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One of Thatcher’s former top ministers drops a bombshell Norman – now Lord – Tebbit, famously the scourge of trade union militants and who also survived a murder attempt by the IRA in the mid-1980s (an ex-RAF fighter pilot by the way), is urging voters not to vote for the main political parties in the European elections. Instead, the implication is that folk should vote for UKIP. Well, that is Guido’s take on the matter.
Suddenly, the Tory Party does not look in quite such bouncy shape this morning. I guess when you have MPs trousering taxpayers’ money on a fairly impressive scale, it dents the brand somewhat. Like I said yesterday, though, the central problem of UK political life is not fiddling expenses. No, the problem is a continuing failure to push for a major rollback of the state, including removal of this nation from the clutches of an European federal state. Compared with how much money is wasted on quangos, or ID cards, or the rest of it, an MP’s claim for swimming pool maintenance is small beer.
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Christmas has come early this year!
That a government should be brought down because of “MPs trousering taxpayers’ money” reminds me of Al Capone being arrested for… tax evasion. Let’s all stop right there, and not think any further: the worst that government is guilty of is trousering taxpayers’ money. So it’s just a matter of getting rid of these louses and voting in a new, fresh bunch who will promise not to make the same mistakes. That will solve this problem “once and for all”.
Yes, quite, there are much larger excesses that are being ignored whilst this is in the news.
However, the best way to get a clean up is to have a dissolution of Parliament and find out which political leader really has some balls.
Pity he didn’t get round to dropping the odd bombshell when his leader was signing the Single European Act, isn’t it?
It’s easy to snipe once you are removed from responsibility. It would be nice if some of these people had grown some balls when they were actually in office.
In one way the current expenses row, coupled with a wipeout in the euro elections could prolong the agony.
No sitting MP is going to be looking at a vote of no confidence when they can see their comfortable living being taken away from them by an ungrateful electorate.
On the expense thing, they’re all in it together and if UKIP, the national socialists and the various other nationalist parties pick up a lot of seats in the euros, the temptation for both the major parties, (and the hopeless LibDems), will be to hang on for grim death and hope for something to turn up to remind the voting public that the status quo is the best way to carry on. Just give the other lot a turn at the big trough.
That’s not to say that I’m not in favour of a ‘chuck the bums out’ approach at the upcoming euro/council elections, but the reaction of the ruling elite to a good kicking by the electorate will be desperate, and the likes of the Beeb will step up the propaganda to even greater levels.
The big task will be to stave off the “OK, You’ve made your point and we’ve learnt our lesson and it’s only a protest vote” memes and to counteract the media’s spin that will associate any non Labour/Tory/LibDem winner with the BNP.
IanB, I suspect NT, like a lot of other leading Thatcherites at the time, naively – though this is easy to say with hindsight – thought the single market act was indeed about the free market, not as part of some tranzi project. Only a few, like the late Mr Enoch Powell, rumbled it at the time while the left opposed it because they thought it was all about wicked capitalism.
We now know better. And in fairness to Tebbit, he has been more robust in expressing this point than most of his peers.
I find it somewhat… difficult to believe that people didn’t at least sniff a hint of rat when they were interacting directly with the Eurocracy. Gaitskell said it plainly enough in 1962, after all. There were enough warning voices being raised from the Tory backbenches and from elsewhere. If the likes of Thatcher and Tebbit really didn’t figure out what was going on, then we have to consider them naive and incompetent, surely?
Ian B, I think it likely they probably suffered under the delusion that they could change the system from within.
Normally, even though I’m American, I don’t have any problem understanding the posts here at Samizdata (except for the soccer or cricket ones, and I kinda skip those).
I mean, I know about Thatcher and her awesome union busting and the lackluster Tories who speak and legislate just like Labour-with-a-U and the evil European federal state and plucky little UKIP, but I have to admit, I lost you when we got to “quangos” and swimming in beer.
