Mel Smith on the Conservative Party

As a tribute to the comedian Mel Smith, who died yesterday, here is his Conservative Party Political Broadcast from Not the Nine O’Clock News:

Mad swivel-eyed loons? This time it’s for real...

At first, I was sceptical.

Then, I conceded there might be some truth in it.

Now, it cannot be denied. The Conservative Party really does contain some mad swivel-eyed loons. Today’s Daily Telegraph reports:

Conservative MPs have drawn up an “Alternative Queen’s Speech” with radical policies such as bringing back the death penalty, privatising the BBC and banning the burka in public spaces.

The 42 bills also include legislation to scrap wind farm subsidies, end the ringfence for foreign aid spending and rename the late August Bank Holiday “Margaret Thatcher Day”.

Britain’s relationship with Europe features prominently in the action plan, with draft laws setting out how the UK would leave the European Union and a Bill to prevent Bulgarians and Romanians winning new rights to work, live and claim benefits here from next year.

42 Bills? How did that happen?

All of the proposals were laid before the House of Commons last night after the Tory backbenchers hijacked an obscure Parliamentary procedure by camping out in Westminster for four successive nights.

It is no surprise that one of the Tory MPs behind this coup is the most swivel-eyed of the lot:

Peter Bone, the MP for Wellingborough and one of the architects of the document, said: “This is serious attempt to deliver policies that the British public really want. There are ideas here that could form the basis of a future Conservative manifesto.”

Besides the death penalty, privatising the BBC and banning the burka, Bone and his chums have other demands:

One of the proposed Bills would privatise the BBC, with all license-fee payers awarded shares in the corporation. A separate bill would de-criminalise non-payment of the licence fee.

The programme also includes plans to abolish the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister – a post currently occupied by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader – as well as legislation to abolish the Department of Energy and Climate Change and reintroduce national service.

This sounds like a Daily Express reader’s wet dream, and indeed that is what it is. So let’s make something clear. The 1950s are not coming back. With the best will in the world, no one, not even Peter Bone with a Tardis, can bring them back. You can legislate till you’re blue in the face, but 42 Bills cannot turn the clock back 62 years.

And there’s another reason these 42 Bills won’t work. Bone claims they are “policies that the British public really want”. But they are policies that only one portion of the British public wants, elderly reactionaries. On any normal actuarial expectation, within twenty years these people will be dead.

Postscript: Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) has tweeted some suggestions for what the 42 Bills include:

• On the new Heath Day bank holiday, you get to sit around looking miserable, until someone you dislike loses their job, then you can smile
• You don’t have much fun on Major Day, but looking back it does not seem so bad
• Errand Boys (Whistling in the Street) Bill
• Cloth Cap (Wringing in Front of Social Superiors) Bill

There are more suggestions at #toryqueensspeech.

Tory cocks

Former Tory MP Jerry Hayes is always entertaining on the subject of his former parliamentary colleagues, and his latest two blog posts show an amusing turn of phrase.

On Tim Yeo:

It’s not often that I am shocked to the core, but the Tim Yeo affair has left my gob truly smacked. Did I hear him correctly on tape boasting that he told a business colleague what questions his select committee was going to ask? Forgive me but if that’s not coaching then my cock’s a kipper.

On Patrick Mercer:

One moment you are cock of the walk, the next; just a cock.

Hayes’s refreshing candour is a reminder of just how stilted most politicians sound nowadays. Better his Tourette’s than some spin doctor’s ‘message script’ any day of the week.

No prizes for being dull

On the New Statesman’s blog, Liberal Democrat blogger Richard Morris says that the Tories may be mad swivel-eyed loons, but at least they’re coherent mad swivel-eyed loons:

I am beginning to wonder if, entirely by accident, it’s the Tories who are moving towards a coherent position for 2015, while we in the Lib Dems look like the straight laced, steady as you go, slightly conformist middle men.

Yes, the Liberal Democrats are currently the better behaved half of the coalition. But if their overriding aim is not to frighten the horses, they will fail to offer a compelling vision for the future and won’t rally much support at the next election.

