ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?

 

ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?

It is commonplace amongst political commentators that the voting public is not interested in politics and does not spend much time thinking about it.  In fact the best example of how this has been explained that I have come across over the years was a commentator who said that the public only see politics out of their “peripheral vision”.  If somebody actually manages to get the public to look directly at them then politically that is a game changer. 

So this means that the current parliamentary parties of the British Political Establishment and, in particular, the Conservative Party, which I want to talk about in this article, have lived their whole careers, up until the Brexit vote, in at most the peripheral vision of the voting public.  This has always meant that as long as politicians are looking as though they are going to say the right things whenever they come into view in the public’s peripheral vision, the public’s gaze flicks away from them and they are allowed to get on with it unchecked.

It is because of this lack of attention that the public does not hold Establishment Politicians properly to account and does not put any serious effort into thinking critically about the politicians that are being elected.  This is the situation in which the current generation of parliamentarians have grown up and in which they have developed their careers.

So if, for example, you take Theresa May, she is a politician who has basically been able to get away with lying about what she stands for throughout her whole political career.  Thus in order to get selected by the Conservative constituency party, any Conservative MP who is not genuinely a Eurosceptic has had to lie to claim that they are a Eurosceptic otherwise they would not get selected by the predominantly Eurosceptic Conservative Party membership.   Once selected, in order to get elected, they have had to continue lying and pretending that they are Eurosceptics, because in most Conservative seats they would not get elected if they said that they were Europhiles. 

Theresa May, for example, when she became Home Secretary, on any objective basis she did an appalling job of being Home Secretary. On almost every promise that she and the two Conservative Governments that she got elected but she failed to deliver on almost any of the policies that had been promised.  The most glaring of which of course is on immigration, where they were elected on promises to keep immigration down to the “tens of thousands”.  In fact, she presided over the biggest influx of mass immigration in the history of England, with, in her last year as Home Secretary, more immigrants arriving in that one year than had come to England in the entirety of the thousand years before 1939!

However whenever the public’s political vision flicked over her, there she was saying that was what she wanted to try and achieve a dramatic reduction in mass immigration.  That was enough to satisfy the public so that their gaze moved on and so no critical analysis was brought to bear in holding her accountable for her actual lack of achievement!

This current generation of parliamentarians might have continued to live out their whole political careers just as previous ones had done, without there being a moment where the public would be willing to make any effort to properly hold them to account.  That would however have been without the Brexit vote! 

As a result of the EU referendum on leaving the EU, the public, for the first time in at least a generation, really focussed on a political question and gave an unequivocal answer based upon the largest turnout that has occurred for decades.  The unequivocal expectation of voters was, and is, that the public’s decision would be implemented.  This is where trouble has occurred for our dishonest and deceitful Remainer MPs, who had comfortably expected to be allowed to continue making decisions that suited them and their agendas without any proper accountability to the electorate for the rest of their careers. 

Theresa May is just one of those parliamentarians who had expected to be able to carry on lying her way out of any inconvenient situation. 

It is in that context that she has dishonestly conducted her own hidden Brexit policy which she unrolled to the startled gaze of her Cabinet colleagues at Chequers. 

Theresa May’s Chequers’ proposal is not only completely contrary to the public’s expectations following the Brexit vote, but is also directly contrary to Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech about her “red lines” when she was still repetitively chanting “Brexit means Brexit”.  Now the public is turning its eyes towards Theresa May and is focussing and so is noticing that she is a dishonest and incompetent Remainer, who is, in Jacob Rees Mogg’s words “a Remainer who has remained a Remainer”.  This is despite the public’s vote and despite her pledge to implement it in her otherwise ill-judged General Election manifesto.

This leaves me somewhat torn between two conflicting feelings! 

For the country, and as a patriot, I think that what Theresa May is trying to do is a travesty and a terrible missed opportunity, but as the Leader of what The Times newspaper was kind enough to call an “insurgent party”, I cannot help but relish the prospect that the parliamentary Conservative Party led by Theresa May could well be now heading irrevocably in a direction in which the public will clearly see that the leadership of the modern Conservative Party is composed of dishonest, incompetent, and unpatriotic Europhiles.

When the public truly realises what the modern Conservative Party leadership stands for, I think it likely that the public will regard them as unfit to hold Government Office ever again. 

It may well be that many of the seventy plus per cent that Professor Sir John Curtice of Strathclyde University has identified as being “Leavers” who have been voting Conservative will decide not to come out to vote for the current alternative Establishment party (i.e. Corbyn’s Labour) but that does not mean that they will vote again for a Conservative Party that has so clearly and now noticeably betrayed the trust that was placed in them. 

The purging of the Conservatives from being a Party of Government is the first step required for a reconstruction of our national politics. 

We need a politics more in line with the two opinion blocks of real voters.  These are for the patriotic, anti-mass immigration, pro-Brexit, pro-traditional values and pro-welfare and NHS nationalists.  Against this block is the internationalist, pro-EU, anti-patriotic, liberal values, pro-mass immigration, individualistic cosmopolitan block. 

The current mishmash of views is one in which the Establishment parties are at cross purposes with most voters.  Most of us like some of what Labour has to say and also some of what the Conservatives have to say but we don’t like all of what either of them have to say.  So, at the moment, voters have the awkward and unappetising choice at elections of having to choose between the least worst party, rather than being able to choose a party they actually fully agree with.  Changing that ladies and gentlemen would be a reform of our politics well worth seeing!

