Canadian Cincinnatus

Sharia Law enforcement in London, England

This news clip from London is about a bunch of Muslim clerics who are now starting to enforce Sharia law on the streets in neighbourhoods with large Muslim populations, complete with signs declaring “Sharia controlled zone” and street-level enforcers of Sharia law.

At 1:11 of the clip, you can see a one of these enforcers comes with red hair and fuzzy red beard. In other words, he is not a Muslim by birth but is a native Briton. If there is one category of people I despise it is traitors. Islamofascists are at war with the West and England, and this twit takes their side against civilization – his civilization. He belongs to the same tribe as Winston Churchill, Sir Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare and he renounces his heritage for third-world barbarism. Fie.

Of course, when guilt-addled anti-west multiculturalism is taught in western schools, the danger is that some of the schoolkids will actually believe the claptrap.

On a more positive note, the last third of the clip depicts Londoners fighting back against the barbarians in their midst, from the police to ordinary citizens. I think as time goes on, the average people of the UK will be taking an increasingly tough line on this kind of nonsense.

 

 

Call for right to bear arms in UK after riots

This comment from the Telegraph’s Nile Gardiner:

“During the Los Angeles riots in 1992, many store owners in the south central part of the city defended their property against marauding gangs with their own weapons... And across the country, Americans admired their bravery, thankful for the Second Amendment to the US Constitution which protects their right to keep and bear arms, and thereby defend themselves, their families and their property. In contrast in London in 2011, shopkeepers were left at the mercy of feral, brutal thugs acting with impunity across whole swathes of the capital as the police were overwhelmed. If they had the right to bear arms and defend their stores with force, it would have been a very different story, and brutal looters would have met firm resistance.

Britain’s gun laws are among the most draconian in the world, yet the nation has some of the highest levels of violent crime and burglary in the West, and there is no shortage of gun crime in major cities such as London and Manchester. While criminal gangs are often able to acquire firearms on the black market, ordinary law-abiding British citizens are barred from owning guns for self-defence.” 

Remember, the right to keep and bear arms has little to do with punching holes in paper targets or shooting ducks. It is about the most basic human right of all: the right to defend yourself, your family and your property.

At stake is whether you are a free man or a pawn.

 

The anarchist violence in the UK

Nick Cohen of the Spectator gets it:

As for the anarchists, let us be honest and acknowledge political violence is not always futile. If there isn’t violence, the media will give only perfunctory coverage to a demonstration, something that ought to worry my colleagues more than it does. Today’s proponents of breaking the law and scaring shop girls can also say that riots and a mass refusal to pay destroyed the poll tax in Mrs. Thatcher's day. I am sure readers can throw the moral argument against political violence in a democracy in their faces, but for me the decisive point is that by the time of the protests against the poll tax exploded, virtually everyone in Britain except Mrs. Thatcher had accepted the case against it.

I have long noted that many political strategists suffer from the desire to prefer politically correct shibboleths over cold, unpleasant truths. For instance, many believe that political violence doesn’t work. While it true that middle class voters are repelled by the sight of professional left-wing vandals ritualistically fighting in the street, history nevertheless teaches us that political violence is also an effective way of getting what you want. Many people can be scared into ‘going along to get along’ with an idea that they may be repulsed by. Cowards and thugs – not a pretty picture of society, but one paid political realists should acknowledge more than they actually do.

None of the foregoing analysis is made to justify political violence. When the left equates rioting with political speech, they have it exactly backwards: rioting is the negation of political speech; it is the negation of democracy; it is the negation of a civil society. My purpose in this article is only to point out the frightening fact that political violence does work, and more often than we acknowledge. Which is all the more reason to ruthlessly crush it when it happens.

David Cameron is John Tory

David Cameron started with a 28% lead in the polls 6 months ago and was barely able to eke out a minority government. Why? Because his positioning of the Conservative party was perfectly wrong. In other words, his wounds were self inflicted, just like John Tory’s were in the last Ontario election when everybody was sick of the Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty but Tory managed to make the election a referendum on funding religious schools.

