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SOTOS
RIO/Avant-Prog • France
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This young "progressive" band, having two members of the quintet on violin and cello, were never going to be considered as a typical progressive rock. It is evident that they are in the same spectrum that bands like ART ZOYD and UNIVERS ZERO, and that they receive influences of KING CRIMSON and even MAGMA. Considering their influences, SOTOS could be called the enfant terrible of elements from jazz: "Zheul", "Rock In Opposition" (RIO), and Eastern European folk musics. These young musicians have been recognized as a band with boundless potential and infinite musical ideas. I have to think the best is yet to come.
SOTOS' first self titled CD mixed the influences of GONG, MAGMA, KING CRIMSON and UNIVERS ZERO. They share with all these bands the same madness and emergency. For now, the music on "Platypus" reveals a maturation to SOTOS's sound. It features two long compositions, "Malstrøm" (divided into 7 parts) and "Wu" composed by guitarist Yan HAZERA. The second album is a complex chasm of explored possibilities. This way they can manage between the directness of '90s KING CRIMSON and the acoustic compositions of early UNIVERS ZERO and ART ZOYD. Amazing interplay between violin, cello, guitar, and percussion add the texture and richness of their sound. For fans of KING CRIMSON, MAGMA, PRESENT and UNIVERS ZERO.
- Zaar
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3.64 | 24 ratings
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SOTOS Reviews
Showing last 10 reviews only
Studio Album, 1999
Sotos RIO/Avant-Prog
Review by siLLy puPPy
Collaborator PSIKE, JR/F/Canterbury & Eclectic Teams
SOTOS was one of those under-the-radar avant-prog bands that followed in the footsteps of Univers Zero and Art Zoyd, released a couple albums and then disappeared from the scene. This all instrumental ensemble emerged from Bordeaux, France in 1996 and was composed of five musicians. Nicolas Cazaux on violin, flute & tambourine; Yan Hazera on guitar and djembe; Bruno Camiade on bass and djembe; Nadia Leclerc on violin and cello; Michael Hazera on drums and flute. Both Hazera brothers would later play together in their next band Zaar a decade later. All members attended the French National School of Music and required little time in finding a common thread to create their first eponymous album released on the French Gazul label.
Just like many in the more obscure corners of the avant-prog world, SOTOS marries myriad musical disciplines and drives them together with angular rock riffs, chamber rock atmospheres, post-rock compositional styles along with classical sensibilities in this case from the likes of Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky. While avant-garde is the first thing that comes to mind when a Univers Zero or Art Zoyd connection is made, SOTOS were disciplined enough, despite creating only four monster tracks all clocking in over 13 minutes, to encapsulate a roller coaster ride of interesting hooks that are allowed to play out and add the proper amount of tension before climaxing and shifting to another complex instrumental arrangement.
While the near 22 minute opener "Tango" may have elements of Argentina's favorite dance music, it's only a small part of the overall sound and fairly obscured with a healthy dose of violin and cello sounding more like a classical folk composition taken from the Hungarian countryside of the 19th century but also offers the angular rhythmic rock approach of the avant-prog tradition with a healthy dose of twists and turns that allow more energetic percussive segments than usually heard in this subgenre of prog. The second track "Gilgamesh" sounds as epic as the Akkadian poem from which the name derives. It begins with a rather Steve Hillage "Fish Rising" type of guitar riff accompanied by folky violin but turns into a more energetic rocker and also displays a fair amount of energetic tribal drumming along the way.
"XXVIIIeme Parallele" exudes a jazz guitar intro but is also quite classically inspired and then drowned out by a lamenting violin before spiraling off into a more upbeat parade of folk led flute and drums. As it ventures forward it sounds more like an early King Crimson type of eclectic jazz rock that becomes more progressive as time goes on with the angular rhythms becoming even more so and avant-guitar solos joining in with burst of bubbly zeuhl bass lines that climaxes with one of the most energetic outbursts on the entire album. "L'espoir Du Clan Des Huitres" at almost 17 minutes is the most frenetic track with insane echoey guitars, chugging zeuhl bass rhythms with less of the angular avant-rhythms but they do occur as it all slowly ratchets up into furious guitar frenzies. Like all the other tracks, there is plenty of time for it to breathe and take the time to build up the momentum.
SOTOS is fairly unique sounding. Not as scary as Univers Zero or Art Zoyd. Not as heavy as Thinking Plague. More varied than bands like Nebelnest but not as ambitious as 5uu's. SOTOS utilizes just enough of several different elements to make it feel balanced with a lot of time paid to repetitive patterns that linger with subtleties joining in. Just a tad of rhythmic zeuhl alongside avant-garde angularities as well as the King Crimson proggy rock mixed with the Bartok classical folk elements. The music is definitely dense and complex but it is fairly easy to follow if the listener is actively engaged. Segments proceed in a logical manner and nothing really jumps out of the blue. Excellent music for those who love a more focused form of avant-prog that also offers a few twists and turns along the way.
Posted Monday, June 26, 2017 | Review this album | Report (Review #1738248)
Review by Obersturmbannprogger
I am not familiar with their debut, but this album has grown on me over time although i dont listen very often to it. Here is dominating a blend of the more atonal, dark, strictly instrumental and experimental progrock - clearly influenced by King Crimson (Wetton/Bruford era), a bit of Univers Zero (use of cello), Present, their countrymen Arachnoid and some current Avant/RIO bands like for example Pochakaite Malko, Nebelnest etc. There are even hints of modern classical music and we can find here some Zeuhl traces too (especially in bass guitar rhythm patterns). So i really dont recommend it to melodic progrock or neoprog fans ;).
As for the musicians, they are all very capable, especially technically great and dynamic drummer (clearly inspired by Bruford) and guitar player (no coincidence - clearly influenced by Fripp). Sound quality seems good, but not outstanding to me, the bass guitar and guitar in the mix could be sometimes more in the forefront. Drums sound especially good, they are really driving in some upbeat passages.
Album is divided in two parts, first is a longer composition "Malstrom" consisting of 7 parts in 4-9 minutes range. They are varied enough to keep an advanced progrock fan interested, quiet passages are very often building good dose of ominuos tension and keeping up some impressive atmosphere. Bands approach is often nearly minimalistic, restricted in only rhythm instruments, guitar and one cello and violin. There are no keyboards and only very small amount of effects used. Last track "Wu" is 27 min. long epos, which is unfortunately a reason, why i wont give a 5 star rating here. This one is simply too long and especially in the first half there is too much of uninspired and boring noodling, which is a big drawback after the interesting "Malstrom". In the second half it keeps very interesting though, with some very intense playing and really big amount of dark and demonic atmosphere. It ends in calmer and more peaceful style.
Overall great album for experimental and more openminded prog enthusiasts, with many strengths, impressive atmosphere and a bit of tedious passages. Still 4 stars.
Posted Thursday, January 16, 2014 | Review this album | Report (Review #1115096)
Review by Mellotron Storm
This is pretty close to 5 stars but as Pnoom has noted the final track keeps it from being a masterpiece. It's the first 13 minutes of that track that keep telling me not to give it 5 stars. Too much of too little if you know what i mean. I love that song from there on though.