'The Times' describes Leave votes as:- “Xenophobic Insurgents”!

 

The Times Political Editor describes Leave votes as:- “Xenophobic Insurgents”! 

I couldn’t let Francis Elliott, the Times Political Editor, get away with outrageously describing Leave voters as “Xenophobic Insurgents” without responding.

Here is my letter to him:-

Dear Mr Elliott

Re: Times Article, July 18^th:- “Tory turmoil could lead to Far-Right revival” 

With respect, your heading betrays the unanalytical nature of your article.  You used the smear expression “Far-Right” which is intended to obscure rather than to highlight actual policy positions.  You then claimed a “revival” despite the fact that for several decades now there has not really been any patriotic or nationalist challenge to the British Political Establishment Lib/Lab/Con which has dominated “British” politics since the Second World War. 

You rightly discuss the likely consequences of the Conservative Party’s destruction of its own creditability over Brexit as either competent or patrioticor honest.  It is also true that, if Corbyn’s Labour was to be given a chance at government, Labour would prove to be internationalist, anti-patriotic, multi-culturalist and pro-immigration.  This is virtually a checklist of the very things that English blue collar workers most despise.  Such a Labour Government would be very likely to complete the divorce between the traditional “white working class” and Labour – a path which has already been trod by almost all of Labour's sister parties in Western Europe!

The anomaly of the UK State is that it is a unique, unfair, unequal and illogical mishmash of nations.  This constitutional anomaly has to be sorted out before England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland can become fully normal modern democratic nation states. 

If in the process of sorting this out our politics can shed our grandiose “Legacy Parties” and replace them with a modern party structure where policies chime with the various blocks of ideological opinion rather than cut across them - as our current ones do – then so much the better.  Whether that amounts to “fertile ground for xenophobic insurgents” well that is – “hard to know”! I will leave you to resolve your own loaded question!

Yours sincerely

Robin Tilbrook

Here is Mr Elliott’s article

Tory turmoil could lead to a far‑right revival

Leave voters’ sense of betrayal over Brexit and fear of immigration create the perfect conditions for a new protest party

Our views on race, immigration and Brexit are full of contradictions. But taken together, this jumble of prejudices and ideas is about to change the shape of British politics.

The return to dominance of the two main parties, which saw Labour and the Conservatives share around 80 per cent of the vote, was one of the most surprising consequences of the referendum two years ago.

It left many in the centre ground pining for a new party. But it now seems likely that it’s on the right, rather than on the middle ground, that a new force will appear.

In three recent polls, Ukip has seen an uptick at the expense of the Conservatives. It could be the first sign of the governing party’s electoral coalition unravelling as voters react negatively to Theresa May’s Brexit compromise agreed at Chequers.

Although Ukip is the current beneficiary, the moribund party riven by factionalism looks no more able to revive itself than the Liberal Democrats. Prepare for a new organisation entirely.

At first sight, immigration doesn’t appear to be a factor in the discontent felt by voters. The number of Britons identifying immigration as the most important issue has declined steeply since 2016, while the number identifying Brexit has risen on a similarly striking gradient. But taken together, concern about immigration and the delivery of Brexit mark those who feel disenfranchised by the Westminster establishment, and explain the outrage felt by some voters towards Mrs May’s Chequers plan. It is an uncomfortable truth that just over a quarter of respondents in a recent British Social Attitudes survey said they were “very” or a “little” prejudiced towards people of other races.

Brexiteers react with fury to any suggestion that race played a part in the vote to leave the EU. They are also the first to suggest that a betrayal of the referendum result will unleash an ugly populist backlash.

Nadine Dorries, the Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire, is the latest to sound the alarm. “The Chequers deal has disenfranchised voters,” she tweeted this week. “People tell me . . . that it was the ‘last straw’ and if a charismatic figure stood heading a new party they would vote for him/her. Sounds like we could be heading for our very own Trump/Macron/Robinson.”

She was criticised for appearing to treat Tommy Robinson, former leader of the far-right, anti-Muslim English Defence League, as a mainstream politician. Robinson was jailed in May for contempt of court and his appeal against his sentence is due to be heard today. As Ms Dorries later made clear, her tweet was a warning, not an endorsement.

But Robinson’s anti-migrant creed has no shortage of high-profile supporters. Here is Donald Trump, speaking alongside Theresa May after their Chequers summit last week, on the damage the president believes migration is doing to the cultural fabric of Europe: “I just think it’s changing the culture. I think it’s a very negative thing for Europe. I think it’s very negative,” he said.

“And I know it’s politically not necessarily correct to say that. But I’ll say it and I’ll say it loud. And I think they better watch themselves because you are changing culture. You are changing a lot of things. You’re changing security.”

Sam Brownback, the US ambassador for international religious freedom, is reported to have warned Sir Kim Darroch, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, that “if Britain did not treat [Tommy] Robinson more sympathetically, the Trump administration might be compelled to criticise Britain’s handling of the case”.

Mr Trump’s son, Donald Junior, has tweeted support for Robinson. A US think-tank, Middle East Forum, helped to organise a rally in support of him in London and sent a Republican Congressman, Paul Gosar, to speak in his support.

Robinson is just one possible candidate to lead whatever replaces Ukip as the repository of protest votes, powered by alt-right cash. Generation Identity, an Austrian nationalist movement, is hovering at the political fringe. With slickly produced YouTube videos and clean-cut provocateurs, it is waiting to leap on any grievance in Britain that can serve its narrative of an apocalyptic clash of civilisations.

