The world's fixated on Trump. But Hillary could drag us ALL into a catastrophic war, writes PETER HITCHENS in America

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Here in my favourite American small town, I detect a strange, ominous feeling of approaching danger. Something has gone wrong with the USA.
I first came to Moscow, Idaho, eight years ago when the great Obama frenzy was at its unhinged peak. This is a divided place, traditional rural conservatives living alongside a Left-wing university campus, but in 2008 they coped with their deep divisions in the usual way.
People disagreed, but they did it politely and openly, and were ready to accept the result even if they did not like it. Almost every front lawn had its partisan placard.
Now politics has gone underground in an almost sinister way. I searched the town’s pleasant suburbs for a Trump or Clinton poster and found none, only a single defiant declaration of support for America’s Jeremy Corbyn, the Left-winger Bernie Sanders, who long ago quit the race.
Republican headquarters in Main Street until recently contained posters supporting lots of the party’s candidates for local office, but none at all for Donald Trump. Last week they finally managed to mention his name, but you have to look carefully for it in their window.
Democrat HQ, almost directly opposite, is nearly as coy about Hillary Clinton.
In private conversations (the only sort where people will say what they really think), you find out what this means. Democrats are holding their noses over Hillary because they despise her and wish she wasn’t their candidate.
But many Republicans are stifling their genuine enthusiasm for Trump, because – in small towns like this – they don’t want to annoy or alienate neighbours who may also be customers, clients, patients or employers.
Of course there are conservatives, usually serious Christians, who loathe and mistrust Donald Trump and see him for what he is – a balloon of noise and bluster which will one day burst in a terrible explosion of disappointment and regret.
But they have been swept aside by the great carnival of resentment and revenge which has carried Trump past all the obstacles and restraints that are supposed to prevent such people getting near real power. For Trump is the anti-Obama – emotional, irrational, a spasm.
Those who had to sit, grinding their teeth, through all the long-years of Obama-worship, now hope for their own matching hour of gloating.
And we really ought to recognise that rejoicing over the woes of your enemies is one of the greatest sinful pleasures in life. Few will turn down the chance.
I can see no good outcome of this. Adversarial politics are a good thing, but only if both sides are ultimately willing to concede that their rivals are entitled to win from time to time. But that attitude seems to have gone. Now the rule is that the winner takes all, and hopes to keep it if he (or she) can.
A narrow defeat for Trump will poison the republic. Millions of his supporters will immediately claim fraud at the polls, and nothing will convince them otherwise. The bitterness of the Florida ‘hanging chad’ episode of 2000 will seem like brotherly love compared with that fury.
A victory for Trump – decisive or narrow – will give astonishing powers to a lonely, inexperienced, ill-educated old man who (I suspect) is increasingly terrified of winning a prize he never really intended or expected to obtain.
A clear victory for Hillary Clinton would create even greater problems. Educated, informed people here believe that there are serious doubts about her health. Even if they are wrong, her militant interventionist foreign policies are terrifying.
I lived through the Cold War and never believed we were in real danger. But I genuinely tremble at the thought of Mrs Clinton in the White House. She appears to have learned nothing from the failed interventions of the past 30 years, and scorns Barack Obama’s praiseworthy motto: ‘Don’t do stupid stuff.’
She will do stupid stuff, and drag us into it, you may rely upon it.
How odd it is, to hear on the air the faint but insistent sound of coming war, here in this place of sweet, small hills, rich soil and wistful, mountainous horizons.
Men came here in search of what we all really desire, to be left alone to get on with the really important aims of life, to build a home and raise a family, to see the fruits of their labour, to believe what they wish to believe.
I cannot quite work out how the good, sane impulse that gave birth to the USA could possibly have led us to this nightmare choice between two equally horrible outcomes.
I shall just have to carry on hoping that I am wrong.

Syria's 'WMD moment': Don't be duped again

Almost everyone (barring a tiny knot of deluded losers) knows that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. Most people now grasp that Colonel Gaddafi wasn’t planning a massacre in Benghazi or ordering his troops to engage in mass rapes.

How long will it be before we also grasp that neither Russia nor Syria bombed a UN aid convoy in Aleppo?

This incident, about which almost no independently testable, checkable facts have yet been produced, is the WMD of Syria. If we all fall for it, then we shall very soon find ourselves embroiled in the most dangerous international confrontation since the Cuban missile crisis.

Under immense pressure from the despots of Saudi Arabia, the USA will not give up its efforts to overthrow the Syrian government. It is clear that it is now prepared to risk an open confrontation with Moscow to achieve this. Why? Who do they think they are, and how can their cause be so good that they take such risks?

The deliberate sabotage of a workable peace deal in Syria (opposed from the start by the Pentagon) is one of the scandals of our age. There was a chance we might end the misery of millions, and it was thrown away.

We in Britain must resist being dragged into a Syrian war, not least because, if we are, it will not be long before any troops we send there are being hounded in their own country for alleged war crimes. We’ve been fooled enough by this propaganda. Don’t be bamboozled again.

We'll beat Corbyn with reason - not abuse 

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it, including Corbyn.

Look, there are plenty of good arguments against Jeremy Corbyn, the best one being his absurd thought-free loathing for grammar schools. Some of the greatest socialists in this country, notably the 1930s Jarrow MP Ellen Wilkinson, and that fine teacher and socialist Eric James, realised that such schools helped the poor.

But please can people stop proclaiming that Labour cannot win an Election with Mr Corbyn at its head? It is such a stupid thing to say, that every time I hear it I want to beat my head against the nearest wall.

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it. It is dead in Scotland and the South of England. And why on earth, after the 13-year catastrophe of the Blair government, do so many people seem so anxious to back the ghastly, dishonest Blairites against Mr Corbyn, who is at least open and honest about what he intends?

I personally prefer that to the conscious fraud practised by the Blairites and their Tory equivalents, the Cameroons, who pretended to be patriots and friends of the family, and turned out to be neither.

Mr Corbyn, as well as being generally right about foreign policy, actually confronts the issues that worry many people. His answers may be wrong, but if we listened to him and debated with him, instead of abusing him, this country and its people would benefit.

Freedom is all about being forced to listen to people we disagree with, and to defeat them (if we can) with facts and logic. The Corbyn abusers should try it.

