also folk music. What makes you British is not your passport or your nationalisation papers or even a good score in a multiple choice citizenship test. And it's not who your parents were and what colour your skin is. It's whether or not you identify with those institutions. You can absolutely be a British person with Ruritanian heritage. What you can't be is a British Ruritanian. And you definitely can't be a British person who feels loyalty to the Ruritanian flag and holds Ruritanian street festivals and feels more affection to Prince Rupert than to King Charles. I don't know if Powell would have admitted the existence of British Communists or British Republicans. I strongly suspect that if you scratched the surface you would find that the Conservative Party was one of those institutions that defined your Britishness. All real Americans support the Republican Party because if you don't support the Republican Party you are not a real American. 

There certainly is or was a widespread belief among the clergy that the Established Church of England was a national Church. If you are English you are a member. If Evangelicals had been allowed to insist that people getting baptised and confirmed and buried had to make some profession of Christian faith, they would have reduced the Church of England to the status of a sect.

Which is pretty much just a posh-school version of Norman Tebbit's infamous cricket test. A person whose parents came from Ruritania can certainly be English; but a person who cheers for the old country in a England vs Ruritania Test Match clearly doesn't think of himself as English. And if he was properly English he would know that cheering at Cricket matches isn't the done thing. [2]

Now: many people have spotted that the current Tory leader and several of the contender to replace him have dark coloured skin. Several of them are second generation immigrants: Rishi Sunak's parents were Punjabi; Suella Braverman's came from Mauritius and Kenya; Priti Patel's parents emigrated to England from Uganda; Kemi Badenoch was born in the UK but grew up in Nigeria. 

Nothing in Rishi Sunak's Prime Ministership became him as the leaving of it. Outside Downing Street on the day after the election he spoke movingly of how a second generation immigrant, albeit a very rich one, could rise to the highest office in the land; and how his young children had placed Diwali candles outside 10 Downing Street. That was one of the reasons that Britain was the greatest nation in the world, he said. 

Bravo, said I. If only you'd spoken like that during the election, I might have voted for you. 

Note: I would not in fact have voted for him.

But during the election, the Tories very much nailed their colours to the anti-immigration mast. The dotty scheme about putting asylum seekers planes to Rawanda was the main thing they wanted to talk about in the election and the main stick with which the right wing press wanted to beat Kier Starmer. 

So a lot of liberals were naturally tempted to say: "Ha-ha. You think there are too many immigrations and want to send them back where they came from. But guess what! Your parents were immigrations! Bet that never occurred to you before! Gotcha!"

But this seems to be fully covered by Powell's theory of virtuous institutions: which he himself regards as the essence of Conservatism. The opponent isn't dark skinned people or people who say "Allah" rather than "Jehovah". The opponent is multiculturalism. There are good immigrants and bad immigrants. The good ones have totally identified with Britain; the bad ones still see themselves as French and Irish and Ruritanian. If I am correct about the Established Church, it is perfectly consistent for someone whose actual faith happens to be Buddhist or Hindu to sincerely believe that "our" country was built on Christianity; that "our shared" Christian values define who "we" are; and that Muslims are watering down "our" identity. The old joke turns out to be political position: the question isn't whether Rishi Sunak is a Hindu; the question is whether or not he is a Church of England Hindu. 

And I don't really get the whole nationalism thing. I think of myself far more as a "person" than I do "a white person". Which is why I am perfectly happy for football to come home, but don't particularly mind if it doesn't. I grok that it is easier for a white person to say that he doesn't do race than for a black person, in the same way that it is easier for a cis-male person to say that he doesn't do gender than for a woman or a transgender person. I can't get my head round the mindset of someone who is annoyed every single time a non-white is shown eating a big mac in a McDonalds commercial. I don't know what is going on in the head of someone whose reaction to Ncuti Gatwa or Paapa Essiedu or Chadwick Brosnan or Kamala Harris is to talk about "box ticking" and "DEI appointments". 

That's the answer to "can you be friends with a conservative". If by "conservative" you mean "a person who says 'us' when he means 'light skinned' people and 'them' when he means 'dark skinned people'" and wants his country back, then no, I don't think I could be.

But I look at the current Reform party and the current Tory party and then I look at Enoch Powell.

And I think "In ye olde days, we used to have a better class of bastard."

[1] Why is Pontius Pilate so important to Christian tradition? Why do people in church to this day chant "crucified under Pontius Pilate" rather than, say "betrayed by Judas Iscariot" or "buried by Joseph of Arimathea"? Answer: because it was essential for the early Christians to pinpoint the time of Jesus's death. You could prove that Jesus was the Messiah because the Passion coincided with the time table laid out in (a particular interpretation of) the prophecy of Daniel. Time and time and half a time and all that that entrails. It is highly unlikely that the historical Jesus's death really did cohere with those particular texts. So Pilate must have been retrospectively written into the story for didactic purposes. But if Pilate is a ret-con -- and if there is no evidence outside of didactic Christian sources that he was even involved -- then do we have any reason to think that the Romans were involved in proceedings at all? Don't the texts make it clear that it was the Jewish authorities thought that Jesus must die, must die, this Jesus must die, because he was a blasphemer and threatening to their position? The Gospels acknowledges that "Pilate" was relatively uninterested in the case. So it doth follow as the night the day: the historical Jesus was killed by the Jews, not the Romans. And only the Romans crucified.

