Cicero's Songs

The Scottish referendum was fought on a prospectus that had a bare nodding acquaintance with the economic and political realities of the early twenty-first century. Divisive and absurd ideas were bandied around by the SNP as a sort of alternate reality. The same has been true of the Brexit campaign. Although both sides have resorted to negative and nasty campaign tactics, the fact is that the statements made by the Leave side are repeatedly fact checked by independent scrutiny and found to be totally untrue. By contrast the evidence from genuinely independent research from a very wide range of sources still- despite the attempted rubbishing by Leave - strongly supports the case for Remain. As with the Scottish referendum, the intellectual case is overwhelmingly for the status quo. More to the point though, the moral case is also with the status quo. The fact is that this debate has been conducted by Leave with an absolute contempt towards the truth. The fact is that the Leave atta...

The fact is that the Brexit camp is fighting an dreadful campaign.  The fish rots from the head, and leadership is the first problem that the Brexiteers face. Farage and Johnson posture, but do not lead. Meanwhile Michael Gove has made his case and quietly returned to government. Only IDS continues his angry way, irritating his Conservative colleagues, but not really landing a blow.  In the engine room, controversial but not competent figures such as Arron Banks or Dominic Cummings  have a set a hostile and provocative tone which has even alienated their own supporters. The campaign is divided- unable to put forward a clear vision of a post-EU future, because they can not agree on whether that should be completely separate, an association agreement, or full membership of the EEA. Meanwhile, despite the large amounts of cash available, the campaign is disorganised and increasingly dispirited. The polls are running increasingly against the Leave campaign. A badly le...

With 100 days or so left until the EU referendum, it is clear that David Cameron is getting a good air war. The "leave" campaign is a shambles, and through a mixture of incompetence (Boris Johnson) and his own ruthlessness (Michael Gove), the Prime Minister is seeing off his political enemies. The betting is all one way, and perhaps the PM will maintain his position as one of the luckier and more astute political figures of the past decade. However, post referendum, the clouds are already beginning to darken for both the Prime Minister and his party. Mr. Cameron has already said he will stand down before the election due in 2020. When and how he does so will dictate not only the future fortunes of the Conservative Party, but even, quite possibly, its survival. The problem is that the Tories remain split top-to-bottom on the subject of the EU. More than half of Conservative MPs and probably a far higher percentage of the party membership are strongly in the "leave...

They sow the wind      and reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no head;      it will produce no flour. Were it to yield grain,      foreigners would swallow it up. Hosea 8-6 The first Conservative budget in 19 years is an act of of political hypocrisy so astonishingly blatant that it is hard to know whether to cringe at the opportunism or applaud the cynicism. George Osborne has the reputation as a masterful political tactician. Certainly he has been a astute observer of the political weather and occasionally he has been something of a rainmaker himself. His first Conservative budget is certainly far stronger from a political point of view that it is from an economic one. Take the Minimum Wage, which for the purposes of politics he re-branded as the "living wage". He portrayed the large increase as a "pay rise for Britain", yet the quid pro quo has been such a sharp reduction of in-work benefits that even such a "pay incre...

After the Hollande-Merkel "peace" mission and Michael Fallon's "infelicitous" choice of words  about the Russian threat to the Baltic, it seemed that British detachment from both its allies, including the US, and the burgeoning Putin crisis was growing. In fact, the lack of involvement by the UK in the Minsk-2 debacle now looks prescient. Meanwhile the British decision to provide direct military assistance to the Ukrainian government is controversial, but the in face of the dumb insolence of the Putin government it is a pretty small step, albeit one with potentially momentous consequences for the endgame of the crisis. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the pressure of the Putinist lie machine and the further persecution of Navalny , it is becoming clear that the s ituation in Russia is deteriorating fast. Russia has chosen a direct challenge to the West, nuclear threats and all. However, the reaction from Washington and it now seems in London, is increasingly to ca...

The UK opinion polls are volatile and extremely difficult to read. it has become a cliche that the next election is both uncertain and very open. The only certainty is that the chances of a hung Parliament seem very high. In fact in the face of such uncertainty I can claim no special knowledge ahead of the result. Yet I think that there are actually some significant shifts which are now on the political agenda. There is still a chance that at the last gasp either the Tories or more likely Labour can snatch a single party mandate under the current system. Nevertheless although Labour have an advantage in that it takes far fewer votes for them to win each seat, there remains the imponderable of what impact any SNP surge might have on their overall total. For what its worth, I think that, as in the referendum itself, and as so often before, the SNP confidence will prove highly misplaced, and what might be a quite promising result of -say- 15 seats will be deemed a relative failure and...

