Nick Tyrone's Blog, page 5

The Perugia story: an encapsulation of all that is wrong with anti-Tory politics in the current age

Yesterday, my Twitter timeline was awash with stories about Boris Johnson and a supposed trip to Perugia. The lovely city in Italy’s Umbria region had become the centre of a story that many people who should have known better swore would “bring down Boris”. It came from a story in Italian newspaper La Repubblica about Luis Suarez, the footballer. Our prime minister supposedly landed at Perugia airport on September 11th at 2 pm. Only, it turned out the whole story was false. Someone had confused Boris Johnson with Tony Blair.

Some of the people tweeting about Perugia yesterday make their living as investigative journalists. Most of those have deleted the tweets in question; some have not. I bring all this up for several reasons.

One is that if your worldview is deeply shaped by the idea that your political opposition cheat and lie, peddling fake news to cement their position, going ahead and peddling fake news yourself is not a great look. And I’m willing to have a modicum of sympathy on occasion for journalists who get sucked into a false story. But one, this smelled of fake news instantly – the Tony Blair idea was there from the beginning, for a start. Two, before you go and screech on Twitter that this will be the downfall of Boris Johnson, perhaps be absolutely sure the story is for real first.

An excuse some journalists in the UK used for spreading the story was that came from “a reputable Italian newspaper”. Chaps, the media in Italy is infamous for liking to stir the shit; their readers like gossip and the proprietors are mostly happy to oblige. What I found interesting as well about this whole saga is that it involved people who accuse their political enemies of engaging in British exceptionalism demonstrating their own unconscious belief in the exceptionalism of our island; that the Italians would unquestionably take Boris jaunting to Perugia as a serious political story, as opposed to perhaps seeing it as “Look at what this clown with the funny hair is up to now”.

The worst thing about Perugia-gate, however, is that I don’t understand why journalists and other public figures who don’t like Boris Johnson feel the need to propagate what are at the very least extremely questionable stories when the actual stuff you can pin to the bloke does the job already. What I’m saying is you don’t need to make weird shit up about Boris – he supplies all the negatives in reality already. I mean, seriously, I sometimes wonder whether it’s Dominic Cummings who is behind these ludicrous stories; they do his job for him perfectly in terms of both making his opponents seem like the very conspiracy nuts they claim to be fighting while making any attack on Boris seem unfair as a result.

To summarise: just stop it. When you see a story about how Boris Johnson was somewhere that sounds strange, or read something about how his baby is fake, just ignore it and move on with your life. If it’s a real story, that will come out; most likely spreading it around will make you look like a nutter.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

It’s here:

Why the left needs to steal this trick from the right to win again

I recently wrote on here about how, contrary to what appears to be a widespread assumption, I believe the right are starting to win the culture war. A lot of people on the right resist this idea, at least partly because it rubs up against their game plan, which is to win the culture war by stealth. The way they are achieving this is by using some fairly obvious tricks, ones the left just doesn’t engage in or with whatsoever. I think that if the left of our politics could pick up on some of these methods, it would go a long way toward helping left-wing parties finally start winning elections again.

A big trick the right picked up a few years ago and has expanded its use of to great effect in the last couple of years is getting people nominally (and even more importantly, self-identifying as being) on the left to talk about how crazy their own supposed tribe is and how sensible, at least by comparison, the right is these days. The pundits in question will often paint themselves as dissatisfied liberals who are appalled by the left who nonetheless always seem completely blind to any faults of the modern right. At an extreme, they will even occasionally help portray those on the far right as simply mainstream conservatives, creating a narrative along the way that these figures are being unfairly targeted by the “loony left” just for being centre-right.

The left has helped this strategy along in several different ways. One is by muddying the waters on these things themselves, allowing the right’s own form of relativism to emerge. Let’s take as an example Jordan Peterson. I see Peterson as a mainstream conservative who likes to call himself a “classical liberal”, or even more annoyingly to me when it suits him, a completely non-political figure. I think the distinctions here are important and matter; Peterson often likes to discuss some his ideas as being not of any particularly political bent when in fact they are most definitively conservative in nature. That isn’t to say these ideas of his are bad, at least not all the time; it’s just that they are definitely conservative-leaning and explaining them as such is important to understanding them in context. Yet one of the reasons he gets away with this description of his own political leanings is because parts of the left have done so much to paint Peterson as “alt-right” or even “far right”. I disagree with Jordan Peterson on many things but the idea that he is some Nazi is totally and self-evidently insane. Like I say, I see him as a fairly mainstream conservative – maybe even in some ways, a slightly wet conservative. By labelling him far right, the left prevents any real discussion about Peterson’s true political stripes.

