On Churchill, Burke, Representative Parliamentary Democracy and giving MPs a spine.

Churchill on representative democracy and the duty of an MP.

LET'S GET OUT THERE! It's time to challenge our MPs and flush them from cover. The media won't do it. MPs themselves certainly won't do it. The country is in crisis, Brexit is in crisis, the Government is in crisis and local elections are coming up.

As Timothy Garton Ash has written, we've about 6 months before the Government and hard Brexiteers fabricate a fudge to get us out by any means because, even though they're not aligned, it serves both their malign purposes. (A link to Garton Ash's recent article follows this post.)

Feel free to share this to your MP if you wish, and ask him or her:

DO YOU ACCEPT THIS DEFINITION OF BRITISH REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY?

(If they are a Conservative, remind them that this is supposed to be their party's very creed: a principle laid down by their greatest thinker and here asserted by their greatest prime minister.)

Ask them: what are you going to do now?

They'll probably ignore you or fob you off with feeble justifications.

If so, keep at them.

Bring them back to the substance of the representative principle. Will they act in accordance with it or not?

More silence? More weasel words? KEEP AT THEM!

Remember, had MPs followed the principle that underpins our constitution our country wouldn't have got to this crisis. And it has grown worse on account of MPs' neglect of it ever since.

Three wrongs don't make a right. MPs should be brave enough to vote in accordance their consciences now. And if WE don't tell them that, NO ONE will.

I've kicked things off by asking my own MP (Steve Baker, Con, Wycombe) this through Facebook, Twitter and an email:

"Time to ask again. I know - for you told me in person - that you agree with Burke. I presume - for you wouldn't dare not to - that you agree with Churchill. So no need for 'a prolonged philosophical debate'. [Baker's words last time I challenged him on his inconsistency in demanding that Parliament fulfil The Will Of The People] Why do you deny our sovereign Parliament's rights over Brexit?"

I'm also going to write again to my local paper challenging Baker - see attached earlier letter on this theme which was published last year.

Garton Ash's article: https://www.theguardian.com/…/six-months-foil-brexit-vote-p…

Imagining Britain's Lost Glaciers

My take on how some of the British Isles' grand old mountains would look if the glaciers were still there ...

You can see them all here:
https://www.ukhillwalking.com/articles/features/imagining_britain's_lost_glaciers-10207

Two cases against Brexit

Please read, digest, share, use and - if you disagree or have improvements - critically engage with my two sheets in a constructive and polite manner:

1. Why it is not undemocratic to oppose Brexit
2. Why the nation's anger is not the EU's fault.

I hope they will help you challenge the ignorance and complacency that might lead to the greatest disaster this nation has suffered in modern history - and at its own hands.

Ignore the mindless tendency among Leavers! They won't change. Focus on those who are open to rational, evidenced debate and are secure enough to be able to change their opinions as a result of it.

Challenge "soft" Remainers who, for a quiet life (fat chance!) or out of a misguided sense that to oppose Brexit is a slight against democracy, sit on their hands and call it honourable.

Challenge your MP to vote with a view to what he or she genuinely considers to be the national interest, for that is their calling in a representative democracy and they will have failed it and the nation if they dodge it.

Peter

How to debate with Quitters - some ideas.

Some Top Tips for Remainers when attempting to debate with less thoughtful Quitters. By no means exhaustive. Please critique and/or add your own ideas. We are all going to need them in the months ahead as we turn this mother of a ship around.

1. Don't get angry.

2. Remember that you are the patriot. They are nationalists. You love your country enough to criticise it where due and know that partnership is not surrender; they are insecure enough about it to deny all failings and fear that partnership will reveal them.

3. Don't immediately rebut what they say: ask why they say it and what evidence they have. If none, politely tell them that you can't debate their point unless they can give some. Keep drawing out their beliefs and their reasons for them.

4. Remind them that the Referendum was advisory, Parliament is sovereign and Parliamentarians are representatives not delegates, so they - and it - can still change their minds. Use that to refute accusations of not being "democratic".

5. Don't initially get drawn into defending the EU, however much you're tempted and however well you're able: WE are still in it and THEY want to leave it - so they have to make and defend their case for changing the status quo.

6. Don't be afraid to criticise the EU. Only the dafter among us haven't a trace of scepticism. The crucial thing is to compare the EU's failings with the disaster of leaving it. Then, having established some common ground ...