For the last few months the government of the Russian Federation has been on the offensive on multiple fronts. In cyberspace, in Syria and Iraq, Russian government agents have been active against Western interests. Internationally, through RT and other mouthpieces, official or not, Moscow has created a slick propaganda machine to set out a case against Western policies. Domestically in Russia, of course the free media has finally ceased to exist. Increasingly, Human Rights have been crushed and what passes for Russian political culture is wrapped in a brutal authoritarianism whose strident nationalism strongly resembles those of the Fascist dictatorships of the 1930s. As this blog has warned repeatedly, Russia has become an enemy power.  The image of Vladimir Putin has hitherto been one of an ice cold, intelligent, strategist seeking to probe and develop weaknesses in the Western system- a system that he has maintained an unrelenting hatred for.  Yet as the Ukrainian cri...

Vladimir Putin is a product of the most ruthless elements of the Soviet era. The KGB and its predecessors took human torment to new levels of barbarity in the name of the relentless will of Marxism. Now VVP- as he is known in most of Russia- chooses to operate these same ruthless dictates in the name of a Conservative, Orthodox world view. Yet, in reality both Marxism and Conservative Orthodoxy are both ideas that do not accept challenge, let alone compromise. In the Russian world view, the Slavophile tradition that has always rejected the freedoms of Western Liberalism and which has been reborn under Putin, has much in common with the anti-Western agenda of Communism. We should not be surprised. As a student of Marxism-Leninism and as a loyal officer of the KGB, Putin has been well schooled in two other traditions: conspiracy and deception. From the earliest days of his rise to power, one can detect elements of both. There are many unexplained episodes and considerable evidence that...

Nigel Farage could be name from the pen of   PG Wodehouse , and if so, it would clearly be a name to represent a bad lot .  In real life the actual Nigel Farage, with his tobacco scented, saloon bar heartiness and rather loud taste in shirts, in fact comes close to the Wodehousian archetype. He is a man who Jeeves would undoubtedly view with disfavour- too loud and somehow too... well, vulgar, a wide boy, rather than a gentleman. Mr. Farage himself would probably cheerfully concur, regarding his personal brashness with some pride, as the antithesis of the machine politician that he affects to despise. In the looking-glass world of UKIP, a gaffe is not a mistake, but proof of humanity, and populist point scoring is not political immaturity, but a respect for the democratic process. Except that in the real world, UKIP has a huge mountain to climb to even match the Green's single, lone representative in the House of Commons. UKIP support is broad, but shallow and in no Parlia...

The press reaction to the events of the past few days has been to smear, to misrepresent and to outright lie. As George Monbiot points out in The Guardian today , journalists are now a lickspittle bunch of toadies for their society friends. The circle of journalists is so narrow that any independent thought is being crushed by an isolationist, very right wing groupthink. As the Daily Mail comes out with some variation on Lib Dems support for Europe taxing your granny to give you cancer shock horror and the Daily Express continue to find some spurious excuse to print a picture of Diana, it is hard not to feel a burning anger at the injustice that allows these poltroons to get away with their schtick. Of course the Lib Dems are right to feel that Cameron played to his Eurosceptic gallery rather than the national interest when he wielded a veto that could be ignored. However we also know, as does David Cameron, that if the UK is going to recover, then the Eurozone must recover- and re...

Interesting to note that David Cameron went to Brussels and has returned with no agreement and the dangerous fiasco of his ineptly wielded veto. Chris Huhne went to Durban and despite long odds, has returned with an unexpectedly strong agreement on climate change. I suppose the message is that if you want an agreement, eventually you can find one.

The weekly Parliamentary riot that is the British Prime Minister's Question time must have reminded Mr. Cameron how fractious his own party is, when it comes to the European Union. The problem is that the freedom of action that the government has on the issue is pretty limited. The Franco-German diktat, organised my "Merkozy" is pretty much the only game in town, since any proposal has to have the support of the German treasury. From the point of view of the UK, we have been outplayed and outgunned by the slippery French President.  That is... for now. Britain has been isolated for two reasons, one real, one a matter of perception. The first is that the UK did not an will join the Eurozone. The second is that British comments, however well intended usually sound like existential criticism of the Eurozone itself. However ignoring and isolating Britain on such subjects as the financial transactions tax may let backfire on "Merkozy", because they are not just...

The political discourse of Britain has become gloomy of late. Rational assessments of the position of the country are being drowned in a flood of negativity and invective. Perhaps it is particularly bad at the moment, as we see the bad news from Japan and Libya filling our screens, but I don't really think so. The fact is that the Brits seem to have become more than a little Eeyore-ish in recent years. For example, despite the clear success of the construction work on the Olympic park, were are encouraged to complain that the games will crowd out London, that things won't be that good and so on. In fact London seems set to give a games that will have a lot more heart than the vainglorious Beijing Olympics, and a lot more commercial nous than the incomplete Athens Olympics. Britain is not a failing country- it is a modern and successful country, for all the various problems that we face. Yet, of course there is the terrible word "still", as in Britain can "still...