Yet this sort of activity from the left also does something far worse than that – it severely downgrades the effectiveness of terms like “far right” or even “fascist”, definitions that are more important now to make clear in their meaning than has been the case for the last forty years at least. By labelling everyone on the centre-right as “far right” – and sometimes even calling people who are solidly centrist or even centre-left “far right” – you essentially get yourself into a cry wolf situation. This has allowed figures such as Katie Hopkins, Tommy Robinson and Anne-Marie Waters to paint themselves as mainstream conservatives – particularly in America where they have less baggage – and to cry that they are unfairly targeted by leftists simply for being “centre-right”. Everything becomes unhelpfully relative, which as much as the right often bitches about this sort of thing as being post-modernist cultural Marxist bullshit, actually suits their purposes rather beautifully.

I don’t see why the left can’t adopt this tactic, and when I look round and see they are still aren’t using it, I find it bizarre. Until I think about the problems the modern left has, of course – too many in their ranks are obsessed with purity and want to increase as much as possible both the consensus around certain issues and then the passionate defence of those positions. This creates two major problems. One is that as a large portion of the left grows more and more zealous, that then creates a lot of people whose viewpoints are extreme – and the more extreme voices are the ones that tend to get noticed. This provides the right with ever more fodder for their “the left have gone crazy” talking point. The second problem is worse: it pushes out people who can’t go along with every single item in the left-wing check list and thus the pool of individuals the left appeals to gets ever smaller. Meanwhile, with the right trying as hard as possible to make liberals feel like they really belong on the right, all while those same liberals are being called conservatives by those on the left anyhow, quite logically we end up with a lot more people who consider themselves on the right than would otherwise be the case. This is one reason why Trump is running so hard on culture war issues; he knows it’s the one thing that can peel people off and make them vote Republican given how much better the right has been at handling this stuff over the last five years – despite Trump being such a turnoff for so many in the relevant cohort, I hasten to add.

The centre-left needs to start using this trick for its own purposes. For instance, imagine if someone like Dominic Grieve had a twice weekly column in the Guardian. Constant criticism of the government from someone who was a Tory minister would carry a lot of weight if it got more space in left-leaning outlets. It would also gets a hearing from people who have voted Conservative in the not too distant past, slowly chipping away at the Tory base. Why don’t we see more independent left-wing outlets interviewing ex-Tories appalled at the current government? There are scores out there. Why don’t left-wing donors fund outlets to highlight the reasonable sides of the left while detailing the wrongs perpetrated by the crazy wing of the modern right?

A big reason why the Corbyn project failed so spectacularly is that it just didn’t understand the basic concept that you must convince a lot of sceptical people if you want to win in politics. This doesn’t mean you have to change your values a single millimetre – but you do have to find some way of selling what you’re trying to achieve to the people who at the very least don’t care either way. I don’t know if the left is capable of pulling the same trick as the right has been pulling for a while now. Yet if they did, they would make an electoral resurgence of left of centre parties a whole lot more likely.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

It’s here:

Here’s the big problem with cancel culture

This morning on Sky News, the following exchange took place:

KAY BURLEY: Tony Abbott is a homophobe and a misogynist.

MATT HANCOCK: He’s also an expert of trade.

If cancel culture worked to its intended aim, the Health Secretary would be worried for his job after that remark. Yet we all know nothing of the kind will take place. The big problem with cancel culture is that the real bad guys never get cancelled. The whole thing doesn’t work at all to its intended aim.

Cancel culture is like many annoying facets of 21st century life. It is a restrictive code that trips up a lot of good faith actors while not stopping the evil things it was set up to get rid of in the first place. Other notable examples of this include banking regulation designed to restrict money laundering and Twitter restrictions in place to halt the proliferation of bots. The banking regulations make it much more difficult to set up a business bank account. If this was ending money laundering in the UK, we might consider this a worthy price to pay, but I don’t see how it accomplishes this given how many dirty pounds circulate around London. In the meantime, small businesses are asked to jump through hoops that would be minor inconveniences to navigate for a criminal organisation with massive resource at their disposal, but which for a micro organisation can be daunting.

As for Twitter – I’ve never run a bot farm and never intend to. However, I’m sure that if I had a budget and employees for doing this sort of thing, having to buy a bunch of burner phones all of sudden would be annoying as opposed to shutting me down in any real way. In the meantime, gran’s Twitter account she set up to share some pictures of her grandkids with her friends is shut down when she can’t navigate the protocols.

Cancel culture is designed to end racist, sexist behaviour and yet those things flourish around us while people with 80 followers on Twitter get cancelled for telling an off colour joke. I mentioned Tony Abbott at the top, but Donald Trump has to be the poster boy for the failure of cancel culture to achieve its aims even modestly. Here’s a guy who swims in his lack of political correctness – who was caught on tape during a general election campaign saying when he is attracted to a woman he is wont to “grab them by the pussy” – and yet he’s president of the United States. The left across the western world is engaged in a culture war that it is not only losing, but soundly losing. I have even begun to worry about the liberal advances we had already banked, such as equal marriage, thinking they could be in danger. Perhaps that’s me overreacting, but I am genuinely concerned about this now.

