Malcolm’s blood-pressure (according to his GP) is a matter of concern, at the best of times.
Then he was rendered splenetic by the continuing nonsense spieled (on this occasion) by Iain Dale:
Will the Irish Capitulate to Blackmail?
You might be forgiven for not knowing this, but in only two weeks’ time -on 2 October – Ireland goes to the polls to vote for the second time on the Lisbon Treaty. Bearing in mind how much coverage it got the first time around this side of the Irish sea, you might well ask why it has received scant coverage this time. Could it be because certain people think if it doesn’t get hyped up the Irish will vote the “right way”?
Looking in from the outside it seems to me that the mainstream parties are trying to use the terrible economic circumstances to pressurise the people into voting yes, on the basis that if they don’t the inward investment which provides to many jobs will not be forthcoming. I’d like to think the Irish people will be intelligent enough to see through this …
An oldie but a goldie!
Back in 1880, Gustave de Molinari, born in what would now be Belgium, living in Paris, shrewdly observed that English newspapers:
allow no occasion to escape them of treating the Irish as an inferior race — as a kind of white negroes.
Well now: one of those comparators has changed, become unacceptable in common parlance. So …
The “right way”?
“intelligent enough”?
Any more stereotypes, Mr Dale?
Or do you wot of what you speak?
Ireland is a sovereign nation.
Moreover, both Republic and Six Counties cope electorally with Proportional Representation systems too sophisticated for mere Anglo-Saxons.
IRELAND HAS become a battleground for several conflicting political currents in the European Union as voters prepare to decide on the Lisbon Treaty on October 2nd … the most prominent intervention of this kind comes from the hard Eurosceptic and Europhobic wings of British conservatism who want to weaken the EU radically or withdraw from it altogether. Their objectives are altogether at variance with Ireland’s vital interests as a small state in a well-functioning EU system.
Remember the early ’90s. The GOP dinosaurs ran rampant through proto-Clintonian Washington. MegaNewt Gingrich (the arch adulterer) and Tom DeLay (indicted abuser) ruled the Congressional roost. Nirvana for the Christian Right was imminent.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
Bob Tyrrell, the founder and editor of the American Spectator, was in and of the belly of the Beast. He made denigration of the Clintons his mission in life. Tyrrell can describe himself as a “libertarian conservative” but also say “I’m the last Communist left”, the son of a Chicago Democrat,
and I learned my politics from the Daley machine.
His political pantheon is inclusive:
FDR and Ronald Reagan both were the unique individuals who changed the course of American policy, both domestically and with foreign policy.
In 1992 he published The Conservative Crack-up. Tyrrell saw the neo-Cons failure to put Bork on the Supreme Court Bench as harbinger of present weakness and future further failings:
… in the Bork nomination and the failure to get him on the Supreme Court … we saw the conservatives’ typical weaknesses that have hampered their ability to create the kind of political culture that I think is important for a conservative movement. The conservatives had not reached out. They had not reached out and created the kind of alliances and networks — they hadn’t expanded them — that would have helped them. They underestimated the opposition.
He then wonders where the neo-Con ideology is going:
There were three elements that went into the founding of the conservative movement in the late ’40s. One was libertarian economics and philosophy, as embodied in the work of Friedrich Hayek and others. The other was traditional Western values …
… the final element in the conservative movement was anti-communism and an awareness of the menace to the whole Western world that Russian communist totalitarianism represented. The conservatives in the late ’40s often thought we were going to lose. They were very fatalistic, and Whittaker Chambers was one of those people who wanted to wake America up to the menace of communism, not just Soviet communism.
In other words:
monetarism and resource management by market forces:
The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources — if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.
— Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)
authoritarianism. Since Tyrrell specifically refers to Richard M. Weaver as his guru here, we are into rightist populism (not excluding the Old South as a model) and warnings of the continuing degeneracy of our society into an imminent dystopia:
This is another book about the dissolution of the West. I attempt two things not commonly found in the growing literature of this subject. First, I present an account of that decline based not on analogy but on deduction. It is here the assumption that the world is intelligible and that man is free and that those consequences we arc now expiating are the product not of biological or other necessity but of unintelligent choice. Second, I go so far as to propound, if not a whole solution, at least the beginning of one, in the belief that man should not follow a scientific analysis with a plea of moral impotence.
— Introduction to Ideas have Consequences (1948)
and social control by the exploitation of the fear factor (which, historically, has been the Yellow Peril, the Red Menace, and now Islamophobia: the perceived threat changes; but the method remains the same).