[2] And through the world over, each nation's the same/they've simply no notion of playing the game/They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won/And they practice beforehand which spoils the fun.

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I don't often change my mind, but when I do, I do.

I don't very often change my mind: but when I do, I do.

About big things, I mean. I change my mind about whether I ought to order pancakes or a burger in the Boston Tea Party and whether it would be more fun to head over the road for a pint or stay in with a cup of tea and the new Acolyte several times in a minute.

I recall an pal of mine being slightly miffed because in or about 2000 I recommended that he read Hero With a Thousand Faces, and in or about 2010 I wrote a series of articles saying that Joseph Campbell was a snake oil salesman and charlatan.

I recently wrote an article saying that I had stopped watching a particular TV show that I used to watch rather assiduously, and you'd be surprised how many people ask me what I thought of the last series. "I didn't watch it. I thought I made this fairly clear; I'd decided to make a clean break for the sake of the kids. It's only a TV show, after all."

I've occasionally changed my mind about friends. Not usually after having a catastrophic row: if you can be bothered to have catastrophic rows you are probably still friends. ("You can really only hate people if you love them" as my mother once sagely remarked.) More kind of coming to the conclusion that neither of us are finding hanging out together very enjoyable any more and its probably time to give it up. But you'd be surprised how often people say "I suppose you'll be going out for a drink with Hezekiah when they're next in town" and I'll be, like, "Well no, we're kind of not friends anymore; I thought you knew that." I understand that people who do the romance thing call this process "breaking up" although I think in that case it generally does involve catastrophic rows.

But I think in practice most of us are more like the Pope. Our opinions and tastes and beliefs are not the same today as they were a decade ago: why would they be? But we are inclined to suddenly and infallibly declare that we never liked the restaurant that over-charged us for the undercooked fish, and we always thought the food there was terrible. And we always thought the goatee beard was a terrible idea; and always knew that Neil Gaiman was a wrong 'un and indeed never thought Sandman was very good to begin with. 

I am pretty sure that I thought that Harry Potter was kind of okay but not worth all the shouting before JK Rowling came out as a deeply unpleasant person; and I still think that Harry Potter is kind of okay but not worth all the shouting now JK Rowling is engaged in a race to the bottom on So Shall Mee Jah.

So Andrew: have you changed you mind about Jeremy Corbyn; are you still a socialist; or have you in fact admitted that you never believed in any of that nonsense to begin with?

It's complicated. 

I think perhaps Gloria Swanson summed up my position. I am still a socialist. But the movies got conservative.

Like the Bellman, I have said this several times before. I think that there are two ways of running a country. There is the approach which says that everyone must contribute some of their money to a Great Big Kitty, and that the money in the Great Big Kitty should be used to buy nice things which everyone can share: hospitals, schools, colleges, pensions, prisons, atom bombs, etc. And there is the approach that says that no-one has any business taking other peoples money and putting it in a communal pot; and that people should be free to buy the nice things they actually want with the money they have actually earned. (If one of the things they choose to do with their money is "donate it to help poor people" then that's their business. With great power doesn't necessarily come any responsibility at all.)

Hardly anyone has ever been 100% committed to the most extreme forms of either position. Of course, the Red Party (or the Blue Party, in America) are going to claim that the Blue (Red) Party think that taxation should be zero, that poor people who get sick should be shovelled into communal graves and kids whose parents can't afford school fees should be handed over to Jonathan Swift's new chain of landlord friendly fast food joints. (Look it up.) And of course the Blue Party (or the Red Party, in America) are always going to claim that the Red/Blue Party want to take 100% of your money, give most of it to black lesbian sociology collectives and force everyone to eat borscht at communal state funded kitchens while chanting passages from Owen Jones' Little Red Book. In real life the distinction has generally been between people like me who want slightly higher taxes, and slightly more nice things and the majority who want slightly lower taxes and are prepared to live with slightly fewer nice things.

That's the answer to the question about "have you ever had tea with a socialist?" and "would you ever kiss a Tory?" If by "Conservative" you mean "someone who would cut the Higher Rate of Income Tax" and by Socialist you mean "someone who would increase the Basic Rate" then of course the Plowboy and the Cowman can be friends. There are very good people on both sides. Not all socialists are Kobynites and not all Konservatives are Kunts. 

