Two police and crime commissioners leave the Conservative Party

Two Conservative police and crime commissioners - Marc Jones in Lincolnshire and Alison Hernandez in Cornwall and Devon - have announced that they are leaving the party and will serve out their terms as Independents.

The interesting thing is that neither of those news reports give the impression that the PCC is about to jump ship to Reform. Both are in their third term as PCC, which means they joined the Conservative Party before it abandoned Conservatism to became an English Nationalist party.

So perhaps these resignations are symptomatic of a flight of sensible people from the party (though a study of Hernandez's Wikipedia entry suggests she is not as sensible as all that).

The government has announced that PCCs will be abolished in 2028 and you can see why. The reports on Hernandez's resignation tells us she is

supported by a team of around 30 non-political staff led by a chief executive who will "continue holding the police to account" and fulfilling their statutory obligations.

The creation of PCCs was championed by those scourges of bureaucracy Daniel Hannon and Douglas Carswell.

The Leave campaign – Nigel Farage included – called for more non-EU migration to Britain

You'd never know it from the debate on immigration today, but:

In 2016, the official Vote Leave campaign actively advocated for more immigration from non-European countries. This wasn’t a fringe message – it was a central pillar of the campaign. 

This is a quote from an excellent article by Sam Bright, who reminds us that "every element of the Brexit campaign advocated for more non-white immigration – including Nigel Farage".

He backs this with quotes from a contemporary Financial Times report on Leave strategy and from Saqib Bhatti (now a Conservative MP and shadow education minister), Gisela Stuart, Priti Patel, Daniel Hannan, Boris Johnson and Douglas Carswell.

And here's what Nigel Farage had to say during the referendum campaign:

A Daily Mail headline on 8 June 2016 stated:

"More black people will be allowed into Britain if we leave the EU and immigration will become a ‘non-issue’, says Nigel Farage."

Farage claimed that Britain had:

"been stupid to turn our backs on the Commonwealth in favour of EU membership."

He argued that EU freedom of movement had made it "very difficult" for "qualified and skilled migrants from India and Africa" to come to Britain.

According to The Mail, after the Brexit vote, Farage favoured implementing an Australian points-based immigration policy, which would lead to “more black people” qualifying to enter the UK.

Ironically, Boris Johnson’s government – now the whipping boy of the far-right – implemented a points-based immigration system that directly reflected Farage’s favoured position prior to the vote.

That none of this is ever mentioned is a condemnation of the British media and of our politicians.

The fall of Boris Johnson: It was the Tory right who wanted to make it easier to get rid of MPs

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It was Nick Clegg who gave voters the power to recall MPs. And it was the Tory right who complained bitterly that he didn't go far enough.

Here's a Guardian report from 2014:

Zac Goldsmith, the Tory MP for Richmond, said Clegg was entirely responsible for the bill, which is a "disgrace even by the standards of modern politics". 

And here, from the same report is Douglas Carswell:

"The truth is that on the Conservative backbenches there is strong support. Where there is kickback it's coming from people holding red boxes and people in the Cabinet Office. I wouldn't hold it against Clegg if he opposed he idea, but what's absolutely unforgivable is that he opposed it but pretends to be in favour."

So Boris Johnson has been brought down by a measure that his own supporters called for and wanted to be made even more demanding.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

Giles Watling gets to Westminster 53 years after fighting his first election

Last night Giles Watling gained Clacton for the Conservatives - it was the seat that Douglas Carswell won for Ukip at the last election.

If you were with this blog during its fixation with the 1960s police series Gideon's Way last year, you may remember that Watling, who played one of the title character's children, fought a school election back in 1964.

Play the video above and you will see the snippet of this episode in which he appears.

Fruitcake on fruitcake: Ukip goes to war with itself

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Ukip's main donor wants to deselect its only MP and says he will stand against him at the next election if necessary.

The party's former leader is backing the donor. Its current leader seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

When I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the Brexiteers would probably end up fighting one another, I did not expect it to happen so soon.

Still, you have to laugh.

Douglas Carswell is a special snowflake

Douglas Carswell, Ukip's only MP, sent a tweet ridiculing the judges during Gina Miller's original Article 50 court case. I replied asking what he proposed putting in the place of an independent judiciary.

I didn't get a reply. I didn't really expect to.

Now I find he has blocked me.

It's odd. Ukip pretend to believe in robust debate - no time for political correctness and all that - but the reality is that they are incredibly thin skinned.

Poor Douglas, it seems, is a special snowflake who must never hear an opposing view.

So what did he want to put in place of an independent judiciary? I can think of three alternatives that might attract him.

