How the Lord Mayor of London undermines Liberalism!

 

What the Lord Mayor of London teaches us about Liberal theory! 

OR

How the Lord Mayor of London undermines Liberalism!

Liberal theory, from John Stuart Mill onwards (and especially in the modern era of ‘Neo-Liberalism’) is based upon the idea that all people are fundamentally the same.  In particular, that everyone’s fundamental nature is to maximise their position in the market-place, as economists put it.  This is the theory that human-beings are “rational economic actors” whose only motivation is to improve their personal position in economic terms - like good economic worker ants!  

I believe this theory to be fundamentally wrong and to be a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.  

I also believe that this error is important in explaining many of the problems of our country today because it is an error that permeates the thinking of the elite in our society. That is not only the rich elite, but also the political elite, the media elite and the decision-making elite in universities and in most of the key positions of power and influence in our State and in our country. 

This error has led the key policy decision-makers in our society to disregard and disrespect the natural urges of most of our people. 

I started this with headings relating to the Lord Mayor of London.  Above there is a picture of him in all his refinery!  You might ask what is the link?  I think it is this. The Lord Mayoralty of the City of London is the supreme English example of what rich people will do and how far they will go for Status and for Respect within our traditional communities..

In order to be Lord Mayor you have to give up many hours to unpaid work and activity within the City of London Corporation as an Alderman and as a Sherriff.  There is also a three year stretch, in the run-up to and in the year of being Lord Mayor, in which you have no time for any paid work.  During this time you would have to be fully focussed on your ceremonial roles in the City of London hierarchy.  Also even when in office as Lord Mayor, you will have virtually no real power, nor will any of it will gain you any economic advantage.  Indeed a generally held estimate for the cost of being Lord Mayor is that it costs at least £500,000!

In "Liberal" theory of course all this activity is completely irrational.  In fact, so irrational as to be almost utterly inexplicable.

This of course vividly demonstrates that ‘Liberal’ theory is wildly adrift from the reality of human nature because in fact rich people getting involved in such activities are perfectly rationally focussed on the acquisition of status and respect within our traditional communities.

Across the Nation many other people chose other ways of getting such communal status and respect. For example in most English counties there is an equivalent office of High Sherriff.  Also there is the whole “Honours System” in which many people struggle to get OBEs or Knighthoods, etc. 

The oddity is that rich people do not understand that their own urges for status and respect and community are perfectly normal not only for them, but also for everybody else as well!  

Therefore the same rich people are very often perfectly happy to justify low paid, low status and insecure jobs for “ordinary people” and they try to justify this hypocracy using ‘Liberal’ economic arguments.  Such people really should not be as surprised as they apparently are when most of our people don’t like the outcome! 

We need a new politics with a new economic model which does give proper status and respect to our own people in our own most natural and very traditional community, namely our Nation, I mean those people who do all the “ordinary” jobs which are nevertheless, of course, so very necessary to the proper functioning of our society and to our collective English culture and prosperity.  

My New Year message therefore is that we English Nationalists need to focus more on reforms that give English People a justified pride and self-respect as citizens, and as fellow members of our Nation, as well as a fair reward for fair labour.  Also we should focus on attacking the dogma on “economic efficiency” which currently excessively rewards big business and bankers and ‘Liberal’ British Establishment politicians!

Leading academic analyses why nationalism has a bright future!

Leading academic analyses why nationalism has a bright future!

Professor Matthew Goodwin of Essex University has written frequently on the subject of “Nationalist Populism” as he calls parties that support more direct democratic politics than the tired old elitist so-called “Liberal Democracy”. 

His book is of interest for anyone interested in politics, let alone nationalist politics and, whilst you will not agree with every analytical conclusion that he reaches, nevertheless he makes an interesting and thought-provoking case for his analysis. 

What about this extract?   