God help me, last time around I knocked on doors on behalf of Thangam Debonaire. And from what I can tell, she was a perfectly nice person and a perfectly hard working MP. (I am sure people who pay attention to these things will now send me letters pointing out that she was too far one way or the other way on Gaza and not far enough one way or the other way on Gender, but the point stands.) I knocked on doors because I wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister, or, failing that, to be the strongest possible leader of the opposition.

This never happens.

I fairly quickly formed the opinion that it could never have happened. I do not exactly say that Jeremy Corbyn -- and Tony Benn and Michael Foot and indeed Harold Wilson -- were errors which should never have occurred; and I definitely do not think that Tony Blair is right, or even intelligible, on anything at all. But I do now think that there is no point in campaigning for socialism (on any definition) in this country.

If the issue had been Jeremy's personal electability then things would be a lot muddier. Sadly, Labour didn't lose the 2019 election because Jeremy was telling Romanian spies about Mrs Thatcher's preferred breakfast cereal; or because he wore a donkey jacket to the National Anthem or didn't sing the words of his bacon sandwich. He didn't even lose the election because he was an existential threat to all the Jews in Europe. (Whenever I hear something referred to as an existential threat, I imagine a threat in a black polo neck jumper with a French accent which shrugs a lot, but that is probably just me.)

If any of that had been the case the Fight Would Go On. It would just be a matter of finding a Better Jeremy. My New Labour Friends ("of whom I have none") still believe that I, and everyone else who thought that Jeremy was in with a shout of getting the through the doors to 10 Downing Street, were bewitched by his magnetic personality. We apparently have a Thing about old beardy guys with cardigans. No one can look into their own hearts or see there own secret motivations. Probably some 1980s Tories really did support radical monetarism because they had a thing about being told off by strict nannies. Maybe a certain number of Starmerites would run screaming into the arms of any charismatic prosecutor with a knighthood.[1] But at any conscious level, I supported Corbyn because Corbyn was putting forward the kind of policies which I agreed with an have always agreed with. Charge people more and buy more stuff with it. I would no longer support Corbyn because I no longer think we can have a country where the rich pay more and everyone shares the nice things. Unlike the Right, I don't think there is a sinister anti-woke mob who control everything; I don't believe there is a cabal of Cultural McCarthyites hidden away in a secret base in Frankfurt plotting the upfall of civilisation. I do think that the press, including the supposedly unbiassed elements of the press like the BBC and the supposedly left wing elements of the press like the Guardian all presented Corbyn in the worst possible light. 

But mainly, I think that the Labour Party is a loose coalition of left wingers and social democrats; and that the Tory party is a loose coalition of right wingers and social democrats; and the social democrats in the Labour Party would much rather the Tories got into power for a bit than that the left wing faction in their party should get into the ascendency. There was never any point in getting a newer and shinier left wing standard bearer to replace Jeremy. All the moderates would have upped and formed their own party which would have split the opposition vote and kept the Tories in power. There is certainly no point in the Left breaking away and starting a new party; that party would not win any elections, and it would make it easier for the Tories to win them. Even Jezza himself -- who did win his own seat as an independent, god bless him -- talks in terms of starting a movement, not forming a government.

I voted for Darren Jones, the official Labour candidate, who not only won, but celebrated his victory by making a quite good joke. I'm fine with that. We voted the Bastards out and that's the main thing. Darren Jones is a suspiciously working class name. I wonder what he's really called?

But I am left in an uncomfortable position. 

("That's because you've been sitting at the Mac typing since eight o clock this morning, Andrew. Why not get up and walk round the room for a few minutes?")

During every election debate, Rishi Sunak accused Kier Starmer of believing in the exact things I think he should believe in, and during every election debate, Kier Starmer denied that he believed them, and indeed, insinuated that saying that he believe them was a vile slurs. Don't vote for this man, we kept hearing, because if he gets in he will put up taxes and spend the money on welfare. 

And I did beat my chest and wail exceedingly and cry unto the TV screen saying "I would to God that that were true."

Maths and logic and ideology tells me that you can tax more and spend more or you can tax less and spend less. 

Or you can borrow. I am not clever enough to understand who countries borrow from and where the money goes; but it is generally considered to be not a great idea because you eventually have to pay it back and the only way you can pay it back is by taking money out of the Big Kitty and replenishing it with more tax money. 

However, there is now a consensus around a third position that you can not put up taxes and still have money to spend on nice things Because Growth. To that extent we're all on the same page as Liz Truss's cabbage. If everyone makes more widgets and sells more coffee (and especially, I think, builds more AI Net Zero Windmills) then money will money will flow into the kitty and we can have all the nice things we need.

I do not not want this to work. Kier Starmer absolutely seems like a competent guy and I think he's sincere when he talks about service and making the country better for everyone and his Dad being a toolmaker. I want there to be schools and libraries and roads and eventually student grants and tuition fees and trains you can travel on for less than three figures. I want the poor to be a bit richer and the rich to be a bit poorer: I have always assumed that the Tories are happy for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, as in good Queen Margaret's golden time. Starmer has gambled 2029 on it being possible for the poor to get richer without the rich needing to get any poorer. 

