Heidegger's arithmetic

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, has been feted as winning a great victory – with The New Statesman, for example, publishing a piece called Jeremy Corbyn won a great victory. His party won 262 seats and Theresa May’s Conservatives won 318.

Has the Left lost all grasp of arithmetic? Unfortunately not. What we are seeing is a political arithmetic from a very sinister time in the first half of the twentieth century in Germany: Heidegger’s arithmetic, from his 1927 work Being and Time.

Martin Heidegger was, famously, “Hitler’s philosopher”. He rebelled against the phenomenology of his mentor, Edmund Husserl, which allowed each person an equal right in collectively constructing the world; instead Heidegger divided humanity into two: the “authentic” and the “inauthentic”.

The authentic are the people who, in Heidegger’s view, matter: the elite, even the Master Race. Their thoughts count for much more than the inauthentic, the rest of humanity in an amorphous herd whom Heidegger calls “the they”, whom Heidegger accuses of the tendency to establish a dictatorship of “inconspicuousness and unascertainability”. It’s not difficult to see how those eager to apply a veneer of intellectual respectability to that franchise of street-fighting gangs called the Nazis saw something they could use in Heidegger’s philosophy and adopted it as their ideology. The classification of the inauthentic as the Other, the they, powered the Holocaust.

In 1940-41 Jean-Paul Sartre read Being and Time while a prisoner of war, and would use it as an inspiration for his existential work Being and Nothingness, in which he retains Heidegger’s classification of “the they”, defining it again as the Other, an amorphous mass that “disintegrates” when one tries to understand it.

Sartre’s importance is not so much in what he wrote, but in that his work provided a bridge for Heidegger’s influence to travel from the Right to the Left – Jacques Derrida, for example, was dismissive of Sartre as “merely another metaphysician”, but his breakthrough and most influential work, On Grammatology, is full of references to Heidegger.

There was a golden age of socialism in Britain. It started in 1948 when Clement Attlee’s government instituted full and equal suffrage with the Representation of the People Act 1948 and founded its corollary, the NHS. And it was ended when the OPEC oil crisis of the mid-1970s swallowed up the money that makes any golden age possible. In the wake of this, the socialists who followed used Heidegger-ridden logic to justify their rejection of democracy as a means to pursue the socialist agenda, a justification that was, in their eyes, intensified when the OPEC-fuelled crisis reached full penetration and swept Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979 after the “winter of discontent”.

That’s when Heidegger’s arithmetic became as fully accepted by the hard Left as it had been by the Nazis – not that surprising when you consider politics is a circle, so that as left and right descend below the horizon of democracy they continue to become more distant from the open society, but get closer to each other: see the diagram on the book cover below. So we had Militant running Liverpool City Council in the 1980s, justifying the misery it caused to its own working-class employees by the glories of the Revolution to come: Heidegger’s arithmetic in action.

Heidegger’s arithmetic is also apparent in the attitude of former Home Secretary Diane Abbott sending her son to private school while opposing increasing grammar-school places for working-class children: the offspring of “the they”, the inauthentic, must be denied any opportunity to be able to compete with the children of the elite, the authentic, so as to deny them an intellectual foundation from which they might set out to frustrate the goals of the elite. These goals have never, at any time, had anything to do with enabling the many - the working-class, "the they", to better their lot.

And Heidegger’s arithmetic shines through in Jeremy Corbyn’s composure as a general who has won a great victory: his hard-Left MPs are the elite, and any MPs opposing them, even if they are numerically superior, are inauthentic and therefore their numbers count as nothing.

Nothing is so toxic to Heidegger’s arithmetic as full and equal suffrage democracy, which is why Corbyn has radicalised a horde of young idealists to oppose democracy by calling for restricting the franchise to those under 60. If they succeed in this it is the beginning of the end for democracy: the next step will be epistocracy, where people have to pass exams before they are deemed able to vote by a state who would only pass those who would vote according to its wishes. At present, the only qualification you need to vote is the capacity to suffer because of the deeds or misdeeds of your government, and this must remain so if you wish to be safe from your government.

If this radicalised cadre manages to decentre full and equal suffrage as a means of deciding who rules, we can only make our opposition to our rulers known by unrest, which runs the risk of sliding into civil war. And that’s why Heidegger’s arithmetic needs to be put into history’s waste disposal unit.

Read more about Heidegger, the risks to democracy, and Brexit:

Buy Brexit and Democracy from amazon.co.uk (or your local Amazon store)!

Buy Brexit and Democracy from Smashwords!

Brexit and Democracy is now on Smashwords

Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel is now on Smashwords. A detailed survey of Brexit and the historical, philosophical and political issues surrounding it, this is your unmissable Brexit companion!

• Why did it take the Scottish National Party to start an "avalanche of philosophy" in Britain that finally saw the long-promised EU membership referendum materialise?
• What was the 2012 incident that enabled UKIP to put a crack in the political cartel?
• Why was nothing done when Otto Kirchheimer started noticing cartelisation in European political parties in the mid-1950s?
• Did the Marshall Plan unwittingly lay the groundwork for the eventual formation of the European Union?
• What is the relationship between the German and Italian unification processes and the EU?
• Did nation states start to evolve from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, or from the 1555 Peace of Augsberg?

Buy Brexit and Democracy from Smashwords!

Buy Brexit and Democracy from amazon.co.uk (or your local Amazon store)!

"Brexit and Democracy" is now on Kindle

Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage is out on Amazon for Kindle. It deals with the following questions:

• Was the 2005 general election rigged - and if so, why?
• Was Britain's entry to the Iraq war linked to the above?
• How did 56 Scottish National Party MPs arriving in Westminster in 2015 make the EU referendum possible?
• Why did the Liberal Democrats switch from opposing a referendum to demanding one?
• Why was a plan for European monetary union abandoned in the early 1970s?
• And what on earth does the cover illustration signify?

Go to Amazon to buy your copy now!

