Never Smile At A Brocodile

A version of this has been published on The Conservative Woman - edits are highlighted in green.

Well, they’ve voted for the WA (and PD) at the Second Reading, though not for the accelerated timetable  https://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2019/oct/22/brexit-boris-johnson-deal-leave-eu-live-news?page=with:block-5daf4c148f08142786c4ffcd - they need to make sure the egg is fully addled before stamping the lion mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_Marketing_Board  on it.

Some call this BRINO (Brexit In Name Only), calling to mind a horned but myopic and generally placid herbivore. No, it’s a Brocodile: a sly and lethally patient raptor, waiting for a bumbling gnu new Prime Minister to blunder into its wide, toothy smile. Old and crafty, it strikes with saurian speed at a negotiator’s vulnerability, and Boris is just a guy who can’t say no https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A18kYnP4Pec , which is why his domestic and our public affairs are in a terrible fix. (Yet De Gaulle could say “Non,” which is fifty per cent longer.)

At this point, the waterhole metaphor breaks down, for it’s not BoJo’s neck that will be twisted off in the EU’s death-roll. He spoke airily of dying in a ditch rather than delay Brexit; now we do have that delay, and absent a miracle we shall certainly not have Brexit. But ABdeP Johnson will be all right – perhaps he’ll take his little black book of contacts to an investment bank, like ACL Blair.

No, it is we who shall pay the price. In cash, in EU disenfranchisement, in the semi-detachment of Northern Ireland, in ceding control over fishing, taxation, business subsidies and other areas. In financial ruin, if the Eurozone collapses while we are still co-guarantor for the EIB’s debts; finally, perhaps, in blood and wreckage, if the EU’s ambitions for Empire and command of UK forces tempt them into fatal overreach.

Our leaders were never going to outwit the EU’s, who resemble the kind of lawyer who could write your will and surreptitiously make himself the sole beneficiary. The incompetent amateurism of HMG’s half-hearted efforts to free us are matched only by the Heath government’s in the process of joining.

Nor does our Government have much to fear from the Opposition, who are only determined that whichever way Pussy goes through the catflap she should still be stuck in the house. With all their procedural tricks, they are not an Opposition but a Subversion. Yet it’s not HMG that they are subverting: really both sides are after the same result – one is playing for time to complete their sabotage, the other is signing surrender terms while trumpeting victory.

No, it is we who are the enemy. How long and at what cost did we fight to cage an overmighty Crown within Parliament; and how much longer was the battle for universal suffrage, even now less than a century old https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/case-study-the-right-to-vote/the-right-to-vote/birmingham-and-the-equal-franchise/1928-equal-franchise-act/ ? We are John Major’s “bastards”, we, who opted to Leave, with our stubby pencils.

Yet so powerful are our combined votes, our Horton’s Who voices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_Hears_a_Who! , that they, too, must be muted. First Past The Post and the Boundary Commission result in a House of Commons where only some 220 MPs secure a majority of votes cast in their constituencies. In 1931 the HoC was for the Alternative Vote, but the Lords wanted PR, and the matter fell https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1931/jun/02/representation-of-the-people-no-2-bill ; 80 years later we reopened the issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vote_referendum but by then it suited both major parties to keep things as they are, whereby psephologists and their databanks can calculate how to sway the swing voter in the swing seat.

But that’s not enough. Democracy depends on informed consent, and Power wants it to be managed consent instead. Enter mass communication technology (from newspapers to radio, TV and beyond) and mass psychology; and the counter-evolution of the masses’ awareness of power relations. Over the last few years, growing numbers of us have become sceptical about mainstream news, feeling that our perceptions are being moulded by selection and suppression of facts, and spin.

The new social media have allowed a hundred flowers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign to bloom, briefly - some of them hermetic and rank, but that’s democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window ; now policed in the West, and suppressed in China in their tightly-controlled Internet. After the flowers, weeds: online disinformation campaigns have sprung up – the paid political trolls, the 77^th Brigade https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-77th-brigade-britains-information-warfare-military and so on.

Moreover, in our modern atomised society, where we drive to the supermarket in closed cars rather than rub shoulders in the classic forum, offline we have limited direct experience of what our fellows are thinking. So the dead tree Press have an opportunity to shape public opinion by the way they report the results of opinion polls.

