BBC Question Time, and the Irrelevance of the Political Elite

The past couple of weeks, I've sat through BBC's question time amazed at the lack of balance, intelligence and common sense on all sides.

Last week the main issue was Brexit (again!) With one old guy in the audience shouting that the referendum should be ignored because those that voted leave did so on the basis of lies and untruths spoken by the leave campaign.

Sorry old geezer, the people voted and no matter what their reasons, they voted to leave. The reason why they voted to leave is irrelevant. Just because you didn't get what you want, doesn't give you the right to overthrow the will of the people.

Last night was worse, with much wailing about Trump's win. The panel was 4-1 against Trump, which was hardly balanced.

It was like a kids party, where no-one was happy, everyone was name-calling and the one Trump supporter on the panel was continually shouted down. It just struck me how juvenile politics in the UK has become. The most adult viewpoints came from the audience, who had a more pragmatic view.

The thing that struck me is not one of the 4 anti-trump members of the panel could understand his appeal. And that carries on across America as we see anti-trump protests appearing in various towns and cities.

I'd like to explain why trump won. Outside the neo-liberal political bubble viewpoint that is constantly shown on the media with no counterpoint, there is a majority of people that don't hold that view.

In the UK, is surfaced as an anti-EU, anti-immigration, anti-PC, anti-establishment vote that got the win for the leave campaign. You can rationalize it as a protest vote if that soothes your mind and allows you to think there isn't a majority of  people out there that have the opposite view to the neo-liberal "let everyone in, there are no Muslim terrorists, women and minorities should be given preferential treatment instead of equality" viewpoint.

In America, it crystalised as a "low-tax, no-more-illegal-immigrant, pro-homegrown business, anti-white-collar, anti-corporation, anti-government-expansion" viewpoint.

The women on Question Time last night could not rationalize that women would vote for Trump. They couldn't accept that minorities would vote for Trump. Indeed they tried to rationalise it as the majority didn't vote for Trump, in that the popular vote (the absolute number of votes cast for each candidate) was greater for Clinton and therefore she was somehow cheated out of office.

But the majority of people in America and the UK are poor, white and/or working class.

The poor, white working class are despised by the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. Their viewpoints are refuted, shouted down even,  at every turn by the political elite that refuse to acknowledge they exist, let alone support their viewpoint.

With Brexit and the American Presidential election, someone came along and started speaking their language, publicly aired their opinions and fears and won.

It's now time for the political elite to start working for the majority and keep their lefist, elitist, nose-snubbing opinions and policies to themselves.

They need to remember they work for us.

Article 50 Court Ruling: Constitutional Crisis Ahead.

The courts have just voted in favour of MPs having a vote on invoking article 50.

Given that the majority of MPs are in favour of remaining in Europe (and maintaining the EU gravy train) and the majority of the public have voted to leave, this throws up a crisis where Parliament is unrepresentative of the will of the public.

I seem to remember a previous spat between the supreme authority (the king) and parliament caused a civil war. Hopefully it won't get that far, but it is a huge indication of how MPs in Parliament put themselves far above the will of the people and how removed they are from the will of the people.

The public are the sovereign power, they give power to their representative in Parliament for 5 years. Their representative must respect the will of the majority of their constituents. They are not there to represent the minority view, the view of a small number of lobbyists, or their own personal view on the matter.

MPs handed power back to the public by act of Parliament when the referendum act was brought into law. The majority of MPs voted to agree to the referendum and by doing so, to abide by the outcome of that referendum.

The majority of the public have voted and MPs must bow to the authority they invested in the people.

If they don't then they show the same contempt for the power we the public invest in them that Charles did for the power of Parliament back before the civil war.

This is no time for the majority to be silent. The majority that voted for Brexit need to make it clear in no uncertain terms that if their MP votes to remain, they will not be voted for in the next election. This is not a matter of party politics, it's about the will of the people and democracy.

The public needs to understand this is what you get when you vote blindly for MPs without questioning their loyalty to us the voter. Keep voting the same person in year after year and they get a sense of entitlement, that they will be voted in time after time without them needing to respect the wishes of the people that vote them in.