"Malstrom" is a 41 minute suite broken down into 7 parts. Part 1 opens with experimental vocal sounds that are quickly replaced by some excellent angular guitar. Drums come crashing in to create an awesome sound. This actually reminds me of ANEKDOTEN without the mellotron of course.The violin comes in at 3 minutes. It settles down somewhat a minute later with violin leading the way. Part 2 is mellow with violin to begin with. It becomes fuller a minute in then settles back quickly. It becomes very calm after 2 minutes. Some dissonant violin to end it though. Part 3 is led out of the gate by bass and odd-metered drumming. Cello joins in as this becomes a Jazz / Zeuhl flavoured passage. I like it. Part 4 features a cool guitar line as drums then violin come ripping in. Great sound after 2 minutes of angular guitar and drums. Violin becomes more prominant late.
Part 5 gets dark and heavy before a minute.Then it slows right down only to build back up slowly. This is incredible ! Part 6 features these light intricate sounds without much else going on. Until a full sound comes in suddenly 1 1/2 minutes in. The drumming shines a minute later. A repetitve guitar line sounds cool. Violin and drums build 4 1/2 minutes in. Another incredible section. Part 7 features the metallophone in this pastoral closing passage. "Wu" is the over 27 minute closing track. As I mentioned the first 13 minutes are all about the atmosphere with no real melody until 6 1/2 minutes in when a mellow one appears. It's slow going though until the tempo starts to pick up before 13 minutes. Drums and violin lead the way to a powerful section after 16 minutes. This is where the guitar makes some glorious noise. It gets very intense 2 minutes later like it's going to blow,something has to give. Unbelieveable ! It starts to let up 21 minutes in and winds down until 2 minutes later it starts to come back to life again.
I really feel this band has more in common with KOREKYOJIN, AMYGDALA and POCHAKAITE MALKO then UNIVERS ZERO and PRESENT, although they're all connected.
Posted Wednesday, May 14, 2008 | Review this album | Report (Review #171052)
Review by ShW1
Sotos is a French ensemble that published two albums. On the rock side they hold drums, bass and electric guitar. On the classical / acoustic side, there are violin and cello. No special sounds or effects here, it sounds very strait forward, but the few effects that does appear here and there, adds a lot to the final result. So this is a chamber rock by definition.
As they claim, among their influences is the neo classicism (Such as "The Soldier's Tale" by Stravinsky). For my taste and experience, such influences could end up with an over 'dry' result. But Sotos manage very well to be more 'wet', full of life, dynamic and energetic.
Very well musicianship here by all members, especially by drummer Michael Hazera. His drumming is furious without being bombastic, fresh and dynamic. He has got excellent timing and great ideas.
There are two compositions in this album, "Maelstrom" and "Wu". Due to credits, written by Bruno Camiade (bassist) and Yan Hazera (guitarist, Michael's brother) respectively, but both sounds like a band effort more than a one person composition.
"Maelstrom" is divided to seven parts, each part flaws naturally into the next one. Parts 1-4 are short, dynamic and energetic pieces. In each part occasionally there is one main repetitive theme, and above it there are some improvisations, interplays, melodies that come and go, and other surprises, that makes it flow very well.
The following three parts are moodier, more sophisticated. Part 5 offers an interesting adaptation to the Dies Irae, a famous church motif that used in many classical compositions, such as the Fantastic Symphony by Berlioz, part five. However this adaptation is a little bit long and continues for my taste.
Part 6 include nice reprise to the part one theme, up to the surprising, unexpected finale. Maelstrom could be finished at this point, but then comes the 7th part, a coda, sad, beautiful melody played by violin and xylophone, with silent guitar background. Good and rewarding composition.
"Wu" - Well, that's another story. Here the main goal is to create a vague atmosphere and sound spaces. I must admit that occasionally this is not my regular taste. Plus it's long, almost 30 minuets. Near the end it becomes more interesting and coherent. I suppose that RIO/Post rock fans will find an interest here.
Good and rewarding album, especially due to "Maelstrom".
My rating to this effort - 3.5 stars.
Posted Friday, July 27, 2007 | Review this album | Report (Review #130386)
Review by Pnoom!
Chamber rock is fast becoming one of my favorite styles of progressive rock (most chamber bands can be found under the RIO/avant heading). This usually dark, often disturbing, and generally instrumental music has a unique effect on me as I listen to it. I can't describe exactly what it is I feel, but it's always there. I guess it's some combination of fear, gloom, and impending doom, given the nature of the music, but the point is that it is able to make me feel in the first place. That is one of the main things I look for in all music I listen to, and this particular style of music (as well as post-rock) has an uncanny knack for doing just that, and doing it with more power than I ever thought possible. Whether it's the dark and somber wastelands of Univers Zero, the eerily mind-probing needle of Art Zoyd, the instrumental social commentary of Henry Cow (Western Culture only), the happy, jazzy, almost mantra-like fun of Volapuk, it all is able to make me feel in unique ways. Sotos is no exception to this rule, as they too prove unique and interesting, and just as capable of making me feel as the masters of the 1970s and 1980s.
Sotos has released only two albums, their eponymous debut and this, their sophomore and final effort. Thankfully, however, even though they disbanded, several of their ex-members got together and formed the equally good (by all accounts - I haven't yet heard them) band, Zaar. Platypus is generally regarded as the better of Sotos' two albums, and I'm quite sure that the people who think that are correct. I've heard their debut (I own it), but I don't know it well enough to comment, mainly because I've been listening to this album too much to make time for the other, but from what I have heard, Platypus is much better (not that the other is bad). It consists of only two songs (though one, Malstrom, is split into seven separate tracks), but contains more substance than many albums with well over that many songs. Both of them are amazing examples of the avant-garde that show just why I love chamber music (though technically called by the moniker 'chamber rock,' this music is often far from the boundaries of rock music, making it all the more interesting). Because there are only two songs, I will try and give you a feel of what both are like.
Malstrom is quite possibly my favorite chamber song. It is a forty-minute odyssey through the depths of the dark. I have, I believe, read reviews stating that the song Staralfur (off the Sigur Ros album Agaetis Byrjun) is the song that will be playing at the gates of Heaven. If that's the case, I can only assume that Malstrom is the song that will be welcoming newcomers to Hell (though Wu would serve just as well). This song, though it is split up into seven parts, cannot be seen as multi-part. Each section flows into the next flawlessly, resulting in a great listening experience, and it really does feel like a single song. Each track does, however, serve a slightly different purpose in your voyage through the underworld, representing different climaxes of your trip.
Part 1 serves as an introduction, dark and ominous, setting the stage for what's to come, but without actually exposing you to the horrors within. It's generally soft, with haunting violin work playing the most prominent role. Part 2 rolls right out of Part 1, picking up the action right from the outset and leading you on a roller coaster ride of darkness. The violin has somehow gotten even more haunting than before, and now the drums are starting to come to the forefront as well. When it climaxes (and you'll know it when it happens), it has more energy than most other chamber music I know, and is highly engaging. Part 3 keeps up that energy, moving into almost hard rock territory for a short time, but without losing the dark chamber mindset. Guitar and drums play the lead role here, but they are no less potent than the violin (string instruments tend to play a large role in chamber music). With Part 4, we are taken into even darker realms, beginning with the energy of Part 3 before descending even further into the depths (in a good way) into pure avant-garde strangeness. This part will probably be the hardest for most listeners, but it's just as good as the rest of it. Part 5 sees string instruments return to prominence as the dark nature of the music picks up. This is the longest section of the song, and, at times, the most normal, but still quite twisted at heart. Part 6 features some of the greatest string instrument work I know, simply pounding with unbridled energy. This is probably the climax of your journey, before your trip through the underworld ends. This song puts the 'rock' back in chamber 'rock,' but, even while it rocks, it never fails to hold true to the rest of the song (similar to Part 3, only better). And, finally, Part 7 concludes our journey, serving as an outro (much as Part 1 served as an intro), leading us calmly out of Hell's gates, having just had the experience of our lives.