Tyrrell was prescient: the neo-con operation fell apart, spectacularly, in the last years of Bush II, culminating in the pile-up that was the McCain-Palin ticket last year.
Even so, Tyrrell could be dismissed as a curiosity, a poseur, and ignored as a triviality. This piece would belong across the road, in Malcolm Redfellow’s World Service, were it not for the start of new meme or troupe, which has parallels with Tyrrell’s thesis:
The fragility of the Cameroonie conspiracy
Quite where the Tory Party is going is anyone’s guess. At one level there is this engaging assumption that the General Election of 2010 is a foregone conclusion. The error there is that the Tory share of the vote (currently sampled at about 40%) is way, way below Thatcher in 1979 or Blair in 1997. If — when — it slips below that level, everything is up for grabs. That is
why the fellow-travellers, for one obvious example Mike Smithson, scrutinise the runes and extrapolate hyperspatially;
why the Tory bloggers follow Smithson’s every twitch so avidly; and
Then there is the lack of any ideology in the present Tory leadership. Cameron has made a fetish of being a “modernizer“, of being pragmatic (or whatever non-Wilsonian synonym the snake-oil salesmen can conjure up). In swift order we have had Cameron-the-successor-to-Blair, green Cameron, true-blue-Cameron, unionist red-white-and-blue Cameron, Cameron-the-spender, Cameron-the-cutter, Cameron-the-flipper-of-his-mortgage, Cameron-the-appalled-at-expensesgate … all of which amounts to Cameron-the-rootless, Cameron-the-unprincipled.
That does not mean there are no ideologues in the ranks of Toryism: John Redwood; David Willetts; Oliver Letwin all have their moments. All are kept (in view of previous disasters) on a short rein. Even William Hague (heaven help us) might chip in if they were short-handed. Then there is Dan Hannan, who would love to be elevated to a role. Any, or all of these would find approval in the Right world of ConHome. And therein is the problem: the Right is where any pretence of Tory intellect can be located. It is a rarefied world well adrift from those opportunist Etonians and rough-and-tumble City Slickers currently in charge.
Win or lose next year, things must fall apart when there is no centre to hold.
Already there are several defenestrated Tories — most recently, Edward McMillan-Scott — with grievances. There are many more, particularly among the ersatz squirearchy, would feel they were discriminated against, sold out in the long-running expenses row — the most recent gesture to the pursuing wolves being Alan Duncan. For the duration, the affronted will sit on their hands, bite their tongues, cherish their resentment and keep it warm. Individually, even collectively, after the Election, revenge will be taken; and the fall-out thereof shall be magnificent to see.
Then there is the embuggerance factor. Last Tuesday, First Post gave Donald Malcolm space (well, they never have much of real worth to fill it) to rubbish Labour in London. In the process another vein was opened:
By May or June 2010, unless he’s knocked over by a bendy bus, David Cameron will be prime minister. A year on – less, possibly – he is likely to have become one of the most unpopular prime ministers in modern history. It doesn’t matter that pollsters are currently recording a desire for public service cuts rather than tax rises. The public will be thinking very differently by the time those cuts begin to bite.
Unless an economic miracle intervenes, Prime Minister Cameron and Chancellor Osborne will oversee a bloodbath in public service cuts.
The trickle-down – make that pour-down – effect will be something to behold. ‘Soft’ Labour voters now happily rubbishing Gordon Brown will again have a flag to rally around. By the end of 2011, the Tory government will be heading into mid-term having outraged many members of their new fanbase and re-energised Labour supporters.
Sounds familiar?
That was the scenario is 1979-81.
As Malcolm has pointed out on previous outings. Let us remember Thatcher doing her bit:
Now recall: the self-styled “Lady” was addressing her own Party Conference. She was soliciting support from the blue-rinses and golf-clubbers of her rank-and-file over the heads of her dissident Cabinet colleagues. Her position was so precarious that, short of the Argentinian junta rushing to her aid, her tenure would near-certainly have been abbreviated; and more voter-friendly, middle-of-the-road measures introduced.
What Thatcher had, which Cameron has yet to show, is determination, commitment and a sense of direction (from Keith Joseph).
how long a “Prime Minister” Cameron can survive? Who wields the knife?
whether Philip Hammond’s intended bloodbath of cuts pushes unemployment beyond 4 million? Or does the failure-of-nerve and the U-turn come earlier? Do we get the double-dip depression?
does the Great Tory Schism derive from economic policy or merely the old European heresy? Do the Europhobes and crypto-UKIPpers get their way?
is the only real beneficiary of all this the amazing self-basting Salmond?
Malcolm’s blood-pressure (according to his GP) is a matter of concern, at the best of times.