Beyond tripping up normal people while not actually stopping the bad guys, there are two other major things that cancel culture does which are negative. One is that it makes too many behaviours equivalent. A clip that went viral on Twitter a few months ago depicted a young woman saying that anyone who uses the phrase “All Lives Matter” is “literally the KKK”. Now, I happen to think “All Lives Matter” is an insensitive thing to say. A lot of racists have adopted it as a catch phrase and even if there was a time when saying that phrase could have been argued to have complexities, I think we’re past that now. Yet I still think it goes without saying it doesn’t mean anyone who uses it is literally the KKK. By saying so, what you are doing is taking illiberal behaviours off of a spectrum and making them all equal. So, telling a slightly dodgy joke becomes exactly the same as using outright Holocaust denial, or saying all BME people should be kicked out of Britain immediately.

The other negative is that it makes martyrs of far right figures. They get to pose with gaffer tape across their mouths, signifying they are being silenced, all while they make a packet for saying whatever they like off their followers using Patreon accounts. Cancel culture sure does give the far right a lot of oxygen for something that is meant to crush it down into nothing.

Coming back to my comparison between cancel culture and banking regs and Twitter rules – a big part of what fuels it is the sense of having to do something and then just picking what seems like the natural thing, even if that not only doesn’t solve the problem but actually makes it worse while creating all sorts of other issues. “What else can we do?” ask those who want to stop racism, or stop criminal organisations from being able to rinse their dodgy money in our banks, or stop Twitter from being the place where everyone settles into their bubbles while the savvy figure out how to make money out of the mess. I get that. But there is a time when you have to realise that what you’re doing isn’t working. The era of cancel culture has also been the era of Trump, Boris and Brexit. The right is definitively winning the culture war. Time to think of new tactics.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

Here’s how the Lib Dems should deal with Brexit from now on

With Ed Davey’s ascension to the leadership of the Liberal Democrats comes the question of what the party’s exact position on Brexit should be from here on out. Clearly, the Lib Dems are not in any danger of becoming some pro-Brexit outfit; yet there is still some doubt as to what the yellows should do with this subject. Everyone in and around the Lib Dems feels burned by the revoke policy and some wonder whether it’s time to just stop talking about Brexit altogether.

I think doing so would be a mistake. The Lib Dems need easy to understand points of differentiation with the two main parties that aren’t alien to most voters. Being “more green” isn’t going to cut it; going on about electoral reform will certainly not demonstrate that the Lib Dems are “listening”, as Davey put it in his acceptance speech. I think there are only two things the Lib Dems can do to make themselves stand out. One is their stance on Brexit – but to be clear, it has to be handled in a very different way than it has up until now, which I will elaborate on in a moment. The other is pro-business positioning. What’s great here is that those two things are easily combinable. Get the mixture right and the Lib Dems have a chance to be relevant again. Yet I need to stress here that it will be tough and require an ability to think outside of the box not seen in the party for several years.

I’ll start with being pro-business because it’s easier to talk about Brexit positioning once that’s out of the way. By being pro-business, I do not mean being against any forms of social democracy or thinking any and all regulation is bad or that corporation tax should be abolished. To think that being pro-business must entail these things just demonstrates that you don’t know anything about business. Since the end of the Coalition period, the Lib Dems keep saying they are the most pro-business party without having any actual policies to which businesses would respond positively. I won’t take the time to go into what pro-business policies would be good for the Liberal Democrats to adopt here – that would require a whole other, long article, one I will write someday soon – but they need to get the business community taking them seriously. Again, to stress, this will be very difficult and may not even be possible after the monumental screw ups of the last year or so. But if the party can’t pull this off, I don’t know where it has to go.

Being pro-business would allow the Lib Dems to adopt an angle on Brexit that might work for them much better than any of the other approaches on the topic to date. During the 2016-2019 period, anti-Brexit sentiment was almost always expressed in the most left-wing way possible, by pretty much all pro-European voices. It was about holding hands around the blue and gold flag, singing “Kumbaya” and hoping for a socialist wonderland to emerge from Euro federalism. I’m exaggerating here for effect, but it’s striking how little hyperbole I am having to utilise in that description. The Lib Dems talking instead about the effect of Brexit on both businesses and their employees (i.e. everyone who isn’t a child, a pensioner or unemployed in the country) as it unfolds in real time could be very effective. It’s about having something to say on Brexit that makes life difficult for the Tories; something that isolates them from some vital part of their base, such as the business community.