Don’t believe me? Then ask yourself why, despite the recent self-inflicted damage to the Tories, Liberal Democrat opinion poll ratings stubbornly continue to average 10%, as they have done since the autumn of 2010.

The strange case of Tory homophobia

Former Tory MP Jerry Hayes has written a highly entertaining piece for the Guardian about the Conservative Party’s conflicted attitudes towards homosexuality.

He notes that history is repeating and quotes some of the vile things said during the decriminalisation debates of the 1950s by three Tory parliamentarians; Lord Winterton, William Shepherd MP and Sir Cyril Osborne MP. Hayes makes this delicious observation:

I suspect that nowadays Winterton, Shepherd and Osborne would be welcomed into Ukip, the sort of party one instinctively feels watches Roots backwards so that there is a happy ending.

Mad swivel-eyed loons? I’ll take that back...

In a post the other day, I questioned the use of the term ‘mad swivel-eyed loons’ to malign Conservative party members.

As if to disprove my point, Norman Tebbit has been interviewed in this week’s Big Issue on the topic of gay marriage and his eyes seem to be rotating through 360 degrees:

“The government discussed it for twenty minutes on the morning of its announcement,” former Conservative Party chairman Lord Tebbit told The Big Issue. “They’d done no work on it beforehand. I said to a minister I know: have you thought this through? Because you’re doing the law of succession, too.

“When we have a queen who is a lesbian and she marries another lady and then decides she would like to have a child and someone donates sperm and she gives birth to a child, is that child heir to the throne?

“It’s like one of my colleagues said: we’ve got to make these same sex marriages available to all.

“It would lift my worries about inheritance tax because maybe I’d be allowed to marry my son. Why not? Why shouldn’t a mother marry her daughter? Why shouldn’t two elderly sisters living together marry each other?”

Swivel-eyed, maybe, but not a ‘loon’. There is not a full moon till next Saturday.

The real legacy of Margaret Thatcher

A lot of rubbish was said and written about Margaret Thatcher immediately after her death. The consensus was depressingly deferential – partly in the spirit of “never speak ill of the dead”; partly due to her supporters seeking to exploit the mourning to reinforce her legacy; partly due to her opponents being overwhelmingly defeatist; but mainly because, although the economic orthodoxy she established has crashed in flames, no one has any idea what to do next.

The few who dared to criticise her openly were no better. Many of these critics descended into appropriately 1980s-period SWP-style gesture politics (the ‘Ding Dong’ song and mock funerals and all that).

What was missing was some serious analysis and an historical perspective, and two commentators have helped to remedy that lack.

In the New Statesman, John Gray, ostensibly reviewing a book about Edmund Burke, observes that Thatcher sought to shake up Britain but that the results were far from those she expected and in some ways the opposite of what she wanted:

As a consequence of her leadership, the Conservative Party is in some ways weaker than it has ever been. Turning it into an instrument of her personal will, she triggered a coup that has left every subsequent Tory leader on permanent probation. Alienating Scotland, she virtually wiped out her party north of the border and planted a large question mark over the Union. Within England, her indifference to the human costs of de-industrialisation deepened the north-south divide. The result is a hollowed-out and shrunken party that faces huge obstacles in ever again forming a government. For someone who has been described as the greatest Conservative leader since Churchill, it’s quite a list of achievements. If you wanted to shake up Britain and change it beyond recognition, Thatcher was, of all postwar leaders, the one mostly likely to have this effect.

In short, Thatcher instituted the very kind of revolutionary politics that Conservatives were meant to oppose. Her politics is no longer a solution to anything but the present political establishment remains mesmerised by her legacy and unable to snap out of it.

TV documentary maker Adam Curtis, meanwhile, has a theory about why the pundits were incapable of analysing Thatcher after her death. As a corrective, he has put up a film he made in 1995 about Thatcher called The Attic:

It’s about how she constructed a fake ghostly version of Britain’s past, and then used it to maintain her power. But also how she became possessed and haunted by this vision.

I’m putting it up as a bit of a corrective to the terrifying wonk-fest that took over after Mrs Thatcher died. A conveyor belt of Think Tank pundits and allied operatives poured into the TV studios and together they built a fortress around Mrs Thatcher’s memory that was rooted in theories about economics.