For example, The Sun said “Brits tell MPs to vote for Boris Johnson’s agreement” https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/brexit/10165122/brits-back-boris-johnsons-brexit-deal/ based on a YouGov poll https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/10/18/two-thirds-leave-voters-say-parliament-should-acce which also revealed - further down – that only 17% of the general population thought it was a good deal, as opposed to 23% who considered it a bad one!

Or how about the Daily Mail, which did a savage handbrake turn on Brexit when Geordie “independence for Scotland, but not for the UK” Greig took over the editorship? It commissioned a Survation poll and concluded https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7589705/Daily-Mail-poll-reveals-Britain-wants-MPs-stop-delay-Boris-Johnson.html that half the nation backs Boris’ deal. Yet if you drill into the poll https://t.co/kiRyQXmIJA and look at Tables 59 and 60, you’ll see that more people “strongly opposed” the deal than “strongly supported” it (and only two-thirds of respondents answered that question anyway).

This is a complex issue, one where facts do matter and as Thoreau said https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/25/opinion/l-one-man-s-majority-654087.html , “Any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one.” I wonder what results we'd have got if respondents were restricted to those who did more than read the Daily Mail or watch BBC News, and instead looked at the online commenters' analyses of the pros and cons of the full deal.

It’s Them v. Us, I’m afraid. It was deeply ironic to watch ex-PM Mrs May castigating the Opposition in Parliament https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1192892/Theresa-may-speech-brexit-vote-today for failing to honour the statutes they helped enact - withdrawal from the EU, and the triggering of Article 50.

Did they mean it? she asked. Well, did she, when she then came to the Commons three times with her Withdrawal Agreement? Or her successor, who has returned with much the same, plus lipstick? Or those who now call for another Referendum, with a choice of a rotten deal or Remain - the latter being the one thing that was definitively ruled out in 2016?

Yes, we are being pushed into the jaws of the Brocodile. And I’m not smiling.

Guido's Chinese Whispers

I have combined and edited two recent posts to make one that I am submitting to The Conservative Woman. Here is what I have said:

“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising,” as Randolph Hearst said. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/77244-news-is-something-somebody-doesn-t-want-printed-all-else-is Over the last few years, growing numbers of us have become sceptical about the mainstream media, feeling that our perceptions are being managed by selection and suppression of facts, and spin.

So we season our understanding with a variety of alternative sources, many online. One such is Paul Staines, aka “Guido Fawkes,” who gives us a stream of Westminster gossip and up-to-date news. Some of us appreciate his support for Brexit, all the more valued since the Daily Mail did a savage handbrake turn when Geordie Greig took over the editorship.

But a couple of Guido’s recent posts have got me worried. I’m hoping it’s just owing to the pressure of constant publication, rather than consciously adopting the Government’s line on Johnson’s “deal.”

****************

On 18^th October, he bannered a piece with “Snap Poll: Public Want The Deal Passing” https://order-order.com/2019/10/18/snap-poll-public-want-deal-passing/ , subtitling it “Two thirds of Leave voters say Parliament should vote to accept the new Brexit deal.”

His source was a YouGov poll whose headline is very similar  https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/10/18/two-thirds-leave-voters-say-parliament-should-acce , but whose detail is troubling. Yes, 67% of Leave voters say they want Brexit done; but YouGov’s third table shows they feel they don’t really know enough. 31% think it is a good deal, 11% think it is bad, and 58% are neutral or undecided. This is a complex issue, one where facts do matter and as Thoreau said https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/25/opinion/l-one-man-s-majority-654087.html , “Any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one.” The general public is even more conflicted: 17% say the deal is good, 23% say bad – and since the 2016 Referendum involved everyone, not just Leavers, perhaps that should have been the headline. In Guido’s case, his headline and the subheading are at odds – the public is not the same as its Leaver element.

Does this matter? Yes, it does. You can influence people by telling them that most of their fellows think a certain way – isn’t that one of the reasons to own a newspaper? Or to infiltrate the BBC?

******************

Cut to 21^st October: Guido tells us “Brexit Party Supporters Back The Deal” https://order-order.com/2019/10/21/brexit-party-supporters-back-deal/ and crows "Despite Nigel’s continuing opposition for opposition’s sake, it seems his usually loyal followers are abandoning him in favour of Boris’s new deal. Last man in the bunker…”

The facts? Out of 1,025 polled among the general public by Survation https://t.co/kiRyQXmIJA , a total of 15 (fifteen) Brexiteers “strongly approved” Boris’ deal. (Click on the link to see the whole thing – Guido’s stats are drawn from Sheet 3, Table 60.)