It is worth imagining what British politics will be like if Mrs May does, after all, squeeze a version of her Chequers compromise through Brussels. For most of the period between March 29, 2019, when we formally leave the union, and the next general election in 2022, Britain will be paying its full dues to an organisation over which it has no control. What’s more, every politician other than Mrs May will have a vested interest in stoking discontent over the terms of our departure. It is probable that she won’t even be in No 10 to defend it four years from now.

If this isn’t fertile ground for xenophobic insurgents, it’s hard to know what is. For the Tories, it could get even worse. Those now urging a delay in our departure next March are ignoring one large obstacle. If we are still in the EU, Britain must take part in elections to the European parliament next May. These polls are already causing great anxiety in Brussels, where the Commission fears they could return a majority of Eurosceptic MEPs from across the member states, with fatal consequences for the federalist dream.

Senior ministers say that Brussels will find a way to refuse any request to extend our negotiating period because it fears that Britain’s participation in the Euro-election would only inflame the Continental populist revolt.

Just as likely, they know that the Conservative Party would suffer an almighty drubbing in such a poll because it would be outflanked on the right by a populist nationalist party offering a “real Brexit”. That day of reckoning may simply be postponed until the next general election. By then, Labour may find itself in a corresponding bind to the Tories, if a new centrist party ever gets its act together.

The outcome of that election will be determined by which of the two main parties suffers most from the unravelling of forces responsible for their current dominance.

Here is the link to the original article>>> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-turmoil-could-lead-to-far-right-revival-thw8slrq5

DAVID DAVIS TRIGGERS CABINET MELT-DOWN

DAVID DAVIS TRIGGERS CABINET MELT-DOWN

Whilst the fall-out from David Davis’ resignation has captured the headlines, I thought one of the most interesting articles about David Davis was written by his friend Paul Goodman, the Editor of the Conservative Home blog site. 

Mr Paul Goodman was previously the Conservative MP for High Wycombe and has been given the editorship of Conservative Home after its founder, Tim Montgomery moved to.  I think it is significant that Mr Goodman’s career has not been one where it seems that he has ever been a key decision maker and that, I think, is significant in reading his article. 

The article is written as a friend and admirer of David Davis and also someone who thinks that David Davis’ method of making decisions is rational and principled, rather than the approach of someone who doesn’t find it naturally easy to make decisions and is therefore seeking a crutch for his lame decision making process. 

Below is the article.  See what you think.

“Davis resigns. My part in his downfall

It is possible that you are right and I am wrong,” David Davis writes to Theresa May in his resignation letter.  The phrase was in a draft that I saw just over a month ago on the evening of June 6.  Earlier in the day, he had been asked, after delivering a speech at RUSI, whether or not he would resign if the Prime Minister did not offer a date by which, in the event of a Brexit deal, the backstop arrangement over the UK-Ireland border would end.  “That’s a question, I think, for the Prime Minister, to be honest,” he replied.  This was less of an evasion than a confession.  The Brexit Secretary was trying to think through, using the logic tree methods that he loves to deploy, what to do for the best – and what the range of outcomes of a resignation might be.  He hadn’t made up his mind what to do.

The story of how I know so is as follows. The previous day, he had texted me: “are you around tomorrow evening”?  This was unusual.  I am a friend – having voted for him not only in the leadership election of 2005, but in the previous outing of 2001, shortly after being elected as an MP for the first time, and working briefly as his PPS.  But messages of that kind don’t come every day.  “Yes, if wanted,” I replied. “Which I seem to be.”  “Dinner?” came the reply.  “I could use some advice.”  This is not a request I’d ever had from him before by text – or perhaps in any other form – and the terse terms expressed an unusual urgency.  So it was that the next evening we found ourselves chewing his choices over, almost literally, over Albondigas and Pisto Madrileno upstairs at Goya’s in Pimlico.

Three main issues emerged.  The first was the backstop.  It was already known that he hadn’t been happy about its terms at the time when agreed, because he feared that, once the UK was in it, the EU might never let us out – thus trapping us in the Customs Union and Single Market, at least in part, in perpetuity.  His conviction that the Government must find a route map to escape it, and that he might resign if one wasn’t forthcoming, wasn’t exactly a secret that day: his arrival at our small table was preceded by a frenzy of tweets from fellow political journalists speculating on what he had said at RUSI.  He had sent me a text earlier: “Running late. On my way”.  “Don’t resign before you arrrive,” I replied, to which the half-joshing answer came back: “nip and tuck, I reckon”.

The second issue was delay.  Davis feared that if the Commons wasn’t presented with a detailed trade proposal in the autumn, it would vote the deal down, projecting the Government and the country into unknown and unknowable political territory.  Hence the urgent need to get a move on: get a proper customs policy – the stand-off over agreeing one was helping to tick the clock down – get a broader approach agreed and a White Paper published; get back round the negotiating table.  That he had spent only four hours since Christmas negotiating with Michel Barnier had been well reported.  The bleeding obvious had gained less traction: that, until or unless the Government had first closed its divisions, there wasn’t much to talk about.