Business has mostly been abandoned by the Conservatives since the EU referendum came and went. The Tory attitude has been “We’re the only game in town, so who else are you going to support?” With a Corbynite Labour Party and a Liberal Democrat party trying unsuccessfully to pretend they were never in government with the Tories, this has worked. Unless a party comes along and threatens their business base, the Conservatives will be able to continue playing this game forever. Starmer’s Labour I suspect will try to win over the business community at some point in earnest; ironic given Lib Dem activists moan about the legacy of the Coalition all the time, here’s where the supposed baggage of that government becomes a plus for the Lib Dems, particularly over Labour.

Often when I’ve said the Lib Dems could stand to be a little more centre-right in some areas, I’ve got back that this supposedly means that I’m saying the Lib Dems should “become the Tories”. But I have never said anything of the kind. What I’m trying to communicate is that the Lib Dems should be trying to steal political geography that the Conservative Party has abandoned while remaining a liberal party. If the Tories have turned their backs on business, demonstrate that there is an alternative. A level-headed, Brexit-regretting, pro-business, pro-aspiration Lib Dem party could fill this void if its pitch was convincing enough, i.e. if it was clear the party really meant what it was saying.

I will conclude by saying I don’t really expect any of this to happen. Even with Ed getting the nod over Layla, I still worry the Lib Dems have still gone way too far down the “let’s pretend the last fifteen years didn’t happen (particularly the Coalition) and protest the Iraq War again” road to come back to sanity. But I’ll only say this to Lib Dem activists who want to kick the Tories out of office: whether that happens or not may come down to the Lib Dems being appealing enough to people who live in key seats and have voted Tory the last few elections opting to vote Lib Dem next time round. There are several ways what happens to the Lib Dems may not be that vital in the end – Labour could become so popular and poll so high that like 1997, they don’t need the Lib Dems. Yet if you’re in the Liberal Democrats and hoping the party gets to be part of some Keir Starmer led government, it fails me how you cannot see that being a carbon copy of Starmer’s Labour with some Green-esque quirks thrown in will not work. Unless the Lib Dems can gets votes from Tory-leaning voters, they will fail as badly at the next election as they have at the last three general elections.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

The post Here’s how the Lib Dems should deal with Brexit from now on appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

How Brexit fuelled Scottish nationalism in a much simpler way than is usually discussed

Scottish independence was roped into the effects of Brexit from the day after the EU referendum took place. It was said by many, myself included, that one of the reasons that the Scottish people had voted no in 2014 was because by leaving they couldn’t be assured of getting into the EU as a new, independent country and so the one way to ensure EU membership was to remain in the UK. Also, that Scotland having voted to Remain by 62% while England voted to Leave showed ever more how separate the politics of the two largest nations in the Union had become. Scotland was going to become independent because of Brexit went this logic – it was only a matter of time.

I think Brexit made Scottish independence much more likely for a simpler reason. The arguments Leavers made to convince us that leaving the EU was the right thing to do also worked unconsciously in the Scottish Nationalists’ favour in a massive way.

Think back to the 2014 Scottish referendum. “Better Together”, the No campaign, had these main messages: Scotland leaving the Union will make it an economically poorer place. Independence also comes with a lot of massive practical complications that Yes campaigners haven’t explained away. Countries are better off when they maintain close ties with their nearest neighbours. Massive change without any idea of what it will look like is inherently a bad idea.

One of the ways in which the Leave campaign won in 2016 while the Yes campaign lost in 2014 was because the Leave campaign was able to negate the negatives of Brexit while accentuating the imagined positives. Brexit won’t make us poorer – we will be richer. Or at the very least, the people who will be poorer won’t be you but someone else. Brexit won’t be complicated because we hold all the cards and the EU will give us whatever we ask for out of fear of losing our trade. We won’t leave until we have the deal we need in place anyhow. Yes, countries are better off when they work closely with their neighbours – which is why we are going to leave the EU to do that more effectively.

It doesn’t matter that those lines became almost their exact opposites over time. Brexit will make us poorer now, but who cares, at least we have our freedom. Instead of us holding all the cards against a quivering EU, we are facing an all-powerful European Union is about to shaft us by not giving us a deal we rightly deserve, throwing us into a poverty that has a supposed dignity about it. We don’t need a deal now anyhow, since trading on WTO terms will be perfectly fine, despite this going completely against the entire logic of desperately wanting a deal with the US. Working closely with our neighbours? Not as important as having our freedom.

What the 2016 EU referendum taught the Scottish Nationalists is that emotion beats logic, so long as you can sideline people’s logical concerns. Worried about whether an independent Scotland will be able to rejoin the EU? Of course we will! Are you suggesting that Scotland isn’t strong enough to do this? Are you an enemy of the Scottish people for even thinking this way? If you’re worried about what the currency, don’t be – we had ways of trading with each other long before we were cowed into a union with the English and we’ll be fine after we win our freedom. Don’t you want to be free?