Had the album ended there, it would have earned a five star rating from me, no questions asked. The final track, however, while still great, suffers from many of the problems I superficially found on their debut album (in just my first listen, when I had not fully digested it), most prominent of which is a lack of focus. It, like Malstrom, goes through a variety of moods (all of them dark and somber), and should serve as an excellent chamber music piece, but somewhere along the line it fails. The ideas are not connected well enough, and thus, while all the ideas are good, they don't quite gel together. I certainly cannot fault the band for lacking inspiration, just for failing to live up to their potential (which they did in Malstrom). And yet, despite all I've said, I still love the song and can listen to it without getting bored at all. The ideas they have are absolutely top-notch, and when they do connect them, this song is perfect. When they don't, it suffers, as you would expect, but it still manages to hold itself up on its own two legs (or twenty-seven minutes, one of the two) quite well. In fact, the lack of focus problem is really only evident for the first six minutes or so, after which this is a - I hesitate to call it smooth - fully engaging ride, just as Malstrom was.
If you like dark and ominous music, this album is for you, as the song Malstrom is better than anything Art Zoyd or Univers Zero ever did. Even Wu is worth owning, as it is better than much of the music I see these days, even if it isn't perfect. This album is essential for all fans of RIO/avant-prog, and even if you don't like the genre, this album could very well teach you to appreciate it (at the very least). One of the greatest albums I know, one you can't go wrong with. When I give a four star rating, it does not just mean that I like an album (that gets an album three stars), but, rather, it means that this album belongs in every progressive music collection. For me, four stars means that an album is a masterpiece at least on some level. While this would seem like my four star ratings should all be five stars, I reserve that rating for albums that truly are perfect in every sense of the word, which, for reasons I explained earlier, I cannot quite say about this album. Keep in mind, however, that this four star rating you see from me would, for many reviewers, translate to five stars. This is a band you must check out (along with, I would assume, their follow-up group, Zaar) if you like progressive music (which, given the fact that you're on this site reading this review, I assume you do). Well worth whatever it costs.
Posted Wednesday, March 21, 2007 | Review this album | Report (Review #115885)
Review by laplace
Like many other recent chamber-prog bands, Platypus sounds like Present playing variations on King Crimson's "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, part 1". It's up to you to decide whether that's a good thing. Personally I enjoy this album and appreciate that it can be uneventful in all the right places. 3 and a half stars from me, rounded up to 4 to give the piece a little extra push..
Posted Saturday, December 30, 2006 | Review this album | Report (Review #104933)
The second and final album from Sotos saw them on a new label, Cuneiform, and with a new producer, the brilliant Bob Drake (5UUs). Platypus is a big improvement on their promising but patchy debut, at least partly due to Bob Drake's production skills. The King Crimson/Magma/Present/Univers Zero influences are still in evidence, but there is a sharper sense of focus and a more distinctive compositional voice to be heard here.
The album is in two parts, beginning with the 41 minute, 7 part Malstrom. This piece could, and perhaps should, have been an album in its own right; in the good old days of vinyl it would have been about the right length for a single LP. Reviewers elsewhere have rightly pointed out that, while each of the 7 parts works well as a stand alone track, it's not immediately obvious how the pieces form a coherent whole. This is a minor quibble, however; while there may not be any great thematic unity, there is a consistent and compelling atmosphere throughout. The dynamics are much more effectively managed than on the debut album, with the acoustic/electric and quiet/loud contrasts being used to sometimes spectacular effect. There are also some electronic treatments of the instruments, but the effects are used sparingly and add to the generally brooding atmosphere. At times their influences become extremely obvious - in part 6 there is a passage which recalls Robert Fripp's one note solo on the studio version of Starless, used in a similar way to build tension - but they never fall into the trap of simply copying from the artists who inspire them.
Having crafted an album's worth of dark, atmospheric, RIO-tinged chamber rock, Sotos felt the need to add another epic, this time a 27 minute epic called Wu. Rather like the 22 minute Tango which opened their debut album, it has plenty of atmosphere but rather too little content to justify its epic proportions. It's not particularly bad, but compared with the clarity and concision demostrated for most of Malstrom it's a rather vague, formless piece which outstays its welcome. There are some powerful moments, and Michael Hazera turns in possibly his best performance to date on drums, but the piece could probably have been edited to half its length and been far more effective for it.
4 stars for this album, mainly for Malstrom. Anybody who loved the 73-74 incarnation of King Crimson will find plenty to enjoy here, and for those disappointed that Sotos broke up after this, the brothers Hazera went on to form the excellent Zaar.
Posted Tuesday, August 8, 2006 | Review this album | Report (Review #86221)
This is the debut album from a French group which formed in the mid 1990s. They operate in a similar territory to Univers Zero, Art Zoyd and Present; dark chamber rock which uses orchestral instruments alongside a rock rhythm section and which exists somewhere between RIO and Zeuhl. There is also some resemblance to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt Zion in the sound, although the compositional style is very different - there is a little too much rhythmic complexity for post rock.
There are just four long pieces on the album, three of them composed by guitarist Yan Hazera and one by bassist Bruno Camiade. While they have a good grasp of dynamics and a real sense of adventure, the writing of these pieces often lacks the focus and sense of urgency that is found in albums by the RIO/Zeuhl bands which are their most obvious inspiration.
The opening piece, Tango, is a 22 minute epic that could probably have been slimmed down into an effective 12 - 15 minutes, with lengthy passages that fail to develop in any significant way. This is a pity, because there is also some superb interplay between the strings and electric guitar, with intelligent support from a flexible and imaginative rhythm section.
The next piece, Gilgamesh, is a big improvement on this, with an imaginative interlude on percussion featuring the guitarist and bassist on Djembe, an African drum, before leading into a violin-driven climax that briefly recalls King Crimson circa 1974.
XXXVIIIeme Parallele is Bruno Camiade's contribution and includes some very nicely scored flute, percussion and cello parts, with Yan Hazera switching to acoustic guitar for the quieter interludes. The contrasting acoustic/electric, quiet/loud interludes could have been realised with a greater sense of drama, but this is a minor quibble and has more to do with the production than with the composition.
L'espoir Du Clan Des Huntres closes the proceedings, and begins with one of the most uptempo passages on the album, Camiade briefly taking the lead on fuzz bass. This then settles into a similar style to the opening track, with a rhythm that owes more than a little to Magma's Kontarkohsz. As with the opening track, some sections are a little drawn out and repetitive, although again there is also some superb playing to be heard here. The track closes in a manner that recalls the end of Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh, inviting further Magma comparisons.
Sotos is the work of a relatively young band - one member was only 16 when they formed, and apparently this was recorded only a year or so later - and shows a lot of promise. With a stronger willed producer and more disciplined writing, this would have deserved four stars and a strong recommendation. As it is, this is still a worthy addition to any RIO/vant prog collection.