Quotes opening "Brexit and Democracy"

These are 6 quotes on democracy and the European integration process with which I open my new book. Brexit and Democracy is due out on Monday 5 June!

It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.

John Stuart Mill, 1861 [1]

I know that you [English] have the art of sticking to the form, and more than the form, of the old traditions while starting them in new directions. While becoming an extremely democratic country, you have kept the form, and more than the form, of an hereditary aristocracy and an hereditary monarchy. It may be that even if your constitution becomes more dictatorial you will preserve the form, and something more than the form, of the parliamentary system.

Élie Halévy, 1934 [2]

Europe finds itself still divided and indeed has never advanced beyond the unity achieved by the legions of the Roman Empire. It has vigorously resisted the attempts made successively by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler to achieve unity by force…Certainly Europe was never, since ancient Greek thinkers first conceived it as a continent and tried to map it, either culturally homogenous or politically one.

W Gordon East, 1962 [3]

There is no chance of a possible EU democracy because there is no European people, no demos. No demos, no democracy – quite simple.

Karlheinz Nunreither, 2000 [4]

The whole European integration experiment, from the Coal and Steel Community on, has been a political wolf dressed in economic sheep’s clothing.

Willem H Buiter, 2010 [5]

Membership of the EU makes Britain literally un-governable, in the sense that no administration elected by the people can govern the country.

Steve Hilton, 2015 [6]

1. Mill, John Stuart, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Batoche Books 2001, p184

2. Halévy, Élie, Socialism and the Problem of Democratic Parliamentarianism (1934), in The Era of Tyrannies, Anchor Books 1965, p263

3. East, W Gordon, An Historical Geography of Europe (1935), Methuen 1962 (new epilogue), p437

4. Neunreither, Karlheinz, Political Representation in the European Union: A Common Whole, Various Holes, or Just a Hole? in Neunreither, Karlheinz and Wiener, Antje, European Integration after Amsterdam: Institutional Dynamics and Prospects for Democracy (2000), Oxford University Press 2004, p148

5. Buiter, Willem H, Economic, political and institutional prerequisites for monetary union among members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, in MacDonald, Ronald and Al Faris, Abdulrazak (eds.), Currency Union and Exchange Rate Issues: Lessons for the Gulf States, Dubai Economic Council 2010, p65

6. Hilton, Steve, How the EU makes Britain impossible to govern, Daily Mail 23 May 2016. Available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3603793/Why-quit-EU-Cameron-s-guru-Friend-strategist-Steve-Hilton-breaks-ranks-Brexit-say-Britain-literally-ungovernable-unless-power-self-serving-elite.html#ixzz49wh1Y52c, accessed 28/5/2017

Brexit and Democracy: Reclaiming full and equal suffrage from the political cartel is due out on Monday 6 June.

Article 50 may be legal, but was Gordon Brown's premiership valid?

Tony Blair may not be telling the whole truth about the reasons for his unhappiness with the British EU referendum result.

When he says Brexiteers "dismissed" the Remain campaign as scaremongering, he seems - seems to be buying into the absolutely toxic stream of thinking that questions the intelligence of people who voted for Brexit. For more of this see today's Times, which beside the usual graphs of what the regional votes were, gives the average percentage of people in that area with 5 or more GCSEs at A-c. One woman interviewed this morning complained that she was "highly educated" and didn't understand the case for Leaving. Are the metropolitan intelligentsia preparing to take us down a slippery slope, similar to one that caused a lot of trouble in the 20th century?

I believe Blair is nervous because of a little-mentioned change to electoral law during his first term. The Representation of the People Act 2000 effectively legalised postal voting on demand by abolishing safeguards built into the Representation of the People Act 1985 (and earlier versions) which stipulated that anybody who wished to vote by post had to give a reason for doing so to the Registration Officer. A House of Commons Library investigation into electoral fraud dates the rise of such fraud to industrial levels to that change.

Jump to the 2005 General Election, and as you can see in the tables below, the number of postal votes cast were a massive 514% of Labour's majority over the Conservative Party, who were the runner up, ie they formed the main Opposition Party. This is in terms of raw numbers and does not take into account our first-past-the-post system, of course, but look at what the raw numbers are: there were 5,500,000 postal votes, and Labour's majority over the Tories was a mere 770,000. (click to enlarge)

Here's what Judge Richard Mawrey QC had to say about electoral fraud in his famous "banana republic" judgement, delivered two months before the 2005 General Election:

Anybody who has just sat through the case I have just tried and listened to the evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find this statement surprising. To assert that ‘the systems already in place to deal with the allegations of electoral fraud are clearly working’ indicates a state not simply of complacency but of denial.

The systems to deal with fraud are not working well. They are not working badly. The fact is that there are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been. Until there are, fraud will continue unabated.

This matters because, after Tony Blair retired, Gordon Brown signed us up to the Lisbon Treaty.

Article 50 of this treaty specifies the procedure to be followed if a country is to secede from the EU. There has been some debate over whether Article 50 is the sole legal way of achieving Brexit. But there may well be another factor to consider here: was Tony Blair's 2005 election win democratically valid? In other words when Gordon Brown signed us up to the Lisbon TReaty, including its Article 50, did he have a legal mandate to represent the people of Great Britain?

Mr Blair - and Mr Brown - have some very interesting times ahead.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Representation of the People Act 2000

House of Commons Library: Postal Voting and Electoral Fraud 2001-2009 (Isobel White, 2012)

House of Commons Library: Election Statistics 1918-2007

House of commons Library Election Statistics 1918-2012

Postal voting an invitation to fraud, says judge Nick Brittien, The Telegraph, April 2005)

Judge Mawrey's "banana republic" remarks on postal voting fraud in full

are the SNP "managing" news of 10,000 job losses?