It is something of a disappointment to note that the proposed HS-2 rail link will now not be linked to Heathrow . Any such link is now set to be delayed until the 2030s. So London will have a substantially weaker transport system than Paris for several decades into the future. A weaker infrastructure reduces competitiveness, and as we are seeing this week cutting corners - for example on snow cleaning equipment- eventually ends up costing far more money than it saves. Yet that has been the British way now for several decades. "Make do and mend" might have been a good slogan for the Second World War, it is not good enough in a world where China is building, in a single year, more highway than Britain has done in 30 years. Yet the root of the apparently necessary cost cutting on physical infrastructure remains the astonishing damage that Labour inflicted on the British social infrastructure. The imposition of absurd health and safety legislation combined with the diktat of an ...

It does not take any particular genius to notice that the Conservatives are a fairly disparate and occasionally divided party. The battles of the "Nasty Party" ( tm . our new Home Secretary), were mostly with each other, not with the other parties, which is why their electoral record became so poor. The Cameroons were, and are, a minority that is forced to do deals within a shifting pattern of allegiances. Nothing too unusual there: most parties are the same in that sense. What made the Conservatives divisions so painful was the incredible vehemence with which different sides held their views. Instead of the rather senior common room atmosphere of party debates amongst the Liberal Democrats, the Tories like to conduct their debates like a fight in the playground: no quarter is given. Any change in approach is examined for signs of weakness- and compromise by one's own side is regarded as the blackest betrayal. The Conservative debate on Europe, for example, degenerated i...

The 2010 general election has certainly had its twists and turns, culminating in a cliffhanger result. Now, however, it is clear what the shape of the new government will be: a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. It is not going to be an easy ride. However, the impact of Liberal Democrat voices around the cabinet table could well be profound. In any event, the very nature of a coalition will mean a more open kind of politics. There is also the matter of electoral reform: a referendum has been conceded by the Conservatives as part of the government programme. There is now an agreed programme on education - where in truth the parties' policies were not that different. It is the economy that is now the most important focus, and with Vince Cable taking a senior role, we can at least hope for some coherence and forward thinking here. The two exhausted negotiating teams should be congratulated on coming out with a detailed programme. Nick Clegg should be congratulated on sticking f...

Alas! I will be in Vilnius speaking at an economics conference, so will not be able to watch the first leaders debate- at least not live. It is quite a moment - the first time anything like this has happened in British electoral history. The historic excuse for not doing so was ostensibly because the British system is Parliamentary, not Presidential. However, as power has been centralised on 10 Downing St, so the resistance to the idea of a debate has fallen. It will be - of course- a highly managed affair, though David Cameron tried to pretend today that the rigid restrictions were nothing to do with him, in fact the Tory minders, such as Andy Coulson, pretty much dictated the rules: so if Mr. Cameron thinks the debate might be "slow" he has only himself to blame. In fact Cameron is on very thin ice- he has a record of breaking down at interviews, the latest with Gay Times , was particularly excruciating, but he has also done it on Sky too. It is no wonder that he is trying ...

it has been a pretty ho-hum week for David Cameron. Despite a good performance on Prime Minister's question time, he has had to consider a swathe of polls all showing Labour support up, and the Conservatives down. Many Conservative commentators are coming out of the woodwork to give advice to Mr. Cameron- and the chorus has increased in intensity with every percentage point the Tory lead falls. Amongst the various voices trying to steady the ship, there is a growing voice of simple perplexity: "how", they think, "can the Tory lead be in danger, when Labour has so manifestly failed?" Benedict Brogan's piece in the Telegraph this morning is a classic of the breed. And of course he is right: Labour has failed, and the voters are indeed heartily sick of Gordon Brown. But that is not the same as saying a Conservative victory is inevitable, or even desirable. Fraser Nelson in the Times , I think, comes quite close to explaining why. He points out that winning o...

Oh dear! the deselection of Liz Truss by Norfolk Conservatives is something of a challenge for the so-called modernisers around David Cameron. To most people these days, the deselection of someone because they had an extra-marital affair several years ago looks pretty absurd. These days the majority of the population are understanding about the pressures that can cause marriages to fail, and know that the idea of blaming someone is often wide of the mark. Nevertheless it is only to be expected that Conservatives would be more concerned about the issue of marriage and morality. Social Conservatives pay a great deal of attention to institutions, and are naturally conservative about maintaining them. There is indeed a real cost to society from the failure of such institutions, but while Conservatives try to defend the institutions themselves, a Liberal will focus of the role of individual rights and responsibilities, rather than an imposed sense of -often hypocritical- social morality. G...