And if he's right, I'm wrong: from each according to his ability to each according to his need was never a desirable goal. Indeed, if he's right, either Jesus Christ was wrong, or else Jesus Christ was right at a personal level but there is no means of applying Christian ethics to the economic or political sphere. If only we made the needles eye wider the poor would no longer be with us. And that would represent quite a radical change of mind on my part. 

See you in five years, God willing.

[*] Did you hear about the lawyer who had a fetish for jurisprudence? He got off on a technicality.

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This is me writing about the election

This is me writing about the election. 

So. We have had an election. We have voted the bastards out. There is now no need to go through the horrible process again until 2029. It would be nice to think that the success of Starmer's dull nice reasonable sensible party would mean that five years from now the Conservatives will try to outflank him by being even duller, even nicer, even more reasonable and even more sensible. But all the evidence is that their response to Starmer's nice part is go even further in the direction of being the complete bastard and nutter bastard party.

Someone on the American Twitter recently directed a question at LIBERALS:

Do you actually, personally know any conservatives? Do you really believe that they are as horrible as you say they are? Have you ever just taken the chance, sat down, and just talk with them? You might be surprised to find that they are actually human beings, just like you. You might even be surprised to find that they are exhausted and scared. You might even just discover that they're a lot like you after all.

Which is a nice bit of rhetoric. It's worth deconstructing, slightly. It is, of course, directed at conservatives, not at liberals: the Tweeter and the Tweetee are assumed to agree that LIBERALS don't believe that conservatives are human beings; that LIBERALS as a group don't think conservatives are anything like them; and the LIBERALS, as a point of principle, don't talk to conservatives. In the exact moment of saying "Liberals, don't demonise the other side" the other side is in fact demonising the liberals. They could have framed the question as "do you know any one with the opposite political views to yourself?" But they didn't.

But we long ago proved that most public conservatives utterances are a form of performance art; in which the actual views of conservatives are inverted and comedically attributed to liberals. Conservatives reallt do believe that everyone to the left of them politically are Stalinists and Communists; so they accuse the Left of saying that anyone they don't like is a Nazi. Conservatives are actively engaged in removing books they don't like from libraries, so they claim that the defining feature of the Left is that they don't allow freedom of speech. It's a fine old game. 

Conservatives -- do you actually know any liberals? Do you really believe they are as mindless as you say they are? Have you ever taken the chance to sit down with a member of the woke mob, and just talked to them? You might find out that they are human beings just like you....

Another man on the internet once wrote that Sigmund Freud spoke of "the Nazism of small differences." Rather ironically this was a Freudian slip: what the great man actually talked about was "the narcissism of small differences". But either way, it is a good point. It's a terrible cliche to say that all the political parties are exactly the same and just as bad as one another. But it is also true that more similar two sides become, the more fervently they hate each other. I seem to recall Monty Python wrote a funny sketch around this point. Labour has moved further and further away from it's original left wing principles; they have in fact found more and more common ground with the Conservative Party. And they are understandably reluctant to admit this. I think this post-Brexit centre-right consensus makes the discourse more poisonous than it needs to be. I have an impression that in the olden days when there real, ideological differences between politicians, there was less need to resort to abuse. Enoch Powell and Tony Benn could afford to have a civilised debate about their massive ideological differences of opinion. David Cameron could at least be open about how much he despised Jeremy Corbyn. 

The Right of the Tory Party think that Sunak is woke; the left of the Labour Party think that Starmer is Tory Lite; literally everyone agrees that the Tories have made a shocking mess of everything. It's not an argument about ideology; it's and argument about competence, that the Tories were always going to lose.  The two leaders spent six weeks pretending that they thought the other one was a monster whose election or re-election would instigate an apocalypse cover all the lands of Middle-earth in a second darkness. But under slightly different circumstances, they could very easily have been in the same party.

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Andrew thought he had better say something about the election

Andrew thought he had better say something about the election.

When Andrew writes about important subjects like Doctor Who and the Micronauts, he often edits and polishes and checks facts in standard reference works Wikipedia. He generally doesn't start a piece until he has thought up an interesting new angle or spotted something no-one has spotted before. He could perhaps sometimes be legitimately accused of overthinking.

Having just finished a long summation of Tom Baker's ante-penultimate season; he was quite tired. And he was about to go on his annual holiday to Sidmouth. So he thought he would blurt out everything he didn't have to say about the election in a couple of writing sessions and get them out into the world with minimum editing. 