Which brings us to the third point.  Someone had been regularly back and forth to Brussels on the Governent’s behalf, but it hadn’t been the man who Theresa May appointed to undertake the task: it had been Olly Robbins, her Europe adviser.  Whatever one thinks of this decision, it may well be that, when the history of this Government is written, that the Prime Minister’s reliance on her adviser will be a pivotal part of the tale.  Robbins was May’s Second Permanent Secretary at the Home Office.  He was sent to DexEU as its first Permanent Secretary.  He and Davis didn’t get on.  So he was moved to Downing Street and his present role.  The decision to use a civil servant as an emissary, rather than the politician appointed with an express brief for Brexit, has had consequences.

The long and short of it is that there was a feedback loop, in Davis’ view, between the wrong way of making decisions and what he saw as the consequence – namely, wrong decisions.  He also claimed that the Prime Minister hadn’t been straight with him.  This charge is set out in the resignation letter he sent yesterday evening, which refers to “the progressive dilution of what I thought was a firm Chequers agreement in February on right to diverge…the unnecessary delays of the start of the White Paper…the presentation of a backstop proposal that omitted the strict conditions that I requested and believed that we had agreed”.  The implications of all this for others were infinitely more important than they were for me. But it may be worth mentioning that they pulled in different directions.

As a friend, I wanted Davis to flourish.  As an editor, I wanted a story.  As a Conservative, I wanted the best for the Government.  As a Brexiteer, I wanted the best for Brexit – and, by extension, for my fellow citizens.  Such were the conflicting pushes and tugs.  For what it’s worth, I told him that if he really felt that he had to resign…well, then, he would have to resign.  This doubtless wasn’t the most scintillating advice ever offered a politician, but for better or worse it was the best I could do.  “Reckon it’s 50.50,” I tweeted afterwards.  But I felt that the logic of the position leaned towards him quitting: if you can’t trust your boss, what other option do you have?  At any rate, the decision went the other way.  He had a long meeting with May the next day and, in short, decided to give her a second chance.

On the backstop, I felt he lost – that gaining a date by which the Government wanted a replacement was useless.  More broadly, I thought he won.  In those meetings, the Prime Minister agreed to get a move on with the White Paper and to set a date for a Chequers summit – which sets up an irony: Davis thereby gained the meeting that propelled his resignation.  You will have noticed that he went dark over the weekend, in the aftermath of the Chequers agreement.  I wrote on Saturday that he and four fellow Brexiteers, plus others in Cabinet up to a point, spoke out against what I call the Prime Minister’s new Brexit Minus Minus Minus proposal – which, whatever else may be said for it, isn’t the Canada Plus Plus Plus ideal which enthuses him.

He told me on Saturday that he was off to Silverstone yesterday (nice for some).  He sounded dispirited.  I asked him again if he would resign – it had become a staple opener to our conversation, rather as one might say: “great weather, don’t you think? – but, by now, the boy-who-cried-wolf factor had kicked in, at least for me.  In retrospect, the warning sign was there: elliptical reserve was a better guide to the future than public agonising.  And perhaps I had forgotten that he has a track record of quitting on principle.  He said that he “might be busy” yesterday evening.  “These resignation letters take a long time to write,” I replied – believing, wrongly, that one wouldn’t be forthcoming.  “Well, I already have a work in progress…”, his text shot back.  It was signed off with a smiley sporting a halo.

Saint to some, sinner to others: we will get both takes, and everything in between, today.  Mamma mia!  Here we go again.  I repeat the most objective summary of which I’m capable. “There is no shortage of marmite politicians at Westminster, but Davis makes most of them taste like blancmagne. His friends’ take is that he is principled, brave, strategic, a deadly campaigner, highly intelligent, a lost leader, loyal to a fault…and occasionally exasperating. His enemies’ view is mostly unprintable. What can be written of it once the expletives are removed are such words and phrases as: egotistical, boastful, unreliable, opportunistic, a plotter, not a team player. There are quite a few of those friends and even more of these enemies – a fair number of whom are his fellow Tory MPs.

It may that the waters close over Davis with a quiet plop, that May appoints Michael Gove to replace him and sends Rory Stewart to Defra, and that life carries on much as before.  This is doubtful, to put it mildly.  Davis suggests in that resignation that the Prime Minister has been tricksy with him, and Downing Street will now feel obliged to trash his reputation – and with interest.  As we have seen, it will not be short of an audience.  More to the point, the cry is already up: who’s next?  My successor in Wycombe, Steve Baker, has already gone.  Like Davis, neither Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Penny Mordaunt nor Esther McVey ventured into the studios this weekend to defend the policy that the Foreign Secretary has compared to a dollop of dung.

Will he “do a Heathrow”, as it’s known in the trade, today?  But how can he now cling to office?  And – as Mark Wallace asked last night, as he burnt the midnight candle – “bluntly, will May get the chance to appoint a replacement at all?”  We are in full-parade-40-letters-bells-and-whistles-country.  The 1922 Committee meets to be addressed by the Prime Minister this afternoon.  These occasions usually star loyalists called early to praise the Party leader – after which those present warn of the dangers of a Corbyn Government (quite right too), denounce the media…and leave to brief their favourite journalists.  This evening, it may be different – and not just in the sense that the meeting will be followed, with superlative timing, by the annual ConHome Parliamentary reception.

Like most of the rest of us, Davis likes to believe that his heart follows his head – all those logic trees; all that rational exposition – but sometimes, as for the rest of us too, it’s the other way round.  “I don’t know how but I suddenly lose control /  There’s a fire within my soul,” the song goes on.  I have given the best account of what has happened that I can but, just as it is partial, it is also limited.  There is sometimes a mystery to our decisions – a momentum that may suddenly drive them that we cannot fully explain.  On the one hand, I am with my old friend.  I think he was right to resign, and believe the new policy is a stinker.  On the other, I believe that to hold a leadership contest now, with the Brexit negotiation still in place, would be narcissistic self-indulgence – not to mention an act of electoral self-harm.