“…we have argued that four broad transformations have been key: people’s Distrust of the increasingly elitist nature of liberal democracy, which has fuelled a feeling among many that they no longer have a voice in the conversation, and which is likely to spur their support for a more ‘direct’ model of democracy; ongoing anxieties about the Destruction of the nation that have been sharpened by rapid immigration and a new era of hyper ethnic change, which raise legitimate questions as well as xenophobic fears; strong concerns about relative Deprivation resulting from the shift towards an increasingly unequal economic settlement, which has stoked the correct belief that some groups are being unfairly left behind relative to others, and fears about the future, and the rise of De-alignment from the traditional parties, which has rendered our political systems more volatile and larger numbers of people ‘available’ to listen to new promises, while others have retreated into apathy.

The ‘Four Ds’ have left large numbers of people in the West instinctively receptive to the claims being made by national populism: that politicians do not listen to them, even treat them with contempt, that immigrants and ethnic minorities benefit at the expense of ‘natives’ and that hyper ethnic change and in particular Islam pose a new and major threat to the national group, its culture and way of life.

We have also seen how these are far from fringe concerns.  Sometimes more than half of the populations in the West express views that are broadly in line with national populism.”

The book is somewhat of the nature of “ranging shots” from a First World War dreadnought battleship, since Prof Goodwin is politically an opponent, as he demonstrates in his conclusion. 

However his analysis as an opponent is in many ways as confirming of the shape, dimensions, speed and course as true “ranging shots” should be.

Let’s hope our opponents don’t read his book!

Here is a link to the book>>> https://www.amazon.co.uk/National-Populism-Against-Liberal-Democracy/dp/0241312000/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544018818&sr=1-1&keywords=national+populism+the+revolt+against+liberal+democracy

Brexit has reopened two constitutional conflicts which must be resolved

In the heats of the Brexit battle between the elitist and undemocratic Remainers and the few Brexiteers in Parliament there is an occasional glimpse of the wider constitutional implications.  The article below on the Conservative Home website, which describes itself as “the home of Conservatism”, is such a glimpse and deserves wide circulation. 

 

Those who support what Professor Matthew Goodwin of Kent University is calling “National Populism” will, like me, support unconditionally the idea that our People are the ultimate sovereignty. 

 

Supporters of so-called “liberal democracy” may talk about popular sovereignty, but they want it channelled through systems which prevent the majority of the People’s Will being even expressed, let alone enacted. 

 

A good example of that mind-set is the Right Honorable Ken Clarke MP who regularly says that the EU Referendum was merely an opinion poll, which is only “advisory” for MPs, rather than an expression of popular sovereignty which must be put into effect by the political system to be legitimate.  In short you could say that liberal democracy is in effect an open conspiracy against popular democracy! 

 

Once we are clear about that division we populist democratic nationalists can be more focussed and consistent in our attacks on the short-fallings of the British Political and Media elites in their attempts to shelter behind the ornate structures of British Liberal Democracy. 

 

Below is the article.  What do you think?

 

Jonathan Clark: Brexit has reopened two constitutional conflicts which must be resolved

 

The British have, typically, little interest in constitutional law. Unlike the French, who regularly rewrite their constitution in revolutions or attempts to prevent revolutions, the British tend to assume that little changes and that all is well. Alas, the constitutional problems accumulate nevertheless. Dominic Grieve was right in a recent Commons debate to say that there are areas of the British constitution that need clearer definition. But what exactly are they? Why is the Brexit question so difficult to resolve through the familiar Westminster machinery?

 

The big issues of constitutional conflict are so fraught because they happen in legal grey areas, in which agreement and definition have never emerged. Today there are two such major areas, though many minor ones.

 

The first is the question of sovereignty: where does ultimate authority reside? It is many centuries since any significant number of people claimed that it resided with the person of the monarch alone. But the decline of that image was followed by the growing popularity of another, ‘the Crown in Parliament’, that is, the monarch, the Lords and the Commons acting together. This image never went away, but was upstaged by the doctrine of the lawyer A. V. Dicey (1835-1922) that ‘Parliament’ (meaning, increasingly, the House of Commons) was sovereign. Yet from the Reform Bill of 1832 into the 20th century, successive rounds of franchise extension strengthened another old idea, that the ultimate authority lay with ‘the People’, however defined.