Posted Sunday, April 23, 2006 | Review this album | Report (Review #75970)
Review by progadicto
Fantastic! Following the steps of Univers Zero and Present, Sotos gives ur a really deep and consistent album with two powerful masterpices:
Malstrom: divided in seven parts, is a real dark and complex compositon with extraordinary performances. Raw and terrorific, and even so quiet and simple sometimes looks like a classic string quartet...
"Wu" - 27 minutes of pure RIO!! With superb performances on guitar, cello, violin and drums this song is very complex and envolvent. A very slow and mysterious intro that slowly transforms in a real battle. Totally powerful. Just for advanced ears...
This CD must have to be in your colection... really...
Posted Friday, April 7, 2006 | Review this album | Report (Review #74366)
Somewhere between Magma and RIO Type music such as Ensemble Nimbus , this is long acoustic pieces that could also classified as zheul. As I traded this album with Chris/SYZYGY, in the early part of 2006, you should be reading a review of it sometime soon.
This is not for repeated listening , at least not for these ears. Still good , though. According to the grapevine, they made a second album , but by the time of the trading of this album, the groups had stopped existing.
Posted Monday, March 1, 2004 | Review this album | Report (Review #25190)
Thanks to ProgLucky for the artist addition. and to Bj-1 for the last updates


text:
Brendan O'Neill
A Final Word On Charlottesville
August 17, 2017 August 18, 2017 Samuel Hooper5 Comments
I want to talk about one rather overlooked aspect of the Alt-Right vs Counterprotesters + Antifa demonstrations which roiled Charlottesville, Virigina last weekend and left one young woman dead as the result of a far right domestic terrorist attack.
To listen to Donald Trump and his cheerleaders on one hand and the arrayed forces of the mainstream media on the other, one would be forgiven for thinking that ideology and conduct are one and the same thing.
On the Left, a strong insinuation has been made that because neo-nazis hold abhorrent views their violence is to be condemned while those who oppose them should get a free pass whenever they breach the peace – as evidenced by the fact that the "is it okay to punch a Nazi?" conversations and articles are bubbling up again. Meanwhile, on the Right, too many apologists are claiming that because both sets of protesters committed atrocities there is some kind of exculpatory moral equivalence, overlooking the fact that the AltRight saw Antifa's standard street brawling tactics and raised them an Islamist-style car terror attack.
Let's be clear – ideology and conduct are in fact separate, a fact which is particularly important in a country like the United States which at least nominally respects the right to free speech. Violent actions are unlawful and punishable. Provocative speech is not.
Most decent people should be able to agree that neo-nazis hold repugnant and immoral views which humankind really should have transcended by this point. Whatever the president says, there were no "fine" people at this Unite the Right rally – any decent person would have taken one look at the company around them and either gone home or rapidly joined the counterprotest. But nonetheless, free speech means that these far-right activists have every right to express their views and peaceably gather to protest if they wish to do so.
The counterprotesters, on the other hand, were not a homogenous bloc of people. Many were decent, upstanding citizens outraged at the resurgence of neo-Nazism in their hometown and determined to express their opposing view. But a significant contingent were Antifa troublemakers – Antifa being anarchist at best, communist at worst and always inclined to use their fists (and baseball bats) rather than their words in either case. These people do not have the right to silence the expression of any idea, however abhorrent and immoral, by force. There is no rioter's veto over free speech, and nor should there be – though craven authorities too frequently allow violent leftist groups to enforce one.
The neo-Nazis who assembled in Charlottesville clearly lose the ideological argument. Their political ideas are bad, and so are the acts of violence they committed – particularly the act of domestic terror carried out by James Fields. But the fact that the Antifa elements of the counterprotest oppose the racist views of the neo-Nazis does not excuse the violent acts committed on their own side, including more than one attack against journalists.
One would think this would be a simple concept to grasp, but numerous partisan commentators on Right and Left prefer to engage in whataboutism, pointing to the sins of the opposing side while exonerating their own. This is asinine. The counterprotesters clearly win the moral argument insofar as they oppose white supremacy. The identity politics which many of them peddle may be supremely unhelpful and damaging to the fabric of American society – Lord knows that this blog spends enough time analysing and criticising it – but it doesn't hold a candle to the very real and tangible damage wrought by white supremacy in America's history.
Pretending otherwise is stupid, and only diminishes the moral authority of the Right, opening conservatives up to criticism that they are complicit in the white nationalist Alt-Right agenda.
That's not to say that conservatives should engage in self-flagellation or admit any responsibility for the violent actions of Alt-Left extremists when these odious people inhabit an entirely lower moral plane. But neither should we shower undue blanket praise on all of the people who opposed the neo-nazis in Charlottesville – many of the violent Antifa contingent in particular hold abhorrent and totalitarian ideas of their own, a fact overlooked by some conservative apologists such as Mitt Romney:
No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) August 16, 2017
Doubling down and allowing the Left to claim the moral high ground – either by furiously denying that the Alt-Right is a problem or by overcompensating and suggesting that the Right has a monopoly on evil – is political suicide for conservatives, reputationally speaking. People will not listen to our valid complaints about identity politics and leftist intolerance if we fail to clear the very low bar of unequivocally condemning the odious Alt-Right infiltrators who seek to piggyback on the wider conservative movement.
As I wrote the other day, when the devil is in our house – as it is right now – conservatives of conscience should spend less time pointing out the flaws of the Left (however real) and more time getting our house in order.
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Vince Cable Joins The Anti-Brexit War On The Elderly
August 6, 2017 August 6, 2017 Samuel Hooper10 Comments
Remainers love to claim that the EU referendum "divided Britain". But many prominent Remainers are perfectly happy to stoke divisions of their own in order to thwart Brexit
While any measured, rational human being ought to be immediately capable of seeing through YouGov's recent flawed opinion poll – which was constructed to give the misleading impression of elderly Brexit voters being selfish extremists – new LibDem leader Vince Cable is happy to stoke intergenerational conflict in order to feed his desperate pro-EU confirmation bias.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday (surprising enough in itself, considering most bien-pensant elites view that paper as little more than a fascist propaganda newsletter), Cable moans and wails about how the older generations have supposedly "shafted the young".
Cable writes:
The Remain argument about economic damage is now largely accepted. Mounting evidence of a slowing economy and rising inflation give substance to earlier warnings. The issue has become one of how to minimise or postpone the damage. And instead of countering the arguments, more and more Brexiteers are embracing economic pain as a price worth paying for 'taking back control': almost as a badge of honour.
This attitude has reached worrying proportions. Press stories refer to 'martyrs for Brexit' based on a YouGov survey suggesting 61 per cent of the public would accept 'significant damage to the economy' from Brexit and 39 per cent 'don't mind losing their job'. These figures seem wildly implausible.
I don't encounter people running around saying 'please make me poorer' or 'please sack me'. These figures are also difficult to reconcile with polling which shows 66 per cent of voters wanting to remain inside the single market.
Of course, as I explained at length in my response to an equally idiotic piece in the New Statesman, there is in fact no contradiction here. It has nothing to do with being a "martyr", or acting irrationally against one's economic self interest. Rather, elderly voters simply understand that there are other motivations and considerations besides short term economic gain.
Having grown up in the post-war years and through the Cold War, older voters tend to appreciate the value of democracy and self-determination more than young voters who have never faced existential threat and for whom the EU has been an ever-present reality and an unquestioned positive force. And Vince Cable probably knows this full well, but it suits his purposes to portray those with differing political opinions as somehow unhinged or even malevolent.