I suspect a “quango” isn’t a British mango, but I’m out of ideas after that. Perhaps dismissing something as “small beer” is like us saying it’s “small potatoes,” but I have no theories at all on what “swimming pool maintenance” might signify.
Can a clueless American request a translation? 🙂
Laura
QUANGO is a “Quasi autonomous non-government organisation”; they are used to provide jobs for the boys.
Small beer is indeed small potatoes
Swimming pool maintenence is what it says; an MP has claimed the cost of maintaining the swimming pool at one of his homes as an expense “wholly, exclusively and necessarily”* incurred as a result of his duties as an MP.
*For costs to be an allowable expense for ordinary taxpayers they have meet this definition. Apparently the same applies to MPs’ claims but their word is accepted because there is an assumption that Members of Parliament are “honourable”. Not being an MP and thus not honourable, I have to prove it on my tax returns. I will not be claiming for maintenance of my swimming pool though – cos I ain’t got one!
The point about the SEA, surely, was that it wasn’t the Treaty on European Union that was proposed. Thatcher thought she’d managed to cut the “bad” bits out, leaving only the trade “liberalisation” measures. It seemed like a win at the time.
But they just got rid of her and passed the rest of it in 1991 at Maastricht. Which, to his credit, Tebbit vigorously opposed.
Well, yes. But to be fair, Thatcher is probably the only PM of the last 50 years who did figure it out in the end (apart from those who actively supported it, like Heath), even if it did take a while.
One thing that comes out strongly from Booker & North’s history of the EU, The Great Deception, is how extraordinarily naive our entire political class has been when dealing with the European project. They’ve all gone in thinking they could “reform” something that isn’t up for being reformed; they’ve all said at one time or another that it’s “coming round to our way of thinking” despite all the evidence; and they’ve all believed that it’s an enterprise in intergovernmental co-operation gone wrong, when, as you say, it was clear from the start it was something more ambitious. That – and not “xenophobic anti-European prejudice” – is why we and other northern countries set up EFTA instead, which explicitly was what most of these idiots still think the grand European Union, with its flag, national anthem, Court of Justice, and military staff, is “supposed” to be.
I had already decided not to vote for any of the main parties in the Euro elections and probably in the general election as well. There are some who say that voting for a minor party with no hope of winning is a wasted vote but now that the three main parties are all seemingly facing in the same direction it would seem that a vote for any of them is a waste and could be seen by whoever wins as an endorsement of the status quo.
On the subject of Norman Tebbit I like this quote:
“Don’t judge a man by his freinds but by his enemies, I am very proud of my enemies.”
MarkE kindly wrote:
QUANGO is a “Quasi autonomous non-government organisation”; they are used to provide jobs for the boys.
I’m sorry, I feel like an idiot, but I’m still not sure what this means. If it’s TVA-like government make-work jobs, I could see that, but you said these are “non-government organizations.” And who precisely are “the boys?” Do you mean “unemployed folks who would otherwise be on the dole if not for these make-work jobs”? Or do you mean “union members who are being pandered to with more jobs,” such as Obama is doing with the UWA and Chrysler and GM?
I don’t know if his objective really is to bash the tories, but more to bash Labour: On Andrew Marr’s program and the Politics Show on Sunday there was talk of UKIP being a credible threat against the major parties, including especially Labour.
Yes Sam ıs rıghtö naıvıty and stupıdıty was the order of the day back when the Masstıcht Treaty was sıgned, Ken Clarke cheerfully admitted that he didn’t even read it.
And probably those who did, didn’t understand it.
I have said before all this that I am voting UKIP.
We need a total clear out of these corrupt venal bastards from top to bottom, and from all the Political parties.
Laura
A quango is a body created to implement government/EU policy but which is not a part of a government ministry and somewhat at arms length from direct ministerial control.
From health to arts to consumer protection to railways and anywhere the state sticks its nose into our business, there are hundreds of quangoes employing hundreds of thousands of people spending scores of billions of our pounds.
The jobs for the boys are at the top. A board will direct a quango, and on the board(s) will be the chums and buddies and spouses of the political establishment, sticking ther noses into our business at our expense.