David Cameron’s Big Idea when he took the helm was to make the Conservative Party more ‘warm and fuzzy’ to broaden the Conservative big tent. To further this goal, he embraced environmentalism, calling the Conservatives the real green party. Then the economy crashed and the expense scandal hit. As a result, anti-incumbent fever swept the electorate and the voters’ minds concentrated on the economy. Euroscepticism was popular too. A perfect environment for traditional conservative values: small, modest government, patriotism, anti-EU policies, Margaret Thatcheresque tax cuts and deregulation, and a dismantling of the PC police state that grew by leaps and bounds under Cool Britannia. Cameron hit all of these themes – eventually, but by then his credibility was weak.

The voters wanted a change and Cameron offered them Tweedlededum instead of Tweedlededee. In the middle of a perilous crisis, Britons were given a choice between three establishment candidates offering minor variations on the status quo.

It never ceases to amaze me how Red Tories on both sides of the Atlantic keep insisting that their watered-down brand of conservatism is the ticket to electoral success, even though the voters keep handing their lunch to them. The Red Tory bargain is to trade principle for electoral success. The trouble is, a lot of the time you end up with neither. Red Tories are often a failure, even on their own terms. 

Gordon Brown might even beat David Cameron!

Politically, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown should be a dead man walking. Anti-incumbent fever in the UK is as high as it is in the US right now. All the chickens of 13 years of Labour rule have come home to roost: sky high debt, out-of-control spending, tax hikes, an arrogant and corrupt political class, a seething mass of hostile unassimilated immigrants topped off by a nanny state that harasses the law-abiding citizen at every turn with big brother cams and a constellation petty ordinances while being, at the same time, impotent when confronted by real criminals. As recently as a few months ago, it looked like Gordon Brown was cruising to a historic defeat. But it seems, things have turned around for Mr. Brown. According to Bloomberg:

A YouGov Plc poll gave the Conservatives the support of 37 percent of voters, down two percentage points, and Labour the backing of 35 percent, up two. The uneven distribution of votes across districts means this would leave the incumbent Labour Party with the most seats, about nine short of a Parliamentary majority, said the Sunday Times which published the poll.

The trouble is, even a loser needs somebody to lose to. 

For years, David Cameron has been touting himself as the Tony Blair of the Conservatives. Unfortunately, what the Conservatives - and Great Britain - need now is another Margaret Thatcher.

“Cameron has a very hard time appealing to the working class of the UK. What many people remember is that Margaret Thatcher, another prime minister who came in after a run of Labour government, appealed to the working classes. Some of her appeal came from her humble background. (Thatcher is the daughter of a green grocer.)

Cameron, on the other hand, is straight from the pages of P. G. Wodehouse. … He is a direct descendant of Queen Victoria’s uncle, King William IV, and his mother was the daughter of a baronet.”

“While Cameron speaks of less government and more freedom, his policies can be seen as patrician and nannying. His policy on raising taxes on cheap beer to prevent “anti-social behavior” will not go over well with those already suffering greatly in the weak economy. The fact this policy was announced at conference while delegates and MPs alike quaffed champagne was a bonus for his opponents”

 On the huge tax increase that Labour Party is set to implement this year, Cameron says that “he will not – at least in the beginning - do anything about it. He merely holds out hope that he will be able to reduce the top rate before the end of his first term.”

One of Cameron’s innovations was to reinvent the Conservatives as Britain’s green party. This has not gone over well:

The Ipsos-Mori Issues Index, which has been running for decades and is well respected, suggests that “pollution/environment” (a category that includes climate change and other issues) ranks 11th, with just 7 percent of the British public ranking it is an important issue. By contrast, 67 percent consider the economy an important issue, 32 percent say the same about crime, and 25 percent say that about race relations and immigration. Only 2 percent cited pollution or the environment as the most important issue facing Britain today.

As a result:

The political failure of David Cameron’s environmentalism has been reflected in the Conservative party’s serial shifting of its position. The party had promoted the slogan, “pay as you burn, not pay as you earn,” but has now retreated from green taxes. Most of the Tories’ more radical environmental policies have been quietly dropped — including forcing supermarkets to charge for parking spaces and halting all road widening and airport expansion.

Unfortunately, however, the Tory leadership continues to support measures that will hit people’s pocketbooks without their knowing, and such policies are already taking a huge toll on British families and businesses. For example, according to government estimates, the average British home electric bill has already increased by 14 percent due to climate-change policies.