It would be the greatest irony of all, would it not, were Davis’s resignation to kick-push a domino of effects which bring about the very opposite of what he wants: the collapse of the Government; the postponement of Article 50; the kicking of Brexit into the long grass – from which, buried deep, it never emerges?  But what I think scarcely matters.  Perhaps all that’s to be done is to follow the trail of what happens next.  On Friday, a Government source warned “narcissistic leadership dominated Cabinet Ministers” to back the Prime Minister or “their spots will be taken by a talented new generation of MPs who will sweep them away”.  We are about to find out whether or not that is true – and who will or won’t be swept away.  One more thing, David: whatever you do, don’t call another bloody by-election.”

(Here is a link to the original >>> https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2018/07/davis-resigns-my-part-in-his-downfall.html )

David Davis is someone who has previously said that he supports an English Parliament and considers himself to be English.  He is therefore potentially supportive of the English Nationalist Cause.  However I do think it is interesting to see that he needed to discuss his decisions with friends and needed a rationalised decision making process. 

Although I do not for a moment suggest that David Davis would ever have been a rapid fire decision maker that history shows Napoleon to have been.  Napoleon’s willingness to make decisions was such that he positively refused to reverse them, even when it would cause unnecessary deaths, as in his famous refusal to countermand an order that he had already given on the battlefield:- “Order plus Counter Order equals Disorder!” 

Instead of such ruthless and incisive decision making what we get any glimpse of in this article is of a somewhat muddled decision making process by David Davis who clearly means well and is nice but probably wouldn’t be, if this article is telling us the whole story, a good choice for supreme command.   

After all what could be worse than being commanded in battle by a General who wants to be NICE to the enemy?

What is Theresa May’s real Brexit battle plan?

What is Theresa May’s real Brexit battle plan?

In a middle of a battle it is often impossible for any onlookers or most participants to understand the plans of the commanders on each side.  That is even more the case in a political battle where all sides puff out stories like chaff out of a Second World War Lancaster Bomber to confuse the political radar of opponents and often also of supporters!

In the case of Brexit, this is a complete reversal of the British Establishment’s foreign policy in the last 40 years. This means that it is the most significant reversal of British foreign policy in almost the entire careers of all the parliamentary participants - so the chaff deluge is huge!  

Brexit is also a direct challenge by the voting public to the British Political Establishment.  Which is part of the reason why the Remain elite have got themselves into such a state of hysterical denial over the situation. 

At the centre of the conundrum as to what is happening is of course Theresa May.  All those who have met her and know her, whom I have met, have assured me that she is not especially intelligent and certainly not any sort of an intellectual.  She is however apparently very devious and controlling.  I cannot do anything better than quote the article that I quoted in our Spring Conference on the 17^th September 2016 when Theresa May had become the new Prime Minister and new Leader of the Conservative Party.

Here is what I said at conference about this:-

“Let’s turn now to the Conservative and Unionist Party.

They have emerged from the EU Referendum on the surface undented but let’s just look beneath the surface. 

The Conservatives have pretended for all my adult life (and I know that I am getting on!) to be a mainly Eurosceptic led Party.  That was exposed in the referendum, by most of their Ministers and MPs, as a downright lie!

In contrast apparently about 60% of their ordinary members and supporters voted to “Leave”.  Also the Conservative Party’s elite Establishment shenanigans have now given their Party a replacement Remainer Leader and the UK a Remainist Prime Minister. 

Theresa May, according to Jonathan Foreman, is apparently a vengeful and obsessive micro manager. 

Jonathan Foreman is an editor and writer based in London.  He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute for the Study of Civil Society and a frequent contributor to the Sunday Times and Saturday Telegraph. 

In his article “Theresa May is a failed Home Secretary and a bad choice for PM (http://reaction.life/theresa-may-failed-home-secretary-bad-choice-pm/) published in “Reaction” on the 2^nd July he wrote and I quote:-

“In the run-up to the 2015 election one of the handicaps David Cameron had to finesse was the fact that net migration to the UK was three times as high as he had promised it would be. Remarkably, none of the opprobrium this failure provoked brought forth the name of Theresa May, the cabinet minister actually entrusted with bringing migration down. Then, as now, it was as if the icy Home Secretary had a dark magic that warded off all critical scrutiny.

The fact that her lead role in this fiasco went unmentioned reflects Mrs May’s clever, all-consuming efforts to burnish her image with a view to become prime minister. After all, Mrs May’s tenure as Home Secretary has been notably unsuccessful. Its abundant failures include a succession of derelictions that have left Britain’s borders and coastline at least as insecure as they were in 2010, and which means that British governments still rely on guesswork to estimate how many people enter and leave the country.

People find this hard to credit because she exudes determination. Compared to many of her cabinet colleagues she has real gravitas. And few who follow British politics would deny that she is a deadly political infighter. Indeed Theresa May is to Westminster what Cersei Lannister is to Westeros in “Game of Thrones”: no one who challenges her survives unscarred; the welfare of her realm is a much lower priority than her craving for power.”