I’d hoped to have something a bit cheerier to write about on Burns’ Day, but was alerted to a haemorrhage of jobs by a Scottish friend: 5,500 late last year, forecast to rise to 10,000 soon, mostly in Aberdeen. I replied I was surprised that I hadn’t read about losses on such a scale in the national press, to be told "the SNP is managing the news".

The Scottish National Party (SNP), I should say, is the party that won 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in Westminster (with 50% of the national vote), making them Britain’s third largest party in the process.

Much of their astonishing performance was based on their own predictions of a new oil field discovered off the East Coast of Scotland which, they said, would add a minimum of £15.8 billion to the nation’s coffers, and a maximum of £38.7 billion.

After they had won 94% of the nation’s seats in the Westminster election, they were forced to admit that the true range was £2.4-£10.8 billion, but it turns out this estimated sum had already been factored into figures available before the election and therefore adds nothing new to anybody’s coffers.

As if the misery caused by unemployment on this (or any) scale were not enough, a brain-drain of highly skilled workers formerly employed in Scottish oil is taking place, taking not just income but know-how out of the country. If they’ve settled down by the time (please God) the industry recovers from what looks like turning into a global financial meltdown, how will they be replaced?

The Scottish National Party is a socialist party. Socialism and nationalism have been mixed before and it didn’t work. Personally, although I’m Scottish I live in England and, much as I value my Scottish heritage, in neither country have I ever voted for a party whose name ends in –NP.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Oil explorers predict 10,000 more job losses in North Sea sector Kiran Stacey, Financial Times, October 18 2015

Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce survey highlights challenges facing North Sea Mark Williamson, The Herald, 26 November 2015

SNP dramatically cuts pre-referendum oil predictions Simon Johnson, Daily Telegraph 25 June 2015

SNP MSP apologises after causing outrage with comments over North Sea oil crisis Catriona Webster, Daily Record, 6 January 2016

Nicola Sturgeon told to quit blame games and deal with oil crisis as union chief demands summit Andy Philip, Daily Record, 25 January 2016

Click here for the Daily Record's rolling news page on North Sea Oil and the unfolding crisis

Indoctrination? All About History publishes guide to striking

A word can give away so much, and this time the word was “abhorrent”. The word was used by the magazine All about History, saying in a spread entitled Protest across history that the "Red Wedge" of socialist musicians toured the UK in 1987 because of "the abhorrent possibility of a third consecutive Conservative government", in an issue of the magazine timed to come out when many doctors are striking and hard-left unions are pledging to come out in support.

It’s the only point in the feature where an emotive adjective is used to describe the object of protests. Here’s a quick summary of just some of the movements or incidents from the feature that appear not to warrant being described as abhorrent or indeed anything else judgemental:

• The Imperialist government of India which brought Mahatma Gandhi into conflict with it ( resulting in the Salt March, 12 March 1930)
• Rosa Parkes being ordered to vacate her seat for a white person in Montgomery, Alabama (Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1 December 1955-20 December 1956)
• Racists from the US who spawned the Black Power movement (Black Power salute, 1968 Olympics)
• Homophobes from New York City Council who closed the Stonewall Inn (Stonewall Inn riots, 28 June 1969)
• Apartheid in South Africa (Soweto School Uprising, 16 June 1976)
• The Philippines’ murderous Marcos regime (People Power Revolution, 1983-86)
• Suppression of democracy and democrats in China (Tiananmen Square Protests (15 April-4 June 1989)
• Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq in the face of a million-strong protest (Iraq War potests, 15 February 2003)
• The police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (Ferguson Riots, 9 August 2014)

The next spread deals with How to go on strike and gives a pictorial guide to the Miners’ Strike, although there are several facts missing. The very first window is entitled Hold a Ballot, but although we learn the legalities strikers must observe before going out, there’s no mention that the National Union of Mineworkers(NUM) held two national strike ballots in 1982 and one in 1983 it lost all three, and had to resort to holding ballots on a region-by-region basis and concluding that the activist-enforced victories added up to a mandate for a national strike, which was illegal both under UK laws and the NUM’s own constitution, leading people both within and outwith the NUM to conclude that the strike was more about trying to spark a regime-changing revolution than fighting for admittedly bad pay and conditions. Neither do we get the chance to read that there were 989 coalmines employing 502,000 people in 1964, the year Labour’s Harold Wilson started his first stretch as Prime Minister (with the Tories’ Edward Heath holding the post 1970-74) and 219 mines employing 242,000 people in 1979, when James Callaghan, having taken over following Wilson’s resignation in 1976, lost the election to Margaret Thatcher. Nor, unforgiveably, is there any mention of David Wilkie, the taxi driver murdered by two strikers, Reginald Hancock and Russell Shankland, because he was taking a non-striking miner to work. The only mention of violence is:

Acts of violence could alienate some of your supporters. Getting thrown in jail can help gain sympathy to your cause, but you can’t stand on the picket line when under lock and key.

And on the strike’s end, the magazine counsels:

it is important to know when a battle is lost. Cut your losses and you may return another day to win the war.

Some pages on – and significant given Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s chucking Mao’s Little Red Book at Chancellor George Osbourne – is a Lonely Planet-style guide to Maoist China which, while not quite a celebration, mentions that Chinese people "die in their millions" under Mao’s leadership, but leaves out the scale: at least 50 million people, many more than Hitler and Stalin combined. A little later comes an article entitled What if Trotsky had come to power?, which again is not a hagiography, but is remarkable given the Trotskyist tendencies of Labour’s new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his followers.

Magazines are often compiled over the course of weeks if not months, but the BMA strike was decided on in mid-November, which would have given politically-skewed personnel ample time to partially clear the decks and produce an overtly political "bookazine", printed on glossy paper and with lots of illustrations, that would be especially attractive to young people (David Butt, Group Managing Director of Imagine Publishing, All About History’s parent group, states the company took on many former Ladybird illustrators").

For this reason, I advise you to buy All About History issue 034 for a rare insight an how the wider educational establishment is presenting a skewed narrative to younger people in order to co-opt them as footsoldiers in the war to right what they perceive as being history’s wrongs.