Laura,
A Quango is a formally non-government organisation performing government functions such as administering regulations, often funded with government money and with appointments subject to government influence.
They are basically front organisations – a way for government to meddle in things that they’re supposed to keep out of (or don’t want to be seen to be running). They’re seen as a way to maintain the illusion that certain industries are self-regulating, or to lobby for policies that the government would like to introduce but have no visible public demand for.
They’re full of small-minded bureaucrats sitting on committees and making rules. The usual, in other words.
See here
See also: ‘Fake charities’.
Laura-
It’s an organization that, while nominally is not part of government, gets a significant chunk of funding from the government. In return, it advances some part of a government agenda or program.
Think of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or AmTrak or Project CeaseFire the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Or now ACORN.
The UK has had a substantial problem of supposedly-private orgs getting government money and using it to either lobby the Parliament for new laws, or to influence the public to do so. Kind of like at least a few of the US examples.
Small beer: when you brew a strong beer with a lot of grain, you’ll have plenty of fermentable sugars left on the grain after collecting whatever wort you need. Some brewers will sparge the grain again (taking the ‘second runnings’) and use that to brew ‘small beer.’
This is actually where the XXX, XX, and X labels on beer came from. XXX was brewed from the first runnings, XX the second, and X the third (if there was enough left to take third runnings.)
But the useful answer is, ‘small beer’ means ‘relatively small and unimportant.’ Sorry…felt the need to be a smartass for a moment.
And taught me 2 new words in the process.
Laura, ‘jobs for the boys’ is like nepotism- you give contracts to supporters, or friends of supporters. It’s amazing how many of these people then vote for the party that gave them the handout!
Sunfish, that’s not quite right 🙂
A Quango is a nominally independent body set up by the government and funded by it, but supposedly beyond direct political control; i.e. there is a facade of it being objective and independent. Regulatory bodies are a typical example. In the USA, the EPA would be called a quango.
The situation is becoming more complicated as the social-democratic project of everything becoming a part of government, and government being a part of everything- in other words, corporatism- becomes more and more entrenched. So you have bodies that started up as being independent, such as charities or pressure groups (Save The Children, or Greenpeace) or trade organisations (The Society Of Boilermakers And Pipe Bashers) becoming contractors and advisors to government, drawing their resources and authority from it. But technically they’re still supposed NGOs rather than Quangos. In practise, the diffference is becoming/has become largely meaningless.
I have been an active member of the Conservative party for thirty years – but (in spite trying to find out) I am uncertain what the policy of the Conservative party is regarding the vile and disgusting European Union.
I was also sent a primary ballot form for Conservative candidates for the European Union Parliament – but there were instructions telling me what order to put the candidates in (if I remember correctly a women had to be put in first place and so on).
Indeed a person who was on the committee selecting candidates (no open primary of course) told me that they were instructed what candidates to put on the list.
I will not formally state what all the above will lead me to do in relation to the elections of June 4th – I think it is obvious what I will do, and would hope everyone else does.
One great danger I see is that the British National Party (a Fascist outfit) may get more votes than the United Kingdom Independence Party – and thus the B.N.P.s false claim to be “the only party committed to getting Britain out of the E.U.” will gain some traction.
Hopefully enough people will see this danger and vote to prevent it.
Despite their supposed ‘Euroskepticism’, it is a policy of the Conservative Party to support Turkish entry into the EU, which strikes me as irresponsible and stupid.
The French don’t want Turkey in, so let’s vote For Turkey!
May 18th – and I still have not heard any policy position (let alone position of principle) on the European Unon from the political party I have been an active member of for 30 years.
The leadership of the Conservative party have been given many opportunities to explain their position (political shows have not only been talking about M.P.s expenses – there has been space if they had wished to speak about the election campaign) and have not done so.
So I can only assume that the leadership of my party is not interested in winning the E.U. elections.
Fair enough – let them be judged accordingly.