Foreman also wrote that:- 

“The reputation for effectiveness that Mrs May enjoys mostly derives from a single, endlessly cited event: the occasion in 2014 when she delivered some harsh truths to a conference of the Police Federation. Unfortunately this was an isolated incident that, given the lack of any subsequent (or previous) effort at police reform, seems to have been intended mainly for public consumption.

In general Mrs May has avoided taking on the most serious institutional problems that afflict British policing. These include, among other things, a disturbing willingness by some forces to let public relations concerns determine their policing priorities, widespread overreliance on CCTV, a common propensity to massage crime numbers, the extreme risk aversion manifested during the London riots, and the preference for diverting police resources to patrol social media rather than the country’s streets.

There is also little evidence that Mrs May has paid much attention to the failure of several forces to protect vulnerable girls from the ethnically-motivated sexual predation seen in Rotherham and elsewhere. Nor, despite her proclaimed feminism, has Mrs May done much to ensure that the authorities protect girls from certain ethnic groups from forced marriage and genital mutilation. But again, Mrs May has managed to evade criticism for this.”

Foreman continues:-

“When considering her suitability for party leadership, it’s also worth remembering Mrs May’s notorious “lack of collegiality”. David Laws’ memoirs paint a vivid picture of a secretive, rigid, controlling, even vengeful minister, so unpleasant to colleagues that a dread of meetings with her was something that cabinet members from both parties could bond over.

Unsurprisingly, Mrs May’s overwhelming concern with taking credit and deflecting blame made for a difficult working relationship with her department, just as her propensity for briefing the press against cabinet colleagues made her its most disliked member in two successive governments.

It is possible (Foreman says), that Mrs May’s intimidating ruthlessness could make her the right person to negotiate with EU leaders. However, there’s little in her record to suggest she possesses either strong negotiation skills or the ability to win allies among other leaders.”

So if that article is right, Ladies and Gentlemen, Theresa May may well be the Conservative’s version of Gordon Brown. 

In any case she and the Conservatives also are locked in, by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, into having the next election in May 2020 by which time both they and she may be hugely unpopular!  This will be especially true if she doesn’t fully implement Brexit. 

This is also a risk for us all because she is a classic backroom EU operator.  It was Theresa May after all who was the main driver behind the gay marriage campaign and she used the EU’s systems to force this through not only here but also in other countries too.

It does appear however that Theresa May may have more of a sense of humour than the seemingly totally humourless Gordon. 

After all she and her team had made her leadership rival, Andrea Ledsom, turn on the waterworks and surrender her leadership challenge in tears and blubbing, having usefully knocked every other Leaver out of the running. 

Ladies and Gentlemen Theresa May has appointed Andrea Ledsom as the Minister in charge of waterworks and floods at DEFRA! 

I ask you has Mrs May got a sense of humour or what?

There is also the fact that the EU referendum showed that there are basically two main types of people who are Conservative MPs (except for a small and usually totally uninfluential number of mavericks).

These two types are either Liberal Globalists or Liberal Europhiles.  Neither of these two types care a hoot for England!  Both of them also actively hate the very idea of English nationalism.  This means that the Conservatives too have ruled themselves out of being the party for England.”

So it was to me rather doubtful that when Theresa May said in part of her tedious mantra that “Brexit means Brexit” that she necessarily meant us to understand what she was thinking.  I wondered whether that was simply a smokescreen to deflect criticism or analysis of her position.  

Given that she had a parliamentary majority before she called her unwise General Election it seemed to me likely that in doing she wanted to reduce the influence of Brexiteers so that she could do whatever she wanted to do with Brexit, which I felt was very likely not to be what anybody who really supported Brexit would want. 

I thought some corroboration to this suspicion was given by Jeremy Hosking as reported in this article in which he said that he thinks she is deliberately trying to sabotage Brexit. Such an approach certainly seems to be consistent to what we know of her character. 

“Tory donor: Brexit ‘incompetence’ is a ploy

No 10’s rejection of funds for Eurosceptic candidates shows it wants to keep EU ties, claims financier

• The Sunday Telegraph
• 20 May 2018
• By Christopher Hope CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

GOVERNMENT “incompetence” over the Brexit talks is part of Theresa May’s strategy to keep Britain tied to the European Union, a top Conservative donor claims today.

Jeremy Hosking, a City financier, alleges that one of Mrs May’s aides frustrated his attempt at last year’s general election to donate hundreds of thousands of pounds to Tory candidates under a “Brexit Express” campaign. In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Hosking said: “Those who think the Government is vacillating or making a mess of Brexit due to incompetence are wrong.

“It is part of a strategy. It’s going to plan and the inference from the experience of Brexit Express is that the Prime Minister herself is probably implicated.”

His accusation comes a year after Mrs May’s disastrous election manifesto launch, which commentators said contributed to the Conservatives’ failure to win the election outright.

Mr Hosking has donated £375,000 to the party over the past three years and he offered to give £5,000 to 140 Brexit-backing Tory candidates to fight pro-Remain candidates at the last election through “Brexit Express”.

However, he claims some of the donations were blocked by Fiona Hill, who at the time was chief of staff to Mrs May. Eventually Mr Hosking was able to donate just £376,000 of the planned £700,000 to the candidates.

He said: “Brexit Express’s offer was spurned by the Conservatives.

“It was made as difficult as possible to contact the constituencies that had been (easily) identified, let alone give Tory candidates the money. It was indicated to us by high-ranking party officials that the roadblock to our £700,000 Conservative Party donation lay within No 10 itself.