7. ... re-frame the sovereignty question, usually expressed as something like "getting our country back" or similar hand-me-downs. Ask the Quitter what they think of the UK's care system (adult social care, mental health care etc.), our education systems, the state of the NHS, our prison system, our road, rail & transport infrastructure etc. - there are more! They're unlikely to sing any of their praises. Then point out that the EU has no or next to no input in any of them. They're products of our sovereignty not membership of the EU. You may also want to point out that we are, by international comparisons, one of the least healthy and least literate countries in the developed world and have chronically low productivity compared to all major and most minor EU nations. Nothing to do with the EU. Hand the question to the Quitter: what faith do they have that we would use our sovereignty more wisely after Brexit, and why?

8. This may fail, and if I know my average Quitter, will be likely to fail without their having left a mark on you (metaphorically speaking; they may of course by now have clumped you one or told you, in what seems to pass in Quitter circles as the argument clincher, to "fuck off"). If so, smile, use Ronald Reagan's presidency-winning phrase, "There you go again" - and end the conversation.

Go home and kick the cat or a convenient synthetic - but recyclable -alternative.

Thought for the Day, 8th August 2017

The Brexit “experience”– the rejection of knowledge and expertise on no better grounds that they are expert and knowledgeable; the primacy of assertion over argument; the abolition of the tedious duty to justify opinions – is less a right-wing upsurge (which is nothing new) than the child of the marriage between the relativist leftism dominant since the 1980s, for which all opinions were equal, and the market, in which we’re all customers and therefore always right.

Both these indulgent parents encourage, sustain but above all permit the worst in us and make us blind to the results of our choices. This is what we are seeing in these dark, dark days and what we must fight.

Hey America!

America, you’re looking old –
No longer fair and free and bold.
Perhaps that never was the truth
But as a dream it gave you youth.
For us back here, though moan we might
We saw the point, the nickel’s light:
A new world hammered from the wood
Where Europe reached its adulthood.
But human nature sniffed your track
To brand its mark upon your back.
Where fact fell short the dream too died
And left you nothing else inside –
So time has broken you; and thus
You’re no younger than the rest of us.

Sticky Wicket.

Let's Call a Spade a Spade, Shall We? is proud to team up with Don't Shoot the Messenger to bring you a souvenir edition to mark England's defeat to Sarth Efrica by several thousand runs.

Potential future employers may not wish to look away now, but I'd rather you did.

What is this garbage?

It's an advertisement in this Sunday's papers for NatWest Bank, presumably attempting to cash in - which is what banks do - on its sponsorship of cricket, that greatest of all team games, although it is modest about saying so.

It ticks just about every box in the politically-correct yet sell-your grandmother lexicon of big business today:

Firstly, you may notice something that is becoming the norm: the main photograph studiously features a person of indeterminate ethnic origin. (We've "moved on" from the odd black or Asian face: far too challenging; why, people may actually form opinions! We did try but unfortunately we all ended up hating each other, or would have done had we not been blessed with white European immigrants whom we're permitted to hate instead without being called "racist". Wiser by far to picture someone who, to paraphrase Theresa May, could be anyone - and ends up being comfortably no-one.)

Then, having laid this mushy, swampy foundation, down to patriotic business with a mawkish appeal to an admittedly rather apt shame-faced patriotism ... "This game is different. Just like the country it comes from. Our island of individuality." Yeah, RIGHT: where we all - individually, of course - are proud to follow liars, dissemblers and, NatWest clearly hopes, the shining example of international banking! ... "Where we ... champion the lucky and defend the underdog." That underdog being ourselves, of course, as we are inexplicably and unreasonably bullied by horrid, backward Europeans. It must be us: we certainly don't seem to give a cuss for anyone else.

Yet there's still time for a Goebbelesque, straight-up lobotomising beamer of a lie ("Not a country of small minds ...") followed by that limp but eternal excuse for philistinism ("... but of big hearts.") - the kind of phrase often heard at international football tournaments as England crash out to one of the United Nations' newer members who nonetheless seem to play another game we invented more intelligently than we do.

And how about this for bottom-of-the-pond relativism: "And, even if you're the odd one out, you can still be in." To which the absolute (relatively speaking) clincher is added: "Or out." Precisely. Relatively speaking.

As for "Cricket has no boundaries." Well, yes it does, actually. Two of which are: how you hold the bat and your stance at the crease. So cut the crap and have a word about technique with that poor young lady of who-knows-where, whom you've either roped in to your squalid little game or exploited by buying her off a picture agency.

Sickening stuff. But, as NatWest tell us, we are what we do.