Brexit made Scottish independence more likely for the simple reason that the arguments for Brexit follow the same logic as the arguments for Scottish independence. National sovereignty is more important than anything else and no amount of economic pain can alter that. Becoming independent doesn’t mean we’ll cut ourselves off from our neighbours – if anything, our relationship will improve once we are our own people again, free to make our own decisions. They’ll respect us more.

If you doubt what I’m saying, I’ll challenge you to do the following: what would you base a No to independence campaign on now? What would your messages be? If you tried the 2014 stuff again, it would fail, but I genuinely don’t know what you’d replace it with. Brexit has shown us the extent to which an emotionally pitched nationalist argument can win out over any logic put in its way. Watching the same people who created this problem try and reverse it may be the only entertaining thing we’ll get out of watching the Union disappear.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

The post How Brexit fuelled Scottish nationalism in a much simpler way than is usually discussed appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Is the Brexiteer answer to making Brexit work now…..socialism? Has Lexit won in the strangest way possible?

I wrote an article for the Spectator this week about what I think Keir Starmer’s likely approach to Brexit from here will be. I was fascinated by the response, particularly from Leavers who basically agreed with me. I feel like getting people talking again about realistic paths back into the Single Market and Customs Union is part of what I’m trying to do with all of this, so this pleased me greatly.

One response from the Brexiteer wing of British politics intrigued me in particular. An article in the Daily Express which was essentially a riposte to my piece, which you can read here if you’re interested. In particular, what interested me was the proposed Tory counterattack, should Keir Starmer be thinking along the same lines on Brexit as I have predicted he shall.

“….if Sir Keir should decide to impose this strategy……..the Conservatives “could frustrate such a cunning plan by creating facts on the ground. The Tories could counter by creating jobs in critical constituencies, especially in the North, where Labour still holds a significant presence, meaning Sir Keir’s pledge for the UK to re-join the single market “would then take on a different quality”.

What’s interesting to me about this is that the Tory response to a threat from Starmer to plausibly get the UK to re-enter the Single Market – the one Margaret Thatcher herself helped greatly to forge, let us add here – is to create government jobs in the north. There is a word for this I’ve been grasping for…..oh yes, socialism. The Tory plan to make Brexit work is a form of socialism that isn’t far from some of the stuff the more cogent Corbyistas have been talking about for some time now.

This is key. Brexit is now no longer talked about as something that will unleash the power of the free market to create prosperity throughout the UK. Basically, the way the Tories will fight Starmer at the next election could be by being more effective socialists than Labour. Is Lexit about to carry the day in the strangest way imaginable?

Let’s really think about what we’re talking about here. A Labour leader could go into the next election promising to liberalise trade and allow market forces to create jobs in the UK, while the incumbent Tory government argues against that and says that we will use the protectionism that Brexit has created in order to create a host of public sector jobs in the north.

It says a lot about how deep tribal allegiances run that the Tories are becoming a sort of updated version of an Attlee-esque Labour Party and yet the vast majority of Conservatives, most of whom I would assume joined the party because they liked the free market at least a little bit, are not even really complaining all that much. Brexit, which was supposed to create a libertine fantasy Britain, is becoming an excuse for the Tories to morph into an actual socialist party.

How long can this continue? Will we really go into the next general election with a Labour Party that is basically the liberal party, as in, socially and economically liberal but with some social liberalism of the type the Lib Dems used to do? All against a socialist Conservative Party that is socially conservative (in other words, the exact opposite of the Cameron Conservative Party)? It is really starting to look that way.

There is a section of the Conservative Party that will undoubtably think this matchup would have the Tories win hands down. They will point to the 2019 general election for comfort, citing that the Lib Dems tried to be the socially and economically liberal party and look where that got them. Except this is completely false comfort – the Lib Dem 2019 campaign was riddled with unique problems that stymied their efforts greatly, not to mention their supposedly liberal pitch on the economy wasn’t well thought out, to put it mildly. A much better comparison could be 1997, when a reasonably liberal sounding Labour Party managed a landslide against a Conservative Party that had screwed up a lot and that people were completely sick of. It is understandably why this isn’t the comparison Tory Brexiteers reach for, however.

If the answer to making Brexit work is socialism, I think it will fail spectacularly. Yet I suppose we’ll wait and see. I suppose I would say that given I am liberal who believes in markets, free trade, internationalism. You know, all those things the Tories used to believe in only a few years ago.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

The post Is the Brexiteer answer to making Brexit work now…..socialism? Has Lexit won in the strangest way possible? appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Clearing up what I have (and have not) said about the Liberal Democrats recently

I have written a series of articles, mostly in for the Spectator but sometimes elsewhere, about the state of the Lib Dems. I’ve written about what I think the party should do, what I think they will do, and what I think other parties need to be mindful of when it comes to the Liberal Democrats. There seems to be some confusion about what I believe to be the case, with some accusations thrown at me for being supposedly inconsistent. This, I believe, mostly comes down to people being confused between what I think WILL happen and what I think SHOULD happen, which are not the same things at all.