I am a little concerned that the survey was conducted on behalf of the Daily Mail – I’m sure that Survation will have done a professional job, but I wonder what the brief was; it covers a lot of ground, rather too much in my opinion.

Table 60 analyses responses to Question 26, which reads, "From what you have seen or heard about the government's Brexit deal, to what extent do you support or oppose the deal?"

Already we wonder what the respondents know – what are their sources of information, and how has it been presented? “Garbage in, garbage out,” as the techies say.

Moreover, the replies in this table are merely a subset of the total respondents - only 674 out of 1,025 - so the margin of error is greater. Even then, not all in that subset replied to all parts: the "current voting intention" line (line #1641, Columns Q-W) adds up to only 601 people, and only 596 people said how they voted in the 2016 Referendum (Columns H and I). We’re now down to a sample of less than 60% of people polled.

And Guido’s news about Brexiteers is not only cherry-picking statistics out of this reduced sample, but combining them to give a misleading impression of homogeneity of feeling. The 15 who say they intend to vote TBP next time and who "strongly supported" Boris' deal (Line 1641, Column T) are added to 36 who only "somewhat supported" it, to make a combined total of 51 people - then reported as "67% of Brexit Party supporters."

Step back: 1,025 people took part in the poll; of whom only 87 intend to vote TBP; of whom only 15 are strongly in favour of the deal. I say, if you really want to know what TBP supporters feel about Boris’ deal, do a more focused poll. 5,248,533 people voted for TBP in the 2019 European Parliament elections – there’s plenty of material there!

Using much the same approach, Guido tells us that 70% of Leave voters and 90% of Tories also back Johnson’s WA Mark 2. Is this a safe basis? I'm not inclined to think so.

In fact of ALL those who responded to question 26 and also indicated their voting intentions in the next General Election, only 137 "strongly supported" the proposed deal, and a further mere 158 "somewhat supported" it. Even adding them together - sheep with cows (Little Boy Blue, you're falling down on the job) - you get 295 people out of a total survey population of 1,025. 295 very variably informed people with probably very differently nuanced stances on their support for "deal".

I wonder what results we'd have got if respondents were restricted to those who did more than read the Daily Mail or watch BBC News, and also looked at the detailed analyses of the pros and cons of the full deal.

********************

We need informed consent, not managed consent; so we need commentators who view sources critically and present their findings judiciously. “If you can keep your head when all around you…”

For we’re not getting the straight gen from our leaders, are we?

It would have been comical, had it not been almost tragic, to watch ex-PM Mrs May castigating the Opposition in Parliament https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1192892/Theresa-may-speech-brexit-vote-today for failing to honour the statutes they helped enact - withdrawal from the EU, and the triggering of Article 50.

Did they mean it? she asked. Well, did she, when she then came to the Commons three times with a ball-and-chain Withdrawal Agreement? Or her successor, who has returned with much the same (lipstick on a crocodile, I call it)? Or those who now call for another Referendum, with a choice of a rotten deal or Remain - the latter being the one thing that was definitively ruled out in 2016?

Guido, we need people like you to be our compass, or we shall be lost on a sea of misinformation.

Guido Fawkes - "TBP supporters back Boris' deal" - REALLY?

Parliamentary gossip broker Paul Staines aka "Guido Fawkes" confidently transmits this news:

... commenting:

"Despite Nigel’s continuing opposition for opposition’s sake, it seems his usually loyal followers are abandoning him in favour of Boris’s new deal. Last man in the bunker… 

"A new Survation poll out this morning shows 67% of Brexit Party voters want the Commons to pass the deal, a little behind the 73% of leave voters and 90% of Conservative voters. In the country as a whole, the deal has 47% support versus 37% opposition. Theresa May could only dream of numbers like these…"

_______________________

Survation's Tweet makes it clear that their results indicate 51% still wish to leave the EU, versus 45% wishing to remain and 5% unsure.

More usefully, Survation give a link to the full results [https://t.co/kiRyQXmIJA] and it is worth seeing what underpins this apparently overwhelming endorsement for the new Prime Minister's deal.

The context is a worry. The first page of the spreadsheet (see the second and third tabs at the foot for Contents and Tables) show that the survey was conducted on behalf of the Daily Mail, a newspaper that has radically changed its stance on Brexit since Geordie Greig took over the editorship from Paul Dacre. Greig's preference is for Remain, but also for Scottish independence, a stance I find illogical - you either believe in national sovereignty or you don't.