 Then there is the intrusive Lisbon Treaty, which Labour signed with the EU:

“A survey of party members by The Sunday Telegraph yesterday found widespread unhappiness over the Tory leader's decision to ditch his promise to hold a referendum on the controversial treaty on the grounds that it will be law within weeks.”

“Constituency officials said many members were ‘really angry’ and felt ‘let down’ by Mr. Cameron, who said last week that such a vote would be a ‘a waste of time and money’.”

“The former party donors Lord Kalms and Stuart Wheeler, who now back UKIP, also predicted that Mr. Cameron will lose support.”

The UKIP is the UK Independence Party, a respectable anti-EU political party that appeals to conservative voters. Cameron’s indecisiveness will ensure that Conservative voters continue to bleed to them. Cameron should have learned the lessons of John Howard’s third majority win in Australia. Howard’s Liberal party increased its share of the vote even though the opposition Labour party’s share increased at the same time. How did Howard do it? By co-opting enough agenda items of Australia’s fringe conservative parties, their voters voted for him instead. Cameron’s approach is to reverse the process.

Like John Tory’s run to replace Dalton McGuinty as premier of Ontario, this election is David Cameron’s to lose, and he is doing his best to lose it.

The worst part of it is that if the British Conservative Party were led by somebody bold and able, the opportunity exists now to deliver such a crushing defeat to Labour that the British political landscape would be shifted permanently, with the Liberal Party rising up again to replace Labour as the UK’s other party.

The rise of the BNP in Great Britain

Warning signs have been growing about the increase in popularity of the British National Party (BNP), a group with significant National Socialist leanings. In the last round of elections to the EU parliament, two BNP candidates were elected. In a recent poll, 20% of Britons say that they will consider voting for this party. And the political classes do not know what to do about it.

The political classes are, of course, precisely the problem.

The reason such an extreme party has come from nowhere to be a contender is that they are able to cater an underserved market –white working class people. This group used to vote Labour overwhelmingly but the paths of England’s working people and the Labour Party has diverged in the past 20 years. The Labour Party was at one with the working class in the 1920’s and 30’s when the predominant problem facing workers was the stratified class structure in Great Britain (and most of Europe). Labour was the party of workers, the Liberals were the party of the middle class and the Conservatives were the party of the aristocracy. As a result, the rhetoric and issues championed by the Labour party reflected this fact. We in North America cannot imagine how much of a problem this was for ordinary people back then, not ever having a formal class structure. But to working class Britons in the 1930’s, the class structure was to them what Jim Crow was to blacks in the Southern US in the same time period.

However times change, and so has the Labour Party - and so has the white working class. These days, working class whites are worried about a different form of apartheid: affirmative action. They are also increasingly at odds with the Muslim underclass whose numbers grow as they become ever more truculent and less interested in assimilating with English society. Britain’s working people feel a genuine patriotism for their English heritage and worry about the EU’s encroachment on English sovereignty, a patriotism which the multi-culti Labourites increasingly hold in open disdain. This was made clear in recent revelations in the Telegraph, where a Labour party operative admitted that “Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country.” In short, Labour politicians decided to choose a different set of voters, one they felt would be more congenial than their previous supporters, the indigenous working classes. This has created the situation where new Labour voters are at odds with old Labour voters. In contrast, the Labour aristocracy is above the fracas because they largely live in Tony flats in the fashionable quarters of London, where their love of immigrants can remain safely theoretical. Working class whites have increasingly come to the inescapable conclusion that Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’ doesn’t include them. They are the uncool in Britain.

In the US, a similar process has also occurred, but the Republicans have generally picked up the slack when the Dem’s moved on. For instance, the coal miners in West Virginia used to be the staunchest Democrats. But when then-presidential candidate Al Gore promised to take away their guns and ban coal in the 2000 election, they switched to the GOP and haven’t returned. If West Virginia had stayed Democrat, the recount in Florida would have been irrelevant.

Has this happened in the UK? Have the Conservatives picked up the working class votes that Labour has discarded? Sort of, at least under Margaret Thatcher. In spite of her free market philosophy that was at odds with their trade union institutions, working people at least knew where she stood on cultural issues. With things like the Falkland Islands war, you know Mrs. Thatcher was an English patriot. When Tony Blair remade Labour into his own image, he kept the free market policies but canned all the patriotism stuff – the worst of both worlds from the perspective of the working class. And David Cameron, the new leader of the Conservatives? He apes Tony Blair the way Blair copied Thatcher, except that Cameron is closer to Blair than Blair ever was to Thatcher. Cameron’s big idea for revitalizing the Conservatives last year was making the Conservatives the green party of the UK.

