The Prerogative of the Harlot

“Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”.

Ringing words from Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1931 (though they were written by his cousin, Rudyard Kipling). He was denouncing the Press Barons, influencers of events answerable to no one for the consequences. However, the denunciation applies with equal force to a great many others.

Baldwin (right) said it
Kipling (his cousin) wrote it

Take, for instance, a former boss of mine.

He’d founded the company I joined, basing himself on one brilliant product idea. It was, indeed, that brilliance which drew me in. It didn’t take long to discover, however, that the brilliance had stopped with the initial idea. There had been a short period of growth of the business, but then the company had stagnated, and now it was well into the inevitable next phase, decline.

That meant that radical change was needed. That’s what I thought I’d been brought in to undertake. Within a year, it became clear I was doomed to fail.

Nothing happened in the company without my boss’s say-so: no modification of the product, no phase of development work, no sales decision, no sales presentation even. Indeed, his domination of every aspect of the company was such that a naïve observer might have supposed any failure was down to him.

Not so. I was assured on the best of authorities, indeed the only authority that mattered at all in that business, that my boss knew exactly what needed to be done and was straining every sinew to make it happen. Sadly, he was surrounded by people of crass incompetence. Worse than incompetence. Some of the errors were so flagrant that they seemed deliberate, positive and treacherous against the business. Software developers who took unforgivable shortcuts or simply made elementary errors. Sales staff who demanded information and shared it with potential customers even though that could only put them off ordering from us. People like me who had the gall to question his every move and prevented him achieving the progress his efforts merited.

In fact, he exercised autocratic authority, but the responsibility for any failure was down to anyone but him. Power without responsibility. It was a harlotry I couldn’t bear and I left. Though, to be fair, had I not jumped I would certainly have been pushed soon after.

This was all petty stuff. A few people were inconvenienced in their careers. An insignificant company faded towards well-deserved oblivion. A man prey to an authoritarian streak was presiding over the collapse of unearned ambitions.

Now, though, consider a much more substantial backdrop for such behaviour.

A by-election in a massively safe Conservative seat, Sleaford and North Hykeham, has just elected another Conservative. No surprise there. What is more concerning is that Labour, which came second in the General Election eighteen months ago, came fourth this time around. Vernon Coaker, a Labour MP, commented that in the by-election, “everything was about Brexit”.

Indeed. In another by-election, in Richmond a week earlier, the Liberal Democrats had overturned a huge Conservative majority by firmly opposing Brexit. It is the issue of the day. But Labour, sadly, has no coherent position on it. At best, it criticises the government’s handling of the Brexit process. But it seems to have no clear position on the substantive issue: are we for or against Brexit? Will we only accept a soft Brexit – in which we stay in the Single Market or at least the Customs Union – or a hard Brexit in which we cut all such ties?

No one knows because no one in the leadership is saying.

So we drift from catastrophe to catastrophe. The Sleaford result was completely in line with national polls, which put the Conservatives well up on their General Election result and Labour well down.

Now it’s possible to be as naïve as I was about my boss. Some of us might conclude that if Labour is unable to develop any kind of leadership over the one great question that is agitating the minds of voters, then that’s down to the leadership. Or, more to the point, its lack of leadership.

Again, though, that view turns out to be wrong. The backers of the present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, never tire of telling us that he’s outstanding. The problem is he’s let down by those, like the Parliamentary Labour Party, or others who have no confidence in him and who are therefore ‘red Tories’ or ‘Blairites’. On their shoulders and their shoulders alone lies the blame for Labour’s parlous position.

Corbyn and his circle of admirers insist that they have a mandate from the membership. That allows them to dictate our way forward while we just have to swallow our objections and get on with helping them achieve a glorious future for the country. If glory escapes them, however, be sure that it isn’t down to them. They have power within the Labour Party, you see, but no responsibility.

The prerogative of the harlot through the ages.

A triumph for the LibDems. A defeat for the Tories. A warning for Labour

It’s always satisfying to see a Tory government being given a bloody nose. 