Gerry Dorrian

Recources

Historical coal data: coal production, availability and consumption 1853 to 2014, gov.co.uk - click link to open spreadsheet

McDonnell's great leap forward puts Osborne one step ahead John Grace, The Guardian, 25 November 2015

From the archive, 1 December 1984: Taxi driver killed by striking miners Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, December 2014

Ian Burrell: The publisher of 'bookazines' hopes his reliable, unstuffy medium will appeal to parents everywhere Ian Burrell, The Independent, December 2014

Imagine Publishing homepage

All about History Issue 34

some estates need bulldozed, but they sink because of people

David Cameron’s vow to take the bulldozer to sink estates applies to England, but I thought some lessons from my homeland might prove a cautionary tale for him.

In Glasgow, there was a much-trumpeted slum clearance project in the 1950s. I’m sure it was proposed for the best of reasons, but what it turned into was an exercise in social cleansing, in that when the slums were knocked down – and they did need knocking down – working-class people were moved out of the city centre and relocated at its periphery. Talk about deconstruction at work! Unfortunately, not all went well in the new estates, and for a simple reason: the same people who made the slums worse than they needed to be turned the new estates into sink estates.

The borderline and more-than-borderline psychopaths who keep people divided and tied up in crises are fireproof: at best landlords are scared of confronting them, and at worst they are invaluable to landlords because they prevent effective tenants’ committees to form and stay stable long enough to hold said landlords’ feet to the fire.

This is, as I say, a Glasgow story, but I would be very surprised if it were just a Glasgow story.

The millionaire songwriters of Squeeze, who changed the lyrics of Cradle to the Grave to send a message to the Prime Minister on the welfare State, might have been lucky enough to get out of council housing before drugs took hold, more in some areas than in others. But I lived through it, so please forgive me for my lack of misty-eyed nostalgia. To make things worse, Glasgow Housing Authority (later Glasgow Housing Association) was so fiscally incontinent as to run up almost a billion pounds in debt, meaning it could do nothing to upgrade its stock, and GHA’s leader was forced to admit that nobody who could afford to live elsewhere was living in its stock. Again I’d be surprised if this were purely a Glasgow story, even if the scale of folly is unique.

Many housing estates do need bulldozing, because they were built not out of respect for human families but along the lines of battery farms, confining the maximum number of voters in the minimum space. But beware agenda contamination: will the new houses be smaller so there’s more of them, to disguise the overpopulation crisis arising from open-door immigration? Will the input of EU money be trumpeted in order to influence the result of the referendum and settlements thereafter?

The ball’s in your court, Prime Minister.

Gerry Dorrian

Sherlock and the BBC's war on plot

Since I refuse to fund the media wing of a paedophile ring – ie I don’t pay the BBC Licence fee – I had to wait until today to watch the Sherlock New Year Special. It was good. Better than that, it was great, done in the definitive style of Granada’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett, the definitive Holmes, with a gothic mystery it seemed only Holmes could solve, with witty references to Watson’s publication of Holmes’ adventures in The Strand.

Then suddenly and inexplicably we are in the present day on board a private jet and Holmes is delivering an impassioned defence of recreational use of illegal drugs. How depressingly BBC. The theme of the episode was women’s rights, particularly in the context of the invisibility of women in the late 19th century.

Really? Wasn’t this show broadcast by the same BBC that dropped former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’ Reilly like a hot potato when she started making noises about misogyny and ageism in the Corporation? That has form in hiring pretty young female current affairs presenters and weather-girls then throwing them on the trash heap when they no longer look like Barbie? That forced Martine McCutcheon, while in Eastenders, to do a lingerie photoshoot for lads’ mag FHM without a female chaperone?

Although the programme aired at 9pm on New Years’ Day, right on the watershed, there were several explicit scenes of suicide, which will be watched by teenage fans throughout the iplayer availability slot. Is this really appropriate?

The theme of suicide was part of a postmodern thread going through the program drawing attention to the fiction-within-a-fiction gothic tale within the “real-life” tale. As soon as I worked this out I saw the connection with the theme of Santa Claus recurring throughout the dreams-within-dreams thread of the inspirational Dr Who 2014 Christmas Special Last Christmas – and it turns out both episodes were produced by the same man, Stephen Moffatt. Is there such poverty of talent within the BBC that they have to recycle old plotlines?

Postmodernism, the view that there are no facts except those things we decide (ie the Establishment decides for us) are facts, and there is no right and wrong except those things we decide (is the Establishment decides for us) are right and wrong, but when used to underpin plot so heavily it allows a war against plot that amounts to an excuse for lazy writing and producing.

And in the last analysis, given the problems the world faces at the moment, it’s salutary to remind ourselves that people who believe in facts and that they are on the side of right will always win against people who have surrendered their powers of discernment to hypocritical Establishmentarian bureaucracies like the BBC.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Women in News and Public Affairs Broadcasting House of Lords Select Committee, Miriam O' Reilly's evidence begins from p171

Call the Midwife and the bleak road to Bethlehem

In Christmas Eve’s Daily Mail, Libby Purves writes a heartwarming piece about the Call the Midwife Christmas Special and how the series as a whole provides an island of emotional comfort in the cynical ocean that modern life has become.

It would be cynical of me, therefore, to point out that Purves, who predicts that BBC’s Call the Midwife’s Christmas Special will outperform ITV’s rival Downton Abbey offering, has been a BBC radio presenter since the 1970s and is using the article to curry favour with her managers.

But there’s a whole further level of cynicism to go to. Call the Midwife seems not just to be an evocation of a fondly-remembered past but also a reflection of how the Establishment works, in that it depicts middle-class professionals doling out largesse to a poverty-stricken and prejudice-ridden populace.