1. All judges to be appointed by the prime minister and dismissed on the sport if they make a politically inconvenient ruling.
2. All trials to be settled by referendums, with buses plastered with lies touring the country during the campaign.
3. All judgments to be delivered from a dais by Paul Nuttall in full Ukip uniform while his minions (inc. D. Carswell) sit adoring at his feet, only to break into three hours of spontaneous applause when his peroration is complete.

Now I guess I'll never know which it is.

Discovering Gideon's Way

I have a new weakness - or rather I have revived an old one.

The Gideon stories were a series of police procedurals written, under the pen name J.J. Maric, by the extraordinarily prolific John Creasey between 1955 and 1976.

For some reason I took to them while I was at school even though they were already dating markedly by then.

Now I have discovered that the whole of the Gideon's Way TV series has been uploaded to Youtube. There were 26 of them made for ITV and broadcast in 1965 and 1966.

John Gregson took the title role, playing him as a world-weary liberal who sometimes had to reign in his keener subordinates - a sort of prototype for Morse and Wexford.

Gideon's family feature regularly. Political trivia fans may like to note that his younger son was played by Giles Watling, who was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate against Ukip's Douglas Carswell in the 2014 Clacton by-election.

One of the pleasures of Gideon's Way is spotting familiar actors in unfamiliar roles. I have watched only a few of the shows so far, but already I have seen Inspector Wexford masterminding a bullion robbery, Mrs Bridges from Upstairs Downstairs running a gang of pickpockets and fences, and Arthur Daley committing arson,

Then there are the pleasures of spotting actors on the way up.

This, for instance, is a young John Hurt on the run from prison. (You can see an even younger Hurt on this blog as an undergraduate in The Wild and the Willing.)

And this young man is now in the House of Lords. It's Michael Cashman, formerly of EastEnders and the European Parliament, in his first role. At this stage of his career his chief means of conveying emotion was hunching his shoulders.

Above all, though, there are the pleasures of the location footage. This is London before turbocapitalism and moral relativism. It's a city of quiet suburbs and decaying warehouses where the villains are cornered and the police inevitably round them up.

Why I do not support the recall of MPs

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I am a great believer in representative democracy. You elect someone and if you do not like how he or she performs as your MP, you vote for someone else at the next election.

Increasingly, however - fuelled chiefly by the expenses scandal - there have been moves to allow voters to petition for the ejection of an MP between elections and the holding of by-elections.

Some versions of recall require an MP to be convicted of a criminal offence or some other former of wrongdoing. Others just require the voters not to like them very much.

It is this latter sort of recall that is championed by the Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith. And the problems with it were laid bare by the Labour MP Kevan Jones in the Commons today:

Mr Kevan Jones: I am very interested in what the hon. Gentleman says about recall empowering voters. In practice, would it not do what it does in the United States, which is to empower wealthy individuals who are not happy with what their representative is doing to mobilise against them? It would empower wealthy individuals, such as the hon. Gentleman, to influence events in a way that my ordinary constituents and I cannot? 

Zac Goldsmith: I will explain why such concerns are groundless during my speech, but I will make one point, partly in response to the Opposition spokesman. Concerns about expenditure during the recall process are a matter for regulations; the amendments that my colleagues and I seek to introduce would not tamper with the Government’s proposed regulations on expenses. That separate technical issue can be very easily addressed. 

Mr Jones: I am sorry, but that is not the point. Expenditure limits can be put on the recall election, but the campaigning in the lead-up to such an election would undermine the representative in getting their constituents— 

Douglas Carswell: Trust the voters. Mr Jones: This is not about trusting the voters, but about putting influence in the hands of a small group of very wealthy individuals. If the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), with the wealth he has, wanted to shift a Member of Parliament, he could do it. 

Zac Goldsmith: The hon. Gentleman takes a very dim view of his electorate if he thinks that that is so easy. Irrespective of that, the two-month petition stage before a referendum will be regulated, so his cost arguments simply do not apply. 

Mr Jones: What happens in practice in the United States is that individuals who take against a policy or a state or national representative can use their tremendous wealth to use a campaign in the lead-up to the recall election to undermine such a representative. The idea that that is somehow empowering the voters is not the case. Recall empowers very wealthy individuals who could then— 

Douglas Carswell: You don’t trust the voters. 

Mr Jones: I do trust the electorate. The hon. Gentleman should stop chuntering from a sedentary position. The fact is that recall will give influence over who the Member of Parliament is not to the majority of the electors but to a small group of very wealthy individuals.