Also, I'm not quite sure who set the questions, and why they did it that way. The answers you get are conditioned by the way you ask the questions.

At any rate, "Guido Fawkes" is picking his sample results from Table 60, which you can check for yourself on the third page as linked above.

Table 60 analyses responses to Question 26, which reads:
"From what you have seen or heard about the government's Brexit deal, to what extent do you support or oppose the deal?"
Already we wonder what the respondent knows - who has provided that information, and how has it been presented?

Moreover, the respondents are merely a subset of the total respondents - only 674 out of 1,025 - so the margin of error is greater. Even then, not all in that subset replied to all parts: the "current voting intention" line (line #1641, Columns Q-W) adds up to only 601 people, and only 596 people said how they voted in the 2016 Referendum (Columns H and I).

And, of course, this news item is not only cherry-picking statistics out of this smaller sample, but combining them to give a misleading impression of homogeneity of feeling. For example, of those who told the pollster they intended to vote for the Brexit Party next time, only 15 people "strongly supported" Boris' deal, as opposed to 36 who "somewhat supported" it. That's a dodgily combined total of 51 people - reported as "67% of Brexit Party supporters." If you want to know what TBP supporters feel about the deal, go and poll them. 5,248,533 people voted for TBP in the 2019 European Parliament elections - that's more than 100,000 times that 51-person sample!

The same kind of game is played with "Leave voters" (those who voted Leave in 2016) and "Tories" (those telling the pollster that's who they will vote for in the next GE - they'd never lie, would they?).

Safe and reliable? I'm not inclined to think so.

In fact of ALL those who responded to question 26 and also indicated their voting intentions in the next General Election, only 137 "strongly supported" the proposed deal, and a further mere 158 "somewhat supported" it. Even adding them together - sheep with cows (Little Boy Blue, you're falling down on the job) - you get 295 people out of a total survey population of 1,025. 295 very variably informed people with probably very differently nuanced stances on their support for "deal".

I wonder what results we'd have got if respondents were restricted to those who did more than read the Daily Mail or watch BBC News, and instead looked at the online commenters' analyses of the pros and cons of the full deal.

It would have been comical, had it not been almost tragic, to watch ex-PM Mrs May castigating the Opposition in Parliament for failing to honour the statutes they helped enact - withdrawal from the EU, and the triggering of Article 50.

Did they mean it? Well, did she, when she then came to the Commons three times with a ball-and-chain Withdrawal Agreement? Or her successor, who has returned with much the same (lipstick on a crocodile, I call it)? Or those who now call for another Referendum, with a choice of a rotten deal or Remain - the latter being the one thing that was definitively ruled out in 2016?

What is "Guido Fawkes" doing, cheerleading this farrago of misleading information?

Walkabout to Wave Hill

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067959/mediaviewer/rm1550407936

Our ramble begins with an internet writer's reference to an Australian comedy book from the Seventies, The Outcasts Of Foolgarah. Surfing the reviews, I came across a Depression-era larrikin Oz classic, Here's Luck, by journo and rake Lennie Lower, which is now making us laugh.

But Outcasts, by Frank Hardy, was far from the author's most significant work. His most notorious was one that got him in court for criminal libel - the last case of its kind in Victoria; but that's not where this journey leads us. The experiences of the Depression that gave Lower his comic material had radicalised Hardy, as they did so many others, prompting him to join the Communist Party and use his talents to fight the Establishment.

We have since learned what Communism did; but the instincts that it exploited - compassion for the poor, and vicarious indignation - are valid. In our secular age, they inform ecological panic and adolescent self-loathing, an opportunity for ostentatious do-gooders to secure bossy, well-upholstered sinecures for themselves.

In Australia, they take us to the aboriginals.

Twenty thousand years before Neanderthals recolonised an unpeopled Ice Age Britain, forty thousand before modern man supplanted them in Europe, even longer before humans saw the Americas, the first Australians came to their island continent. Early agriculture? The cities of China and Mesopotamia, Egypt and Mohenjo Daro, the stones of Wiltshire and Giza? Last week's news.

For them, time had no meaning, as is so with all of us, our past always fading into dream, driving us to build, write, record images; futile attempts to preserve our intangible selves in something that endures forever, though nothing will.

Where are their monuments? In their minds, and in their tongues. In their myths of creation and arrival, in the songman's store of rhymes that give life-saving directions for nomads in a pitiless land; an inconceivably long heirloom of songs, some maybe stretching back to the birth of language itself. Old to young, old to young, the chain continued, handing on words and skills that gave them their law and culture; the policeman and warrior, the getter of food and drink, the builder of shelters contained in their skins and carried within their hands and brains wherever they went.