In fairness to the programme makers, that's not a million miles away from how the healthcare Establishment sees itself. A friend’s mother, as a staff-nurse in the 1960s, was reprimanded for “socialising with care assistants”, the latter being traditionally drawn from more working-class backgrounds as the professionals. In the 1980s as a student nurse myself, I had to endure a lecture from a ward-sister on how people from my part of Glasgow’s East End were uneducated, feckless and had too many children. Nowadays it becomes harder and harder for people of working-class backgrounds to become nurses as the entry level qualification is a degree – heaven knows why – and when was the last time you were treated by a senior doctor with an inner-city accent?

And sometimes the programme-makers’ own prejudices show through the slick production, now that the storyline has moved beyond Jennifer Worths original memoirs. For example, in the 2014 Christmas Special, we see a mother-and-baby home for unmarried mothers where the care standards are appalling. The doctor comments, “these places used to be run by charities, then they were taken over by the council”. In fact, the original National Health Service White Paper of 1944 envisaged control of services on the ground by local and borough councils, but with the 1946 National Health Service Act Aneurin Bevan expropriated the councils – and therefore the councillors and the electorates who voted for them – in order to nationalise the whole thing and place it under the control of predominantly unelected officials, ground-level services being entrusted to local health authorities, now trusts and clinical commissioning groups, which were and are almost completely outside of democratic control and oversight. The subtext of the doctor’s comment was, I think, that democracy was not the proper system from which to run services that reach out to “ordinary people”, as I believe we of the non-elite are now called.

I suppose this year’s Call the Midwife Christmas Special will provide an island of warm fuzziness in the bleak ocean of exclusion we all now founder in, and sometimes that’s what the doctor ordered. Programmes like Call the Midwife manipulate our brain chemistry to produce a sense of supported catharsis – a good cry, in other words. But sometimes it’s time to put down the tissues and see the world as it really is. As Mary and Joseph discovered on the bleak road to Bethlehem, the world is cold and unforgiving, and nobody comes to mitigate this. Sometimes the solution can only be that we have to create warmth and forgiveness by ourselves, because when nobody comes then each individual has to ponder whether it is he or she that has to act.

I hope you manage to draw what warmth and forgiveness you can from whatever source you can find this season. As the sun sets on freedom and democracy the road ahead is bleak, and I hope we find each other in the coming year. Resources A magical reminder of a time when those in need really felt cared for: As Call The Midwife is set to top Christmas Day ratings, we can learn something from a bygone era by Libby Purves, Daily Mail 24 December 2015 Call the Midwife Christmas Special 2015 BBC webpage A National Health Service White Paper of 1944 National Health Service Act, 1946

was Hilary Benn also referring to fascism at the British Establishment's heart?

There’s no denying the power with which Hilary Benn wrapped up his Syrian war speech, summarising why Britain should go to war and at the same time reminding his Labour colleagues that they are the inheritors of a proud tradition of facing down fascists.

But was the Shadow Foreign Secretary also referring to fascism elsewhere apart from Syria? I ask because the man whom the coda seemed to be directed against most, Jeremy Corbyn, took the position of Labour leader after an election in which there was no defined electorate, which would seem to be the sine qua non of any democratic process. Instead, you paid your three quid and you got your vote, leading to a satire-transcending farce in which even a journalist’s pet cat was sent a voting paper.

Significantly, a large number of Conservative party members voted for Corbyn, with the Daily Telegraph leading the charge in a strategy they claimed would "destroy the Labour Party", in a move that many Telegraph readers found a step too far, one writing:

Isn’t anyone feeling just a little queasy at a mainstream newspaper calling for a democratic election to be undermined and compromised?

I believe that the Telegraph, the Tories’ in-house paper, was lying about its motives. One key characteristic of the 2015 General Election was how similar the three main party leaders sounded (before the Lib Dems’ parliamentary collapse): in particular, on the subjects of open-door immigration and integration, David Cameron, Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg each became a Nigel Farage mini-me.

Suddenly, Miliband having fallen on his sword, Jeremy Corbyn comes out of the political outback to win the Labour Party leadership, his job to show the faithful that there really is a difference between the Labour Party and the Tories, in an “election” that both of these parties, Parliament’s biggest, participated. In order to keep the Labour party faithful on-board, it was imperative for them to believe that Corbyn represented a different sort of politics, and it was imperative to get the Conservative party faithful behind him to mitigate the effect of labour democrats upon the election. This, I believe, was the Telegraph’s true intention.

The Labour Party leadership election was an example, I believe, of the political cartel in action. This is a system whereby which party is in power takes second place to the “right people” the chosen few from the three main parties, being re-elected. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s adviser during the PM's first term, took this even further in the Sunday Times and referred to our system as “a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite who are in power no matter the electoral outcome”.

So when Hilary Benn referred to the Labour Party’s tradition of facing down fascists, I have to wonder whether he is referring to the expropriation of the democratic process by figures on both his benches and those opposite. If he is, I hope he’s prepared to seek out friends among democrats of all political shades, as he’ll need them.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources Read Hilary Benn's closing remarks at Hansard (begins on column 486)

Ned the cat votes Corbyn for Labour leader – but llama family misses out - Aisha Gani, The Guardian, 21 August 2015

Why the Telegraph's call for Tory votes for Jeremy Corbyn will backfire - Roy Greenslade, The Guardian, 16 July 2015 (original Telegraph article: How you can helo Jeremy Corbyn win - and destroy the Labour Party, 15 July 2015, article attributed to "Telegraph Comment Desk")

Fascism's ascent through the Labour Party

Eric Hobsbawm said in The New Century that in the early 1980s left-wing activists started entering public services in huge numbers.

The timing is significant: in 1979 Margaret Thatcher won a convincing general election victory after a campaign aimed predominately at working-class people. It became apparent that democracy wasn’t working in the way hard-left figures wanted it to, in not delivering victory to socialist politicians whose plan was to bring the country to its knees financially in order to foment revolution. Post-revolution, democracy would be allowed to wither on the vine so that the middle-class revolutionaries could not be replaced by what they saw as their underlings.