It caused a civil war last time, all we need to do is watch and remember just how our representative voted when it came to represent the true will of the people. And then vote accordingly at the next opportunity.

It's something those died-in-the-wool Labour heartlands I come from that voted to leave need to understand and the Conservative safe seats of the South I've lived in since.  Stop guaranteeing their accession to power.

As a final observation, I just wonder if there would have been so much opposition to the result had the referendum gone 52/48 in favour of remain? I've a good idea that the leavers would have had to swallow the result, shut up and put up with it.

Post-Brexit Realignments and Realism.

It's been a while since I posted.

It seems the BBC and other Left-leaning media can't shake themselves from their propagandist view of Brexit. In their mind the outbreak of true democracy is anathema and must be pilloried and put down at every turn.

Every dip, depression and disaster is sub titled "Due to Brexit", whereas every positive, progressive lift is prefixed "despite Brexit"  and tailed with a negative future outlook.

The clearance of the Calais migrant camp is seen as another disaster, rather than the truth that it is long overdue and it's about time the French authorities took on the obligations of the EU and started to process the migrants, rather than give them a springboard to the UK where they cease to be France's problem.

Brexit has forced upon the French and the wider EU the reality that the UK will not tolerate ignorance of the rules of the club. As the EU elite said to us during the referendum debate, you are either all in, or you are all out. The migrants should have been processed by any one of the half dozen EU countries they crossed. The fact that migrants were allowed to stay in Calais almost permanently, until they found safe passage to the UK makes a mockery of that statement. France was able to ignore those rules to suit their own ends.

Now the UK public has forced our politicians to do what they should have done decades ago and forced the extraction of the second largest net contributor to the EU, the shock has been real and the French have had to act to mollify the situation. Lest we use the Calais camp and the millions we've spend strengthening France's border as a bargaining chip.

Today Nissan announced major investment into the UK (yet again, "despite Brexit") and now the BBC and their lefty chums smell conspiracy and demand the government produce the details of any deal that was done with Nissan to keep jobs in Sunderland. Now let's ignore the hypocrisy of the left for a moment decrying something they were crying out for the government to do months ago with the steel industry , i.e. intervene to save a large UK employer (it seems it only suits the left to start squealing when they want us to waste taxpayer's money propping up unprofitable businesses: clearly profitable ones can go fuck themselves).

I'll tell you what deal I think the UK government made. They made the deal that any tariffs applied by the EU to any vehicles imported from the UK, will be directly applied in equal measure to vehicles exported from the EU to the UK. The EU have a lot more to lose then us. We have Rolls Royce, Bentley, Morgan, Lotus, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, JCB amongst others. The EU have Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, Audi, Mercedes, Volvo, BMW, VW, Seat, Dacia, Ferrari, Lamborghini and a lot more. They have a higher number of high volume manufacturers than we have. Any tariffs applied (quite rightly) in reciprocal fashion will damage them more than it damages us.

All we have to do to state our case for trading terms with the EU is to simply state that we would apply ANY tariffs the EU wish to impose on ANY goods shipped from the UK will be equally applied to goods coming in the opposite direction.

WTO rules my ass, tariffs will shrink to zero immediately. Think the EU governments would blindly follow the EU commission into committing political suicide? Because if the EU commission tried to make an example of us and applied punitive tariffs on cars made here, we'd just apply the same tariff and then ask VW to ship us cars made in Brazil at lower tariffs, or BMWs from America, Mercedes made in the U.S. too.

The big global companies wouldn't suffer, only the workers in the EU would. And those workers would quite rightly reward the governments that lost them their jobs, with a P45 of their own.

I work for a firm that supplies car parts around the world. Right now, thanks to the drop in the Pound, our exports are booming. Within weeks foreign buyers have cottoned on to the fact that our parts are cheaper than parts in the Euro zone and foreign sales are through the roof. One customer is actually bringing his car over from France to have work done on it. Taking jobs from EU workers we are. Terrible aren't we?