Until the last link broke.

Dispossession, displacement, disrespect; opium via the Oriental trading in Port Darwin; alcohol everywhere, ruining the young as it did their counterparts in America, where sometimes crazy-drunk First Nation kids hang out of cars as they tear around settlement lands which they cannot sell or mortgage.

Instead of the remorseless pressure of daily survival, jobs: money, enough to get by and for some, to dream the modern dreams of easy intoxication. And since the young stopped listening to the old, the elders (some, at least) shut their lips. One by one, the guiding stars of the aboriginal are winking out of existence, taking their knowledge with them.

Materially, a little is done to compensate material wrongs, some in response to action by the victims themselves. Following a walkout in 1966 by mistreated Gurindji aboriginal workers at the vast Wave Hill cattle station, a small portion of their traditional lands were eventually restored to them, and the law has begun to address past injustices. Frank Hardy helped to publicise the issues in his book The Unlucky Australians, and a TV documentary followed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tWBmqZVSTg

What can make up for the vast, invisible vandalism of an ancient way of life? Like all humanity, the original Australians have always known war and crime, but what they carried in them was no less precious and far older than the historical relics over which we wonder and grieve in museums.

Still, many times older is the history of humanoids written into all our genes, itself dwarfed by the general relay of life that began billions of years ago. It is fleeting life that endures.

Dumbographics: Greta Thunberg and the young "femographic"

Sex Pistols manager Malcom Maclaren said, "You can make more money exploiting yourself than by exploiting other people."

He didn't add, "Except your kids and other youngsters." That can be left to politicians, and quangocrats like Greta Thunberg's milieu. Canadian investigative journalist Cory Morningstar has already deconstructed the moneymaking juggernaut that has poor Greta tied to it like the secondhand teddy on the front of a lorry, referring to "the targeting of female youth as a key “femographic”".

And the social media owners are happy to manipulate our discussions to help the panic along. Here's an example from today's Facebook feed:

What I'd like you to notice is that when you click on "1 comment" you find that comments are filtered for "relevance". How kind.

Except that when you drill down further to see "All comments", here is what that one person said:

I don't know whether this subtle censorship is done by machine, or is handmade. But surely that comment is spot-on for relevance. China is the world's biggest CO2 emitter.

When public affairs are to be guided by a latter-day Shirley Temple fresh off her Good Ship Lollipop we should start lowering the lifeboats.

Et Tu, Guido? The Boris Deal Is Lipstick On A Crocodile

"Guido Fawkes" on the proposed new deal:

Snap Poll: Public Want The Deal Passing

Important snap poll from YouGov. Top lines:

Excluding ‘don’t knows’, the public want the deal passing by 63% to 37%
A quarter of remain voters, Labour voters and Lib Dems want the deal passing – less than half of each group oppose passing the deal
Only 10% of Leavers and Tories oppose passing the new deal
With an election looming, this should be a huge wake-up call to MPs…

Here's the YouGov poll HEADLINE:

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/10/18/two-thirds-leave-voters-say-parliament-should-acce

Here's the YouGov poll FULL FACTS:

I comment at Guido's - not sure it'll get past the censor:

"Get it straight: 45% of the general population say they don't yet know enough to decide; 15% are neutral; 17% say it's a good deal, versus 23% saying it's a bad one. So far then, it's a NO."

UPDATE

Well, it's on, now. 
https://disqus.com/home/discussion/orderorder/snap_poll_public_want_the_deal_passing/#comment-4656930048

FRIDAY MUSIC: Ray Charles, by JD

Ray Charles Robinson (1930 - 2004)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Charles

Ray Charles is so well known that there is nothing I can add to Wiki's potted history of his life and career. But I can add a couple of my own anecdotes: I think it was 1962 when I bought the EP of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival concert. The two sides of that EP are the first and last videos below. A work colleague who was also a Ray Charles fan was with me when we visited a local record shop after work and we listened to both sides standing in one of those booths, remember them? It was great to be alive in those far off youthful days!

And then sometime later in the sixties I saw the great man himself in concert with his full orchestra, and of course, The Raelettes (including Margi Hendricks) Quite possible the most electrifying concert I have ever seen; sensational and euphoric.... pick any superlative you like and it will still fall short in describing that concert!