It didn’t quite work that way: the electorate continued to vote Conservative through the 1980s and well into the 1990s in numbers that would be impossible to explain without votes from working-class people, who Marx’s lazy assumptions indicated should be becoming class-conscious and seeking to make the state, and therefore democracy, irrelevant.

Hence the Gramscian infiltration of public services by hard-left activists in what Gramsci’s acolyte, Rudy Deutsch, called a "long march through the institutions". Preparations were made to turn the country into what they claimed would be a multicultural society, which would have been a laudable aim, but was actually a Derridean attempt to deconstruct Britain and ended up giving us a nation of ghettoes. Most unforgivably, Lucaksian views that the state would fall more quickly with the implosion of the nuclear family were used to justify sexualising children, a view that allowed the far-left BBC to ignore Jimmy Savile’s paedophilia, if not tacitly condone it.

Harriet Harman, the interim leader of the Labour Party after Ed Miliband’s resignation, was a follower of the last view, as shown by her lobbying of the Callaghan Government in 1978 to decriminalise child pornography. Her successor, Jeremy Corbyn, became leader after an election without a defined electorate which Labour’s own senior figures where desperately trying to wreck until the last moment. But democracy – largely through their own efforts – had become as irrelevant within the Labour Party as it has outwith, as witness the voting figures for the 2005 General Election which indicate an enquiry as to its democratic probity is required.

The French-Jewish philosopher Élie Halévy, in his landmark 1936 essay The Era of Tyrannies, established that Marxism and fascism are both descended from socialism, which was constructed in the early 19th century to carry on the work of the French Revolution. If he is correct, and I believe he is, we should call a spade a spade and correctly identify the process that has brought Jeremy Corbyn only a short chain of events away from the premiership as fascism at work.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Letter from paedophile group links Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt to it AFTER they said it had been marginalized Daily Mail - shows picture of 1978 letter from Harriet Harman, proposing that child pornography only be an offence if the child pictured institutes proceedings

The Federalist Derivation by Kriss day on academia.edu. Go to p15 for figures indicating voting fraud in the 2005 general election. Free - sign in with Facebook, Google+ or email account

near and far Jihad: a question for Western leaders

In the Daily Mail, Robin Harris makes an impressive case for robust action on the Caliphate proclaimed by Islamic State, now massacring thousands in Iraq and Syria, and condemns Western leaders for being "catastrophically naïve" in their analyses of the turmoil in Muslim countries.

I can’t argue with that, but I feel I must in turn suggest that Mr Harris is naïve in suggesting the Caliphate poses problems only for countries with a majority Muslim population.

As early as 2009, Jihadis have split their struggle into that against the far enemy – or far Jihad – which is America and the West, and near Jihad against Israel and all local administrations that fail to unqualifiedly call for its destruction.

Far Jihad is well-ensconced in the West, with anybody proposing counter-Jihad (literally action against jihad) condemned by organisations such as Hope not Hate as fascists, racists, and generally “far-right”, which has no fixed beaning but refers to anybody whose views they disagree with.

Jihadis like Anjem Choudary have openly called for a Caliphate for years, and this is key to understanding their mindset. The Caliphate can be proclaimed at any time in any country by any jihadi.

Counterjihad military action must therefore also take two parts: far counterjihad against genocide and, crucially, supporting Israel, whose attacks by Hamas were a diversion tactic to blind liberal Western media to Islamic State atrocities; and near counterjihad, including robust action on hate-preachers like Choudary and real policing of protests against established Western traditions such as free speech.

Far and near Jihad are now coming together, as shown by a recent open recruiting drive by Islamic State's predecessor ISIS in Cardiff. The question I pose Western leaders is: do you act now to protect your many loyal citizens of all backgrounds, including moderate Muslims, or must you be swept away to protect our children?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

ROBIN HARRIS: Our leaders are in denial about this Islamic revolution because it exposes their own naivety - Daily Mail, August 11 2014

Why Jihad went global -Jim Miles, The Palestine Chronicle, 2009

Counter-Jihad report - Jim Lowles, Hope Not Hate, August 2012

Anjem Choudary: Steps to an Islamic Caliphate - The Clarion Project, April 2012

10,000 Muslims Protest Against Free Speech at Google in UK - Gerard Direct, October 2012

Thousands rally in UK to demand end to anti-Islam speeches - Murtaza Ali Shah, The International News (Pakistan), April 2013

'Infidels must wear red collars and shave heads': 'Nazi' vision of Muslim Britain from Imam who ran 'Isis' barbecue in Cardiff park - Abul Taher and Nick North, Daily Mail, June 2014

'That's my boy!': Shocking photograph of a SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Australian boy brandishing the head of a Syrian soldier - and his jihadist father who took it - Emily Crane, Louise Cheer, Daily Mail, August 11 2014

Israel and why Westphalia matters

In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia ended the 30 years' war by esconcing Cardinal Richelieu’s principle of raison d’état – justifying Catholic France’s alliances with Protestant powers to prevent absorption into the Holy Roman Empire – as the defining principle of the nation state.

Under raison d’état each state was free to run its legal internal affairs as it wanted, for example responding to pressures for universal suffrage at its own speed.

When Tony Blair was elected in 1997, he trumpeted a post-Westphalian settlement which would see Britain not only buy into the European Union’s supra-national agenda like never before, but participate in wars to spread neo-conservative values to Afghanistan and Iraq in what former US Deputy Defence Secretary Robert Ellsworth called "salvation without representation".

In Israel’s Gaza campaign, we’re seeing a demonstrably democratically-elected government take on Hamas, a group banned in many countries for its links to terrorism. It is in a sense a campaign against the crisis-hit post-Westphalian movement, where

it is the "internal" boundaries that create problems. Security, defence of privilege, identity, recognition and cultural traditions…are now altered, uncertain, liquid. They are no longer reliable.