Of course, I know how this goes. I expect that every writer does. You hand a friend some hastily written note and said "This is a very rough draft of the first couple of paragraphs of an idea I had, could you scan it and tell me if it's worth carrying on with?" and the friend will definitely say "I think there is an "e" in phenomenologial, and it would look better with Em dashes." Hand a friend a typescript and say "This is going to the publisher tomorrow; could you check it for any really obvious typos?" and the friend will say "I don't think the main character's dialect was authentic, and it would work better if it was set in the seventeenth century rather than modern times."

At least three times in the last twelve months I have published highly confessional apologia explaining why I am who I am and why I do what I do. No-one appeared to notice. Not that I particularly write in order to be noticed. And the best feedback is that sixty people send me money each month so that I can buy time to carry on doing what I am doing. But I fully expect any off-the-cuff and not particularly well thought through remarks I make about Kier Starmer is likely to be taken as my irrevocable judgement and result in a deluge of six or seven messages from the American internet.

I like both kinds of responses. I liked it when people use my blog as a forum to talk about things loosely related to my blog. Unfortunately, He Who Must Not Be Named killed or curtailed that, as one assumes he intended. I like the other kind, the kind when people give me money, even more. But I am kind of aware that just saying what I am thinking is a hostage to fortune.

I suppose there are always moments when writers start to write about why they write about writing. I know that some people find the Jocycean web of cultural reference points and insider jokes a barrier to reading my nonsense: so let's just say that the forgoing was my equivalent of Howard the Duck issue 16 and move on, shall we?

If you enjoy my writing and want to give me positive feedback, please consider supporting me on Patreon, for as little as $1/£1 per essay. 

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"Don't be mean with the beans, Mum. Beanz meanz Heinz."

1: Oh, adult human female who has procreated or adopted! Be more generous when distributing the edible seeds of climbing plants! Unrelatedly, "Edible seed of climbing plant" is synonymous with a German name meaning "Ruler of the House"!

2: Mother: Give us generous portions of cooked haricot beans in tomato sauce, because the words "cooked haricot beans in tomato sauce" mean the same as the words "Heinz canning company."

3: Although many varieties of canned baked bean are available, if you mention canned baked beans, people automatically assume you mean the variety manufactured by Heinz, because the quality is so high. So if you have children, you ought to give them large portions.

4: If you buy Heinz baked beans rather than any other kind, your children will be pleased.

5: The kinds of people who like Heinz baked beans are the kinds of people who would notice that the name of the product and the name of the manufacturer assonate. That's because they are a fun, informal product to be enjoyed on fun, informal occasions

6: Buy our product.

What does woke mean?

What, indeed, does anything mean? Even the most innocent expressions are fraught with ambiguity. We learned this last year when trying to translate some of the more gnomic Thoughts of Chairman Musk. 

For some time now, my working hypothesis has been that the word woke is synonymous with ethnic (and minority representation): it is used primarily by people who believe that ethnic representation is an unreservedly bad thing or (to translate that into plain English) racists. 

"Doctor Who is woke" (on this theory) translates as "Black characters appear in Doctor Who, and this is bad", or alternatively "Only white characters ought to appear in Doctor Who."

I decided to unscientifically test this hypothesis.

This afternoon, I looked up the twenty most recent pejorative usages of the W-word on the right wing hate site formerly known as Twitter. I ignored non-English messages, messages from people who include "Woke" in their user names but not in the tweet and messages which only contained links.

I don't think the results were especially surprising. Obviously one would need a larger sample to prove the hypothesis. But I think they are worth recording.

The Experiment

About fourteen of the posts related primarily or secondarily to race, religion or immigration. The tweets that I saw did not contain hateful tropes or slurs about black people or Jewish people: but they did complain obsessively (in both England and the UK) about "immigration" and (less frequently) "Islam".

Five or six of the posts used "woke" generically to refer to liberal or left wing viewpoints; 5% used the slogan "go woke, go broke". Racial, religious and political definitions were frequently conflated. Two or three used "woke" unintelligibly to refer to "bad thing" or "thing I dislike". Two or three used the word primarily to mean "Islamic" or "pro-Islamic". I saw only a couple of specific references to gender. 

I spotted no positive or neutral uses of the word -- no posts where black people or liberals exhorted each other to be more "woke". There were some ironic usages ("I suppose people will say that such-and-such is too woke...") and some critical usages ("Someone silly has implausibly claimed that such-and-such a thing is woke.") One hopeful sign is that "anti-woke" may be passing into the lingo as a synonym for "silly right wing person."

In the 80s and 90s, when the "PC gone mad" panic was at its height, "political correctness" was still occasionally used in a neutral or descriptive way. ("The Spastics Society is now called Scope because this is felt to be more politically correct"). No equivalent usage of the w-word shows up on my radar.

I didn't see much sign of a consistent conspiracy theory; but the posts seemed to take for granted the existence of a malevolent third party pulling the strings. The US Army is run by "brainwashed socialists"; and the UK immigration system is "overseen by the woke". 

There is a strong implication of weakness, hypocrisy and insincerity in accusations of wokeness. 