They did this because economics is the only language that wonks understand. It’s a view of the world where they see the voters – the people who put Mrs Thatcher in power – as simplified consumption-driven robots.

What was missing was the fact that Mrs Thatcher was also a powerful romantic politician who created a strange but compelling story about Britain’s past that connected with the imagination of millions of people. It was fake, but it was incredibly powerful because she believed it. And the power of her belief raised up ghostly dreams from Britain’s past that still live in people’s imaginations – long after she fell from power.

The problem with wonks is that they can’t deal with emotion and feeling, and they don’t like stories. It means that they cannot connect at all with the feelings and imaginations of the voters. Yet the think-tankers have built a sarcophagus of economic discourse around Westminster.

What we are waiting for is a politician to come along who can connect with our imaginations and inspire us about political ideas instead of boring us to tears.

I fear that emotional politician might be a bloke called Nigel, propping up the bar with a pint and a fag and a thing about foreigners. In the meantime, here is the film:

Mad swivel-eyed loons? Think before you laugh

Today’s newspapers are full of reports that an unnamed ally of the prime minister described Conservative grassroots activists as “mad swivel-eyed loons”.

Liberal Democrats might be inclined to agree. The idea that members of opposing parties are bonkers is a tempting one but we should avoid it. Tory blogger Iain Dale demonstrates why:

Of course there are swivel eyed loons among the Tory Party membership. Just as there are in any party. It’s just a shame that the Liberal Democrats have more than their fair share. Just go to a LibDem conference and you will see what I mean.

Not so funny now, is it? And this contemptuous view of Liberal Democrat members has been promoted less by Tories such as Iain Dale than by our own party leaders and their hangers on. A recent post on this blog discussed Nick Clegg’s travesty of his party members, but he is just the latest in a long line of Liberal leaders dismissing their activists. Indeed, successive leaders have accumulated so many straw men that they now constitute a serious fire hazard.

The bunker mentality and a fear of the ‘enemy within’ began during Jeremy Thorpe’s leadership. Iain Brodie Browne reminded us recently of Thorpe commissioning Stephen Terrell QC to investigate the Young Liberals in 1970. During David Steel’s leadership, his coterie regularly accused grassroots members of not being “serious about power”, when what was really happening was that local pioneers of community politics were winning power and outshining a self-appointed nomenklatura who had never won so much as a seat on a parish council. In 1986, the then chief whip David Alton made up a baseless story about people “walking in off the streets” to vote in the defence debate at the Eastbourne party conference. Immediately after the 2005 general election, Charles Kennedy launched an attack on party activists, blaming them for controversial policies that he felt had embarrassed the party.

Party leaders come and go but the dishonest narrative remains the same. A small elite is convinced that it knows best; that politics is all about the people at the top; that if we want to be “serious about power”, we must become more centralised and jettison party democracy (a process described as ‘modernising’); and that the job of party members is to shut up and deliver the leaflets.

This paranoid narrative says more about the accusers than the accused. And it is the same story in the other mainstream parties. But we know it’s untrue. If you have worked with members of other parties in some joint endeavour such as local government, you will know that most of them are basically decent human beings who share your sense of duty to society. Conversely, you will have encountered a few people in your own party who are deranged or complete arseholes (and in some cases, both).

So a lot of Tories oppose the EU and gay marriage? Of course they do. That’s why they’re Tories. It is a political position with which Liberal Democrats strongly disagree, but we live in a pluralist society and it is legitimate to express those views. The Liberal position is that such views are fundamentally wrong, not a form of mental illness. The way to deal with them is through argument, not exclusion.

I’ll leave the last word to Tory MP Douglas Carswell, not someone Liberal Democrats would normally agree with, who expresses a universal truth about political participation:

“The Conservative Party has haemorrhaged members since 2005, but my own association in Clacton has massively expanded its membership. Instead of treating the membership as the enemy, the modernisers should respect them as shareholders,” he said.

“If you treat the membership as the problem, you will eventually end up with a membership of one.”

