Every one of the commitments made today by our new Prime Minister outside Number 10 cannot be delivered. At best, over the next few weeks and month, we will be fed a diet of platitudes, slogans, and outright lies. But, as the saying goes, Johnson is all fur coat and no knickers. In a previous essay I believe I hit the nail on the head when I described Johnson as the Anton Drexler of British politics. He is the placeholder leader who will make the monster to come more palatable.
The Threat to the Scottish Parliament
Scots are genuinely and rightly concerned about the future of devolution. There is nothing permanent in the current constitutional arrangement, and nor can there ever be. It matters not a jot what the Scotland Act says or what any one politician says; sovereignty in the United Kingdom rests only in Westminster. No law and no treaty can bind the power of this or any future London government to any particular course of action. We can talk about the Claim of Right and Scots Law all we like, the legal reality, for so long as we remain a part of the United Kingdom...
Valuing Ruth’s Mental Health
Where one would expect to find compassion in Ms Davidson, even revulsion, what she gives is enthusiastic support to a government that would do this to women who are going through the hell of a psychological misery of which she has painful personal experience. There comes a point in ethical discussion when one can no longer hide behind the trauma of one’s own past when one is inflicting the same and worse on others. Ruth Davidson has passed that point – and this is before we mention the other Conservative policies...
What’s This Legs Akimbo Thing?
This is the thing with derivative western political culture – something Britain’s Tories have taken to whole new depths; it gets progressively worse and less convincing with each new generation. Gone are the days of a marbled Gaius Octavius Thurinus as Caesar Augustus – vultus bonus, ut me addere – pointing the way ahead for Pax Romana. Now we don’t even have an effete William of Orange on his gee-gee. We have been reduced to this: Middling civil servants accidentally promoted – through the rigours of last man standing – to leadership, poised as though bracing to release excess gas.
It’s Official: The End is Nigh for Great Britain
States simply do not survive this level of internal division, and – as we can see from the headlines on every newspaper – Britain is no exception. The very forces that held the United Kingdom together in the past; a strong English state, a sense of shared hostility towards everything on the other side of the English Channel, and England’s willingness to exert brute force on its possessions, are now wholly evaporated. The dominant opinion both here and around the world is that England is in a tailspin, the centrifugal force of which is pushing Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales out.
The Gospel According to Jacob Rees-Mogg
Jacob Rees-Mogg, on the other hand, is the real McCoy. He is full fat, and he might well be Britain’s first Catholic Prime Minister. In the main this is to be welcomed. In 2017 there should be no religious bar of any kind on any elected position. I would still argue that a Catholic should not be monarch, but that’s because I am of the opinion no one should be monarch.
The Madness of the Prime Minister
What we have, rather than a Prime Minister who needs to be taken into the care of a secure institution, is a women who is quite clearly out of her depth. She’s not a politician. She is a careerist, perhaps more suited to the basement of some government department, who has found herself – by default – as the head of the British government.
Why are we so Shocked to Find Racist Tories?
The Conservative Party does not have “a racism problem.” The Conservative Party is a racist party. Racism is so much more than the spoken or written word; racism is a whole set of attitudes and assumptions about one’s own superiority and the superiority of one’s own group over and above an inferior and dangerous racialised other.
Random Public Journal 