On the basis of this very small sample, it seems clear that "woke" does not refer to any one group or belief-system; nor does it precisely scapegoat any particular minority, although it is overwhelmingly hostile to what it calls "immigrants". But it pretty consistently speaks to an inchoate ambience:

1: Everything is terrible

2: Someone is to blame for everything being terrible.

3: The people who are to blame for everything being terrible are a malevolent third party who insincerely advance the interests of black people, immigrants, trans people and Muslims for unspecified nefarious purposes.

4: In so far as this group has any specific characteristics, it can be said to be weak and hypocritical.

Summary

Who is woke?

Show Your Working

Text of Tweet

Proposed Definition of Woke

Blogger Commentary

We granted citizenship to 202,000 people in 2023. The success rate for citizenship applications for the UK is 99%. One of the highest rates in the world. Our citizenship tests are weak and overseen by the woke. Then need to be fixed by @reformparty_uk

Woke: [1] Insufficiently Hostile to Immigrants

The Citizenship test has always been a formality in which people who have already been given the right to remain answer questions about where they would find Big Ben and which poems William Wordsworth wrote: you would expect the pass rate to be close to 100%. But the poster imagines it to be a system for preventing undesirable foreigners remaining in the UK, which is not being applied with sufficient rigour. 

Cuban says winning arguments with young adults on Instagram and TikTok is so much easier than X. Mark Cuban was handed his head by @TheRabbitHole84 and @elonmusk repeatedly when he said stupid woke S$#% while virtue signalling.

Woke: [1] Liberal views, insincere 

[2]Insufficiently right wing. 

[3] Insufficiently supportive of Elon Musk.

Obscure: so far as I can tell this refers to Mark Cuban, generally thought to be an objectivist/libertarian. "Virtue signalling" almost always refers to insincerely held liberal values, so I take it that he is being blamed for being insufficiently right wing. (One of my former Labour friends regards the Green Party as virtue signallers by definition.)

It’s the woke white folk who feel they have to stand up for the appressed [sic] and be the voice to make them feel like they are the true humanitarian.. Horse Stuff! [Poo Emoji]

Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to racial minorities 

[2] Disapproval of derogatory imagery, insincere. 

This Tweet refers to campaigns to remove stereotypical imagery of Native Americans from football logos. The specific issue may be nuanced, if as one contributor says, the logos were often originally created by or in consultation with native Americans. "It's only white people complaining, the black people don't really mind" is a common trope used to close down any criticism of racial content whatsoever. 

The only thing you're sorry about is that you have been exposed by the Angiolini Inquiry

Sarah and many others would be alive today if you people had done your jobs

Suella Braverman was right

The Met surrendered to woke and Sarah Everard died because of it

Woke: [1] Bad Thing 

[2] ??Insufficiently racist 

Very Obscure. The tweet refers to a report into the shocking murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer who haad a history of committing sexual offences. 

The Metropolitan police have often been accused of systemic racism and misogyny; it is alleged that in this case they ignored "red flags" about the officer because they didn't take sexism seriously enough. The implication that they didn't identify the murderer in their ranks because they were too liberal or left wing is rather hard to make sense of; but it is very hard to suppose that the Tweeter understands "surrendering to the woke" to mean "being sexist and misogynic."

When I first wrote about Political Correctness, I noticed that some of the main vectors of the conspiracy theory used the McPherson Report as their primary example of political-correctness-gone-mad. So the thought here may be:

• MrPherson told the police to be less racist
• Being less racist is woke
• Twenty seven years after being told to be less racist (=more woke) a police officer commits a terrible murder
• Therefore, the murder was caused by wokeness

Ahh you got your words mixed up: damn sure it should say woke cun.... !

Woke:  [1] Disapproval of bad taste jokes, insincere
[2] Insufficiently hostile to Palestinians
[3] Insufficiently hostile to Muslims
[3] Bad Thing 

The context here is that one Tweeter had made an offensively bad-taste joke about the protestor who set fire to himself outside the Israeli embassy, and implied that the people who attended his vigil had bad or insincere motives. There followed the kind of witty, Socratic debate for which Twitter is justly famous. Well, hardly anyone would come if they held a vigil for you / At least they would be sane rather than indoctrinated into a vile religion or woke cult / Better a woke cult than a bigoted cunt/Damn sure it should say woke cunt.

"It was a prostitute on the altar the first time around; today it’s a funeral for a male prostitute, laid out just feet from the Tabernacle and hailed as the “Mother of All Whores”. ~Michael J. Matt, "Woke Catholicism and the New Reign of Terror"

Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to transexual people

[2] Dogmatism 

[3] Bad thing 

A barking mad hyper-catholic who doesn't accept the papacy of Pope Francis maintains that because the funeral of a trans man took place in a Catholic cathedral, the Church is now in thrall to a new French Revolutionary Terror, a new Whore of Babylon, and a new Abomination of Desolation. Note, again, that the ostensible target is not trans people themselves, but a conspiratorial "woke catholicism" which supports them and forces other people to support them. 