Queen’s Speech amendment: “an act of venal self indulgence”

Former Tory MP Jerry Hayes is usually worth reading and his verdict on those Tories backing the Queen’s Speech amendment is no exception:

The amendment to the Queen’s Speech could be the beginning of the end of the Conservatives in office. It is an act of venal self indulgence which will horrify those sentient members of the electorate who actually think and care and will antagonise those who fear for their jobs and families.

What is it meant to achieve? No parliament can bind another. But this amendment doesn’t even try to. It is just an expression of regret that the government’s legislative programme doesn’t mention a referendum. Most Labour MPs and all Lib Dems will vote against so it will be defeated.

What a thoroughly futile and pointless exercise. And according to some MPs this is just the beginning.

So apart from making them all look like incompetent fools more interested in a stunt to save their own miserable skins it is a gift to the Faragistas.

Hayes’s views (which once would have been a mainstream Tory perspective) now seem like a voice in the wilderness. No wonder he is exasperated with his former colleagues:

This freak show has got to stop. But it will get worse. This is a gift for Farage giving him a sense of importance that is totally unwarranted.

But this whole farce is just beginning to gain momentum. The Onanistic wing of the Tory Party are now pressing for a referendum on gay marriage. Completely nuts.

Hayes recognises something that eludes most fanatical eurosceptics. In all the grandiose talk about what the Great British Public thinks about the European Union, an important fact is forgotten. Most of the Great British Public couldn’t give a flying fuck one way or the other.

Tory membership plummets

Buried within a bigoted report in the Daily Express about gay marriage is an interesting fact: membership of the Conservative Party has fallen from 400,000 to 130,000.

Given the sharp fall in Liberal Democrat membership, there is no reason to feel smug. Even so, the fact that some senior Tories think their loss of members is due to gay marriage shows the extent to which they have been unnerved by UKIP.

Although many Tories dislike gay marriage, is there not a more plausible reason for the decline in their membership? The average age of Tory members is so high that they might simply be dying of natural causes.

Meanwhile, in a distant galaxy far, far away, there is a bizarre news report about Liberal Democrat MP Sir Bob Russell. Three Eddie Stobart trucks have been named after his wife, daughter and granddaughter. It turns out that Sir Bob has been a member of the Eddie Stobart Fan Club for twenty years. This fan club has no fewer than 25,000 members, which is equivalent to 59% of the Liberal Democrats’ membership (42,500 at the end of last year).

The price of everything and the value of nothing

It’s official. The Secretary of State for Culture is a philistine.

Maria Miller will deliver a speech at the British Museum today:

British culture should be presented as a “commodity” and “compelling product” to sell at home and abroad, the culture secretary, Maria Miller, will argue in her first speech on the arts since taking up the job in September.

It has taken Miller seven months since becoming culture secretary to deliver a speech setting out her philosophy, and it turns out that she knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It is this economistic outlook that is the true heritage of Margaret Thatcher. Instead of attacking the corpse of a dead prime minister, critics should focus on the zombie of her ideas.

Thatcherism is not a Thousand Year Reich

In today’s Guardian, John Harris wonders what happened to that extinct species, the One Nation Tory. He finds a revealing statement by Margaret Thatcher (quoted in a book by Ian Gilmour, one of her cabinet ‘wets’):

“Do not say it is time for something else! Thatcherism is not for a decade. It is for centuries!”

Thatcher said this in 1990, towards the end of her premiership when she was already going round the bend. Nevertheless, the idea that Thatcherism is permanent or inevitable is widely held, even among her opponents.

The apologias by juvenile right-wingers among the comments on Liberal Democrat Voice are only to be expected, but others who ought to know better have been equally fatalistic. Here for example is Paddy Ashdown, speaking in last week’s debate in the House of Lords:

At the time when she did those things, they needed to be done.

Historical inevitability? I never knew Paddy was a Marxist.

More often, inevitability is cloaked in a false notion of pragmatism, where the Thatcher settlement is viewed as so permanent as to be beyond ideology. This has led to the current fad for managerialism, which suggests that most mainstream politicians have given up on offering real political choice.

There is a difference between agreeing with Thatcher and being mesmerised by her. It is time for people to snap out of it.