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*******

When will we learn that making new laws is useless unless we enforce them? It is no good having ‘tough’ laws against texting while driving unless lots of people are caught, prosecuted and punished for this.

Now car manufacturers, with breathtaking cynicism, are marketing new models with dashboard internet screens. This will undoubtedly mean more pointless deaths. My suggestion is that such cars should only be sold if the driver’s seatbelt and airbag are removed first, and that they should not be permitted to have any insurance apart from third party cover. Too many drivers think they are invulnerable. That is why they kill.

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PETER HITCHENS: Grammar wreckers KNEW they would make our schools worse

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Here's why the quarrel about grammar schools never ends: it is not really about schools, but about what sort of country this should be.
Grammar schools stood for adult authority, for discipline, for tradition, for hard work first and reward afterwards, and for self-improvement. They also tended to assume that boys and girls were different, and so educated them apart from each other. I like these things, but many don’t.

Old-fashioned Labour saw the point of this. They realised that it helped the poor become better-off and to have better lives and more power. They created a peaceful revolution that changed Britain for the better. Labour councils used to build new grammar schools and be proud of them.

But the modern liberal Left don’t like any of these ideas. They would rather teach children how to have sex than teach them to believe in God. Especially they don’t think parents or teachers should have any authority over the young. The State should be trusted to tell them what to think. They should look to the State for any improvement in their lives.

They don’t like the idea that there are fixed things that you just have to learn – which is why the teaching of languages and sciences is shrivelling in our schools. The people who smashed up more than a thousand of the best state secondary schools in the world didn’t do it to make education better. They knew it would make it worse for bright children.

In one case, that of Sir Graham Savage, they openly admitted this. They did it to make the country more ‘democratic’, more like the USA. They have made it like the worst bits, but very unlike the best bits.

How odd it is to recall that in my childhood there was a thing called the ‘brain drain’, which meant British scientists being lured away to the USA because they weren’t educating enough of them. And in those days a set of English A-levels was said to be equal to an American university degree. It isn’t so now. The enemies of grammars really should stop lying about the subject to get their way.

They moan about those who don’t get into grammars. But what about the huge numbers who can’t get into good comprehensives, and are dumped in vast bog-standard comps which are, in reality, worse than the old secondary moderns.

Of course selection for any school has losers as well as winners. But we have selection in our supposedly comprehensive schools. It is mainly done through the secret privileges (fake religious belief, close knowledge of feeder schools etc) exercised by sharp-elbowed, well-off parents. How is this better than selection by ability?
A 2010 survey by the Sutton Trust found that comprehensive schools in England are highly socially segregated. In fact, the country’s leading comprehensives are more socially exclusive than the remaining grammar schools.

Both the 164 (then remaining) grammars and the 164 most socially selective comprehensives drew pupils from areas where about 20 per cent of children were from poor homes. But the supposed comprehensives were more socially selective, taking only 9.2 per cent of their pupils from poor homes, while the grammars took 13.5 per cent. Who’s democratic now?

In fact, most of the remaining grammars are so besieged by middle-class commuters hiring tutors that their entry figures are utterly distorted. If we still had a national grammar system they would be far fairer than the top comprehensives are.

I wish I thought Theresa May really wanted to restore grammars. This has been successfully done in the former East Germany. But I fear that this is just a token move to try to hold on the support of the many voters who want to see this change. Even so, it is a good deal better than nothing, and a sign that this dreadful national error may one day be reversed.

A modest victory for decency

Islam’s real challenge to Western society is not terrorism. With a bit of resolve and common sense we can always defeat this filthy thing, and most Muslims would (in my view) be as happy as us if we did.

No, the challenge comes from Islam’s near-total monopoly on things we used to value quite a bit and then totally gave up – female modesty being one of them. And yes, I know that plenty of other things, much more controversial, come with the package.

Pictures of Egypt’s veiled and covered Doaa Elghobashy, right, competing against bikini-clad Western opponents in the Olympic beach volleyball, are very thought-provoking.

You don’t have to go more than 100 years back to find Western women who would have had much more in common – in attitudes and dress – with Ms Elghobashy than they did with her near-naked rivals.

I often wonder if our society will sicken and tire of its seemingly endless relaxation of rules. Such things have happened before. If it does, the Muslim religion may be very well-positioned to lead the counter-revolution. I don’t want this to happen. I just think it might.

*****

Shouldn’t we have a formal ceremony, with parchment documents, trumpets and heralds, to declare that the ‘war on drugs’ is over? Then at least Sir Richard Branson would stop claiming tediously and inaccurately that we groan under a cruel regime of prohibition.

If the Government still seriously disapproves of illegal drugs, explain this: EU enthusiast and hereditary Labour politician Will Straw (son of Jack) has been awarded a CBE, a heavyweight mid-ranking honour one down from a knighthood, aged 36, despite being caught (aged 17) trying to sell cannabis to a newspaper reporter. Indeed, for many people this event is the most memorable thing about him.

He went on to boast that he had carried on smoking the drug for the next nine years.
There was a bit of a fuss about the award – but it wasn’t about the illegal drugs.
Stop pretending we are actually trying to do anything about this.

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Of course judges should not swear in court, especially at defendants. Justice is not emotional revenge, but a cold, rational process where we all try to keep our feelings out of it.

Judges hold the keys to the prisons. They can change a convicted person’s life utterly. To wield such power, they have to be cool and self-controlled.
In fact the person Judge Patricia Lynch swore at is pathetic, fat and lonely – a dismal life probably made worse by taking State-approved ‘antidepressant’ drugs, the failed panacea of our age. Stupid four-letter words are all that is left to such people.

Her Majesty’s judges shouldn’t stoop to such sad things. Only two kinds of people use this language in public. The powerful, who employ it to bully, and the inadequate, who have no other way of expressing themselves.

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PETER HITCHENS: Sorry, but I won't be saluting the dimmest Cabinet in our history

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why is it supposed to be a good thing that the new Cabinet are worse-educated than the old one? Half the media trumpeted on Friday that Theresa May’s new Government was full of state-educated Ministers, as if this were a cause for rejoicing.

But why should it be? It is a regrettable fact that this country’s private schools are vastly, incomparably better than all but a very few of its state schools. All figures and results confirm this. All employers know it.