Egypt’s sponsoring of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is also a classic Westphalian move: Egypt is one of the states that have banned Hamas. If Palestinian terrorists (by no means all Palestinians) were to catastrophically weaken Israel, the terrorists’ first move would be to announce themselves part of the soi-disant caliphate proclaimed by Jihadis in Iraq and Syria.

This is also a supra-national power, but far removed from the multilateral transfer of rules with the EU as template dreamt of by Blairites. It is an attempt to rebuild the Ottoman Empire, and as such the next stop would be Egypt, therefrom the rest of Arab Africa.

Israel is certainly fighting for survival, but it is now at the centre of the fight for the nation-state system. All of us who value freedom need to realise that freedom lives or dies with Israel.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Imposing Our 'Values' by Force - Robert F. Ellsworth and Dimitri K. Simes

A Crisis Of The State? The End Of The Post-Westphalian Model - Carlo Bordoni

The EU as a Multilateral Rule Exporter: The Global Transfer of European Rules via International Organizations - Mathieu Rousselin

the political super-elite: "universal suffrage gave the wrong people the vote"

Between 1945 and 1956, Austria saw four general elections produce parliaments in which the opposition’s tussles with government were choreographed, for which Austrians coined the term Bereichsopposition. This might translate as opposition arranged within a set area; Marxist social scientist Otto Kirchheimer, writing in 1957, translates it as "opposition of principle," which he defined later as "'the desire for a degree of goal displacement incompatible with the constitutional requirements of a given system".

Kirchheimer’s 1957 paper The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes rails at the birth of the cartel arrangement of politics, whereby a group of parties with little to differentiate them dominate parliamentary politics. He notes this was an "extreme procedure" in Austria, but that the same arrangements were emerging in (West) Germany, France and Italy.

These three were the main signatories to the Treaty of Rome the next year. This transformed the European Coal and Steel Community, intended to prevent another war between France and Germany, into the EEC, the proto-EU.

Left-leaning political scientists like Kirchheimer and Peter Mair (right - whose Ruling the Void references the former’s essay) are pessimistic about the outcome of cartel politics. This seems to stem from a middle-class phobia of the revivifying power of the popular vote: a primal suspicion that universal suffrage gave the wrong people the vote. Walter Bagehot’s fear that "ultra-democratic" politics (universal suffrage – "the rich and wise are not to have, by explicit law, more votes than the poor and stupid") will lead to "violent laws" leads straight to Mair’s phobia of populist politics.

Think of this when you hear Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem politicians slate UKIP: you are hearing the self-serving super-elite of the anti-democratic political cartel, perpetually mired in oppositionalism to the mechanisms of government in Brussels, inform you that universal suffrage gave the wrong people the vote.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes - Otto Kirchheimer, Social Research, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 1957. Link takes you to the essay on JSTOR, where permissions may be required. You can click here to try to access the pdf

Political Perfectionism and the 'Anti-System' Party - Michael keren, Party Politics 6, January 2000: a summary of the article giving Kirchheimer's definition of "opposition of principle"

Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (Treaty of Rome)

The English Constitution - Walter Bagehot, second edition, 1873. The quote about giving the vote to the "poor and stupid" is on p127 of the pdf

Ukip "racism" row: is the Daily Telegraph buying into the political cartel?

Comedy’s funny. Peculiar, I mean: for example, I remember an American friend looking nonplussed at Father Ted, while I was splitting my sides.

Less amusing is the alacrity with which some on the Left will jump on certain types of comedy but not others. Dan Hodges, for example, has published a blog entitled Ukip is now a racist party, in which he seizes on comments made by comic Paul Eastwood (right), which retain their humour even within Hodges’ tirade.

It’s all what you’d expect from a Labour and union aficionado. What is unusual is that it was published on the blogs site of the centre-right Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph has become obsessed with Ukip recently, the party being mentioned in the analysis section at least once daily.

This, I believe, is the political cartel in action. We have a Tory-aligned publication running standard left-wing dog-whistle fare because both Conservatives and Labour are terrified of the long-term consequences of Ukip breaking up the current three-way football match where the parties kick the ball to each other to try and con the masses that the result is democracy.

And as for the charge of racism, I think questions like, for example, "what race is Islam?", although valid enough, risk heading down the wrong road. The whole vocabulary of race relates to the sinister concept that differences between groups of people are inherited and not culturally instilled. This vocabulary first served the slave trade (and indeed still does) before being conscripted to justify eugenics. It’s easy to forget, though, because "you are racist/fascist/insert your own meaningless-through-overuse adjective" is increasingly used merely as a synonym for "I disagree with you". We risk sliding back to the horrors of the 20th century through forgetting that words, contrary to what post-modernists believe, have meanings.

And that wouldn’t be funny.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Ukip is now a racist party - Dan Hodges, Telegraph blogs, 3 March 2014

Neo-fascism and neo-corporatism: The Emergence of the Cartel Party - 300 words

Click to go to Paul Eastwood's page at Jo Martin management

Establishment and Outsiders: patriots live on Winston Parva's Estate

I’m sure Norbert Elias and John Scotson never intended "Winston Parva" to represent the relationship between patriots and super-elites, but as an analysis of power relationships their sociological classic The Established and The Outsiders holds strong in this context.

Winston Parva is the fictionalised village in which the authors identified two classes of people: the Established in the old village, and Outsiders who inhabit the "Estate".

The power differential between Insiders at the centre and Outsiders on the Estate is what they wanted to examine. Power centres, once established, proceed mindlessly upon the Nietzschean task of acquiring more power: witness the neo-imperialistic chequebook held out by George Osbourne to Ukraine while flood victims here, on the UK Establishment’s home ground, appear to occupy at most afterthought status.

Lars B Ohlsson describes in his summary of Insiders and Outsiders the mechanism by which we Outsiders on the Estate – patriots – are kept in our place:

gossip centres and cliché-based judgements, condemnation and discrimination of 'them' while praising and promoting 'us', continually [feeds] the existing order.