Ironically, immediately after impugning the motives and morals of older Brexit voters, Vince Cable then goes on to make a plea for tolerance and mutual respect:
But the last thing the UK needs is further polarisation. There is already more than enough bad-mouthing of opponents and questioning of the patriotism of those who criticise the Government.
The gall of these establishment EU-defenders is absolutely off the charts. Where once a senior politician might have felt a degree of shame that would have prevented him from contradicting himself so completely in an Op-Ed, Cable does so proudly, fully expecting not to be picked up on it. This is how little establishment centrist politicians think of voters and their capacity to understand political or rhetorical arguments. But it is also a sign of the desperation in the Remain camp, as the dream of thwarting Brexit altogether recedes further and further into the distance.
And it gets worse:
To describe such masochism as 'martyrdom' is dangerous. We haven't yet heard about 'Brexit jihadis' but there is an undercurrent of violence in the language which is troubling. We have already had the most fervent of Brexiteers, such as Nigel Farage, warning of civil unrest if the 'will of the people' is frustrated.
Brexiteers may well be frustrated since the practical difficulties of Brexit, as well as the costs, could result in Brexit never happening.
This is a clever little construction of Cable's, writing that we haven't yet heard about "Brexit jihadis" while simultaneously inserting what he clearly hopes will become the Left's new insult of choice into the public discourse. Let's be clear – the leader of the Liberal Democrats, that party which considers itself so rational and pragmatic, has just compared Brexiteers who dared to weigh considerations other than economic gain when voting in the EU referendum to jihadis. To murderous Islamist terrorists who maim and kill.
At what point do we stand up to the establishment's collective hissy fit over Brexit? At what point do decent people refuse to be thus insulted by what Tim Montgomerie called the very "greybeards" who only recently urged further EU integration and the Euro on us even as these failing policies devastated the younger generation, particularly in southern Europe?
No Vince. Europe's young have been 'shafted' by unemployment caused by the € that you and other 'greybeards' tried to impose on Britain https://t.co/be4GON7DBU
— Tim Montgomerie ن (@montie) August 6, 2017
That's not to say that Vince Cable is wrong in many of his warnings about Brexit. In many ways he is right to warn about the implausibility of hammering out a bespoke deal with the EU by 2019, and to urge a slower, managed transition which maintains current access to the EEA. But all of these sensible warnings are completely overshadowed by the overwrought, flowery language suggesting that Britain's grey-haired voters are supposedly full of hatred and malice towards the children that they raised.
Are the older generations completely innocent? Of course not. Valid arguments can be made that they have been too sheltered from "austerity" and the consequences of the Great Recession thanks to universal benefits and the "triple lock" on pensions. And certainly, as a demographic with a high propensity to vote, the retiree lobby has been very successful in seeing their interests turned into government policy.
But Vince Cable's over-the-top attack on older voters immediately turns them back into sympathetic characters, and only makes it harder to question the privileges that they have accrued through successive government policy. Comparing decent people who have worked their whole lives and done so much to build the country in which we live today to radical Islamist terrorists is so heinous, so wildly excessive, that sensible discussion becomes impossible.
This kind of behaviour might be just about acceptable from someone like me – a relatively unknown political blogger perhaps looking to make a splash by saying something outrageous or provocative (see Abi Wilkinson's clickbait call for a 100% inheritance tax in the Guardian). But Vince Cable is not an obscure political commentator. He is leader of the Liberal Democrats, a political party which still purports to be taken seriously.
In reality, most people vote both for reasons of self interest and for the perceived good of society. The truth about the elderly Brexit vote probably lies between Brendan O'Neill's lionisation of these voters and Vince Cable's haughty dismissal.
O'Neill has been effusive in his praise:
I find it deeply inspiring, moving even, that my fellow Brexiteers are willing to have it rough in the name of democracy, in the name of bringing law-making back to where every progressive of the modern, Enlightened era believed it should be: in the nation, under a people's oversight.
I straight up got a lump in my throat when I read the bit of the YouGov research that says many Leave voters would even be okay with losing their own jobs, or seeing a family member lose a job, in the name of Brexit. Thirty-nine per cent said such personal hardship would be a price worth paying, against 38 per cent who said it wouldn't be. Now that's devotion. That's idealism. And if it seems alien to us, that only goes to show what a flat, grey political era we live in.
Indeed, the rather elitist alarm that has greeted the revelation that people are willing to suffer for their democratic ideals sums up what a baleful influence technocracy has had on our political imagination. In the technocratic era, when politics has been drained of big ideas and reduced to a box-ticking exercise that is all about managing society, its inhabitants and their aspirations, political passion can seem threatening. Strong feelings, democratic devotion, self-sacrifice – these have become foreign bodies in a time when politics is about making things chug along as uncontroversially as possible. To the technocrat, to the EU suit who drafts laws far from the madding demos, the utterance 'I am willing to go through hardship for what I believe in' seems perverse. It's disruptive. It is because we inhabit such a beige world of spun, small politics that the willingness of us Brexiteers to suffer for our beliefs can look like 'extremism'.
I get where O'Neill is coming from, even though I think he goes a little too far, reading something that both he and I desperately want to see (a return to conviction politics and commitment to ideology rather than fudged centrist compromise) into a vote whose motivations were more nuanced than either extreme.
In truth, elderly Brexit voters are neither selfless heroes nor foaming-at-the-mouth jihadists. But as far as the media is concerned, the narrative about older voters being selfish is too convenient to ignore. Unfortunately it reveals a gulf of misunderstanding, as Vince Cable makes clear:
The old have comprehensively shafted the young. And the old have had the last word about Brexit, imposing a world view coloured by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation much more comfortable with modern Europe.
If I had a pound for every time some sanctimonious Remainer airily asserted that Brexit was motivated by "nostalgia for an imperial past" then I would never need to work again. In reality, the Lord Ashcroft poll taken in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum clearly showed that the principle motivating factor for Leave voters was "the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK". Perhaps this lacks nuance and an understanding of modern day interdependence in the regulatory environment, but it is also a clear and unambiguous call for the same kind of autonomy enjoyed by countries far smaller than ours in terms of GDP such as Australia, Canada or Korea. This is by no means unreasonable, and cannot be fairly caricatured as some kind of imperial nostalgia.
So why pretend that it is? Either Vince Cable is so full of self-hatred for his own country and its history that he believes that our dissolution as an independent nation state into an increasingly federal EU is somehow appropriate "payback" for our transgressions in the days of empire, or he knows full well that the Brexit vote was not motivated by imperial nostalgia but simply finds this to be a convenient trope with which to whip up his own supporters.
For now I will do Vince Cable the courtesy of assuming the latter rather than the former – that he is in fact not a self-hating Brit, but rather just a cynical old politician like so many others. But the longer this tantrum against anyone and everyone who voted for Brexit goes on, the harder it becomes to assume good faith on the part of the furious Remainers.
At some point the Vince Cables of this world have to either engage with the real substance of Brexiteer arguments, attitudes and motivations, or else just admit that they don't care – that they simply feel blind, unthinking hatred towards those who disagree with them and have no interest in rational discussion.
It might actually prove quite cathartic; rather than having to make increasingly ludicrous arguments that people voted for Brexit somehow want to bring back the Empire, Vince Cable and his ilk could simply have their Two Minutes Hate every day and be satisfied.
