A Son of the Rock

Not content with all his other serial idiocies culminating in being reckless with the UK’s future and then walking away from the resultant mess I today heard on the news that the man this blog knows as Mr Irresponsible, aka former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, is to resign his parliamentary seat.

He can’t even be bothered to give another four years commitment to constituents who were reasonably entitled to expect he would serve out his term till the next General Election. (The reasons he advanced for his decision were entirely spurious by the way. It is perfectly possible for him to be a back-bench MP and not cause the Government any bother at all.)

I would hope the good citizens of Witney give his party a bloody nose at the consequent by-election for being troubled totally unneccessarily but of course they won’t.

No doubt he has a very lucrative job (more likely jobs plural) or even sinecures lined up with some of the people and organisations whose interests he favoured while in office. To them I say; take care. He’ll mess those up just like everything else he has touched. I hope you come to regret it. He certainly won’t.

Mr Irresponsible, aka Call me Dave, otherwise known as the Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron Esquire, has a lot of idiocies to his name. But surely the largest of these is his utterly obtuse decision to give in to the bullying of his Conservative cohorts and the threat of UKIP to his voting base by first promising and then granting them a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.

Instead of lancing the boil (he warned his party not to continue to bang on about Europe) his indulgence of their obsession has now unleashed a tide of xenophobia and intolerance, egged on by those who knowingly encourage a false belief that the troubles experienced by various communities up and down the UK are as a result of external forces (the EU,) so-called lack of control (again the EU) or immigrants (supposedly the EU but there are more migrants into the UK from outwith the EU than from inside it – and many Britons living and working in the countries of the EU) rather than the banking crash and the policies his Government has followed ever since its election in 2010. (I know its first five years were in coalition but really it was a Conservative Government in all but name.)

This tide has been growing for years – stoked up by spurious newspaper stories of EU “impositions” and “red tape” and the simplicities of people who claim that the country’s problems have one solution – and has now taken the form of a vicious and intemperate “Vote Leave” campaign which has peddled all sorts of what may be politely called inaccuracies but are in fact downright lies and often strayed close to, if not over, the border of racism.

I know the “Remain” campaign has also given apocalyptic warnings of the consequences of a leave vote, but it has not been whipping up fear of others, nor blatantly arousing expectations which will not (cannot) be fulfilled. Against whom will the anger the “Leave” campaigners have stoked be directed when things do not get better? (Either “in” or “out”, ditching austerity is not on their or David Cameron’s agenda.)

Had I been in any doubt about which way I would vote in Thursday’s referendum the “Vote Leave” television broadcast claiming that the £350 million pounds a week of the UK’s contribution to the EU budget (a large part of which promptly gets sent back anyway) would – in a leave future – be spent on the NHS instead would have made my mind up. These guys have no intention of spending money on the NHS; they want rid of it. They want to privatise everything that moves (and everything that doesn’t.) The worse thing, though, was the highlighting of five Balkan countries said to be on the point of entry into the EU (none of which actually are any time soon) plus Turkey: Turkey! which has been moving ever further away from meeting accession criteria under its present government) and then a series of arrows, leaping, Dad’s Army style, over to Britain. As if every inhabitant of those countries would immediately up sticks and come to the UK as soon as they were given the opportunity. Some may, most will not.

Then there was “Vote Leave”‘s pamphlet – delivered by post – which handily showed Turkey as having borders with Syria and Iraq. Are Syria and Iraq applying for EU membership? I don’t think so. What possible purpose can their inclusion on this map have? (Except to stoke up fears of people from there coming through Turkey – and riding the arrows to Britain.) Well, they’re doing that anyway, as “Leave” well knows and plays on. Yet in their circumstances so would I – and so would every leave campaigner.

The circumstances under which this vote is taking place, the Eurozone under strain, a refugee crisis, a war on Europe’s margins (two if you include Turkey in Europe which geographically part of it is,) render its timing more than unfortunate. It is potentially disastrous.

I really fear that a leave vote will see other countries (but emphatically not those who border Russia) seek to leave the EU. These may even include France if the Front National wins power.

In that case there will certainly be unresolved tensions between France and Germany – and we know where that has led in the past.

What the leave campaigners don’t seem to have grasped, or have deliberately ignored, is that the EU was set up (as the European Coal and Steel Community, then the Common Market) precisely so that France and Germany would never go to war again. That is emphatically in the UK’s national interest, and may be at risk. The writer of this letter to the Guardian knows what is at stake.