So from the perspective of working class whites, the major parties in Britain today are Tweedledee and Tweedlededum, neither of which represents their interests.

As far as minor parties go, the Liberal Democrats are another identical choice. There is also the UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party. However, this reasonable anti-EU party has been unjustly tarred for so long with the ‘fascist’ label that a real fascist anti-EU party has come along – the BNP - and they are doing well.

This is what happens when the leaders of the liberal order (both Conservative and Labour) become insular and corrupt. The only way the BNP threat can be eliminated is if the Conservatives start challenging the increasingly unsustainable status quo and begin to offer real solutions to the working people’s legitimate problems. The Conservatives don’t have to go all the way. Deep down, people don’t want to vote for extremist fringe parties but they do vote for them when they are desperate and no one else will listen to them. If the Conservatives acknowledge 80% of their grievances, they will happily vote Tory because the Conservatives have the respectability that the BNP lacks.

This is what John Howard did when he won his fourth term as Prime Minister in 2004. He was able to increase his share of the popular vote by 3.4% even though the voter share of his principal opponent – Labour – hardly budged. He got those votes from the fringe parties, whose supporters flocked to Howard’s strong leadership and his red meat platform.

Can the Conservative Party of Great Britain do the same? Well, the first obstacle is their leader, David Cameron, who is temperamentally disinclined to go that route. So I guess we will see more of the BNP in the future.

UK libertarian’s speech sends David Cameron Conservatives to the fainting couch

The following speech has been making the rounds on the blogosphere. Normally when I encounter a good passage, I will link to it and only post some of the choice cuts. However in this case, if I did that I would end up quoting almost all of it anyway because there is so much good stuff in it, and because most of the advice he offers the British Conservatives is germane to the John Tory and Stephen Harper Conservatives as well.

So without further ado, here it is:

Text of a Speech to Conservative Future,
Given in The Old Star Public House, Westminster,
Monday the 16th February 2009
by Sean Gabb

I’d like to begin by praising your courage in having me here tonight to speak to you. I am the Director of an organisation that tried hard during the 1980s to take over the youth movement of the Conservative Party. The Libertarian Alliance provided a home and other support for Marc-Henri Glendenning, David Hoile and Douglas Smith, among others, when it looked as if libertarians might do the same to the Conservative Party as the Trotskyites nearly did to the Labour Party. Sadly, our efforts failed. Since then, the Conservative Party has become more watchful of people like us. It has also, I must say, made itself progressively less worth trying to take over.

I did say that I would come here and be rude to you. But that would be a poor thanks for your hospitality. Besides, while your party leadership has consistently ignored my advice during the past twelve years - and has, in consequence, been out of office during this time - there is no point in dwelling on what might have been. We are where we are, and I think it would be useful for me very briefly to outline my advice to a future Conservative Government.

Now, this is not advice to the Government that looks set to be formed within the next year or so my David Cameron. I may be wrong. It is possible that Mr Cameron is a much cleverer and more Machiavellian man that I have ever thought him, and that he plans to make radical changes once in office. But I do not think he is. I think what little he is promising to do is the very most that he will do. In any event, he is doing nothing to acquire the mandate without which radical change would lack legitimacy. And so this is advice that I offer to some future government of conservatives, rather than to any prospective Conservative Government. It may even be a government formed by the people in this room.

My first piece of advice is to understand the nature of your enemy. If you come into government, you will be in at least the same position as Ramsay MacDonald, when he formed the first Labour Government in the 1920s. He faced an Establishment that was broadly conservative. The administration, the media, the universities, big business - all were hostile to what it was believed he wanted to do. The first Labour Governments were in office, but not fully in power, as they were not accepted by the people with whom and through whom they had to rule the country. To a lesser degree, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson faced the same constraints. A future Conservative Government will find much the same.