I believe the only space for the Lib Dems is roughly Orange Book shaped.

I know the word “Orange Book” is instantly emotive in Lib Dem circles, but what I really mean to say here is that the Lib Dems’ available electorate is made up of mostly middle-class people in the “yellow halo” around London. St Albans is a classic of this kind that is actually held by the party at present. Remainers who are vaguely centre-right in their politics; people who would never vote Labour but have certainly voted Tory in the past and might do so again if someone less odious than Boris Johnson became leader.

Now, yes, it so happens I would like the Lib Dems to be this kind of party myself. Having said that, I’m so fed up with British politics, I would like any party that was vaguely decent and had a broadly okay vision of the future. Whether that was a little to the right or a little to the left of my “perfect” politics, I wouldn’t mind. So, I don’t describe the shape the Lib Dems can take as being Orange Bookish simply because I want the Lib Dems to be like that, but because I actually, genuinely believe it is the only place for the party to go that will not result in their annihilation. I do not believe that hoards of young, left-leaning voters will vote Lib Dem again unless something drastic happens – loads of Labour far left figures visibly joining or something very formal agreed with the Greens that was borderline merger.

2. I said the Lib Dems WOULD merge with the Greens

I even said this was inevitable. However, I don’t think it will happen anytime particularly soon. If it is going to happen it might as well happen now, when the Lib Dems are on what is probably going to be a relative high of local seats and activists – a hangover from summer 2019, essentially – but given the nature of both parties, any merger will not happen until both parties are crushed almost completely, which I figure will take another five to a dozen years to see through. Getting this straight: I think a merger between the Lib Dems and the Greens WILL happen (although not for a while) but I think it’s kind of a bad idea all round (I’m not saying it SHOULD happen).

3. I said that the Lib Dems SHOULD chuck it all in and join Labour

Actually, specifically what I said is that unless the Lib Dems are interested in carving a realistic niche out in British politics in which they are not any closer to one party than another, and instead of that they will always prefer a Labour government to any other realistic other option, then they should just join Labour as an entity a bit like the Co-Op grouping. I still believe this to be the case. Weirdly, this has caused some people to label me a Tory (more on this in a bit), which is odd because the Lib Dems merging into Labour would make a Tory win at the next election way less likely. Getting this straight: I do not think Labour should “take over” the Lib Dems. That would be weird. What I said was that the Lib Dems should melt into Labour of their own free will if what they want is a Labour government – which is what both leadership contenders keep saying they want.

I have also said very recently that I think Labour should be careful about the price the Lib Dems are saying they will want to extract in order for there to be a Labour prime minister after the next election, should Labour be the largest party in a hung parliament. This is not inconsistent with saying the Lib Dems should melt into Labour; if they were part of the Labour Party, the problem I highlight – that the Lib Dems would demand PR – goes away.

4. I am not a Tory

Trust me, the easiest thing in the universe for me to do would be to become a Tory and announce it to the world. I would have the protection of the whole of the right; there are any number of vocational opportunities that would arise quickly for me; I would take my place in the Tory ecosystem, which is a pretty cosy looking place to be. I haven’t done this because I’m not in fact a Tory. More to the point, I detest Brexit more than ever and think Boris Johnson is one of the worst if not the worst prime minister ever. Actually, even more to the point, not being Tory enough has actually cost me some concrete opportunities in the past few years.

Instead, the thing I have advocated more than anything over the last few months has been a Starmer-led Labour government, with a few caveats (if the progression he has made since becoming leader continues, essentially). I know some people like to throw around the word “Tory” like it’s an insult – I don’t feel insulted when someone calls me a Tory. I know and love a great number of Tories; in fact, career-wise, Tories have been more helpful to me than anyone else (again, this is why becoming a Tory would be very useful to me!). But I do feel like calling me a Tory is a way of avoiding my actual arguments, which is irritating. I know when I say mean things about the Lib Dems, the easiest thing to reach for is “he’s a Tory” – except, when I’m saying that I’ll vote for the Labour Party at the next general election instead of the Lib Dems, this doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense.

To recap: I think the Lib Dems should accept that their available electorate is Home Counties Remainers who liked the Coalition. Since it’s clear they aren’t going to do that, I think they should melt into Labour. Since I know they aren’t going to do that, I reckon at some point a Lib Dem-Green merger is on the cards; yet given the impractical nature of both sets of activists, this merger will not happen until both parties are much smaller and thus much more desperate than they are now, making the merger mostly meaningless and ineffective. That’s what I have said and whether you agree or disagree with some or all of it, nothing in there is inconsistent with any other part of it. If you’re going to have a go at something I said, go for it – but at least take on my actual arguments.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

The post Clearing up what I have (and have not) said about the Liberal Democrats recently appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Will the threat of Scottish independence end Boris Johnson’s time in Downing Street?

