“The only idea around,” is how the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar described the opposition to Brexit. The public’s importunity to want rid of it has swept away the PM’s hopes of burying ideas of a return to Europe for good.
Half the country has never been reconciled to the other half’s coup de foudre over leaving. Meanwhile, as my colleague Stephen McNair points out this week in Brexit: can Starmer seize this demographic opportunity? many who voted for Brexit have died, while six million new young voters have arrived: and they would vote to return by five to one. According to calculations by Peter Kellner, doyen of pollsters, that makes a majority of voters in favour of EU membership of eight million.
There is now a 63% to 37% in favour of the EU. As Mr Kellner points out, no UK general election in history has ever produced such a clear-cut result. So for a government which is about as unpopular as any have ever been, far from being the hot potato they dare not pick up, a declared determination to return to some kind of close arrangement with the EU would very likely save their bacon.
Nobody is sensibly suggesting we should apply to join again tomorrow. Ministers are right to be cautious about how solid that vote to return might be. But it is in their hands. They have the means to see off any remaining Brexit fairytale fantasies, end this charade and commit the country firmly towards Europe. But though they have the means, when the obsequies are read over the Starmer government they will report that they lacked the courage.
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Meanwhile Patrick Maguire for the Sunday Times reveals that Labour Together, the group founded by Morgan McSweeney (now the PM’s chief of staff) and which is credited with being the power behind Keir Starmer’s throne, has been surreptitiously polling party members to determine the best candidate to replace him.
The possible candidates touted in the survey are Wes Streeting, Shabana Mahmood, Bridget Phillipson, Ed Miliband, Darren Jones, Angela Rayner, Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell.
Mr McSweeney and Labour Together are also held responsible for brainwashing the PM into reversing his position on Brexit and focus policies on winning back the Red Wall voters to suit their own socially conservative ideas. So we might expect that their survey is intended to identify the best candidate to carry forward the Brexit torch if Sir Keir falls.
But Labour Together has had its own problems recently. It is now headed by former MP Jonathan Ashworth, who always looks like a man who has had a custard pie in the face but is pretending it is quite normal. For months they have been losing both donors and staff.
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This week the Liberal Democrats introduced a 10-minute rule bill in the Commons, favouring a return to a Customs Union with the EU. Being a 10MRB, it has no chance of being enacted, but the reactions of the two sides are interesting.
The actual voting was 100/100, and the bill was passed (for what it is worth) with the casting vote of the speaker, as is Commons custom. But 100 Brexit supporting MPs turned out to an apparently inconsequential bill, determined to vote it down. In other words, the very idea of discussing a return to Europe could not be tolerated. A sign surely that they know the game is up.
But Pecksniff learns from one Commons source that the LibDems were “delighted” with the victory. They have in recent times seemed shy creatures on EU matters, only coming down to the waterhole at dusk to drink. This may have been only a 10MRB, but the party’s reactions suggest it may have further repercussions. They have emerged from the EU closet over recent weeks: does this mean Ed Davey is preparing to commit his cavalry?
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It was said of David Cameron that he could not recognise that his lunatic fringe – John Major’s ‘bastards’ – “would never take yes for an answer”. They always wanted more, and more extreme xenophobia and racism. That is what brought about the Brexit referendum.
via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Now it seems, Keir Starmer is in the same piteous position. He tries a palliative for Reform voters, hoping to buy them off, but it only encourages them. So we have the likes of the malignant Nick Timothy, Tory MP for West Suffolk, making openly xenophobic demands over the two-child benefit reversal.
“Strip residency of migrants who are a net financial drain,” is the way The Times reported his speech. Apparently one third of all families with three or more children are foreign-born. But surely, you cry, I thought those on the right were demanding that we should have more children, to cover for the manpower shortages partly caused by Brexit?
Well, yes and no. An awful lot of these families are – how shall we put it? – black.
*
It is difficult to recall a more deliberately specious, amoral or cynical government statement, even from the Tories, than that from the Home Office last weekend. “Britain welcomes migrants who contribute to our economy and our society,” it says. “High earners, entrepreneurs and skilled frontline workers like NHS workers will be fast-tracked to settlement – rewarding those who give, not take.”
The most sneering and truculent words are that last phrase, of course. Are we to take it that everybody not mentioned in the preferred groups is a scrounger? And how about those fleeing for their lives?
“Are there no workhouses?” asked Scrooge. Yet we are denying them even that.
Every bit of data shows that immigrants provide a healthy contribution to our economy, providing far more in return than they claim on benefits. So the statement is not only poisonous, it is factually wrong in its implications.
A study of Labour’s historical theology reveals nowhere is there a sanctimonious determination to turn away the poor and the destitute; and the party’s founding belief in the international brotherhood of man recognises, as the Labour imposter as home secretary refuses to countenance, that we prosper by embracing and encouraging others to better themselves. The astonishing success of the Ugandan Asians demonstrates that entrepreneurs are born of the hard graft of people starting at the bottom. They are not delivered fully formed, as though by Amazon.
