Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more

Henry V had it easy - he didn't have UKIP to deal with and, anyway, he would have known what to do with them. We, however, need to discuss them and their performance in politics, such as it is.

I am delighted to say that the Boss on EU Referendum has commented at length and very knowledgeably (here and here) on my previous posting. I shall, in due course, respond to some of the points made and to comments on this blog.

In the meantime, I should like to pick out just one aspect of the discussion because it has shown up on the EURef blog as well and has become a mantra among UKIPers and their supporters (of whom the Boss is definitely not one).

Whenever I pointed out that UKIP has now been in existence for twenty years, that it gets a great deal of media attention and that the political situation in this country and over the water ought to be immensely helpful I was reminded by people who are too lazy to check their facts that new parties need time. How long did it take the Labour Party to achieve anything?

Here is the answer to that question and I have produced it on other threads for the benefit of UKIP.

The Labour Party was formed in February 1900 and was first called the Labour Representation Committee. As such it sponsored fifteen candidates and won two seats in the election of October 1900. In 1903 there was a secret electoral pact between the LRC, represented by its Secretary, Ramsay Macdonald and the Liberal Party, represented by its Chief Whip, Herbert Gladstone. (The idea of an electoral pact has been discarded by the UKIP leadership but is, in any case, unlikely to be proposed by either of the big parties seriously.)

One outcome of the Lib-Lab Pact was that the LRC won 29 seats in the 1906 election, that is six years after it had been founded. The new MPs then formally adopted the name of the Labour Party. Despite the odd set-back the Labour Party managed to win 42 seats in the 1910 election, ten years after it had been founded.

The First World War produced a split in the party as it had produced one in most socialist parties across Europe between those who supported the war and those who opposed it. There were further splits and splinterings after the war and the revolutions in Russia. However, the Liberal Party emerged from the war rather battered as well, so the Labour Party managed to win 142 seats in 1922 and 191 in 1923, forming the first Labour government in 1924 with, admittedly, support from the Liberals. There is a more detailed history here.

Curiously enough, as soon as I produced some of these facts I was told by the same people who had been challenging me on the subject that it was irrelevant because the situation is completely different. Of course, it is different. It always is. For one thing, there is no major war being fought. Nevertheless, some similarities do exist.

We have an electorate, large parts of which feels disenfranchised and disenchanted; we have serious crises in this country and across the Channel, which affect this country; we have a new(ish) party that is supposedly producing new ideas and new directions and that is getting more publicity than the early Labour Party did. Yet, not only does this party not perform as well as the other one did, it does not come anywhere close to performing well.

Or as the Boss puts it:

Looking to our history here does not help at all. Going back to the 1920s, and the emergence of the Labour Party as a force in politics, which eventually displaced the Liberals, cementing in its prominence in the 1945 election, we had a situation where a disaffected electorate switched loyalties.

Now, we are seeing the same disaffection but, instead of switching loyalties, the electorate is progressively opting out of the political process altogether.

This could and probably is the sign of a greater malaise in the system. Let us not forget that democracy in its present form, which is, according to some people a holy of all holies, is, in fact, a very recent experiment in political systems and may have already proved itself to be a failure. There is nothing sacred or, for that matter, necessarily intelligent in crowd sourcing (to use a very modern expression) policy and we may well  have to face up to the fact that the constitutional liberals who opposed it were right.

Or, alternatively, it is a good enough system and could be fixed but, at present, we do not have a clear idea how to do it. One thing is certain: as long as UKIP and its supporters refuse to acknowledge that the fault is in themselves and not in the stars (to paraphrase the Bard) they and we are going to get nowhere.

Curiouser and curiouser

It used to be that you could not argue seriously with anyone on the left because they would launch into personal attacks at the drop of the hat. Now one finds the same to be true about an ever larger number of Conservative supporters and activists. The slightest disagreement sends them into paroxysms of rage and really unbelievable personal abuse.

Take the hysteria around Gordon Brown who, according to a number of these great thinkers, "has no popular mandate". The moment one points out that he is the leader of a party that has won three elections, whether one likes it or not, and therefore does have a popular mandate, one is abused for being a nulab supporter or, as I was quite recently, a pinko. Clearly the person in question knows very little about me and, given his hysterical stupidity, I prefer it to remain that way.

No, Brown was not elected to be a Prime Minister. We do not elect Prime Ministers. No, he did not lead the party in the last election when they won the popular vote as well as the largest number of seats. Neither had Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas Home, Callaghan or Major. These are facts, which are, as Stalin kept saying, stubborn things. (Mind you, they had a more flexible characteristic under his rule.)

There is no disagreement about the fact that the Labour Party had promised a referendum on the Constitution for Europe and reneged on it when it came to the Lisbon Treaty. Whether that makes them filth, traitorous scum, fascists or just politicians in power is questionable. What is not questionable is the fact (that stubborn entity again) that all three parties promised a referendum in their manifesto and all three have reneged. It matters little as far as the Lib-Dims are concerned but it does matter that the Boy-King of the Conservative Party gave his "cast-iron guarantee" that there will be a referendum under a Conservative government, not bothering to qualify the guarantee. He has now made it clear that there will be no referendum on the EU for some time. As for those promises to bring back powers they are not worth the paper they are written on or the disk space they occupy.

This is a family friendly blog and, therefore, I cannot quote some of the abuse that has been flung in my direction by Conservative supporters in response to that very simple fact, which goes a long way towards explaining why the opinion polls and by-election results are all over the place.

This inability to argue vehemently but without nasty personal attacks is very odd. There are a few possible explanations.

It could be as simple as the fear that they will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and they are already flailing round trying to blame everyone they can and vent their fury instead of turning the situation round in the next few months.

It could be that the difference between the Conservative party and the left has eroded to the point of the two being indistinguishable in attitude as well as political thinking.

Or it could be that conservatism is meaningless to the present-day members, supporters and activists of the Conservative party and they think entirely in terms of teams, akin to football supporters, except that if you listen to the latter, as I do whenever there is a match around here, you can distinguish interesting discussions about games, players and tactics. In other words, there is more substance to football supporters than to supporters of political parties.

We need better stories

This lunchtime I went to hear Dan Ikenson of Cato Institute. Sadly, it was not in Washington DC (though, actually, I find that city rather tiring) but in London, the Adam Smith Institute, to be precise. His talk and the subsequent discussion was on the merits of free trade, the demerits of protectionism in a world of rapid transport and long production chains and the need for policy makers to understand these simple facts.

Among other points he mentioned that "we need better stories". In other words we, on our side of the political spectrum, must learn to produce good sound-bites and heart-rending stories. This can seem a problem only to economists and that is, of course, what has happened to much of the right - it has been captured by economists, who produce wonderful theories and spectacular graphs but find it hard to cope with the human side of the issues.

Mr Ikenson told of how his well-prepared presentations would be trumped by somebody referring to a clothes factory in, say, North Carolina being closed and what about the workers there. To which one should reply, said Mr Ikenson, well, what about the single mother with two children who cannot easily get a good job (or a full-time job at all) and who would have to pay far higher proportion of her income for her children's clothes if there were no cheap imports.

One could develop that story: people can get out of poverty by education and training. If that single mother with two children spends less on clothes and shoes for her children, she can spend more money on educational and training matters, such as books, visits to exhibitions, adult education classes and so on.

Let's have more and better stories. We need to collect them.