It’s even more satisfying when it’s a victory for those who don’t accept the Brexit verdict as irrevocable. 

And it’s best of all when it’s administered to an unpleasant individual of thoroughly toxic views.

All that happened this week.

Zac Goldsmith ran an unpleasant Tory campaign to be Mayor of London last year, calling on racist and Islamophobic notions to try – and, fortunately, fail – to beat Labour’s candidate, Sadiq Khan, whose name is probably enough to explain the racism and Islamophobia. Not to justify them, of course, but certainly to explain why an unprincipled candidate would resort to them. 

This year, he resigned from the Conservative Party and from Parliament to precipitate a by-election in his constituency of Richmond Park, where he ran as an independent against the government’s decision to build a new runway at nearby Heathrow airport.

The Liberal Democratic candidate, Sarah Olney, a strong supporter of continued membership of the EU, chose not to campaign on the airport but to focus on Brexit instead. To widespread surprise (including my own), she snatched the seat from Goldsmith, converting his majority of 23,000 votes into her own of nearly 1900.

An excellent result.

The defeated candidate (for local MP and London Mayor)
and the victorious LibDem

If I have a quibble it’s that we had to depend on the Liberal Democrats to win this victory. The main party in opposition to the Tories is my own, Labour. It should be the one challenging the government, and all the more so since the Liberal Democrats were in coalition with the Tories between 2010 and 2015. That was both a betrayal of principle and counter-productive: it reduced the party’s presence in Parliament from 62 to eight. The Richmond Park result may suggest that things are turning around for the LibDems (though one win doesn’t make a resurrection), but it certainly reflects a Labour failure.

Why do I say that?

If Sarah Olney’s win owed a great deal to the LibDems’ position against Brexit, undoubtedly the biggest question for the vast majority of voters, her party was able to make it their own because Labour’s silence on the subject has been deafening. 

Why is it so quiet? Silence is always hard to interpret, but occasionally it gets broken. John McDonnell, a close ally of the party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, recently described Brexit as an “enormous opportunity”. This seemed to confirm a suspicion many of us felt that the Labour leadership wasn’t particularly comfortable with the party’s official policy of backing continued EU membership. 

Meanwhile, siren voices on the right of the Labour Party are calling on us to address anxieties over immigration in Labour’s traditional voter base. Again, this provokes suspicion, in this case that we are being urged to move rightwards, to counter the challenge presented by the extreme anti-EU and xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. As another of Corbyn’s allies, Diane Abbott, recently pointed out – correctly – Labour can’t win by being UKIP-lite. If people want UKIP policies, they’ll vote UKIP. Labour doesn’t beat them by accommodating them, but by explaining that turning against foreigners won’t address any of the real problems affecting our supporters, which are poverty, insecurity and joblessness. Instead, we need to tackle the causes of economic decline – not least of which is the decision to leave the EU.

That’s hard to do if you’re not too sure about the EU yourself. Hence the silence.

The problem is that silence isn’t leadership and leadership is what voters are crying out for. Labour isn’t doing leadership right now. There was recently a Parliamentary vote, on a motion advanced by the Scottish National Party, to investigate Tony Blair’s role over the Iraq War and his possible misleading of Parliament at the time.

There are two positions one can legitimately take on the issue. 

The SNP’s would be that Blair behaved unconscionably and needs to be held to account by Parliament. 

The majority Labour position, with which I agree, isn’t simply one of “hands off our former leader” but rather argues that the problem was that Blair had far too much authority, allowing him to commit the country against its will. So it was an institutional issue, not a personal one, and it needs to be tackled at that level. That ties in, for instance, with the calls for Parliament and not just the present Prime Minister to have the final say over Brexit.

A third position is illegitimate. That’s to have nothing to say on the matter. It’s striking that all three of Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott stayed away from Parliament at the time of the debate.

Silence, like over the EU.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Similarly, voters abhor silence. While it stays quiet and on the fence, refusing to lead, the group that technically controls the Labour leadership leaves the Party vulnerable to attack by those who flow in to fill the political vacuum – whether from UKIP or from the LibDems.