And almost all the good state schools are academically selective grammar schools, a tiny, hugely oversubscribed remnant of survivors, utterly untypical of the state sector. And they must remain a pitiful few dozen, besieged by desperate parents – because it is against the law to open any new ones.

Most of the other good state schools select just as ruthlessly, judging pupils by their parents’ ability to afford expensive houses, or to fake religious belief, or both at once.

So what is there to celebrate about all these new Ministers? Either they have taken advantage of a rare privilege just as unfair as that used by fee-paying parents, and more secret. Or they have been poorly educated and are not going to be very good at their jobs as a result.

This very odd cult of state education among politicians used to be confined to the Labour Party, where the worse the school was, the more virtue points you scored. Private education was a matter of shame. A grammar school education was often concealed. 

I once caught a Labour MP pretending to have gone to a comprehensive when he hadn’t – because none had existed in his home city at the time. Then, the Tory Party turned into the Labour Party.

The transformation is now complete, which is why the Labour Party is biting its own tail trying to work out what on earth it is for.

And Tory politicians started bragging about sending their children to state schools, as well as looking embarrassed about having been privately educated themselves.

Mrs May seldom mentions her time at a private convent school, and tried for years to keep quiet about her grammar school days, though she now seems to have decided to trade on it as it suits her new image as the woman from Middle England.

But none of this changes the fact that in the 50 years since most grammar schools were abolished, state education in this country has been in decline – and that the continuing existence of private schools has shown it up again and again.

So let’s have no boasting about having the worst-educated Cabinet in modern history.

Instead let’s restore the lost grammar and direct grant schools that were taking on and beating the private schools at their own game, until politicians destroyed them.

Roll up for Theresa's street theatre! 

There is lots of talk about a supposedly ‘brutal’ reshuffle. But actually the fall of David Cameron is much more like an old-fashioned General Election than a reshuffle.

My generation were quite used to the rather satisfying sight of Alec Douglas-Home’s sofa, or Harold Wilson’s desk, or Ted Heath’s piano being carted out of Downing Street by whistling removal men. They lost. They went. Government really changed, in character and policy.

It was our great triumph that we had peaceful revolutions in which the beaten party were actually turned out, and accepted it. It was good and healthy and I miss it. 

But in recent years the true changes are all inner-party putsches – Lady Thatcher stabbed in the back by her own Cabinet in 1990, the long march of the Blairites in the Labour Party, the ejection of Iain Duncan Smith.

Despite all the flag-waving fuss in 1997, when Labour Party employees were bussed into Downing Street and told to pretend to be a crowd, we’ve had more or less the same government since 1990 – pro-EU, high-spending, politically correct and broadly approved of by Michael Heseltine.

If the millions who voted to leave the EU had had a party, it would have been the opposite of all that, and we’d have had a huge political change.

As it is we have to make do with Mrs May, who personally opposes her government’s main aim of leaving the EU.

And, knowing she is unlikely to deliver what the Leave majority wanted, she has cunningly provided some satisfying street theatre – plenty of heads rolling, some new faces, a furniture van in Downing Street and poor old David Davis, who she no doubt hopes will fail to get us out of the EU, so that she can sack him and do a deal with Brussels that keeps us in, in all but name.

A solution to 'terror' that no one cares about

Thought is the first casualty of terror. Nobody ever actually applies reason to the subject. And so we flounder on, uselessly doing the wrong thing.

In general, we end up doing whatever the most powerful lobby, or the Government, wanted to do anyway. Those who are not thinking ‘This is a good day to bury bad news’ are saying: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’

In the US, mass murder is blamed on relaxed gun laws, though other countries with strong gun laws have mass murders. And mass murders are new, as is the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, while America’s gun laws are very old.

Over here, mass murder is blamed on Islamic radicalisation – though the killers are almost invariably drugged-up low-lifes with criminal records for violence and theft. I can already be sure that this is what the Nice murderer will turn out to be, once all the facts are in. By definition, devout Muslims wouldn’t live such lives.

And in all cases, politicians reach for blunt instruments, such as France’s state of emergency – which has just been proved useless by the events in Nice, or more surveillance (likewise it failed to find the culprit of this outrage), or stupid travel restrictions, which treat us all like criminal suspects.

And they make pious speeches in which they growl and thunder against terrorists in general. Is this because they feel guilty about the fact that they have negotiated with terrorists in the past, or that they will certainly do so in the future, or how is Martin McGuinness getting to meet the Queen and how is Algeria independent? Either way, I find it unconvincing. So should you.

The best solution, if there is one, lies elsewhere. But there is no lobby for it, so it is never considered. Can you work out what it might be from the words above?

No one ever trusts a Robocop

If you ever wondered whether the growing transformation of police forces into heavily armoured riot squads was a good idea, this picture of protester Ieshia Evans confronting a phalanx of Louisiana cops will confirm your doubts.

The whole point of police in free countries is to be on the side of the people against crime and disorder. 

Once they climb into armour, and rely on menace, they are bound to lose a great deal of our friendliness and trust.And that will mean more armour, more clubs and more guns.

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Why Blairites would rather be led by Theresa May than by Jeremy Corbyn

I urge anyone genuinely interested in British politics to set aside the time and quiet needed to read this truly gripping and original article by Rafael Behr from Tuesday’s Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/how-remain-failed-inside-story-doomed-campaign

leave aside its tiresome assumption that all those reading it will sympathise with the pro-EU case. Its portrayal of the deep and committed collaboration between the Tory Party and the organised Blairite Left is superbly telling.

I have long maintained that there is no profound political division between New Labour and the Tories, and that the two are in effect one party. Here are factual details to demonstrate that this is truly so.  

This passage

‘With non-partisan zeal that impressed their colleagues, the Tories on the team agreed to a script aimed at core Labour voters, which included the threat that Brexit would “turn industrial heartlands into wastelands” and “finish the job that Thatcher started”.

'Old party rivalries were largely banished from the campaign “war room” at Stronger In’s Cannon Street headquarters. Researchers and press officers who had been savaging each other’s work for years now collaborated amicably. Residual tensions stayed below the surface. Former Labour staffers, moderate refugees fleeing the hard-left takeover under Corbyn, sometimes bristled at what they saw as unmerited swagger in the step of the Downing Street contingent, who expected to easily replicate their victory in the previous May’s general election. “They arrived like an occupying force,” recalls one former Labour staffer. “They came in with a sense of, ‘Step aside and we’ll tell you how it’s done.’”