In politics, nothing is inevitable or permanent. If that were the case, there would be no need for politics. We always have a choice and, the sooner that is recognised, the healthier our politics will be.

‘Unease’ about Osborne is not good enough

“Lib Dems attack Osborne for ‘playing politics’ over Philpott” says the front-page headline in today’s Guardian.

But the story beneath does not justify the hype. What does this “Lib Dem attack” actually consist of? According to the Guardian:

A coalition rift was blown into the open when the Liberal Democrats condemned George Osborne for “playing politics” with the deaths of six children after the chancellor highlighted the Mick Philpott case to raise questions about high welfare payments.

Amid deep unease among senior Lib Dems – up to and including Nick Clegg – over the Conservatives’ use of the deaths of six children to make the case for controversial welfare reforms, the party went out of its way to distance itself from the chancellor’s remarks.

Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, who is usually careful not to criticise the chancellor, made clear his unease. “The Philpott case is an individual tragedy,” he said. “Children have died in that case. I think that is where we should let that case lie. I would not want to connect that to the much wider need to reform our welfare system.”

So this is not an attack, merely “deep unease”. Furthermore, only one Liberal Democrat minister (Danny Alexander) has gone on the record, and his remarks are guarded. The only evidence we have for the “deep unease” of other ministers “up to and including Nick Clegg” is unattributable briefings. This doesn’t much sound like “a coalition rift was blown into the open” or that “the party went out of its way to distance itself from the chancellor’s remarks”. In fact, it doesn’t amount to much at all.

The Guardian’s report includes only one genuine Liberal Democrat attack:

In the most hard hitting remarks by a Lib Dem, the party’s former Treasury spokesman accused the chancellor of playing politics with the deaths. Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay said: “You can forgive George Osborne’s immaturity and inexperience as chancellor but not this calculating, callous cruelty. If he can’t see it is wrong to play politics with the death of six children, he is not fit to be chancellor.”

Oakeshott, who acts as an informal adviser to the business secretary Vince Cable, often does not reflect the thinking of the leadership. But Cable is understood to feel that vilifying people on benefits in the way Osborne has done is misplaced.

That’s more like it. Except that Oakeshott is not a member of the government but an outspoken backbench peer known for his off-message remarks. The only other prominent Liberal Democrat to condemn Osborne publicly is Sarah Teather – again, not a member of the government but an ex-minister.

Osborne’s statement is morally disgusting and has poisoned discourse on a controversial subject. Yet the best that Liberal Democrat ministers can do is express their “deep unease” or feelings that Osborne’s view is “misplaced”, and only then via their spokespeople’s unattributable briefings.

If Liberal Democrat ministers had openly expressed their revulsion in similar terms to Matthew Oakeshott, the Guardian’s headline would have been justified. As it is, we must conclude that there is no “rift” in the coalition, barely a ripple.

The balance of Cameron’s competences

France and Germany have decided to have nothing to do with David Cameron’s review of the powers of the European Union. And they are quite right.

They consider that the UK government’s ‘review of the balance of competencies’, launched at the insistence of the Conservative half of the coalition, is a “domestic political exercise”, which it plainly is. If several EU member states had agreed that a comprehensive review were necessary, this project would have some legitimacy, but they haven’t, so it doesn’t.

The sole purpose of this review is to enable the British Conservative Party to mollify its eurosceptic wing sufficiently to avoid an internal split, while fending off the electoral threat from UKIP. To propose a review on these parochial grounds is imperial conceit of the highest order. Does anyone seriously believe that any sort of fundamental constitutional review for a 27-member union should be based primarily on the selfish needs of just one party in one member state?

France and Germany also point out, quite rightly, that you cannot have an “à la carte” approach to EU membership. When you join a club, you must abide by its rules. Of course, all the member states have a say in what those rules should be. The UK, as one of the larger member states, has more say than most, or would if the Tories were not so maladroit at making friends and influencing people.

The British Tories would rather the EU were simply a loose, free trade area. If that is what they really want, they need to build a coalition behind it by mobilising allies across the EU. Instead, they pulled out of the main right-wing bloc in the EU (the EPP, the largest group in the European Parliament) and formed a rival right-wing bloc (the ECR, a rag-bag of “nutters and homophobes” – Nick Clegg’s words, not ours).