Brexit, LeftWatch, UK Current Affairs, UK PoliticsBrendan O'Neill, Brexit, Confirmation Bias, Democracy, European Union, Grey Vote, LibDems, Liberal Democrats, Vince Cable, YouGov
People Don't Want Theresa May To Emote, They Just Want Her To Lead
June 17, 2017 June 17, 2017 Samuel Hooper4 Comments
Not the "Princess Diana Effect"
Sadly, Brendan O'Neill has jumped on the Theresa May apologist bandwagon, mocking the prime minister's critics for supposedly demanding that she "perform" for us, wearing her emotions on her sleeve as she weeps with the survivors and bereaved relatives of the Grenfell Tower fire victims.
Apparently by criticising the prime minister's slow, tone-deaf response to the tragedy and its aftermath we are behaving like a baying mob seeking emotional catharsis rather than concerned citizens with legitimate fears about the quality of leadership that Theresa May is providing. But this is to misunderstand the nature of the public anger directed at the prime minister, and assumes that the hard left socialist agitators who shout the loudest are somehow representative of all of May's critics. They are not.
O'Neill writes:
Do people want Theresa May to weep in public? Allow herself to be pelted with rotten fruit? Make herself available for cries of "murderer" even though it's ridiculous for her to be accused of murder? What if it isn't in her nature to show her feelings to strangers — should she still do it? For the good of the nation? I'm finding this climate of emotional retribution quite ugly, I must say. The public's urgent questions and anger over Grenfell are being channelled by some into a narrow, cartoonish anti-Toryism designed to hurt May and help Labour. To refight the General Election on the ruins of this building strikes me as a far more callous thing than May's inability to emote for the cameras.
Ross Clark jumps to the same baseless and rather condescending conclusion (those silly plebs want to see emotion, but we enlightened people are above such base considerations as whether or not the prime minister can act like a real leader in public) over at the Spectator:
If she still hasn't got the message, it is this: you are expected, Mrs May, to go and blub before the cameras. You are expected to hug, to hold and say that you share everyone's pain, that you will not rest until you can make sure that tragedies like this will never, ever be allowed to happen again. That you might have been working behind the scenes since Wednesday on an appropriate regulatory response to follow the disaster counts for nothing at all; it is just tears, please.
The idea that Theresa May is some kind of heartless creature who has not been affected by the Grenfell disaster is absurd. I have never met her, but it is quite clear from the look in her face that she is she is as shocked by the whole thing as we all are, one or two psychopaths aside. It is just that she has a very English facet of character which, until a couple of generations ago, was seen as an asset: she has an aversion to showing emotion in public.
As a public figure in modern Britain, however, this will no longer do. What used to be called a stiff upper lip is now seen as fault, if not a disability which requires treatment. The new rules of emotional correctness demand not just that you care but that you can cry with the people.
This is asinine. I don't think that any sane critic of Theresa May wants the prime minister to "weep in public" or "blub before the cameras". That's not what this is about. The problem is not Theresa May's failure to behave like the most unhinged of Princess Diana mourners and rend her garments in front of the television cameras. The problem is her complete and utter failure to lead, at least according to any modern definition of leadership in the age of television and social media.
Would Theresa May have been subjected to angry, painful and politically awkward scenes had she gone to meet the survivors and volunteer disaster relief workers in public, the day following the fire? Of course. But as a leader, you suck it up. Even if the people heckle, you show up and let the victims of Britain's worst fire since the Second World War know that their plight and their concerns are receiving the direct and personal attention of the head of government.
It isn't that a prime ministerial visit would make much of a tangible difference to the relief efforts. But the visual would have been very powerful, and that counts for a lot when it comes to public sentiment. I wrote the other day of examples of politicians in America mucking in and helping with disaster recovery efforts as a means of showing solidarity and giving the appearance of engagement. Neglecting to do so, and then only relenting a day later and agreeing to meet the affected people in tightly controlled circumstances, away from the television cameras, is a failure of leadership plain and simple.
That's why Theresa May has to go. Either she doesn't realise that her behaviour has consistently fallen short of the standards expected of a 21st century leader, or she does realise but is incapable of improving her performance. And unfortunately, Brendan O'Neill has conflated his justified distaste with the way that left-wing agitators from Jeremy Corbyn on downwards have sought to exploit the tragedy for political gain with the erroneous idea that Theresa May's lacklustre response to the crisis (and leadership in general) should therefore be immune from criticism. It shouldn't.
Is there a cartoonish anti-Tory sentiment out there? Absolutely. I have been writing about it and criticising the left's reduction of conservatives to two-dimensional cartoon villains more or less constantly since I started this blog in 2012. And are many of the hysterical accusations being hurled at Theresa May completely outlandish and hysterical? Yes, of course they are. But Theresa May has also opened herself to vociferous and fully justified criticism thanks entirely to her astonishing failure to lead or carry out the basic entry-level requirements of a modern head of government.
This is not the same as demanding that Theresa May "performs" or emotes for us, or leads us in some kind of cathartic national therapy session. This is about demanding that the prime minister either steps up and acts like a leader, or quits the field so that somebody else can do the job.
As a country we are drifting at the present time, and Theresa May bears the overwhelming share of responsibility for this fact. Acknowledging this fact and holding the prime minister to account for her repeated abdication of leadership does not mean validating the separate, cynical attacks of the hard left.
On the contrary, it is our duty to demand strong and effective leadership, and to refuse to settle for Theresa May's pitiful approximation of the same.
LeftWatch, Local Politics, UK Current AffairsBrendan O'Neill, Disaster Relief, Emotional Intelligence, Fire, Grenfell Tower, Leadership, Prime Minister, Ross Clark, Theresa May
General Election 2017: Tory Apocalypse / Brexit Salvation Reax
June 11, 2017 Samuel Hooper3 Comments
A self-inflicted catastrophe for small-C conservatives with one – potentially enormous – silver lining
Who knew that Theresa May was quite so staggeringly incompetent? I mean, we all knew that she wasn't a real conservative, at least in the best Thatcherite traditions of the party. That much was made clear from successive party conference speeches and her idiotic manifesto's all-out assault on the libertarian or free market wing of the party.
But her years plugging away in the Home Office and quietly manoeuvring herself into the most powerful job in the country belied the fact that as prime minister, Theresa May would be revealed as little more than a puppet manipulated by her two closest aides (also both cuckoos in the conservative nest) with almost zero reliable judgment of her own.
Through her sheer campaigning ineptitude and inability to articulate a positive conservative vision (remember how this blog kept banging on about the need for one of those?), Theresa May has allowed Jeremy Corbyn's brand of 1970's style socialism to regain a foothold in British politics, and for this unforgivable high crime alone she needs to be sent to political Siberia with no undue delay.
But as I made clear in my election night live-blog, Jeremy Corbyn also deserves enormous credit for improving Labour's electoral position and enthusing so many people with socialist politics. Sure, in one sense it is easy to sway people with the promise of endless free stuff, always paid for by someone else. But as I noted a couple of weeks ago, it is still necessary to overcome voter scepticism that the promised Utopian land of plenty can actually be achieved.
Jeremy Corbyn successfully made the pitch to lots of people – or at least got them to temporarily suspend their disbelief. And he did so in the context of a still-centrist Parliamentary Labour Party which hates his guts and has been trying to undermine him since before his leadership even began, not to mention a hostile television news media which only fell into something approaching balance when election campaign rules took effect, and a pro-Tory print media which pulled out all the stops to get Theresa May over the finish line. That is no small feat.