'But over the course of the campaign, the most senior remainers found collegiate sympathy in a shared world view. As one put it: “We were the pluralist, liberal, centrist force in British politics.”’ (my emphasis, PH)

 

Followed by this one

 

‘Pro-Europeanism became a proxy for the fusion of economic and social liberalism that had been a dominant philosophy of the political mainstream for a generation, although its proponents were scattered across partisan boundaries. These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state – call it Remainia – whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer. (My emphasis, PH)

'In the days when the politics of the fringe did not threaten their intellectual security, adherents of New Labour, the Lib Dems and “Cameroon” Conservatives had never seen themselves as a fellowship of moderation. Before Corbynite radicalism seized the left and Ukip’s vinegary nationalism suffused the right, debate was conducted in shades of difference within a broad consensus. But as the referendum approached, Stronger In became the informal party of defensive liberalism – the unpopulists – although that had never been the intention.’ (my emphasis, PH)

And you have the core of it.

In the same issue of the Guardian you can also find this equally fascinating analysis:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/04/post-referendum-politics-eu-vote

by Andrew (Lord) Cooper, a Tory peer and pollster, who advised the ‘Remain’ campaign

which correctly grasps the real divide in British politics. Again, ignore the petty caricaturing of the traditional conservative tendency ‘nationalist’ instead of patriotic, ‘fearful’ of globalisation rather than damaged by it and therefore rationally hostile to it, ‘preoccupied’ by immigration rather than, once again, reasonably concerned by it . The analysis is broadly, even strikingly right. One should also note that the statements with which they are said to be in agreement (“I hardly recognise the country I live in any more” and “If I could wave a magic wand and take the UK back to the 1950s, I would” were devised by liberal elite pollsters, and were not the original words of the people polled, who might well have expressed their sentiments in ways a little less like Polly Toynbee’s idea of what they think. Even so, it is a good analysis of the state opinion in this country,. There’s certainly no ‘silent majority’, but there is a large and vigorous if shrinking, minority, which feels mistreated and left out.

Note first of all Lord Cooper’s point that ‘The research that informs political campaigns is much more sophisticated than published polls. We don’t just want to know who is going to vote one way or the other. We need to understand what perceptions and arguments cause people to come to the voting conclusion that they do. This means looking beyond demographic and regional factors to map the electorate on the basis of attitudes and behaviour. We need to identify our core vote – and our opponent’s – and to define, with as much nuance as possible, the voters who are genuinely in play: what they think and feel about the choice before them and which messages, messengers and modes are the most effective in persuading them.’

And then : ‘The foundational research showed Britain divided into three almost equal chunks. The first chunk – 34% of the population – was internationalist in outlook; socially liberal; positive about globalisation, immigration and multiculturalism; and optimistic about the future. For these voters, the economy was by far the most important issue in the referendum. They were overwhelmingly going to vote remain, regardless of the terms of the debate.

'The second chunk – at that stage, 32% of the population – was diametrically opposed: nationalist in outlook; socially conservative; fearful of globalisation; opposed to multiculturalism; preoccupied by immigration; pessimistic about the future; and very hostile to the EU. For these voters, immigration was far and away the most important issue in the referendum; most of them favoured ending free movement, even if this made Britain worse off. The attitude that most characterised them was “I hardly recognise the country I live in any more”. More than half of them agreed with the statement “If I could wave a magic wand and take the UK back to the 1950s, I would”. Their imperative was to shut out the consequences of globalisation and open markets. These voters were overwhelmingly going to vote leave, regardless of the arguments.

‘The third chunk – 34% of the population – was conflicted. These people were the in-play voters: the primary target for both campaigns in the EU referendum. They were very clear that they didn’t like the EU, and why: uncontrolled immigration, the huge direct cost of membership, too much meddling in our laws and lives. They were torn between the appealing idea of insulating the UK from the pressures of an open world, and fear of the idea of a Britain outside the EU, isolated and alone. They were defined by the attitude that “my heart wants to leave the EU, but my head says it may be too risky”.’

Amidst all this, Mrs Theresa May seems to think her main task is to reunite the Tory Party,  an impossible alliance of people with wholly incompatible beliefs, and a major obstacle to intelligent thought or useful action.  Surely that’s the last thing Britain actually needs? Many of her party (perhaps Mrs May herself)  would surely be happier in New Labour, or merging with it, if unity is what they want. What's quite certain is that New Labour would be happier with Mrs May as their leader than with Jeremy Corbyn, which I for one find quite funny. 

 

Then the rest of us would realise we need to start a party of our own, if we're to have any friends at Westminster.

 

 

I Told You So

Yes, I told you so.

First of all, we seem to have the constitutional crisis I predicted here :

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-leave-campaign-may-well-be-winning-.html

and here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-british-people-have-risen-at-last-and-were-about-to-unleash-chaos.html

and , as it began to unfold, here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-british-people-have-risen-at-last-and-were-about-to-unleash-chaos.html

I was confident of this because the referendum had always seemed to me to be a violation of the supremacy of Parliament. How can you have two rival democratic mandates competing for supremacy over an issue of vital national importance? Who will decide which one is in charge? The political bog into which we are now squelching is a result. The pro-EU faction are determined, with the support of the BBC and many others, to de-legitimise the anti-EU majority. Supposedly, we didn’t mean to do it, we were misled, and we didn’t really vote for what we thought we were voting for etc. I said things of this kind would happen,as they did when the people of Ireland voted against the EU constitution - and they have, and they will.

The initiative launched this week by Mishcon de Reya http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-law-idUKKCN0ZK0HZ is just part of this effort, combined with squeaky Europhile demonstrations (where do they find them, people actually enthusiastic for this lumpish, disastrous thing?) mutterings from MPs, leftover former ministers, and other grisly creatures released for the moment from the Cupboard of the Yesterdays saying that Parliament must have its say, especially if that say means the decision is overturned. Meanwhile EU supporters seek to regain full control of both corpse parties, so that the struggle is properly one-sided and there is no danger of the corpses being declared dead and buried (there is some interesting speculation to be had, in future, about what might happen if the establishment fails to regain control over Labour in the weeks to come. I hope to turn to this soon).