Note how Douglas Carswell, despite his change of party, has mastered the art of modern politics - feigning outrage on behalf of some group or other. Most debates on education, for instance, consist in accusing your opponent of "not trusting parents" or "not trusting teachers".

Yes, it can be irritating if an MP is caught doing wrong and refuses to resign. But there is a danger that the cure will be worse than the remedy.

And I have a particular reason for not giving wealthy Tories - you might even say Richmond Tories - the power to launch campaigns against MPs from other parties in this way.

As I recalled back in 2010:

In 1981 Adrian Slade won the Richmond seat on the Greater London Council for the Liberal Party, defeating the sitting Conservative Edward Leigh in the process. The Conservatives then lodged an [unsuccessful] election petition, contesting the result because of technical errors in Slade's return of expenses for the contest. 

The process, however, left Adrian facing ruinous legal expenses. His friends rallied round and staged An Evening At Court on Sunday the 23 January 1983 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to help him raise the money. As Smarter than the Average! tells you in exhaustive detail, many of the greats of British comedy performed that evening.

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Iain Brodie-Brown says the Liberal Democrats should rethink their post-election strategy: be prepared to enter a confidence-and-supply arrangement and abandon the pledge to deal first with the largest party.

"One of the less obvious side shows to the defection of Douglas Carswell MP from the Tories to UKIP has been the report that he may be taking his data with him – detailed data about his constituents, it appears, and according to the Daily Mail people at UKIP are ‘purring’ at the prospect of getting hold of the data." Paul Bernal looks at the legal and moral questions raised when MPs change party and seek to take their data with them.

"I met a woman once with an exhausting history of mental difficulties who was married to a headteacher. Her husband had charge of her medication and she told me she couldn't help noticing that, when they had any kind of argument, he increased her dose." David Boyle on health professionals who threaten patients.

Facebook’s Report Abuse button has become a tool of global oppression, says Russell Brandom on The Verge.

Miles Goslett in the Oldie points out that the BBC is still concealing the truth about who knew what and when about Jimmy Savile.

Alan White from Buzzfeed looks at the unlikely rise, fall and rise of Viz.

Douglas Carswell speaking in favour of open primaries

When you have finished laughing, remember that the 'political reform' section of the Coalition Agreement said:

We will fund 200 all-postal primaries over this Parliament, targeted at seats which have not changed hands for many years. These funds will be allocated to all political parties with seats in Parliament that they take up, in proportion to their share of the total vote in the last general election.

I think there is a lot to be said for this proposal, but nothing has been heard of it since 2010.

Is Douglas Carswell trying to save his seat?

Nigel Farage has hailed Douglas Carswell's decision to resign his seat in the Commons and fight the resultant by-election as a Ukip candidate as "the noblest thing I've seen in British politics in my lifetime".

But is he right?

Could it even be that Carswell's decision results from a cool consideration of his own interests?

Because I have seen two pieces of evidence today that suggest Clacton is just about Ukip's best prospect at the next general election.

The first piece of evidence comes from Huffington Post:

According to research by professor Matthew Goodwin, from Nottingham University, and Manchester University's Rob Ford, Carswell's Clacton voters are the most Ukip-friendly in the entire country. 

Goodwin, co-author of the book Revolt On The Right, explained on his blog: "This is because the seat contains high concentrations of voters who are likely to be very receptive toward Nigel Farage: it has lots of pensioners, lots of voters without a degree, lots of voters with no educational qualifications and higher than average levels of economic disadvantage and unemployment. 

"UKIP tend to thrive in such communities --older, less well educated and insecure voters provide the ideal breeding ground for Farage's army. 

"Clacton is also very 'white', with high numbers of voters born in the country and few minorities, which again favours UKIP, who poll strongest in ethnically homogeneous areas."

The second from Cicero Elections:

In the 2010 General Election, UKIP didn’t enter a candidate to oppose Carswell, who won 22,867 votes. However, in the European elections, UKIP did turn up and absolutely stormed the polls, gaining 19,398 votes against the Tories’ 9,981. Winning almost 50% of the vote, UKIP performed better in Clacton than almost anywhere else in the country. It’s also worth noting that a further 1,500 people voted for other eurosceptic parties at the time. 

In the three months since the European elections, UKIP’s standing in the polls has not dropped and they have continued to do well in local elections in the South East of England.

So resigning as Conservative MP for Clacton to fight a by-election for Ukip may not be so noble after all.

No, the noblest resignation in Farage's lifetimes is probably that of Bruce Douglas Mann, who appalled his fellow defectors by resigning as Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden to fight a by-election as an SDP Alliance candidate when he knew he would almost certainly lose.