Thus we have patriots condemned in general as "racists", "swivel-eyed loons" etc, for no good reason other than these are the present Establishmentarian buzzwords describing political Outsiders – witness Nigel Farage’s treatment in Edinburgh. The most extreme example so far is the removal of foster-children from their guardians on the grounds that "Ukip members might not be suitable foster parents for non-British children".

That UKIP is poised for major gains is due in no small part to the revulsion felt by people of all political persuasions that the Establishment feels parents’ political persuasion is sufficient reason for interventions in family life of the most extreme kind. Come the elections we need to remember that as far as the Establishment is concerned, we’re all outsiders living on the estate.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

The Established and The Outsiders - click to read reviews on Amazon

Insiders and Outsiders - aspects of inclusion and exclusion - a summary by Lars B Ohlsson

We should open chequebook to rebuild Ukraine, says Osborne: Chancellor offers millions to new government - Tim Shipman, Daily Mail, 23 February 2014

EU wonders why Britain hasn't tapped fund for flood relief - Reuters, 12 February 2014

Nigel Farage Edinburgh Protest Turns Ugly As Ukip Leader Locked In Pub 'For Own Safety' - Huffington Post, May 2013

Ukip row: multiple reasons children taken from Rotherham foster parents - Helen Pidd, The Guardian, November 2012 - "Ukip members might not be suitable foster parents for non-British children"

Council admits mistakes over Ukip foster parents storm - Ben Quinn, The Guardian, May 2013 - "The removal of the children caused outrage across the political divide"

Barnet Alliance [for Public Services] denies responsibility for leaflets branding UKIP 'racist' - Chris Hewett, This is Local London, January 2014

How to Spot a Swivel-Eyed Loon - The Guardian, undated

what the flooding crisis says about our fading citizenship

The thoughts of an Argentinian political scientist about newly-democratised nations might not appear to have much in common with the present flooding crisis, but perhaps we should look closer.

The late Guillermo O’Donnell wrote On the State, Democratization and some Conceptual Problems about the travails of Peru, Argentina, Brazil and other countries, but as comparative politics his insights are valid further afield – for example, you could say that the "profound crisis" of the "big state" becoming democratic mirrors that of the hypertrophied state in danger of losing its grip on democracy.

For O’Donnell, the state is more than the sum of its bureaucratic parts: it is "a set of social relations that establishes a social order" bound together by laws applicable "over a given territory", ie that country’s. He adds that the without these laws and the lawful agencies they underpin "the national state and the order it supports vanish”, leading to "a democracy of low-intensity citizenship".

With the Somerset floods we’ve seen a population which was left in chaos and crisis since the end of last year, with forces personnel only being sent in when the Establishment was embarrassed. Compare this with the near-immediate response to Thames Valley flooding, although even there it seems "some people are getting help and others aren’t": we see "a state whose...publicness and citizenship fade away at the frontiers of various regions and class and ethnic relations". In both areas every adult has one vote each, but each areas’s value to the regime (which O’Donnell stresses can be authoritarian even within a democratic state) seems the variable determining speed and credibility of response.

The Governmental and Environment Agency’s responses to the floods are not what one would expect from democratically-accountable institutions. They evince a vassal state in a neofeudal relationship to the EU overlord.

The question is: will votes challenging the democratic legitimacy of that relationship be respected as having equal value with those cast for parties that accept it?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

On the State, Democratization and some Conceptual Problems - Guillermo O'Donnell, Kellogg Institute, 1993

Chertsey residents claim 'homes sacrificed to save others' - bbc.cocuk - "some are getting help and others aren't"

(neo)feudalism and the EU - 300 words

all issues should be up for debate: letter to Cambridge News

Letter to Cambridge News, published on Friday 13 2014. The names of the people I'm responding to have been changed.

I AM writing in regard of the letter from Jane Smith, Jean Smith and Joan Smith ('Negative power of persuasion', News, February 1, 2014). The education and health sectors are major topics of interest in any election, and should neither be demonised nor protected by taboo that prevents discussion of faults.

What I am most anxious to say, however, is that it is not 'racist' to voice concerns about mass immigration or violent religious extremism. The very vocabulary of race is sinister and outdated, and harks back to a time when differences between groups of people were attributed not to culture but to inherited factors. I believe this vocabulary, designed to turn off the critical faculties and elicit a more primal, uglier response from the target audience, will be employed more and more as the European and general elections draw closer.

People who use words like 'racist' and the like reveal more about themselves than they realise: when they think democracy might return a result they don't approve of, they're just not that into it.

Gerry Dorrian

neocorporatism on the march: the Tube strike is a punishment for democracy

The picture is eloquent:

This is what happens when you elect a clown as mayor. Not so funny now, is it?

The seventeen-word manifesto delineates the purpose of the Tube strikes of 5-6 February: punishing citizens of London for using their democratic birthright to elect a Mayor whom TUC high command disapproves of.

Peter Mair and Richard Katz referred to a situation where bodies such as trade unions developing relationships with the state mirrors the relations between the state and political parties. In other words, these bodies – such as unions – determine the direction of the state, supplanting democratically-elected representatives.

Mair and Katz call this situation “neocorporatism”. Given Mussolini identified corporatism as fascism’s political synonym, it’s surely fair to surmise that neo-fascism and neocorporatism can be similarly identified. The unions – in this particular case the RMT and TSSA – are using a 48-hour strike to inform London voters that their democratic choice of mayor is unacceptable to them.

Neocorporatism is the logical next step on from the political cartel formed by our three main parties, who kick the ball to each other every so often to give us plebs an illusion of democracy. The fightback starts when we use our birthright to elect representatives from outwith the cartel.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party - Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair

Mussolini on the Corporate state - Political Research Associates

Live blog of the Tube strikes - Claire Carter, The Telegraph, 6 February 2014