Sign the petition to stop the censorship so you are not charged for “ having feelings” that don’t align with woke ideology! New federal bill attempts to censor your feelings! What the hell.

Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to minorities 

[2] Not a free speech absolutist

This refers to Canadian legislation that might give financial compensation to victims of hate speech. 

I think it is quite unlikely that the feelings themselves (as opposed to the public expression or publication of such feelings)  are to be criminalised, but I am neither a Canadian nor a lawyer. The feelings in question are presumably feelings of hatred towards Muslims, black people or gay people. Note that although the specific complaint is about the state limiting free speech,  "woke ideology" appears to refer to the belief that racist and homophobic ideas are bad in themselves.

…and it will be half full.

When it is , without fanfare, this will be dropped. Not because of any outcry but because it doesn’t make money.

Go woke, go broke.

Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to black people. 

[2] Belief in white privilege, insincere. 

[3] Belief in affirmative action, insincere. 

This is slightly nuanced. 

A new London play about slaves, imaginatively called Slave Play, has advertised "black only" evenings -- for the benefit of people of colour who would not feel comfortable watching a racially charged play alongside white people. I reserve judgement on whether or not this is a good idea, and whether it would even be legal in the UK. If your reaction is but-what-would-you-say-about-a-WHITE-only-performance then you haven't understood the question. 

The strong implication of the Tweet is that no-one will attend the production (people of colour don't really want this) and that the theatre's motivation is insincere (they don't really care about the racial issue and will drop it if it fails to make them money).

No more irresponsible than you stirring up the idea any criticism of Islam is phobic you woke grifting low life

Woke [1] Insufficiently hostile to Islam 

[2] Contemptible person, bad thing.

Unable to rebut a previous poster's allegation (that claims about the Mayor of London being operated by a shadowy cabal of Islamists is inflammatory) the Tweet resorts to the rhetorical technique known as  whataboutery. 

It may be true that some people unfairly claim that any criticism of the Muslim faith is Islamophobic (and, similarly, that any criticism of the modern Israeli state is anti-semitic). On the other hand "not all legitimate criticism of Islam is necessarily Islamophobic" very often means "all Islamophobic remarks are to be regarded as legitimate criticism of Islam." 

Perhaps this writer is making a legitimate distinction between nuanced religious and cultural criticism and racist abuse; and limits the term "woke grifting lowlife" to those who mistake the former for the latter. Or perhaps he isn't. 

 

The #USA is fn screwed!!

I'm afraid the military is to woke, undisciplined (CLEARLY), brainwashed socialists, n fn drag queens! Ha!

Woke: [1] Bad thing 

[2] Liberal 

[3] Insufficiently hostile to trans (or gender non-conforming) people. 

Obscure. 

The reference point is a film of service-men engaging in what appears to be an activity part way between a raucous play-fight and a riot. Which I would have thought would be exactly the sort of thing that you would expect "single men in uniform" to engage in.

Is the speaker seriously arguing that "a belief in higher taxation and improved public services" (=socialism) and "a taste for gender-non-conforming clothes" (=drag) necessarily causes macho horse-play to get out of hand? And does he seriously think that most US soldiers, or their officers, hold left-wing political views and wear frocks? It is pretty clear that "socialist" and "drag queen" (like "woke') are here simply synonyms for "naughty".

Go woke go broke … fuck em

Woke: [1] Ethical consumption 

[2] Liberal

The Body Shop cosmetic chain is going into receivership. The writer hates the chain because they believe in ethical consumerism and the humane treatment of animals. He believes they only acquired those characteristics recently; and as a result have got into financial difficulties. The fact that the Body Shop failed after only forty seven years proves that running a business on liberal or ethical principles will invariably lead to commercial failure.

Okay, and I am surprisingly tired of this kind of criticism. Which is not to say there is a bunch of a**holes that will label anything that breathes as woke, but it's pretty obvious when "inclusion" is written as a selling point rather than a tridimensional character.

Woke: [1] Inclusivity 

[2] Insufficiently hostile to minorities. 

Another nuanced Tweet: the writer even admits that the term "woke" is overused. 

However she puts scare quotes around the word "inclusion", so she apparently thinks that at least some "inclusivity" is "woke". This really only makes sense if you think that non-white (or non straight, or female, or minority religion) characters are deviations from the norm and that the existence of black people has to be justified as a special case.

It would be interesting to hear which black characters she regards as "three dimensional" and which as "selling points". My guess would be "none" and "all" but I would be perfectly happy to be proven wrong.

Keep in mind this girl was extremely woke, and went to a woke university. Her professors are literally defending the killer and saying it’s racist to blame her death on illegal immigration. Low sympathy for people like Lwken. She’s just another Molly Tibbs.

Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to immigrants. 

