• Hunting grounds

Before the last election, Sunak came up with some classically reactionary suggestions that didn’t find any favour with the voters. Labour has appeared to have adopted most of the Tories’ traditional policies including, as Byline Times puts it, “rejection of the Waspi women, cancellation of pensioners’ winter fuel payments, rising student fees, increased bus fares, retention of the two-child benefit cap, and so on.”

All her party’s traditional hunting grounds have been occupied by others, leaving her with nowhere to go.

Her natural instinct is to move further right and try to out-Reform Reform. This seems unlikely to succeed, at least until its bubble is burst, as some predict and many others hope, at the next election. As was so clearly shown in the Brexit debate, Reform (or its predecessor) is new and different and thus shiny and exciting – exactly what the two main parties are not.

• A new player

The hapless David Cameron is perhaps the real architect of her problems, but his equally hapless successors have done little to ease them. For over a hundred years, the two big parties have operated what looks like a cartel of squashing any green shoots of a new party. In this they were helped by our electoral system.  

By calling the 2016 referendum to heal the wounds in his own party, Cameron invited a new player to the table, gave it a cause to fight for and enabled its popularity to be measured without the restraints of first-past-the-post.

It was worse than that: for all the main parties were fairly united in advocating remain. This gave anyone who felt that life could be better for them a whole range of backsides to kick at one go. This was an unprecedented opportunity and one that 52% of the population was unable to resist.

Undeterred by the complete absence of any of the promised Brexit dividends and following a pandemic from which the government didn’t emerge with much credit, Reform has swept all before it. Its rise, in the polls and media airtime at least, has been helped by its having never having governed nationally, so making it immune from any criticism of past performance.

It’s also been able to take pot shots at what it sees as the failed policies of not only the previous Tory government but also the current Labour one. None of these has been focussed on more than immigration.

• An insoluble problem

This is insoluble unless the parts of the world from which people are fleeing become less violent, more sustainable and less crowded and all the countries in the world co-operate to accomplish this.

None of these things are going to happen. Humans are aggressive, territorial and competitive and the more we’re crammed together and forced to witness wide divergencies of wealth and opportunity, the worse these problems become.

The Roman Empire was destroyed when a series of problems (on which historians can’t agree) caused a large migration of people from the east. Will western liberal democracy go the same way?

• A magic bullet

Reform thinks it has the magic bullet for this. Its latest plan, according to The Week, is to “abolish the right of migrants to apply for permanent settlement, and block foreign nationals from claiming benefits.” This would, its leader claims, save £234bn over several decades, whatever that means.

Four years before an election, you can come up with as many ideas as you like. The main thing Farage has to do is make people still notice him.

Well, I suppose I’m assisting in that. It might help if I added that, even more so than our last PM but two, he’s an unprincipled, dangerous and opportunistic demagogue. In addition, he seems as confused as Angela Rayner about the Stamp Duty regulations, or so his critics claim.

• Right turn

So, back to Kemi B. Her own lurch to the right has recently included seemingly endorsing Turning Point UK, which Private Eye 1659 described as “the British wing of Charlie Kirk’s group” which has “failed miserably” to reproduce over here its stateside success in recruiting university students. Instead, the Eye continues, “it arranges foul-mouthed street protests with groups of ‘patriots’.”

A glance at its FB page catapults me into a strange place I don’t normally go. At the top, at time of writing, is a “thank you” to Kemi Badenoch for “meeting with our team to discuss the murder of our founder Charlie Kirk and the violence we face in Britain from the far left. Kemi is the only MP and elected party leader who reached out to us and it means a lot.” I’m sure it did.

Lower down we have a truly awful poem, various vehement biblical quotations, reports of protests on matters ranging from immigration to flag flying, diatribes against the BBC, praise of “patriots” and an extraordinary video showing what infringements of our liberties will be caused by the proposed ID cards, including not being able to buy various items because we’ve exceeded some Whitehall target for their consumption.

At that point I stopped. If you want the link, you’ll have to find it for yourself.

• A crazy fringe

This is batshit of the highest order. It’s migrated from the crazy fringe world of QAnon and David Ike into the lexicon of an organisation which has, out of desperation, been adopted by the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition.