Boris Johnson is very unpopular in Scotland. A Times poll out this morning puts Johnson’s handling of the CoVid crisis amongst Scots at -61%. There was talk when he became PM that he would end the union – sure enough, the SNP are riding higher than ever in the polls and Scotland voting to leave the Union and becoming an independent country now regularly wins out when the subject is polled.

Yes, Brexit is obviously a factor. But Brexit has been there, waiting, for four years and it is only since Johnson became prime minister that we’ve seen this shift in polling toward independence. There is a temptation to ask why Boris is so unpopular in Scotland but really, the better question is why Johnson is as popular as he is in England; only the English seem to fall for BJ’s charms. Something about the ruffled hair, I’m a cheeky public school boy so don’t mind me as I make a mess of things shtick really only works here and nowhere else.

I have written before about how I think, contrary to popular pundit opinion, that Boris Johnson’s time in Number 10 will be brief. I think no deal (or what amounts to it) Brexit followed by a shocking set of results for the Tories in the local elections next Spring, particular given the Conservatives are long, long overdue to get spanked at local level anyhow, might do for Johnson. However, there is one other thing waiting in the wings for BJ on top of all that. The SNP look likely to get a majority in the Holyrood elections in 2021. That means another referendum on independence, seven years after the last one, appears very likely to happen. The Tories will have to ask themselves at that point which do they like more? Boris or the Union?

Having Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister of the UK when another Scotland independence referendum happens would be putting the Union at terrible risk. Will the Tories see that in order to save the Union, Boris will have to go? The recent record on this shouldn’t give one a lot of hope.

When faced with a choice between having to pause Brexit and screwing over Northern Ireland, Boris made a choice for the latter. The parliamentary Conservative Party went along with this. Some are complaining now that they didn’t read the fine print, but what they are bleating about is the stuff about payments to the EU and other such matters – not what happens to Northern Ireland. No one in the Conservative parliamentary party is complaining about the arrangement with Northern Ireland. This suggests that at the very least, the Union has been deprioritised within the Conservative Party.

Losing Scotland is probably a different matter, however, which is why I think they will ditch Boris in the end. When faced with a PM who is tarnished irrevocably by the handling of CoVid and no deal Brexit anyhow, getting rid of a leader who imperils the Union may seem like the only real choice available. Maybe. If I had to bet one way or another, I think they’ll get rid of Johnson. But I’m also glad I don’t have to make that punt. Betting against Boris Johnson has yet to pay out, sadly. Perhaps the hold he has over Tories is so strong, they will march with him into oblivion – and the end of the UK.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

The post Will the threat of Scottish independence end Boris Johnson’s time in Downing Street? appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Why we need to get real about CoVid

Like everything else in the current era, CoVid is thought of differently on the left and right. The left have, oddly in a way, become lock down passionate, sure this is the right way to go. I say strange since it means giving a Tory government they swear are fascists ever more power. On the right, CoVid skepticism abounds. We don’t need masks, we don’t want more lockdowns, let’s get the economy up and going again as quickly as possible. Increasingly, there is very little in the way of a middle position through all of this.

I hated writing about CoVid or almost any aspect of the crisis for the longest time. I really wasn’t sure how to judge the government’s handling of it, particularly given the novel nature of the whole thing. Was Boris really mishandling it all as badly as most of the left were asserting? Part of me wanted to pull away from such a judgement since I knew I was inclined against Boris to start with; part of me wanted a different answer since we were in the midst of a national crisis and I wished for the government to handle it well, any partisanship be damned. I have now concluded that at the very least, the government have mishandled the comms side of it all; they really have managed to land in no man’s land, annoying larger parts of the right each day as restrictions are either introduced or re-introduced, all while the left have more than enough circumstantial evidence for things having gone badly simply by the ramshackle way things are announced. We have designated safe countries to travel to, only for that to change at the last moment. New measures, when they are introduced, are done so in the most incompetent looking way possible. Again, it may be that any government would have struggled with this crisis in roughly the same way; yet it is Boris Johnson in the hot seat when it happened and that’s all we can try and judge.

The problems run much deeper than all of that, though. We could replace the government in a general election if it came to it. What is uncertain still is how exactly do we navigate the rest of the CoVid crisis from here regardless of who is in charge of the country. All along, since the crisis began, the basic assumption is that it won’t last; there will be a vaccine, or there we be some form of herd immunity, or the virus will somehow quietly disappear from our lives. Any of those things may still happen. Yet it looks much more likely now that we’ll have to live with CoVid for a while, perhaps even years. If that really is the case, some horrible choices will start to have to be made.