“We were allowed to assume the blocker was Fiona Hill, Theresa May’s chief of staff [who has now departed]. The layman’s presumption that the purpose of the last election was to strengthen the position of the Government externally in the exit negotiations is therefore false. The real purpose was for the Government to face down its core of Brexiteer MPs internally.”

A Conservative Party source could not comment on the detail of the claims. However, they pointed out that a “large amount” of the donations was handed over. The source added: “He [Mr Hosking] has been a good and very generous donor to the party and there were issues from our side. Everyone who wants to donate to the Conservatives is very welcome to.”

A spokesman for 10 Downing Street declined to comment. Ms Hill was sent details of the claims by The Sunday Telegraph but did not comment.

Unfortunately there is very little that any of us, who are not within the inner circle of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, can realistically do about this situation It may therefore be worth considering what her position will be if Brexit is actually betrayed as suspected.  In this respect I cannot do better than quote the opinion of one of the key architects of the Brexit vote, Dominic Cummings:-

“On the referendum #25: a letter to Tory MPs & donors on the Brexit shambles

Dear Tory MPs and donors

I’ve avoided writing about the substance of Brexit and the negotiations since the anniversary last year but a few of you have been in touch recently asking ‘what do you think?’ so…

Vote Leave said during the referendum that:

1) promising to use the Article 50 process would be stupid and the UK should maintain the possibility of making real preparations to leave while NOT triggering Article 50 and

2) triggering Article 50 quickly without discussions with our EU friends and without a plan ‘would be like putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger’. 

Following this advice would have maintained the number of positive branching histories of the future, including a friendly departure under Article 50.

The Government immediately accepted bogus legal advice and triggered Article 50 quickly without discussions with our EU friends and without a plan. This immediately closed many positive branching histories and created major problems. The joy in Brussels was palpable. Hammond and DD responded to this joy with empty sabre rattling which Brussels is now enjoying shoving down their throats.  

The government’s nominal policy, which it put in its manifesto and has repeated many times, is to leave the Single Market and Customs Union and the jurisdiction of the ECJ.

This requires preparing to be a ‘third country’ for the purposes of  EU law. It requires building all the infrastructure and facilities that are normal around the world to manage trade.

This process should have started BEFORE triggering A50 but the government has irretrievably botched this.

Having botched it, it could have partially recovered its blunder by starting to do it afterwards.

No such action has been taken.

Downing Street, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet have made no such preparations and there is no intention of starting.

The Cabinet has never asked for and never been given a briefing from responsible officials on these preparations. Some of them understand this and are happy (e.g Hammond). Most of them don’t understand this and/or prefer not to think about it. It will be trashed in the history books as the pre-1914 Cabinet has been for its failure to discuss what its military alliance with France actually meant until after it was too late.

The few ministers who try to make preparations are often told ‘it’s illegal’ and are blocked by their own Departments, the Cabinet Office and Treasury. The standard officials device of ‘legal advice’ is routinely deployed to whip cowed ministers and spads into line. But given officials now know the May/Hammond plan is surrender, it’s hardly surprising they are not preparing for a Potemkin policy. 

The Treasury argues, with a logic that is both contemptible and reasonable in the comical circumstances, that given the actual outcome of the negotiations will be abject surrender, it is pointless wasting more money to prepare for a policy that has no future and therefore even the Potemkin preparations now underway should be abandoned (NB. the Chancellor has earmarked half of the money for a ‘no deal’ for the fiscal year after we leave the EU).

Instead, Whitehall’s real preparations are for the continuation of EU law and the jurisdiction of the ECJ. The expectation is that MPs will end up accepting the terrible agreement as voting it down would be to invite chaos.

In short, the state has made no preparations to leave and plans to make no preparations to leave even after leaving.

Further, the Government promised in the December agreement to do a number of things that are logically, legally and practically incompatible including leaving the Single Market and Customs Union, avoiding ‘friction’ and changing nothing around the Irish border (as defined by the EU), and having no border in the Irish Sea.

The Government has also aided and abetted bullshit invented by Irish nationalists and Remain campaigners that the Belfast Agreement prevents reasonable customs checks on trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Read the agreement. It does no such thing. This has fatally undermined the UK’s negotiating position and has led to the false choice of not really leaving the EU (‘the Government’s backstop’) or undermining the UK’s constitutional integrity (‘the EU’s backstop’). Barwell promised ministers in December that the text did not mean what it plainly did mean. Now he argues ‘you agreed all this in December’. Whenever you think ‘it can’t be this bad’, the internal processes are always much worse than you think.

Parliament and its Select Committees have contributed to delusions. They have made almost no serious investigation of what preparations to be a third country under EU law should be and what steps are being taken to achieve it.

A small faction of pro-Brexit MPs (which also nearly destroyed Vote Leave so they could babble about ‘Global Britain’ in TV debates) could have done one useful thing — forced the government to prepare for their official policy. Instead this faction has instead spent its time trying to persuade people that all talk of ‘preparations’ is a conspiracy of Brussels and Heywood. They were an asset to Remain in the referendum and they’ve helped sink a viable policy since. A party that treats this faction (or Dominic Grieve) as a serious authority on the law deserves everything it gets. (I don’t mean ‘the ERG’ — I mean a subset of the ERG.)

All this contributes to current delusional arguments over supposed ‘models’ (hybrid/max fac etc) that even on their own terms cannot solve the problem of multiple incompatible promises. ‘Compromise proposals’ such as that from Boles which assume the existence of ‘third country’ planning are just more delusions. It doesn’t matter which version of delusion your gangs finally agree on if none of them has a basis in reality and so long as May/Hammond continue they will have no basis in reality.