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“Trump lambasts ‘weak’ and ‘decaying’ Europe and hints at walking away from Ukraine,” was the headline in Tuesday’s Guardian online.
The White House claims Europe is facing “civilisational erasure” because of its laws on free speech (i.e. not allowing fascists to run amuck over social media), the EU (which protects its citizens from predators like Mr Trump’s friends), and immigration – which from a country entirely built on immigration is, as Jack Lemmon would say, a doozy.
Last week, the US State Department openly declared their intention to work towards the actual downfall of the EU (and Britain included), including supporting far right political action designed to bring down our governments. Astonishingly, No.10 declined to comment on an official White House policy which attacks this country.
The PM has exasperated much of the country over what is seen as his supine stance against the US president. It is important to recognise that Sir Keir is not at liberty to offer Mr Trump a full throttle raspberry, as many would prefer. But surely it is not asking too much of our own government that when the country is publicly abused and ridiculed by another government – perhaps especially one which is supposed to be a close ally – our reaction should show rather more than merely declining to respond – or, as no doubt the US would put it, “sucking it up”.
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It is a weekly trial, dear reader, to catalogue all the week’s shenanigans from Nigel Farage. So it is less tiresome to bundle them up into a jamboree bag of Farage finagles.
“Farage reported to police over ‘election fraud’” was the Telegraph headline last weekend. He wasn’t around to read it, because he was high-lifing it at the Abu Dhabi grand prix. In one photo he appears alongside Flavio Briatore, a convicted fraudster, and senior adviser to the Alpine Formula One team. Pecksniff would not dream of speculating who might have picked up the tab for the trip. We can only surmise what unlikely common interests may have brought them together…
That meant the soi disant Mr Brexit was not around either for this week’s Commons vote on the Liberal democrats’ ten-minute rule bill on, er, Brexit. Nor was he here to learn that three more former MEPs in his bloc are known to have followed the same pro-Russia ‘script’ as the now disgraced and imprisoned Nathan Gill.
Meanwhile an explanation and apology is still outstanding over the growing row over his alleged racist comments while at Dulwich College, which increasingly threatens to become uncongenial.
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Last week, Pecksniff reported on the bewildering events at Your Party’s inaugural conference.
Roger Hallam is leader of a group called Assemble, which was supposedly part of Your Party, but nobody seems clear as to whether they are now, or not. He has been involved in Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. He does not lack confidence in his ideas, though it is possible he belongs to the Jeremy Corbyn school of reality.
“If we play our cards right, there’s no reason why we can’t get several million votes, win an election, and more importantly, change UK political culture,” he told Waging NonViolence.
He calls Your Party “the biggest moment of our lifetimes”, something that could spark “a global political revolution” and ultimately “determine whether the world ends or not”. Which is nice. But just in case, he implied a threat of direct action at the Your Party conference if things didn’t go his way.
There is a strong resemblance between Your Party and an amoeba. It promises dramatic growth but has a habit of continually splitting into a number of smaller organisms. The problem with the progressive left is there is a tendency to believe that – sure of the moral superiority of its position – ego and self-interest cannot exist in such morally rarefied regions. They are invariably wrong. The progressive left will prosper when we do not self-righteously assume moral superiority over our opponents. Hard work and competence are more likely to get it done.
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The civil disobedience over the Sheringham bus shelter may seem amusing, but it is of fundamental importance in the context of an overweening local authority like Norfolk County Council, who prefer to treat those they are supposed to serve like the tenantry.
One of Pecksniff’s troublemakers associates reported on Wednesday from the front line in Sheringham – where he was lying in front of the council’s tanks – that the invasion of the shelter snatchers had been repulsed.
Norfolk County Council have retreated to lick their wounds, sulk a bit, and find somebody to blame for the last embarrassing few days. They decided local Liberal Democrat MP Steff Aquarone should be their fall guy, and claimed he first supported their plan, then rejected it. He did this on the unscrupulous grounds, it seems, of having listened to local people. (The depths to which some politicians will stoop, eh?)
One of the convocations of the wise at the Muckrakers recalled the observation of John Maynard Keynes: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
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Everything about Liz Truss is passé, except her ego. But her somewhat leisurely intellect cannot accept this situation. Her latest wheeze is The Liz Truss Show, and your diarist can do no better than to quote from the observations of Alex Andreou.
He suggests the set is reminiscent of a “Harley Street urologist waiting room circa 1992″. Of her appearance, he says: “She looks like she was – to use an equestrian expression – ridden hard and put away wet”.
He adds: “All the bitchy ‘jokes’ are delivered without any apparent awareness that she is making a joke. And so end up sounding like a Joan Rivers gag somehow ended up in the Gettysburg Address”.
One of Mr Andreou’s respondents points out: “Her arms seem to be miming something totally unconnected to what she is saying. Like she’s explaining how to put a sleeping bag away.”
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This week’s seekers after truth were Celina Błędowska, James Porter, Malcolm Lynn, Liz Crosbie, Karl Whiteman, Kate Viscardi, Stace Richards and David Patey.
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