It was disastrous that the ‘Leave’ campaign was not a party, yet (thanks to our traditions) had to conduct itself much as if it was one, more or less issuing a manifesto. And yet there is now no-one responsible for implementing that manifesto, who is in a position to do so.  Those who might be are busy trying to strangle each other. That’s why we needed a new party. That’s why we needed to destroy the Tories in 2010, and all those of you who helped miss that opportunity must now ask yourself whether you did the right thing in ‘Getting Gordon Brown out’ (did you really get him or his ideas, out of anything?) by saving the Tories. I blinking well *told* you so.

The disintegration of the ‘Leave’ campaign high command, shredded like a burst balloon into rags and tatters, may well have something to do with the fact that it was a strange and rather unprincipled coalition, made up in unequal parts of personal ambition, and with no permanent base or organisation. Did all its members really want to win? Just think how different this would be if we had got rid of the Tories when we had the chance, and a new political party determined to leave the EU, and with a clear stated idea of what it would do with our regained freedom, had won a general election. None of this rubbish would now be happening.

Elements inside both the two corpse parties have used the outcome as the pretext for things they had long wanted anyway.  Scores are being settled, and ambitions pursued. I am still puzzling over being asked by a BBC presenter on the day of the result about something she seemed to think was a ‘collapse’ of the Labour vote. The word itself derailed my thoughts. Far from collapsing, the Labour vote had poured in multitudes into the ‘Leave’ camp, expressing a sentiment, long known to me,  that metropolitan liberals never understood or acknowledged, and now spitefully and childishly deride.

By the way, as I am in general making the point that I told you so,  I ought to mention here those contributors who have over many years told me that my belief in a majority coalition of voters from both parties united round a socially conservative platform was fanciful. I think we have now established that it is not, though how it will ever be assembled again I am not sure. The party which could have contained, led and consolidated it does not exist and is not likely to do so.

 Others have also made sure that the crisis does not go to waste. I had suspected that a sort of stage-managed crisis would be inflicted on us by the markets, and so it has been. No doubt they have done reasonably well out of it, though most of the falls and rises have no objective cause.

I note that the Chancellor who has now abandoned his ludicrous and impossible commitment to balance the national books, and the currency markets who have seized the chance to achieve at least part of the long-awaited devaluation of sterling, which I have long predicted

Secondly today’s events (the BBC seem to think that the resignation of a TV presenter is more important) have rather underlined the wisdom of my repeated refusal to take UKIP seriously as a political force. The one party which surely does not need to bite its own tail at the moment is UKIP which can claim(I’m not sure if this is true, but they can claim it) to have brought about the referendum.

Hasn’t Nigel Farage  resigned at least twice before ? I think he first quit in September 2009, and then in May 2015. I shall wait and see how long this one lasts.

There has always been something fundamentally unserious about Mr Farage, epitomised for me by his foolish attitude towards the decriminalisation of illegal drugs (see http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/what-did-nigel-farage-say-about-drugs.html ).

And this has very much affected my view of UKIP, its tacky purple-and-yellow pound sign symbol, which always makes me think of a Pound Shop, its unfortunate Thatcherism, which has learned nothing from and forgotten nothing about that questionable and far from conservative era.

My repeated view that UKIP would never get anywhere has met with a lot of hostility here, so I open my barrage of ‘I told you so’  with the latest news from the Blazer-and-Cravat-Belt. It would be hilarious if it were not so sad that, having managed to elect just one Member of Parliament at Westminster, Mr Farage cannot stand that MP, and that MP cannot stand Mr Farage.

But now to the main point, I have been irritating people ( I have even irritated myself) for months by carping about the referendum. For example : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/why-i-wont-be-voting-on-referendum-day.html

And http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/no-we-have-not-escaped-from-the-eu-and-we-may-not-ever-do-so-.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/the-eu-is-our-own-hotel-california-we-can-check-out-but-well-never-leave.html

I thought initially that the ‘Leave’ side were bound to lose, and in that I was wrong.  I explain this in two ways. I never imagined that two politicians of the stature of Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson and Michael Gove would actually side with ‘Leave’. (This (be warned) very profane and mischievous parody suggests that Mr Johnson, at least, never intended actually to win : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a6HNXtdvVQ

Who can say how much truth there is in such speculation? The chaos which followed the ‘Leave’ victory is suggestive.

And I foolishly believed that David Cameron had a coherent plan for the referendum which he himself created. After all, it was his choice, made deliberately some years ago. You would have thought he had some sort of idea a) how to conduct it successfully and b) what to do if he lost.

But when he came back from Brussels with a ‘deal’ so worthless even his own supporters couldn’t think of anything nice to say about it, I knew for sure (having previously suspected it ) he hadn’t ever intended the referendum to happen, but assumed he would be spared it by a second coalition with the Liberal Democrats.  Until that naked failure, I had still been prepared to believe that Mr Cameron had a plan. They only plan he seemed to have was to scupper Labour by changing the electoral registration rules, a plan which backfired quite badly when it led to many younger voters finding they weren’t on the register any more at referendum time. If Mr Cameron had really expected a referendum, would he have pushed this legislation through Parliament in 2013-14?

I can’t begin  to speculate in what will happen next. Much depends on the behaviour of the Tory Party membership, who were massaged (mainly by a sycophantic media chorus) into choosing David Cameron last time.  Will they be as biddable when offered Mrs May? It is at least possible to imagine that they may not be, just as Labour’s members may refuse to be bossed about by the same forces. I am not sure such rebellions will do any good, though I hope they happen anyway.  