"Molly Tibbs" refers to Mollie Tibbets, a twenty year old student who was murdered in 2018. "Lwken" refers to Laken Riley, a twenty-two year old student murdered earlier this month. In both cases the apparent murderer was a person of foreign origin, in the USA illegally. The argument has been made, in both cases, that their deaths were therefore caused by lax immigration policies. This Tweet engages in particularly despicable victim-blaming: the young woman (to some extent) deserved to be murdered by an immigrant, because she had been supportive of immigrants in the past; and because her college was supportive of immigrants. 
 

"This person was murdered by an immigrant; therefore, we ought not to allow immigration" and "This murderer was an immigrant, therefore, all immigrants are murderers" are both unambiguously racist statements. 

Really? That’s not what they say about guns. When it comes to guns it’s not “that person isn’t dead bc of a gun but because that person ran into a violent person” woke people are seriously dangerous.

Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to immigrants 

[2]Insufficiently supportive of gun ownership 

[3]Liberal

Another nasty tweet about the same tragic case. The twisted argument here is that it is hypocritical to blame a gun-murder on the availability of guns while not blaming a murder committed by an immigrant on the presence of immigrants. Note the othering of "woke people", incidentally. 

So between democrats, woke local governments and sheriffs, victims of the heinous crimes by these illegals - they simply don’t care?!

Seriously, when is someone going be held accountable?

Woke: [1]Insufficiently Hostile to Immigrants 

[2] Liberal

Yet another racist tweet about the Laken Riley case. As I understand it, US immigration authorities can ask (but not require) police forces to detain suspected illegal immigrants for up to 48 hours; and the current sheriff of the county where the murder happened had stated in his election campaign that he would not necessarily cooperate with such requests. This is a rather arcane point of American law. I would only note that "If we had locked all the illegal immigrants up, we would have locked up this illegal immigrant; therefore the policy of not locking up illegal immigrants is the direct cause of this murder; therefore we should lock up all illegal immigrants" is, at best, logically flawed, and at worst, an argument for internment and collective punishment. 

For our purposes, the interesting point is that the writer believes in an indistinct group "woke local governments" who are deliberately or callously allowing bad things to happen. 

If Mason Greenwood returns the media and woke brigade will destroy him. He’s better off abroad

Woke [1] ??Judgemental, self-righteous  

[2] ??Insufficiently tolerant of sexual violence. 

Very obscure. Mason Greenwood is a footballer who was accused, prosecuted, and acquitted of serious sexual offences. The implication is that "the woke brigade" will continue to believe that someone is guilty of a crime even though they have been found innocent in a court of law. 

This seems to be using "woke" to refer to an actual phenomenon: the possibility that someone will be treated as guilty in the court of public opinion despite having been found innocent in a court of law. It is unclear if this is a particularly recent phenomenon; although the internet and social media undoubtedly increase exponentially the speed with which rumours and false accusations can be spread. 

It is interesting that the "media" and the "woke" are here conflated, as if, say, the Daily Mail was well known for its bleeding heart liberalism. (Are the "woke" who tolerated the police officer with the criminal record the same as the "woke" who are going to hound the man who was falsely accused?) 

I wonder if, lying behind this tweet, is a buried assumption that liberals will not accept that someone has been exonerated because they take sexual offences too seriously?

Our military is weak.Anyone who would have entered the past 5 yrs hasn't because of the woke bullshit being pushed into it. They're all at home. Where they need to be. Because shits gonna hit the fan with the illegal immigrants and crazies this summer. Hope not. But seems like it

Woke [1] ?Liberal  

[2] Insufficiently hostile to immigrants 

[3] Bad thing.

Very confused indeed. 

a: No-one has joined the US army since 2019. (Untrue, although there has been a shortfall of recruits.)

b: This is because no-one between the ages 19 and 25 (the famously conservative Generation Z) will join up.

c: This is in turn because, since 2019, the army has acquired an unspecified quality called Woke Bullshit.

d: This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it means that the quarter million people who did not sign up (assuming a target of 50,000 new recruits each year) are available and prepared to participate in a civil war against immigrants in the run-up to the November election. 

This seems 

a: Very unlikely to be true and 

b: Very scary indeed

Homeowners clash with ‘woke’ city that refuses to remove street squatters causing 'disgusting' hazard

Woke: [1] Insufficiently hostile to poor people 

[2] Liberal 

Fairly self-explanatory. Note use of "street squatter" for "homeless person."

London…what a cesspit of nutters. Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Free Palestine….left wing, woke, Islamic capital of the World.

Woke [1] Insufficiently hostile to Muslims. 

[2] Liberal 

[3] Bad things

The speaker disapproves of the tactics of environmental protestors. He regards Extinction Rebellion and Free Palestine as essentially the same thing, and conflates "left wing" and "muslim" into a single thing he calls "woke". 

I forgot you can’t just tweet anymore. Everything is so woke omg

Woke: Everything.

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