Whatever the result on Thursday the passions this referendum seems to have inflamed, at least in England – there has been almost no sign of it taking place at all in the way of posters and window stickers round where I live – will not be stilled easily.

I see our esteemed Prime Minister David Cameron (aka Mr Irresponsible) has put his foot in it again.

In what sort of a world can the UK be governed by a man who has no notion of the need to refrain from comment on trials or the people involved in them while they are still taking place?

Well, this says it all.

Mr Irresponsible (see here for previous posts) aka David Cameron – the Prime Minister of the UK! – has left his child behind in a pub.

Can you really trust your country to this man?

I see Mr Irresponsible has been at it once more.

He has been telling motorists to top up their cars in case the tanker drivers dispute remains unresolved.

In his position should he not having been advising them to behave normally? Not to instantly rush to the pumps?

Has he never heard of panic buying?

I saw the result for myself this afternoon when I went in to a forecourt to check the air in my tyres. Well, I say went in. But I had to queue: due to the volume of cars waiting for petrol.

And to what level should motorists let their tanks drop before “topping up”? A quarter empty? A third? A half? Or maybe after just one litre has been used? Should they drop in to every petrol station they happen upon on the off-chance?

The man is either a numpty (see definition 3) or he was deliberately encouraging anti-social behaviour. (Which in these circumstances is what rushing to top up your car unnecessarily certainly is.)

Our esteemed Prime Minister, Mr Irresponsible, showed himself in his true colours today when he tried to put down a Labour MP who was heckling him.

His phrase, “Calm down, dear,” is all very well for Michael Winner (he, after all, is only doing commercials) but ill becomes the head of the UK government. There’s a video on You Tube here. Note the glee too with which it was greeted by the MPs behind him and the insufferable George Osborne beside him.

This is the true face of “Call me Dave.” A person who thinks others are not worth a degree of respect in his dealings with them and who deploys casually dismissive, arguably sexist, language as soon as his guard is down.

I really don’t know what our esteemed Prime Minister, Mr Irresponsible, thought he was doing (beyond echoing Angela Merkel) when he said multiculturalism had failed in the UK.

To me he seemed to be saying that all minorities ought to become the same as the rest of us.

This demands the question, what rest of us?

For there is no single British culture. For a start there are four distinct national areas in the UK and the “culture” of each differs from the others. Even within each of the four areas culture differs from place to place. It differs within any city. Even within a town. Or village.

Now, I would agree that people who fail to learn English are going to struggle to come to terms with life in the UK and they should be encouraged to do so, by all means. (If I went to live abroad I would make every effort to learn the language.)

I would also agree that anyone who seeks to commit, or carries out, acts of indiscriminate murder (or murder of any stamp come to that) ought to be prosecuted – but that applies to anyone, not just to “minorities.”

In any case, the problem – if it is a problem – is not existential. A few disaffected, and misguided, youths are not a threat to the fabric of the UK nor to the British way of life; whereas laws implemented in over-reaction most certainly are. Neither have the 7/7 attacks on London Transport nor any subsequent actions been as extensive as those of the IRA were.

[By the way, we are all immigrants. There were no humans in Britain till our ancestors migrated via Europe from Africa. As a consequence, none of us has the right to say that others should not come to make their homes here. What we do have is the right to expect and insist that they obey our laws.]

As for the rest of it, the Prime Minister seemed to me to be suggesting that perhaps everyone should be (let’s take an example) members of the Church of England. This is a strange way to try to win over people who may be disaffected as a result of their perceptions of the prevailing attitudes of most Britons towards them and their religious affiliation. To tell them that to be accepted they must abandon what they think defines them is not going to persuade them that they are wrong. Quite the opposite.

This is a Tory playing to the Tory right – and giving succour to the more extreme right wing. I am strongly reminded of the remarks of Margaret Thatcher (of unblessed memory) about “swamping.”

I have two words here for David Cameron.

Guy Fawkes.

Four hundred years ago it was Roman Catholics who were disaffected and the terrorists of their day (albeit the then government knew every detail of the Gunpowder Plot.) Excepting Northern Ireland (and there any dissidents’ wishes are particular not general – and not in any case dedicated to the overthrow of the British state) most British RCs no longer have a grievance against the government – no more so than any other Britons anyway – and would not resort to violence to relieve themselves of it.