And anyway, why should France and Germany care what David Cameron thinks? They know that he is unlikely to be able to leap all the hurdles he has set himself and won’t be around for much longer. As John Palmer points out:

The survey [the UK government’s review] is one part of a carefully orchestrated campaign designed to lead up to a possible referendum on EU membership, to be held towards the end of 2017. This, of course, will be well after the next general election and is designed to follow on what London expects will be a major new EU constitutional treaty to give the Euro area sweeping new powers.

The prime minister’s strategy therefore depends on him successfully clearing three critical hurdles. First: survive as leader of the Conservative party up to the general election. Second: win the next UK election with a clear overall Tory majority. Third: trading demands for the UK to be given a special semi-detached status in the EU in return for not blocking a new treaty for euro-area economic and political union.

There are obvious question marks over all three stages.

The irony is that all this nationalist posturing by the Tories is actually harming the national interest. As this morning’s Guardian leader argues, it is marginalising Britain and diminishing its influence. But then the Tories are so short-sighted and unimaginative that symbols of national pride matter more to them than the substance of national influence.

Tonight on BBC2 – it’s the Boris Johnson Show!

If you enjoyed the car-crash television of Eddie Mair’s interview yesterday with the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, another treat is in store.

Tonight (Monday) at 9pm, BBC2 will broadcast a documentary by Michael Cockerell, Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise. Boris’s sister and father are amongst those spilling the beans.

The idea that Boris would replace David Cameron as Tory leader and prime minister was always rather fanciful. After these two programmes, it is doubtful any bookie would even bother offering long odds.

Later... An interesting analysis by Sunny Hundal, which predicts that Sunday’s interview will open the floodgates.

This time the Tories have gone too far

The Tories have done some pretty appalling things lately, including a dogmatic insistence on austerity policies, NHS reforms and calls to repeal the Human Rights Act. But they have finally done something so vile and disgusting that it is doubtful the coalition can survive.

I refer of course to the decision by Tory-controlled Mid Devon District Council to abolish the apostrophe.

You can tell how bad things are when even a local greengrocer complains: “The apostrophe is part of the English language so I think it should be upheld.”

The North Devon Journal reports that the rot has spread to the neighbouring district councils of Torridge and North Devon.

The Plain English Campaign can be trusted to judge what constitutes clear language:

Steve Jenner, from the Plain English Campaign, said punctuation, including the apostrophe, was one of the basic rules of language and he described the council’s decision as “nonsensical”.

The council’s justification is bizarre:

A statement from the council said: “Our proposed policy on street naming and numbering covers a whole host of practical issues, many of which are aimed at reducing potential confusion over street names.”

However, it declined to comment further and did not elaborate on who might be confused by the use of correct punctuation.

The Guardian’s report gives a good indication of not only the Tory council leader’s grasp of good English but also his IQ:

Council leader Peter Hare-Scott (with a hyphen), was not amused by the attention his authority was receiving.

He said it had long been practice for apostrophes to be left off signs. What was happening now was that the authority was discussing a policy that formalised the arrangement.

“There’s not really a story here,” he said. “Doesn’t the Plain English Society have better things to do like improving grammar in schools?” Asked if he was a fan of the apostrophe personally, he replied simply: “I am a fan of good English.”

Does this story have any serious political consequences? It does when the Tories lose the support of both the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph offers its readers one crumb of comfort, though:

The policy may be greeted with alarm by residents of a neighbouring Devon district – but Torridge council said it had no plans to abolish the exclamation mark from the village of Westward Ho!

Tory Twat of the Week

The award this week goes to Tory MP David Burrowes, who...

...has written to the attorney general, Dominic Grieve QC, asking him to review the eight-month sentences imposed on Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce on the grounds that they are “unduly lenient”.

Whatever you think of the conduct of Huhne and Pryce, or the sentences handed down, it is quite obvious that Burrowes’s request is spurious. To exploit this case for self-publicity is pretty dismal conduct, but presumably Burrowes imagines this odious behaviour will somehow counter his deserved obscurity.