You voted for a revolution... you got a Blair robot

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

So 17 million people voted for a revolutionary change in the way we are governed, and the result is going to be Theresa May. These ignored multitudes were not, I think, hoping for yet another Blairite robot, a living symbol of everything that is wrong with our political system. But this is what they are going to get.
I am sure Mrs May is a perfectly nice person and an ideal neighbour. But this is not the point. She is completely unfitted to answer the national demand for change.
She is a conventional Left-wing liberal. She wanted, for heaven’s sake, to stay in the EU, though she lacked the nerve to campaign actively for this. Given the growing campaign to overturn the referendum by guile and fear, can she be trusted not to fudge us back in?
Look at her. Trevor Phillips, when he was boss of the HQ of Political Correctness, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said in 2011 that Mrs May was ‘just as aggressive as Harriet Harman was on women’s equality’.
She is keenly politically correct. She mysteriously converted from opposition to all-women shortlists for parliamentary selections, to support for them. As Home Secretary she has done little to reduce or control the mass immigration which worries so many.
She also prefers not to mention in reference books that she went to a girls’ grammar school, strange behaviour for someone now alleged to support such schools. She is even quieter about having attended a private school.
Her most important political act was her speech in October 2002 in which she described the Tories she now seeks to lead as ‘the nasty party’.
Incidentally, in the same speech, she specifically endorsed Anthony Blair’s Iraq War policy, perhaps the single stupidest act in modern politics. Her only criticism of Mr Blair was about his ability to deliver on policies she supported.
Crucially she demanded that the Tory Party should adapt itself to Blairism. ‘Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive. And twice we got slaughtered. Soldiering on to the next Election without radical, fundamental change is simply not an option.’
The Blairite insider Steve Richards has written about this era, saying that, in the 2001 Election(NB: I originally referred,erroneously, to a non-existent 2002 election. My apologies for the mistake.), the Blair entourage were often in an exasperated fury. ‘You don’t get it,’ they would occasionally scream. ‘The Election is a historic referendum on a Right-wing Conservative Party. If we win a second landslide, we would kill off Right-wing Conservatism for good.’
To do that, a Blairite fifth column was needed inside the Tory Party – ably aided, as Blairites always are, by media allies.
This first ran the putsch against Iain Duncan Smith. Then it arranged the amazingly prolonged leadership election which allowed the unknown Blair clone David Cameron to defeat the far better qualified David Davis.
You know the rest, in all its ghastly detail. Now it’s going to continue. The Tory Party will be shored up once again by billionaire cash and broadcasting rules which give it airtime worth many millions of pounds and deny it to any rival.
Oh, and if you thought Michael Gove was any better, never let it be forgotten that in 2003, under the headline ‘I can’t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony’, this supposedly ‘Right-wing’ great hope garlanded the grinning Blair creature with words such as ‘right and brave’, ‘impressive’ and ‘resolute’.
Having dug our way out of the dungeon, we find we have merely reached another dungeon, just as deep and just as dark.

***

I will not join in the gang attack on the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. I disagree with much of what he says, but any free Englishman ought to defend, fiercely, his liberty to say it.

This is partly because of my pre-revolutionary schooling, in which I was taught to admire lone figures who stood against overwhelming force. We used to recite Macaulay’s wonderful poem about ‘How well Horatius kept the bridge in the brave days of old’ –  one man defying thousands to save Rome. ‘How can man die better’, it asks, ‘than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?’ A good question, I always thought and still do.

But it is partly because of a growing fury against the whimpering, snivelling legions who won’t accept votes and seek to overturn them.

In this case they are the same people, the Blairites. Not only are they seeking to undo the referendum. They are trying to bypass the awkward fact that the Labour Party, according to its own rules, elected Jeremy Corbyn as its leader by a large majority.

In actions plainly co-ordinated with media allies, Mr Corbyn’s enemies have tried to scare their foe into quitting. I very much hope he doesn’t, and that he beats them because this is now a matter of honour.

These people deserve to be in the fix they are in. They clubbed the Tory Party into becoming just like them. Now that it is, they have no purpose left. If the Tories won’t have them, there’s a vacancy for another futile ‘centre’ party, now that the Liberal Democrats are all washed up. They can fill that.

******

Any fool can break a taboo, and it’s gone forever. In the same way, any fool can cut down a tree that has taken three centuries to grow. Later we find out what we have lost.

And I continue to wonder why there’s so little concern about the  breach of the old taboo against public swearing. The singer Adele Adkins swore repeatedly on live TV, as she performed at Glastonbury last week. What effect will this have?

Those of us who have already lived long enough to see the country transformed, and know that nothing which seems permanent will necessarily survive, are perhaps better able to imagine how far things might go.

Those who are relaxed about this might wonder how they will feel when they start hearing teachers using the f-word in class, nurses using four-letter words to patients, see the strongest words used without asterisks in newspaper headlines, or politicians using them in major speeches. This will happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if some future Archbishop didn’t decide to pander to the spirit of the age by swearing from his or her pulpit.

Some may say they wouldn’t care. But that’s half the point. A thick-skinned society is also a callous society.

******

It is now clear the referendum result is being used as a pretext or cover for many things which would have happened anyway.  Sterling was bound to fall - especially after all that ‘quantitative easing’ inflated our economy. George Osborne’s dropping of his 2020 budget surplus target was simply a recognition of his total failure to control spending, concealed for too long by his many media toadies. There’ll be more. Don’t be scared by it.

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'Conservative Woman' interviews PH on the Referendum and its Outcome

Some of you may be interested in this interview with Laura Perrins of the excellent 'Conservative Woman' website.

 

http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-laura-perrins-interview-brexit-is-a-chance-for-a-new-socially-conservative-party-says-hitchens/

 

Why We Need a General Election by mid-September

Out of the froth and fog of the last few days, something is beginning to emerge. I’m not surprised at all by the unlovely shape of it. You may not like the look of it. But first I thought I’d make a brief tour of some of the more interesting (and perhaps unexpected) commentary in this morning’s newspapers.

Let us start with this fascinating and (in my experience) wholly accurate article about the state of modern England – betting shops, payday loans, mobility scooters and all - from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/27/liverpool-london-brexit-leave-eu-referendum, a good piece of left-wing journalism in the tradition of Orwell’s ‘Road to Wigan Pier' and Priestley’s ‘English Journey’. The closeness of this devastation and demoralised despair to London itself will surprise many, who think it is confined to the West Midlands and the North. I fear it will surprise a lot more who have no idea that it exists anywhere. I think the destruction it records can be blamed on many other things as well as the thatcher era. But BBC Remain types need to read this, by one of their own(though perhaps he’s one of Jeremy Corbyn’s, I don’t know) .

They may then begin to grasp what happened last week, and even start to sympathise with it.

Next, from the same paper, is this typically perceptive analysis by Larry Elliott:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/26/brexit-is-the-rejection-of-globalisation

He correctly notes that Britain’s self-image as an economic success story is batty self-delusion, saying:’ To be sure, not all Britain’s problems are the result of its EU membership. It is not the European commission’s fault that productivity is so weak or that the trains don’t run on time. The deep-seated failings that were there when Britain voted in the referendum last Thursday were still there when the country woke up to the result on Friday. Evidence of just how unbalanced the economy is will be provided when the latest figures for Britain’s current account are released later this week. These show whether the country’s trade and investment income are in the black or the red. At the last count, in the final three months of 2015, the UK was running a record peacetime deficit of 7% of GDP.’