Just give it a few hundred years; problem solved.

Not content with threatening to use the atom bomb on Iran and China while he was only a Parliamentary candidate, I see our wet-behind-the-ears Prime Minister has now opened his mouth yet again only to put his foot in it.

Whatever your private thoughts, when you are in the position he is you really have a duty to temper your speech.

And moreover, to talk down (even insult) Pakistan when you are in India! It beggars belief.

On the world stage he really is a liability.

Don’t they teach them anything useful at Eton?

Britrain doesn’t have a constitution.

Not a written one anyway.

The unwritten one contains the single provision that Parliament is sovereign.

Yet a former holder of high office in the UK government has pronounced that a “suicide vest” has been placed around it.

The language in which he articulated this – of a piece with a previous outburst about “letterboxes” – is clearly intended to speak to a certain kind of inhabitant of the UK – those who have been primed to believe that the British way of life is under attack by people with “un-British” belief systems.

If that way of life is indeed under attack it is not by people from foreign shores (or even by those from Britain who have been brainwashed by terrorists into believing their faith is persecuted here and worldwide) or with alternative belief systems. There is at present no direct threat to the fabric of Britain, either from foreign powers or from agents of inhumane ideologies inimical to independent thinking.

Possible threats to individual citizens from individual terrorist outrages (but that was also true of the IRA without them being demonised in the way we see of “Muslims” now) or actions tacitly approved by foreign governments, yes; systematic undermining, and takeover, of the institutions of the UK, no. Anyone who says there is is guilty of hyperbole and their motives for making such a claim ought to be questioned.

But if anyone did put a suicide vest around the British constitution it was not the present, but the previous Prime Minister, David Cameron – Mr Irresponsible striking again!

He it was who undermined Parliamentary sovereignty by calling a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU without the certainty of winning it.

That vest was detonated – along with his accomplices – by none other than the same man who makes the “suicide vest” claim against the present PM.

The EU referendum result implicitly placed the populace at large – or at least that minority of it whose votes prevailed – as being more sovereign than Parliament. There is nowhere to go after that.

Parliament – despite the present one being elected since the referendum and so technically, under the (admittedly non-existent) constitution, more sovereign than the referendum result as it is subsequent to it – cannot act in any way that ameliorates the consequences of that result. Too much anger would be stoked thereby – and there’s enough about as it is.

In the seventeenth century the English – and Scots and Irish – fought a war (several wars actually) over principals like this. The least we must demand of actors in the present constitutional crisis – becaue that’s what it is – is that they use language that does not stoke any fires.

So. This is May’s day.

… — … … — … … — …
Dot, dot, dot; dash, dash, dash; dot, dot, dot. Dot, dot, dot; dash, dash, dash; dot, dot, dot. Dot, dot, dot; dash, dash, dash; dot, dot, dot.
Mayday! Mayday!

We in the UK have recently been sailing troubled waters but now we are coming out of a lea shore and are about to enter the full blast of the storm. Who knows what the political landscape of these islands will look like in three years’ time? A second Scottish Independence referendum has been made ever more probable by the UK goverment’s stance on a so-called hard Brexit and deaf ear to other voices.

Scottish independence might have been achieved on a relatively friendly basis in 2014 but I doubt that’s at all likely now.

The febrile English nationalists (for that is what they are) who have driven this headlong rush over a cliff have no thought of (or care for) Scotland – and still less for Northern Ireland for which this represents a double crisis, the “cash for ash” scandal having led to a breakdown of the power sharing arrangements. They will exact a heavy price for what they will no doubt see as a betrayal of “England, their England”.

I believe Theresa May is trying to look stern when she lectures all and sundry in the House of Commons and on television but to me she looks threatening – as in, don’t dare cross me, my revenge will be sweet – despite there being no substance behind her bluster. Scotland can look for no favours from her.

I never thought that another politician could achieve a position lower in my esteem than Margaret Thatcher did but Theresa May has managed it. (David Cameron, aka Mr Irresponsible, though he is entirely responsible for the mess the UK now finds itself in and amply demonstrated his irresponsibility by doing so and more so by running away from the consequences, is merely a buffoon by comparison.) May is potentially dangerous. Not so much in herself as in what may come after her.