I understand the urge to keep everything as safe as possible; lockdown when necessary and all of that. The problem is, if we have to live with CoVid for two, three, four years more, this really isn’t going to be possible. We are eventually going to have to start really worrying about the economy. And for those who think this is some bourgeois concern, it isn’t; the people who will suffer from an economic depression most of all will be those economically worse off to start with. The rich may become less rich and upper middle-class lifestyles may take a knock, but everyone in either bracket will ultimately be all right. What happens when there is mass unemployment and we no longer have the means of realistically maintaining a welfare system that can keep living standards even where they were in say, 2018? These are important questions that no one wants to answer. The left will say that there is always a way to provide a welfare state as required by need; just tax the rich more. The right will say that the way round this is to end all lockdown and get people back to work immediately, spending their money in shops or online; let’s prioritise the economy and if a few more people die of CoVid, so be it.

I’m coming to the end of this article and I am fully aware that it is extremely short on answers. All I can say is that the left has a point when it says that we need to contain the virus somehow in order to not overwhelm the health service, not to mention save lives. The right has a point when it says that if we have to live with this virus for several years more, we can’t keep the economy where it is without massive repercussions. With all that in mind, how we get through this, I still don’t know. But I know that at some point we are going to have to start talking realistically about the hard choices ahead. Whatever I can or can’t say about the government’s handling of it all, I can say one thing safely: I’m glad it’s not my call.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

The post Why we need to get real about CoVid appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

Why all the V-shaped economy talk shows how confused Tory thinking is at present

A common thread amongst centre-right commentators at the moment is the “V-shaped recovery”. This is the idea that the unprecedented economic crash we are experiencing will be brief and things will return to normal very soon – thus, a graph showing economic growth in the years 2019 through 2021 will demonstrate a huge dip followed by an equally large spike (making a V shape). What’s so odd about this line is that it isn’t helpful to the Tory government at all.

One, it sets expectations high. If you tell people that everything is going to be hunky dory, then if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, they get angry about it. The fact that the CoVid crisis happened isn’t the Tories fault, so there should be some form of expectation management taking place here. If you tell everyone that hard times are expected and there really is something approaching a V-shaped recovery, at that point the Tories would get credit for doing better than expected. I understand the counter to this – that economic predictions have real world effects and if you tell everyone things will be bad, this can become self-fulfilling. Whereas, if you tell everyone about a V-shaped recovery, more people will go out and spend and again, and this can make that prophecy come true. Except, you are still putting an awful lot on the Tories in terms of expectations.

In the end, I would understand this V-shaped talk a lot more if we didn’t have either a no deal Brexit or a very, very bare bones Brexit at best hitting us at the end of the year. Ah, but there’s the rub. Most of the pundits talking about a V-shaped recovery also happen to be big believers in Brexit. Instead of seeing what I would see as another hazard to an instant economic recovery coming our way, they see the thing that will save us all. As ever, everything comes back to Brexit. Joy.

Add to this today’s sudden announcement of a very large local lockdown, affecting a large chunk of the North West, and again, talking up a sudden recovery in the British economy seems more than a little absurd. And we haven’t even come onto the Scottish issue yet, with the SNP looking to land a majority again in the Scottish parliament and with it, another referendum on independence that looks like it could be won by the nationalists this time round. In fact, it could be perfectly timed, right when anger in Scotland about no deal Brexit reaches its peak.

This is what further backs up my idea that Boris could be in real trouble next year amongst his own MPs. There’s no expectation management going on around what a no deal Brexit might look like whatsoever. If no deal Brexit happens and is very bad, there does not seem to a Boris plan B. Sure, he can try and blame the EU or Theresa May or Starmer or whomever but it’s not really going to wash. At least, not amongst enough people to really work. Everything for Boris seems to hinge on either getting some miraculous deal with the EU in a timeframe that can now be counted in weeks or failing that, hope no deal Brexit is actually not too bad, at least in the short term. On top of all that, there is a further punt that other factors, of which there are a lot at the moment, don’t make things worse. That seems like a hell of a gamble to me, one that isn’t being helped along by pundits on Johnson’s own political side telling everyone we’re going to be back to economic normality in no time at all.

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I have a book out now called “Politics is Murder”. It follows the tale of a woman named Charlotte working at a failing think tank who has got ahead in her career in a novel way – she is a serial killer. One day, the police turn up at her door and tell her she is a suspect in a murder – only thing is, it is one she had nothing to do with. There is also a plot against the Foreign Secretary and some gangsters thrown into the mix while Charlotte tries to find out who is trying to frame her for a murder she didn’t commit.

Also: there is a subplot around the government trying to built a stupid bridge, which now seems a charming echo of a more innocent time!

It’s here:

The post Why all the V-shaped economy talk shows how confused Tory thinking is at present appeared first on nicktyrone.com.