Over the past few generations, a new Establishment or ruling class has emerged in this country. It is a loose coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, media people and associated business interests. These are people who derive income and status from an enlarged and activist state. They have been turning this country into a soft-totalitarian police state. They are not always friendly to a Labour Government. But their natural political home is the Labour Party. They will accept a Conservative Government on sufferance - but only so long as it works within a system that robs ordinary people of their wealth and their freedom. They will never consent to what should be the Conservative strategy of bringing about an irreversible transfer of power from the State back into the hands or ordinary people.

A Cameron Government, as I have said, seems willing to try coexistence with the Establishment. The Thatcher Government set out to fight and defeat an earlier and less confident version of the Establishment - but only on those fronts where its policies were most resisted. It won numerous battles, but, we can now see, it lost the war. For example, I well remember the battle over abolition of the Greater London Council. This appeared at the time a success. But I am not aware of one bureaucrat who lost his job at the GLC who was not at once re-employed by one of the London Boroughs or by some other agency of the State. And we know that Ken Livingstone was eventually restored to power in London.

If you want to win the battle for this country, you need to take advice from the Marxists. These are people whose ends were evil where not impossible. But they were experts in the means to their ends. They knew more than we have ever thought about the seizure and retention of power. I therefore say this to you. If you ever do come to power, and if you want to bring about the irreversible transfer of power to ordinary people, you should take to heart what Marx said in 1871, after the failure of the Paris Commune: “the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people’s revolution.”

The meaning of this is that you should not try to work with the Establishment. You should not try to jolly it along. You should not try fighting it on narrow fronts. You must regard it as the enemy, and you must smash it.

On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to privatise the BBC. This would simply be to transfer the voice of your enemy from the public to the private sector, where it might be more effective in its opposition. You must shut it down - and shut it down at once. You should do the same with much of the administration. The Foreign Office, much of the Home Office, the Commission for Racial Equality, anything to do with health and safety and planning and child protection - I mean much of the public sector - these should be shut down. If at the end of your first month in power, you have not shut down half of the State, you are failing. If you have shut down half the State, you have made a step in the right direction, and are ready for still further cuts.

Let me emphasise that the purpose of these cuts would not be to save money for the taxpayers or lift an immense weight of bureaucracy from their backs - though they would do this. The purpose is to destroy the Establishment before it can destroy you. You must tear up the web of power and personal connections that make these people effective as an opposition to radical change. If you do this, you will face no more clamour than if you moved slowly and half-heartedly. Again, I remember to campaign against the Thatcher “cuts”. There were no cuts, except in the rate of growth of state spending. You would never have thought this from the torrent of protests that rolled in from the Establishment and its clients. And so my advice is to go ahead and make real cuts - and be prepared to set the police on anyone who dares riot against you.

I fail to see how you would face any electoral problems with this approach. Most Conservative voters would welcome tax cuts and a return to freedom. As for those who lost their jobs, they do not, nor ever will, vote Conservative.

Following from this, however, I advise you to leave large areas of the welfare state alone. It is regrettable, but most people in this country do like the idea of healthcare free at the point of use, and of free education, and of pensions and unemployment benefit. These must go in the long term. But they must be retained in the short term to maintain electoral support. Their cost and methods of provision should be examined. But cutting welfare provision would be politically unwise in the early days of our revolution.

I have already spoken longer than I intended. But one more point is worth making. This is that we need to look again at our constitutional arrangements. The British Constitution has always been a fancy dress ball at which ordinary people were not really welcome, but which served to protect the life, liberty and property of ordinary people. Some parts of this fancy dress ball continue, but they no longer serve their old purpose. They are a fig leaf for an increasingly grim administrative despotism. I was, until recently, a committed monarchist. I now have to admit that the Queen has spent the past half century breaking her Coronation Oath at every opportunity. The only documents she has ever seemed reluctant to sign are personal cheques. Conservatives need to remember that our tradition extends not only through Edmund Burke to the Cavaliers, but also through Tom Paine to Oliver Cromwell. We live in an age where it is necessary to be radical to be conservative.

But I have now spoken quite long enough, and I am sure you have much to say in response. I therefore thank you again for your indulgence in having invited me and the politeness with which you have heard me.

[A combination of silence and faint applause]

Comment 1: You accuse the Conservatives of having ignored you for twelve years. From what you have just said, it is a good thing you were ignored. Under David Cameron’s leadership, we have a Conservative Party that is now positively desired by the people. Your advice is and would have been a recipe for permanent opposition.