Then  he points out that the EU (the same is true of the post NAFTA USA) has failed to protect its working population from the ferocious downward pressures of globalisation: ‘In the shiny new world created when former communist countries were integrated into the global model, Europe was supposed to be big and powerful enough to protect its citizens against the worst excesses of the market. Nation states had previously been the guarantor of full employment and welfare. The controls they imposed on the free movement of capital and people ensured that trade unions could bargain for higher pay without the threat of work being off-shored, or cheaper labour being brought into the country.’

He adds : ‘Europe has failed to fulfil the historic role allocated to it. Jobs, living standards and welfare states were all better protected in the heyday of nation states in the 1950s and 1960s than they have been in the age of globalisation. Unemployment across the eurozone is more than 10%. Italy’s economy is barely any bigger now than it was when the euro was created. Greece’s economy has shrunk by almost a third. Austerity has eroded welfare provision. Labour market protections have been stripped away.’

He is very good on the implications of this for left-wing parties which have blithely backed open-doors immigration policies.

Many people, once they understand what free trade really means, are beginning to wonder whether protection is really quite such a bad idea as the modish economists keep telling them.

Finally there is this from the distinguished and original-minded Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the ‘Daily Telegraph’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/26/parliament-must-decide-what-brexit-means-in-the-interests-of-the/

The shape of a compromise, miles from what many in the ‘Leave’ campaign want, but acceptable to the current Parliament, is here very accurately and credibly set out. Something of this kind may very well happen. Just as we are not now fully in the EU, but pretend we are,  we could end with a position where we are not fully out of it, but pretend we are.

This is why anyone who seriously wants a thorough break with the EU that will restore our control of our borders needs to realise that a referendum was never going to be enough to achieve this.

Something – perhaps yet another petition – needs to be done to encourage and record public support (if there is any now people are beginning to realise what's at stake) for a swift general election,  held to cement and confirm the decision of the referendum. In my view, the referendum cannot possibly take full effect( and will have been waste of time) unless the composition and the balance of forces is irrevocably altered now in the Commons.

If an election is held soon enough (certainly before October) then all candidates can reasonably be asked to state without equivocation whether they support or oppose the verdict of the referendum, and how they will vote on the matter if elected. This must then be more important than their party allegiances. It will compel local alliances which could make almost all ‘safe’ seats unsafe. And it would also compel the elected members in such a Parliament to seek new allegiances, refusing the old Labour or Tory whips. It could be the first step towards the complete realignment our political system so badly needs. If it does not happen, then some sort of Norwegian arrangement under which we remain in the Single Market and lack full control of our borders, will be what we will get. It will resolve almost none of the problems described above.  Good luck with that.

.

Boston, Lincolngrad: I saw the seething resentment. Now it is time to finish the revolution

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

They shouldn’t have tried to scare us. It is a sign of how little the Remainers understand or know about Britain, and above all about England, that they thought that would work.

I do sometimes wonder if these odd denatured shiny types, who actively prefer foreign rule to their own, ever visit their own country. Confined to glossy multicultural London neighbourhoods for most of the year, they then hurry abroad.

Most of them are more familiar with Florence or Barcelona than they are with the equal glory of Lincoln Cathedral, whose history, beauties and significance are alike unknown to them.

Well, they should have tried harder to visit Britain. They might also have learned to like it, its unspectacular difference from anywhere else in the world (I know, I’ve visited 57 other countries), its gruff reserve that masks much deeper feelings, and its ancient dislike of being pushed around.

Immigrant workers are pictured working the fields near Boston in Lincolnshire. The town voted 75.5 per cent in favour of Leave

The Remainers’ snobbery was their undoing. They believed they were superior to their fellow countrymen and women, when they were just luckier and richer. Judging from their response to the referendum result, many of them still do.

For instance, they refused to be aware of the quiet seething resentment about mass migration that I found in Boston four summers ago. The established parties ignored this, and the liberal thought police tried to claim it was bigotry.

But it was real, and this was reflected on Thursday night in a 77.27 per cent turnout and a 75.5 per cent vote to leave in that town. I do not see how these people could be clearer about their discontent over the enforced transformation of their lives. I am amazed at their patience. I strongly advise against ignoring them any longer.

Of course, it’s not just about immigration. A wonderful alliance, which I have long hoped for, has been forged in this campaign.

It has brought together two groups who had never really met before. The first group are the social and moral conservatives, whose views the Blairised Tory Party despised, while it still relied on their money and their votes. The second are the working-class families whose votes the Blairised Labour Party relied on, while it dismissed and ignored their concerns.

It is not just mass migration that worries them. They are also distressed about the decline in their standard of living, the pressure to get into debt, the way good state schools are reserved for the rich and cunning, the shrivelling of opportunities for the young, the unchecked spread of crime and disorder, the ridiculous cost of housing, and the general overcrowding of everything from roads to hospitals.

If it weren’t for old tribal party labels, these two groups would long ago have realised they were friends and allies.

They would have combined in a mutiny against the PR men and hedge-fund types who lounge arrogantly on the upper deck of politics, claiming that none of these problems exist – because they don’t experience them themselves.

For instance I, and millions of Tory voters, have far more in common with excellent Labour MPs such as Kate Hoey or Frank Field than I do with David Cameron and the weird, obedient, meaningless quacking robots with which he has filled the Cabinet Room and the Tory benches in the House of Commons.

But the ossified party system kept them apart until now. They could not and did not combine to defeat their common enemy. And so at Election after Election, those who merely wanted to live their lives much as they had always lived them, and were baffled and pained by the unending changes imposed on them, had nowhere to turn.

The parties they thought of as their own were in fact in an alliance against them. Blair became Cameron and Cameron became Blair, and after a while it was impossible to tell which was which.

It’s not just me saying this. As Janan Ganesh, a writer in the Financial Times, recently noted: ‘Conservatives and moderate adherents to the Labour cause share more with each other than with the rest of their own parties… Against them in this referendum is a party in all but name… drawn from the Tory Right and the Labour Left and incubated in the Leave campaign. These politicians are conservative and anti-establishment at the same time.’