There was a time when the Conservative party stood for something. I often disagreed with it but did my best to look at each policy on its merits. Thatcher re-set the dial quite sharply but not everything she did was bonkers or wrong (though increasingly became so).

It now, however, appears to have parted company with reality. Maybe we all deserve five years of a Reform government to wake us up to what can happen if you take all the brakes off.

Meanwhile, the world continues to fight, flood, bicker and burn. Everything that’s happening is increasingly hard to solve and is likely to make the problems faced by nation states more acute; which will encourage them to more desperate and repressive measures; which will make the problems worse.

Economic growth, on which the current government has pinned all its colours, in many ways makes these worse still. The way the world is organised, this growth is most felt by those who are already rich which fuels the scrabble for our shores, the management of which currently dominates our political debate. Looks like a vicious circle to me…

• And finally…

• Not for the faint-hearted, these undercover clips of officers from the Metropolitan Police going about their work perhaps gives one a clue as to why the prosecution rates for allegations of crimes such as rape are so low. The Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said his force had taken “immediate and unprecedented action to investigate these allegations”.

• Not a phrase I often write, but hats off to the Pope who has, the BBC reports, “lambasted critics who ‘ridicule those who speak of global warming’.”

• Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK has launched a petition calling for Michelle Mone to be stripped of her peerage and removed from the House of Lords. “The integrity of Parliament depends on it,” the preamble reads.

“The High Court has ruled that a company linked to Michelle Mone must repay £122 million to the Government after supplying faulty PPE during the pandemic.” You can click here to read more and to sign the petition.

• We already have artificial intelligence everywhere: actors, bands, novelists of suspect humanity. The day may come when we achieve a modus vivendi with this virtual thing: but it hasn’t happened yet. A recent case, reported in Private Eye 1659 (p9), concerned a Daily Mail article about drug abuse. The person named in the piece claimed the story was fabricated and written in a style that suggested it had been written by AI.

The magazine further alleges that “hacks in the Mail’s features department have been under orders to file as many stories as possible about middle-class women doing drugs.” Why such stories should be so attractive is not clear. The implication however, is that demand is exceeding supply, and AI is stepping in to fill the gap.

• Flags still seem to be sprouting up everywhere and causing disquiet amongst some and delight amongst others. These are mainly either Union or English ones, each of which convey different messages. Whether we like it or not their use has become politicised. Anyone who raises one must therefore expect to be accused, fairly or otherwise, of making a political statement.

Some councils have removed these flags which has, in some cases, caused a bit of local grief. However, Section 132 of the 1980 Highways Act gives local councils the right to remove these if they’re on council-owned street furniture, though not if they’re mounted elsewhere (such as on private land or utility poles). If you see council staff removing them from street furniture, therefore, they’re just following the law.

• One of the reasons why English (though not UK) flags have recently been raised might be because of the Women’s Cricket World Cup, which has just started in India. It’s very hard to see beyond yet another Australian victory. England, however, has probably the second strongest team and also the world’s best pace bowler in Hungerford-raised Lauren Bell. She was at school with our sons so we’ve followed her career with interest.

A couple of years ago we were at a match at Falkland at which Lauren was playing and ran into her dad. He told me that, during lockdown, he was pretty much the only person she could bowl at. I understand he’s a decent cricketer but Lauren at full pace is something to behold. I think all his bruises have healed by now…

Across the area

• Constitutional matters

West Berkshire Council’s constitution – which I sometimes need to look at – is an utter nightmare to reference for the simple reason that it’s not gathered together in one document but split into about ten. Laborious searching is thus needed to be sure you’ve found every reference to a particular matter.

It’s a bit like having a dictionary in which the nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on were all in different volumes. Why this should be I don’t know. I’m sure the intention isn’t to prevent anyone finding anything, though that’s exactly its effect.

A step forward was taken on this at the meeting of the Governance and Ethics Committee on 30 September. At about 13 minutes, Councillor Carolyne Culver made this exact point. “I’m happy with that,” said the Chair: “I can take that away,” said the Monitoring Officer, I presume meaning “take that away and do something about it.”

Next time I need to visit this musty and slightly haunted wing of WBC’s website, I’ll hope to find one complete and up-to-date document there. This is what pretty much every other council whose sites I’ve looked at manages to do.