The other major factor was the youth vote. While we still don't actually know how many young people voted or quite to what extent they broke for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, it seems clear that the promise of free university tuition – and let's face it, just an ounce of empathy for a generation coming of age at a time when the prospect of home ownership is more distant and potential career paths more disjointed and precarious – won the support of millions of young people.
Apparently when it comes to closing time at nightclubs, young people are spontaneously breaking into the sung refrain "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!". The naive chant of mostly low-information voters who wear their political views more as a trendy fashion statement than a considered position? Sure. But also a demographic which Theresa May and her campaign team, in their infinite wisdom, did absolutely nothing to court.
I blogged about this in the heat of the moment on election night, and then split out my thoughts into a separate piece here. And it seems clear to me that British conservatives (I use a small C deliberately) simply cannot go on writing off the youth vote and ceding it to the parties of the Left. We have been doing so for far too long, at our peril, and now that a charismatic conviction politician (in the unlikely form of Jeremy Corbyn) has come along who can actually speak to this demographic we are totally defenceless.
And then there's Brexit.
The one silver lining of this confused election result is that Theresa May's stubborn insistence that "Brexit means Brexit" – by which she means that Brexit means abandoning the EEA, denying the existence of non-tariff barriers to trade, demanding a bespoke comprehensive free trade agreement within two years and threatening to walk away with no deal if the EU failed to acquiesce – may now be moderated by more sensible voices which lean toward the once-maligned "Norway Option".
The DUP, on whose support the Conservatives must now rely to command a majority in the House of Commons and remain in government, are against a hard Brexit, as are many Tory Remainers and many small-C conservative Brexiteers across the country. While the Tory Brexit Taliban (a wonderful phrase concocted by Pete North) will kick up an almighty fuss if they sense any dilution of their maximalist approach to Brexit, suddenly it has become a lot harder to see the pathway toward that goal. Good.
Aside from these thoughts, I am still digesting the surprising election result and the potential ramifications of a new political reality with many moving parts. But below are some of the hot takes and more considered reactions which have resonated most with me in the hours since the fateful exit poll was released.
Author and blogger Paul Goldsmith rips into the Tories' awful manifesto, the incompetence of their leadership and their small-minded, fear-based campaign:
Let's not beat around the bush here. Theresa May's manifesto was almost like saying 'come on, I dare you to vote for us'. The idea that people who had worked all their lives and paid taxes and national insurance to build up a nest-egg to pass onto their children and grandchildren should run down that nest-egg to the last £100,000 to pay for care they thought was part of their social contract with the state in return for those taxes and that insurance? A return to a grammar school system that might look superficially advantageous to poorer children but with no clarity on how it wouldn't once again abandon 75% of the population to the mental slavery of under-education? A free vote on fox hunting? A determination to insist that the 'will of the people' had been clearly expressed for the hardest of Brexits including withdrawal from the Single Market and customs union and immigration controls that include the preposterous 100,000 a year immigration cap?
Let's add that to the person delivering this, it turned out, far more madcap scheme. Theresa May came across as arrogant, complacent, prickly when challenged, and downright mendacious when insisting 'nothing had changed' during her unprecedented manifesto u-turn on social care. Then there was the refusal to engage in TV debates. I wonder if any leader will do THAT again. Her refusal to properly involve her Cabinet in creating that manifesto left them hung out to dry when defending it, as they were reduced to constant 'dead cat' strategies of shouting 'IRA', 'MARXIST' and 'TERRORIST SYMPATHIZER' at Jeremy Corbyn, because they had so little positive to say.
Then look at what she was up against. Every night I would watch the news with Mrs G. We are not, and never will be 'Corbynistas', but by g-d did he look good compared to the Prime Minister. Mrs G often said it herself "every night he seems like the only person in this election who really believes what he is saying."
This last point is particularly valid. Don't underestimate the attraction of a political leader who (regardless of the rightness or wrongness of their policies) actually sincerely believes what they are saying, and has the courage to defend those beliefs.
When Theresa May first called this general election, I wrote a piece pondering whether Jeremy Corbyn's likely defeat would spell the end for conviction politics altogether. How wrong I was. If anything, the Tory implosion and Corbyn's solid showing (and the enthusiasm he has generated among many young people) have reminded us that having strong principles and the willingness to defend them can actually be attractive to voters. If only the conviction politician in this case had been on the Right rather than the Left.
Daniel Hannan, writing for the Washington Examiner, reaches for some low-hanging fruit about how young people voted for Free Stuff:
It's true that the Conservative campaign could have been better, but that is true of every campaign in history. The prime minister, Theresa May, was criticized for calling an unnecessary election and then refusing to participate in the televised debates. But that doesn't come close to explaining how Labour rose from 30 to 40 percent support during the campaign.
No, I'm afraid we're down to the simplest and most depressing explanation. Quite a few voters will support any party that seems to be offering them free stuff.
Labour's manifesto was a ridiculous list of public handouts. More money was promised for healthcare, schools, the police, public sector pay rises, pensions and free university tuition. All the extra cash was vaguely supposed to come from "big business" and "the rich." In the event, an awful lot of people liked the sound of goodies that someone else would pay for.
The Labour vote came disproportionately from people under the age of 25, who turned out in unprecedented numbers, confounding every opinion poll. Few of voters of that generation know about the IRA bombing campaign in the 1970s and 1980s, which far surpassed today's Islamist terror in its scale. They do not remember the Cold War. They do not even recall, except in the vaguest sense, the last Labour government which, in 2010, left Britain with a deficit higher than Greece's.
On polling day, a Labour activist tweeted a photograph of students queuing outside a polling station. It was, she said, a sign of the political upheaval that was taking place. But my immediate thought was: "If your guy implements the socialism he wants, we'll all have to get used to queuing."
He's right. The case for free markets and fiscal conservatism has to be made anew in every generation. Many of the young people who helped power Jeremy Corbyn to victory are at best dimly aware of the extent to which post-war consensus, socialist policies doomed Britain to slow and steady decline up to 1979. They didn't experience the Winter of Discontent themselves, just as I didn't.
But if nobody makes the case for the kind of policies which rescued Britain from near-terminal decline and which are at the root of the historic prosperity and plenty which we now enjoy, then they will take this stability and prosperity for granted, assuming that it is the baseline, the default setting. They will wrongly assume that things can only be improved by overturning conservative policies and attacking the free market, when in fact conservative economic policies and free markets underpin nearly every good thing in their lives, from the clothes they wear, the variety of food in the grocery stores where they shop to the smartphones in their hand from which they glibly re-tweet "For the many, not the few".
Here's Margot James, Conservative MP for Stourbridge, making a similar point in Conservative Home:
Apart from a level of debt which is unsustainable over the long term, the economy is now in good shape. We have brought sanity to the public finances, as we promised we would. Consequently, the economy has not been to the fore when people have been deciding how to vote. Labour have been able to latch on to this relative economic security by peddling a message that the state should provide more at every turn.
The election descended into a profligate binge over how much taxpayers' money Labour proposed to give away: keeping the triple lock for pension increases, maintaining winter fuel payments for older people as a universal benefit, thousands more police officers (regardless whether or not they are needed, given the changing nature of crime), more money for schools, health, and social care…all this was added to the billions needed for the nationalisation of the railways and the Royal Mail. And finally, the game-changer: an end to tuition fees for higher education.