Response: I disagree. There is no positive desire for a Conservative Government. If there were, the polls would be showing a consistent fifty point lead or something. What we have is a Labour Government that is so dreadful that I have trouble thinking what could be worse.

There are two ways of doing politics. One is to listen to focus groups and opinion polls, and offer the people what they claim to want. The other is to stand up and tell them what they ought to want, and to keep arguing until the people agree that they want it, or until it is shown not to be worth wanting. I think I know what sort of politicians will run the next Conservative Government. What sort of politicians do you want to be?

Comment 2 [from an Irishman]: What you are saying means that the country would be without protection against obvious evils. With no child protection services, children would be abused and murdered. Without planning controls, the countryside would soon be covered with concrete. Without planning controls, cities like Manchester would be far less attractive places.

I will also say, as an Irishman, that I am offended by your reference to Oliver Cromwell, who was a murderer and tyrant. You cannot approve of this man.

Response: You have been taken in by the Establishment’s propaganda. This is to insist that we live with vast structures of oppression, or that we must accept the evils they are alleged to curb. I say that that these structures do not curb any evils, but instead create evils of their own. We have, for example, seventy thousand social workers in this country. They appear to have done a consistently rotten job at protecting the few children who need protecting. Instead, they are taking children away from grandparents to give to strangers, and are setting the police onto dissenting ministers who allow their children to climb onto the roof. None of this should be surprising. The Children Act and other laws have created a bureaucratic sausage machine that must somehow be filled. I say let it be destroyed along with all else that is evil in our system of government.

[What I might have said, but was too polite to say: As for Oliver Cromwell, he was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. It is partly thanks to him that we have just had around three centuries of freedom and political stability. When you refer to his actions in Ireland, you are repeating Fenian propaganda. What he did in Ireland has been exaggerated by the enemies of England, and in any event was in keeping with the customs of war universally admitted in his own time. If you want to throw an offended fit every time an Englishman in London praises an English hero to other Englishmen, you should consider moving to Dublin where all the letter boxes have been painted a reassuring green, and your own national sensitivities never need be offended again.]

Comment 3: All you speak about is winning and the destruction of enemies. Yet you are willing to consider keeping the welfare state. You are nothing but an unprincipled trouble maker. Thank God the Conservative Party no longer has any place for people like you.

Response: If we were facing the sort of Labour Government we had under Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, you would be right. However, we have an Establishment that has already given us the beginnings of a totalitarian police state. Today, for example, the authorities will start collecting details of every telephone call, text and e-mail sent in this country. Children are about to have their details stuffed into a giant database that will enable them to be monitored by the authorities until they are adults - and probably through their entire lives. We live in a country were privacy is being abolished. Speech is increasingly unfree. The police are out of control. Everything is getting rapidly worse, and it is easy to see the end state that is desired, or total control.

If a government of radical conservatives ever does take power, it will have one attempt at saving this country. That means radical and focussed actions from day one. Anything less than this, and it will fail. I am suggesting a revolution - but this is really a counter-revolution against what has already been proceeding for at least one generation. If we are to beat the heirs of Marx, we must learn from Marx himself.

Comment 4: You are wasting our time with all this radical preaching. People do not want to hear about how they are oppressed by the Establishment, and how this must be destroyed. What they want to hear is that taxes are too high, that the money is being wasted, and that there are ways to protect essential public services with lower taxes. That is why the Taxpayers’ Alliance has been so much more prominent than the Libertarian Alliance. We must have nothing to do with the ranting lunatics of the Libertarian Alliance.

Response: You may have a desire for electoral success that I do not share. But I am the better politician. All debate is perceived as taking place on a spectrum that has a centre and two extremes. If the Libertarian Alliance did not exist, the relevant spectrum would simply reconfigure itself with the Taxpayers’ Alliance at one extreme, and the centre would be still less attractive than it now is. Since most people consciously take centrist positions, it is in your interest - regardless of whether I am right - to say what I do. It makes you and your friend’s moderate in relation to me.

[At this point, some unfortunate woman began screeching that I was a fascist, and the debate came to an end.]

NB—Sean Gabb’s book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3