Douglas Carswell was never a Conservative

Paul Goodman (with whom I was at university some centuries ago) writes on Conservative Home:

Douglas Carswell has never, as far as I know, been a Tory – that’s to say, a believer that authority in Britain originates from its institutions: the Monarchy, Crown in Parliament, the Church of England. For as long as I’ve known him, he has always been not exactly a Whig but certainly a radical.

But then I said much the same on Liberal England two years ago:

Large parts of the Conservative Party now model their approach on that adopted in America. Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, for instance, two of the more thoughtful new members of the party's right, owe little to traditional British conservatism and take many of their ideas from American libertarian circles. Some of their less intellectual colleagues have merely adopted the paranoid tone of Tea Party campaigning.

To be honest, that isn't exactly what I said. Before cutting and pasting I had to correct a typo and two grammatical errors. But my argument was sound.

British politics and the narcissism of small differences

Writing in the Guardian of Sir John Major's appearance before the Leveson Inquiry, Simon Hoggart said:

Perhaps the most moving moment came when he launched an encomium to Neil Kinnock. "The Neil Kinnock I knew was very honest, straightforward, and if something was said in private, it stayed private. If he gave his word, he kept his word. He was a much more considerable person than the media portrayed." 

This too had the ring of a simpler, a more decent past, when we regarded our opponents as rivals rather than enemies. And it was apropos of absolutely nothing!

Nostalgia is always a trap (and for this blogger more than most people), but it is remarkable that British politics are conducted with such bitterness today when the two parties agree about so much.

The Major-Kinnock era marked the end of an era when there were serious agreements between Labour and the Conservatives over the economy. It was the end of the days when Labour believed in socialism and wished to nationalise the commanding heights of the British economy.

Today the ownership of industry is off the agenda and both parties believe that spending must be cut - all that they disagree over is a the rate at which it should be cut and there is some dispute at the margin over what the total of the cuts should be.

Indeed, we Liberal Democrats are depressed over Labour and the Conservatives monolithic agreement over the need for more surveillance and curbs on our liberty in order to fight terrorism and crime in general.

So, given that the parties now broadly agree, why do they hate each other so much?

Part of the answer, I suspect, is that large parts of the Conservative Party now model their approach on that adopted in America. Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, for instance, two of the more thoughtful new members of the party's right, owe little to traditional British conservatism and take many of their ideas from American libertarian circles. Some of their less intellectual colleagues have merely adopted the paranoid tone of Tea Party campaigning.

But the answer must also lie in what Freud termed 'the narcissism of small differences'.

The term is explained in a California Literary Review interview by Freud's biographer Peter D. Kramer:

Freud coined the phrase to encapsulate an observation made by anthropologists, that often our hatred, fear, and contempt are directed at people who resemble us, while our pride is attached to the small markers that distinguish us from them. Freud referred to the idea during the First World War, but most famously in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929-1930), where he was describing an inborn aggressive stance in men and its application in ethnic conflicts, as between the Spaniards and the Portuguese or the English and the Scots.

I am not a great admirer of Freud - his fame owes more to Hollywood than anything else, but maybe he was on to something here?

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You may not be surprised to learn from Virtually Naked that today's encounter between Nick Clegg and Gillian Duffy had Labour's fingerprints all over it.

Chris Davies MEP wants Liberal Democrats to be angry, be proud and campaign harder.

Douglas Carswell, the Conservative MP, has asked Sir Philip Mawer, the adviser on the ministerial code of conduct, to investigate George Osborne. Channel 4's Gary Gibbon has the story.

John Major's next book, according to the diary in yesterday's Evening Standard, will be a social history of the music hall: "The introduction to the book is apparently extraordinary, comprising the death scene of Major’s father, Tom Major-Ball, the music hall performer and circus artiste, who died in 1962 aged 83, having performed at every theatre in the British Isles. Every act in the country trooped through to perform at the bed of their dying fellow artiste. And young Major watched it all."

Could it be that Mr Gladsone is to thank for modern Britain's love of wine? An article on History Extra says: "James Nicholls of Bath Spa University, a specialist on the history of alcohol consumption, hails the 1860 Treaty of Commerce - in which import duties were reduced on all wine - as a turning point. William Gladstone, the treaty’s chief architect, spoke openly of what he hoped would be a change in British drinking habits - away from an obsession with beer - so that wine would no longer be a 'rich man’s luxury'."

I am not the only Liberal Democrat with an interest in tin tabernacles, as an old post about Kilburn by Ed Fordham proves.