 

From 1973, when the UK joined the EEC, it slowly became evident that the answer was ‘none of the above’: ultimate authority lay with Brussels. Parliament rubber-stamped increasing amounts of secondary legislation from an evolving super-state. In 2019, departure from the EU would remove that layer of command. This prospect inevitably reopens an old debate, which had never really been settled: was Parliament or the People finally supreme? Its re-emergence reminds us that Dicey’s doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was the opinion of one commentator only. That opinion partly corresponded to contemporary practice, partly not.

 

Today, the tide is everywhere running in the opposite direction. Deference and duty daily fade; the key word everywhere is ‘choice’, and this means the choices of the many, not just the few. The transformation of communications places steadily more power in the hands of a steadily more educated, better informed ‘People’. But this trend has been matched by another, seen across the West in recent decades and at all levels: in increasingly complex societies, the executive has everywhere grown more powerful vis-a-vis the legislature. Political scientists have largely ignored this tide, but it has swept forwards nevertheless. It means that two powerful social forces now collide. Across western democracies, ‘ordinary people’ find means of complaining that they are ignored by elites who ‘just don’t get it’; elites decry ‘populism’ and exalt the opinion of ‘experts’, expressed to within one decimal point in forecasts of outcomes 15 years hence.

 

This collision reopens a second, equally old, question. What is a Member of Parliament: a delegate, or a representative? Edmund Burke famously outlined the case for the second: MPs, once elected, represent the nation as a whole; they owe the nation their best judgment; they are in nobody’s pocket. But another idea is just as old, and equally honourable: MPs are sent to Westminster by their electors to redress the electors’ grievances, and are accountable to them. Against Burke, we can set another intellectual, Andrew Marvell, MP for Hull in 1659-78, who was paid by his constituents and regularly reported back to them. Understandably, Burke’s high-sounding doctrine proved the more popular among MPs. But after he framed it, his constituents in Bristol threw him out for favouring Irish commercial interests over theirs, and he represented thereafter only his patron’s pocket borough.

Both ideas in their pure form are unacceptable. But how the balance between the two is to be struck can never be quantified or defined, and a crisis like the present makes the impossibility of a definition clear. ‘The People’ voted by 52 to 48 for Leave, and a larger percentage now says ‘just get on with it’; but about five-sixths of the House of Commons are for Remain.

 

Among Conservative MPs, something under 100 are evidently for Leave; of the other 200 or so, over half are on the Government payroll in one capacity or another, and more would like to be. So profound a dissociation between elite and popular opinion is rare. Worse still, public opinion polls and the growing practice of referenda quantify the problem as never before; the issue is easily expressed in binary terms (Leave or Remain); and the arguments have been fully rehearsed. Other countries show similar problems of relations between the many and the few, but in the UK these are brought to a focus. Since the constitution has failed to resolve them, public debate is full of expressions of elite contempt for the ignorant, prejudiced, xenophobic, racialist populace on the one hand; of popular contempt for the self-serving, condescending, out-of-touch Establishment on the other.

 

Before 1914, Conservative peers making technical points over a budget were manoeuvred by Lloyd George into a constitutional confrontation that could be memorably summed up as ‘Peers versus the People’. In this clash, the peers could only lose. Now, the Remainers have been manoeuvred into a constitutional confrontation that, if it goes much further, will be labelled ‘Parliament versus the People’. In such a conflict it can only be Parliament that will lose. In that event, the damage would be considerable.

 

These great questions of constitutional definition are seldom solved; rather, the issues are defused by building next to them a new practice. The present challenge is to accommodate that new arrival in the political arena, the referendum, and to turn it into a clearly specified, moderate, and constructive institution, as it is in Switzerland. Those concerned about daily policy should think again about a subject, once salient in university History departments but now everywhere disparaged: constitutional history.

>>>https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2018/12/jonathan-clark-brexit-has-reopened-two-constitutional-conflicts-which-must-be-resolved.html