Meanwhile, in today’s Guardian, Simon Jenkins gets to the heart of the matter:

The truth is that we have so few ways of making power answer for its misdeeds that we grab hold of any stick that will do. There is virtually no accountability for incompetence in office beyond the ballot.

...since we cannot charge such people for things that affect us, we must charge them for things that do not. The ministerial lies that cascade daily over the dispatch box are left as lies. The human lives that are wrecked by unnecessary recessions and pointless wars are dismissed as just too bad. We can rant at our politicians in fury, but there is nothing we can do beyond silently vote them out after five years.

So we attack the powerful for their private failings, and pretend these reflect on their public duties. We hound their marriages and their finances. We jail them for cheating on expenses, since we cannot jail them for cheating on the country. If they swear at policemen we stake out their homes and shout abuse through their windows.

I am sure Mr Justice Sweeney is no different. He would love to get his orotund tongue round the tax dodgers, Libor riggers, planning fiddlers and energy swindlers. But he cannot, so he too must resort to damning a couple of bit players in the great game who fell foul of a speed trap.

We are back in the middle ages. We subject rulers to trial by combat and ordeal. We force them to “carry the hot iron” or “swallow the blessed morsel”. We make them pass tests of purity and honesty we would never pass ourselves. When they fail, we crucify them. The reason is banal. It is that we cannot get at them any other way.

Not unless we call on David Burrowes MP for some gratuitous comment, of course.

Lest we forget...

The reason we are Liberals. The reason we are not Tories. The need to oppose this sort of thing.

The source of the Tories’ problems

The Tories’ poor result in Eastleigh last night is a manifestation of a deeper problem: the party no longer knows what it is for.

As Robin McGhee points out in a perceptive blog for Prospect magazine, the basic issue isn’t the split over Europe:

Conservatism in 2013 faces an existential problem: how can it reconcile free markets with traditional values? As the Conservative party shuffles meekly towards electoral demolition, this intellectual imbalance can only become more damaging.

A evidence for the prosecution, McGhee examines a recent pamphlet Britannia Unchained, written by five MPs (led by Kwasi Kwarteng) from the Tories’ young, thrusting, market-fundamentalist wing:

In common with many political works that purport to be patriotic, Britannia Unchained displays an amazing contempt for the average British citizen. They are stupid, selfish, indolent, lazy and ignorant. They drink, eat, sleep and die too much. Conservatism, in anything resembling its traditional form, embraces all Britons with its respect for the traditions of liberty that have benefited them. Kwarteng & co only seem to be interested in squeezing every atom of productivity from the beleaguered population so that we can “compete” with countries like India and China, which benefit from vastly greater resources of land and labour. “Too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work,” the MPs claim. Well, good. That shows they are human and able to enjoy life.

The creative destruction of life’s pleasures for the good of economic indicators is not a conservative position. It is the opposite: completely without regard for traditions that do not hasten the advance of capitalism. Kwarteng and his co-authors are apparently unable to grasp this.

A conservative “moral idea” has been abandoned in a ruthless drive for economic competition. So much so that one wonders whether there are any conservatives left in the Conservative Party at all. Certainly a traditional conservative no longer has much moral incentive to vote Conservative.

This is what happens when political parties abandon their guiding principles for managerialism or economism. But then one suspects that politicians like Kwasi Kwarteng and his co-authors – who know the price of everything and the value of nothing – don’t really mind. After all, political ideology is so twentieth century.

Bankers’ bonuses: Liberals 1 Tories 0

The EU proposal to cap bankers’ bonuses has received predictable opposition from David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

The willingness of the Tories to continue to defend the selfish interests of the bankers who caused the global financial crisis seems to know no bounds.

So it is good to hear Sharon Bowles, Liberal Democrat MEP and chair of the European Parliament’s most powerful committee, the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, strike the right note:

“Overall, this is a major achievement for [the European] Parliament, in curbing the culture of quick profit and irresponsible lending that has played such a pernicious role in fuelling Europe's banking crisis.”

Meanwhile, if the Tories are right, and a few irresponsible and overpaid arseholes flee to Singapore or Zurich, good riddance.