You can dance around the fundamental issues all you want but in the end ‘reality cannot be fooled’.

The Government effectively has no credible policy and the whole world knows it. By not taking the basic steps any sane Government should have taken from 24 June 2016, including providing itself with world class legal advice, it’s ‘strategy’ has imploded. It now thinks its survival requires surrender, it thinks that admitting this risks its survival, it thinks that the MPs can be bullshitted by clever drafting from officials, and that once Leave MPs and donors — you guys — are ordering your champagne in the autumn for your parties on 30 March 2019 you will balk at bringing down the Government when you finally have to face that you’ve been conned. Eurosceptics are full of shit and threats they don’t deliver, they say in No10, and on this at least they have a point.

This set of problems cannot be solved by swapping ‘useless X’ for ‘competent Y’ or ‘better spin’.

This set of problems cannot be solved by listening to charlatans such as the overwhelming majority of economists and ‘trade experts’ who brand themselves pro-Brexit, live in parallel universes, and spin fantasies to you.

This set of problems derives partly from the fact that the wiring of power in Downing Street is systemically dysfunctional and, worse, those with real institutional power (Cabinet Office/HMT officials etc) have as their top priority the maintenance of this broken system and keeping Britain as closely tied to the EU as possible. There is effectively zero prospect of May’s team, totally underwater, solving these problems not least because they cannot see them — indeed, their only strategy is to ‘trust officials to be honest’, which is like trusting Bernie Madoff with your finances. Brexit cannot be done with the traditional Westminster/Whitehall system as Vote Leave  warned repeatedly before 23 June 2016.

Further, lots of what Corbyn says is more popular than what Tory think tanks say and you believe (e.g nationalising the trains and water companies that have been run by corporate looters who Hammond says ‘we must defend’). You are only at 40% in the polls because a set of UKIP voters has decided to back you until they see how Brexit turns out. You only survived the most useless campaign in modern history because Vote Leave killed UKIP. You’re now acting like you want someone to create a serious version of it.

Ask yourselves: what happens when the country sees you’ve simultaneously a) ‘handed over tens of billions for fuck all’ as they’ll say in focus groups (which the UK had no liability to pay), b) failed to do anything about unskilled immigration, c) persecuted the high skilled immigrants, such as scientists, who the public wants you to be MORE welcoming to, and d) failed to deliver on the nation’s Number One priority — funding for the NHS which is about to have a very high profile anniversary? And what happens if May staggers to 30 March 2019 and, as Barwell is floating with some of you, they then dig in to fight the 2022 campaign?

If you think that babble about ‘the complexity of the Irish border / the Union / peace’ will get you all off the hook, you must be listening to the same people who ran the 2017 campaign. It won’t. The public, when they tune back in at some point, will consider any argument based on Ireland as such obvious bullshit you must be lying. Given they already think you lie about everything, it won’t be a stretch.

Yes there are things you can do to mitigate the train wreck. For example, it requires using the period summer 2019 to autumn 2021 to change the political landscape, which is incompatible with the continuation of the May/Hammond brand of stagnation punctuated by rubbish crisis management. If you go into the 2022 campaign after five years of this and the contest is Tory promises versus Corbyn promises, you will be maximising the odds of Corbyn as PM. Since 1945, only once has a party trying to win a third term increased its number of seats. Not Thatcher. Not Blair. 1959 — after swapping Eden for Macmillan and with over ~6% growth the year before the vote. You will be starting without a majority (unlike others fighting for a third term). You won’t have half that growth — you will need something else. Shuffling some people is necessary but extremely far from sufficient. 

Of course it could have worked out differently but that is now an argument over branching histories for the history books. Yes it’s true that May, Hammond, Heywood and Robbins are Remain and have screwed it up but you’re deluded if you think you’ll be able to blame the debacle just on them. Whitehall is better at the blame game than you are, officials are completely dominant in this government, ministers have chosen to put Heywood/Robbins in charge, and YOU will get most of the blame from the public.

The sooner you internalise these facts and face reality, the better for the country and you.

Every day that you refuse to face reality increases the probability not only of a terrible deal but also of Seumas Milne shortly casting his curious and sceptical eyes over your assets and tax affairs.

It also increases the probability that others will conclude your party is incapable of coping with this situation and, unless it changes fast, drastic action will be needed including the creation of new forces to reflect public contempt for both the main parties and desire for a political force that reflects public priorities.

If revolution there is to be, better to undertake it than undergo it…

Best wishes

Dominic Cummings

Former campaign director of Vote Leave"

(Here is a link to the original>>>https://dominiccummings.com/2018/05/23/on-the-referendum-25-a-letter-to-tory-mps-donors-on-the-brexit-shambles/amp/?__twitter_impression=true)

Cummings’ letter is particularly interesting considering that the leading commentator on voting patterns, Professor Sir John Curtice, has recently pointed out that now it is 70% of the Conservative Party’s electoral support that are Leave voters. 

If the Conservative Party betrays the Leave vote they will also reveal, what many patriots have long known, that the Conservative Party is not a genuinely patriotic party. 

The Conservative Party elite is part of the globalist establishment and thus fundamentally hostile to nationalism or patriotism.  It will therefore be good for the political prospects of genuine patriots and nationalists if the Conservative Party wrecks itself on Brexit!