So the Richmond result isn’t just a victory for the LibDems. It isn’t just a black eye for the Tories. It’s also a serious wake-up call to Labour.

The leadership needs to make up its mind: start leading, on the issues that matter to the electorate, or see our support continue to erode. Otherwise – please just stand aside and let someone else take over. 

Someone who has something to say. 

Someone who’s prepared to get out in front and lead.
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The pride and the shame of the Richmond Nimby

What a lovely place Richmond is. I was there yesterday; the view across the Thames as you drive from the high point of the town to the centre is breathtaking, and of course the park is one of the most beautiful and extensive in England. As for the houses, they’re nothing short of magnificent: Richmond isn’t a neighbourhood for the poor or disadvantaged.

Despite all this beauty, I did end up metaphorically screaming at the place before I left it, crawling through the centre of town at less than a walking pace. Travelling around England underlines just how crowded a country it is. That’s been a much-debated theme recently, with all sorts of exciting initiatives by our bright new government to restrict immigration into this country. This could keep potentially several hundred thousand people away, and not all of them will be tortured or die of hunger in their home countries. Of course, this would barely scratch at the surface of the problem of overcrowding. To start to solve that, we need to reduce the population by many millions, and for that limiting immigration isn’t enough, we’d need to encourage a lot of Englishmen to move away too. Incidentally, looking out of my window on a ‘flaming June’ day of grey skies and drizzle, I can assure you that this Englishman wouldn’t take much persuading.

Have you noticed how often a mention of something you haven’t heard or thought about for years is followed by your coming across it again within twenty-four hours or so? You know – you may not have heard a word for ages and then stumble across it by happy chance, perhaps a word like lexicographer, or meet it when there’s no-one around who can give you a definition of it, say a term like serendipity, and then you hear or read it again shortly afterwards.

Yesterday was the first time I’d been in Richmond for ages and it was mentioned on the radio news this morning. Another smart new initiative of the government has been to put an end to a Labour measure which allowed building on areas previously used for gardens. The new government is giving local people the right to challenge this kind of development.

Sounds wonderful. Who wouldn’t want to protect gardens? But is that really what we’re protecting or is it more a matter of upholding the rights of those who live in pretty areas? People who would say ‘I’m keen on cheap housing, but not in my back yard?’ The ‘not in my back yard’ specialist or Nimby favours a policy and is happy to see society sacrifice to achieve it, as long as the sacrifice is made by someone else, generally someone much less well placed to bear the cost.

And this morning there it was: a woman who has lived in Richmond for years but by her accent seemed to be of German extraction (which has a certain irony), claimed ‘I’m proud to be a Nimby.’

This is a brilliant debating device. You take something most people regard as a ridiculous contention and then align yourself with it – you state something like ‘I don’t care what people say, but I think Sarah Palin has a working intellect.’ This apparently legitimises the previously illegitimate and shifts the burden of proof to your opponent who has to start by demolishing a position that he thought had already been overthrown.

Of course, we can follow the same policy as I recommended in my last post and test the validity of this device by replacing a key word or two. ‘I’m proud to be a homophobe.’ Not quite so effective is it? ‘I’m proud to be a racist.’ Lacking a certain charm, wouldn’t you say?

In the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno spoke in a public debate in which the Fascist General Millán-Astray, of the particularly feared Foreign Legion, also took part. Some of Astray’s supporters shouted out their slogan ‘Viva la Muerte’, ‘long live death’. Unamuno replied ‘I, having spent my life writing paradoxes that have provoked the ire of those who do not understand what I have written, and being an expert in this matter, find this ridiculous paradox repellent.’

It would be massively immodest for me to claim to resemble Unamuno – perhaps a more reasonable comparison is with the Modern Major General in The Pirates of Penzance who claimed to have ‘a pretty taste in paradox.’ But where I’m with Unamuno is in not finding every paradox attractive. Taking pride in your own shamelessness, in particular, leaves me distinctly cold.