Noting that people such as Labour’s Ed Balls and Chancellor George Osborne have much more in common than they like to pretend, Mr Ganesh says: ‘These politicians have the same basic orientation.’

He believes it would be ‘myopic’ for them to ‘remain separate out of fealty to a party system that was forged in the industrial age for an empire nation’. And he adds: ‘I hear the Tory and Labour moderates newly mingling in the Remain offices rather get on.’

I bet they do. That is why I don’t care who fills David Cameron’s place at the head of a Tory Party that long ago outlived its usefulness. There shouldn’t be any more David Camerons, thanks very much. In future, people like him should stand openly as what they are, globalist pro-migration Blairite liberals, and not call themselves Conservatives. So the important thing is that we do not miss this great moment when the people have joined together against a discredited and failed elite.

'Remainers refused to be aware of the quiet seething resentment about mass migration that I found in Boston four summers ago. The established parties ignored this, and the liberal thought police tried to claim it was bigotry'

What we need is for the Tory Party and the Labour Party to collapse and split and be replaced by two new parties that properly reflect the real divisions in the country.

Since both the old parties are empty and decrepit, with few active members and reliant on state support and dodgy billionaires, the collapsing and splitting bit should not be too hard. The replacement is up to us, the British people, who have now demonstrated our power if we unite.

But it can only happen if the next stage is a General Election, which is much more urgent than a Tory (or Labour) leadership contest.

Thursday’s vote shows that the House of Commons is hopelessly unrepresentative. The concerns and hopes of those who voted to leave the EU – 51.9 per cent of the highest poll since 1992 – are reliably supported by fewer than a quarter of MPs, if that. Ludicrously, neither of the big parties agrees with a proven majority of the electorate – and neither shows any sign of changing its policies as a result.

If we do nothing about this scandal, for it is a scandal, then how can we be sure we will get out of the EU at all? The elite is rallying and whimpering that the minority must be treated ‘with respect’– more than they would have done had they won.

Parliament is pro-EU. The Civil Service is pro-EU, the judiciary is pro-EU, the BBC is pro-EU and is now returning to its old bad habits after an admittedly creditable attempt at balance. Its 6am radio news bulletin on Friday said, falsely and dangerously, that the pound had ‘collapsed’ following the result and there will be a lot more of this foolish panic-mongering in days to come.

We have had only half a revolution. If we do not now complete it, we will have missed an unequalled opportunity to reclaim what is and always was ours.

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First Thoughts on the Referendum Result

I shall be writing in more detail and depth about this on Sunday in my Mail on Sunday column, but I feel I ought to make an immediate comment on the referendum result.

I have been saying for some weeks that ‘Leave’ would win . I freely admit that I was wrong at the beginning of the campaign to predict that the electorate would shy away from such a vote. What changed my mind? The creditable efforts of the BBC to be impartial, which I absolutely did not expect; the number of newspapers which came off the fence in favour of independence, as they had never done before; and perhaps above all the clumsiness and folly of the ‘Remain’ campaign, which turned out to have nothing in its locker, overplayed a weak hand and in the end became a joke. Stand by now for a plague of frogs.

I also came to realise, mainly through some lucky conversations, that the working-class Labour vote had swung heavily towards ‘Leave’. I thought a combination of this group with the pre-existing anti-EU vote would create a majority. Which is why on June 6^th I began to speculate on the constitutional crisis which I thought would follow a majority for ‘Leave’.

Mass immigration was obviously a huge influence on the vote. ‘Sovereignty’ was always an abstract, but the visible loss of control of our national borders revealed to millions that it is in fact a tangible thing which affects their lives. Even so,  do not underestimate the role played by  generalised discontent about everything from absurdly high housing costs, unchecked crime and disorder, the transformation of education into a privilege for the rich and influential, diminishing wages, the impossibility of maintaining standards of living without getting into debt,  overloaded health services and miserable opportunities for the young.

Regular readers will know that I don’t like referenda. I didn’t vote in this one, though I did not advise anyone else to follow my example, or expect anyone to do so. This was not and is not my chosen route out of the EU. I am still not sure it will get us out.

The referendum achieved, by a dangerous short cut, something I have been hoping for and arguing for and seeking for many years – an alliance between the social conservatives trapped and ignored in a liberal Tory Party and the social conservatives trapped in a liberal Labour Party. I had long believed (since the isolated example of a November 2004 referendum on regional government in the North-East) such a combination would throw the ghastly forces of Blairism into the sea.

The problem is that this potent temporary alliance has dissolved now that the referendum is over.  What actual body or power survives to enforce its outcome, to drive it through a hostile Parliament, civil service and judiciary,  and overcome the redoubled propaganda of a pro-EU BBC now released from its temporary straitjacket of impartiality? WE're already being told that the winners must 'respect' the 48% who lost the vote called by their own side to crush anti-EU movement once and for all. Well, no doubt we must be nice to them, and not gloat too much, but it is for them to respect the majority they did not expect.

 

They would certainly have expected the 'Leave' side to respect a 'Remain' victory, had there been one.

 

But the undying resentment and conviction of the Remainers shows us why the referendum short cut is so dangerous. It has raised he expectations. Will it now be able to fulfil them?

We are now back to party politics. The conditions which allowed Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey, Frank Field and similar admirable Labour figures to share platforms with Michael Gove and Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson – and which also allowed Tory and Labour Blairites to collaborate openly with each other – have abruptly ended. In fact, none of the front rank Tory leavers are especially socially conservative, or well-equipped to work on wider matters with these Labour figures  - and I remain puzzled by the real motives of both Mr Gove and Mr Johnson.

People have begun asking me who I think should or will become leader of the Tory Party. I reply that I don’t care. This is the wrong question.  Why are people so anxious to reduce politics to personal gossip? This vote has shown that both Tory and Labour Parties are dead, do not represent their voters, and no longer reflect the real division in this country. Both should have been wound up years ago. Neither ought to survive this.  This vote has been a vote against the existing political system and elite, and against the two political parties which have arrogantly misgoverned the country for decades.

 

The thing we most need now is the dissolution of a Parliament which has been shown to be absurdly unrepresentative of the population on the issued which matter most to it. But would an election be capable, at such short notice, of creating the new political alignment we so badly need? I am not sure.