The moment I heard Labour's policy of free university education I knew young people would turn out to vote in unprecedented numbers. This was a policy that would deliver votes in the same way that the sale of council houses did for us during the 1980s.
At a radio hustings I took part in, we were asked what we would do for young people. Labour was all about handouts: free higher education with no regard for how universities were to be funded, the reintroduction of housing benefit for 20 olds and an equal minimum wage. I was a lone voice calling for improving opportunities for young people to gain skills, start businesses, and access better jobs brought about by encouraging investment.
Paul Goldsmith picked up on this point, too:
Many right-wing commentators have pointed out that all Jeremy Corbyn was doing was bribing people with other peoples' money. One said that the election could be summed up in six words: 'young people vote for free stuff'. Yes, there is an argument for both. But this is why it was incumbent upon Theresa May and the few people she takes advice from to present an optimistic picture of the benefits of the free market, or maybe stepped back, considered that if you keep on cutting spending per pupil in education the country will pay the price for generations, and changed course in a way that stays true to the now normal Conservative consensus that instead of spending a load of money to manage demand, money should go towards increasing productivity and supply, and demand will take care of itself.
But no. Instead we got the cowardice of fear. Fear of proper debate, fear of the demands of those on the Eurosceptic right who will not stand for a single penny going to the EU and who insist with no justification that the world will simply dance to our tune, and fear of antagonising those who fund her party. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn offered the audacity of hope, a hope that economic theory might be turned on its head, a hope that people who would be milked for money would turn it over quietly, but more importantly a hope that no-one in this rich country will live in desperation anymore.
It is astonishing, the degree to which the Conservative Party fought the election and generally structured its messaging according to the terms of the socialist Left. Restraining the growth of the state has continually been portrayed as a regrettable necessity rather than a good thing in itself. And that's when certain ex-advisers who shall not be named (cough, Nick Timothy) were not busy advocating an even more activist role for the state altogether.
When you start speaking in the other side's tone of voice, using their turns of phrase and echoing their agenda (Theresa May's first act as PM was to stand on the steps of 10 Downing Street and talk about how government could help the "Just About Managing" rather than getting out of the way and lowering their tax burden) then you legitimise their arguments. If you concede that it is the job of an activist, paternalist state to help everybody by shovelling benefits in their direction and artificially limiting their choices, why would anybody vote for the Tories when Labour promise to do the job so much more enthusiastically?
Sam Bowman, of the Adam Smith Institute, is not in a forgiving mood:
The Tories did so badly in part because they did not give people a reason to vote for them; in part because they doubled down on a hard Brexit strategy; in part because they neglected and even attacked their own base. For many years they and almost everybody else have totally failed to make a broad-brush case for free markets, with the honourable exception of a few think tanks and newspaper columnists. With that in mind, why is it surprising that someone who despises markets is so popular? How good the moderate and coherent Osborne brand of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism now looks.
[..] The Tories did not offer anything to voters or to their own supporters. A free market manifesto could have energised Tory campaigners and candidates who would have had a reason to go to bat for May when she stumbled. It could have included policies that would have been popular with voters, like stamp duty and inheritance tax cuts, or ways of unlocking more infrastructure investment, that could have been sold on the doorstep as a reason to vote for them if you didn't like them on Brexit. Fox hunting doesn't count.
[..] Virtually no time at all was spent on the economy. What a colossal mistake. Many people's incomes are the same in real terms as they were ten years ago, which is unprecedented. It was insane to ignore this and not to offer policies that might have boosted investment (chronically low in Britain by international standards) and people's wages. All we got was a crude parody of continental European industrial policy, which in practice meant hectoring firms about worker representation on their boards and baseless claims about price gouging. What good is a polling lead on the economy for a right-wing party if you're only interested in talking about business to attack it?
The Conservatives could have had a powerful and, to their base, exciting election platform. More homes, more investment, and better infrastructure could all have been delivered through smart, density-focused planning reforms, by restoring capital allowances in the corporation tax and cutting the part of business rates that falls on property investment, and by allowing local government to finance new infrastructure from private investment.
These ideas are free market to the core but are about fixing the problems that ordinary people have. Standing for free market conservatism does not mean having to be a dogmatic ideologue — something May and her team never understood.
Over on Facebook, Brendan O'Neill – who does himself no favours with his strident insistence that his is the only One True Brexit – does make some good points, first about the nature of the current Labour Party:
As more election number-crunching is carried out, it's becoming clear that the Tories and Labour now play entirely different roles to the ones they played just 20 or 30 years ago.
The first thing that's becoming clear is that people have overstated the extent to which Labour won over Leave voters. According to Lord Ashcroft's exhaustive national survey, 60 per cent of Leavers voted for the Tories and only 25 per cent voted for Labour. John Curtice, the BBC's key number-cruncher, reports that the biggest swings to the Tories were in Leave areas, while it was in "seats which voted Remain last year [that] Labour pulled off some of its best performances". This means the Tories had huge swings in very poor areas like Boston and Skegness and working-class areas like Bolsover — which are Leave areas — while Labour made enormous gains in Hampstead, Kensington and Canterbury, which are Remain areas and / or well-off areas. The Tories made inroads with the poor, Labour made gains among the posh. This is fascinating.
More number-crunching is needed, but two things are becoming clear. 1) The idea that the Brexit issue or the Brexit divide has gone away is a fantasy. It merely takes a different form now, with Leave largely orientating around the Tories and Remain around Labour. Ashcroft says 68 per cent of Tory voters are Leavers and 64 per cent of Labour voters are Remainers. That is extraordinary. It's the divide of our time, and we shouldn't deny that. And 2) Labour, even led by Corbyn, is not a party of the working class. In fact it is becoming something else. It is morphing, or at least might morph, into being a party of the middle class that wants to *keep in check* working-class anger with institutions like the EU. Let that sink in. And let's see what happens next.
Okay, the wild Labour celebrations are getting weird now. Labour didn't win. Even against grey, dull, U-turning May — the worst Tory leader of my lifetime, by far — it didn't win. It is testament to Labour's low ambitions that it is getting so excited about this. This is clearly a party that never expects to be in government again and must therefore welcome upward blips and handfuls of gains as the best it can get, proof it still has a pulse.
I also agree with O'Neill on the excessive celebration of the youth vote, as though their participation in the democratic process is somehow more valuable than that of older voters:
The message we've been bombarded with since Brexit and the Corbyn surge is that when the old vote, everything goes to shit, and the sooner these selfish, nostalgic bastards die, the better; but when the young vote, it's all milk and honey and roses and light, and the sooner this fresh, caring generation takes over society, the better. The old are demonised, the young sacralised, giving rise to what must surely be one of the nastiest divides in our society right now. I can't get behind the enthusiasm for the youth vote, I'm afraid, because much of it seems to me to be driven by a culture-war sense of entitlement against the apparently unfeeling, uneducated elderly. The culture war has come to the ballot box.
Now of course we should celebrate when a normally apathetic demographic group actually turns out to vote, but there is a worrying narrative building of young people, furious at having had their "futures taken away" by the selfish Leave votes of older people, finally striking back by supporting Jeremy Corbyn.
As well as being false, this is highly offensive. As though old people – many of whom sacrificed and laboured to give their EU-supporting kids the best possible chances in life – were not thinking about their children's futures when they voted for Brexit, and as though young people – literally members of generation Me Me Me, consumerists who struggled to frame the EU referendum debate in terms other than what it meant for them and their own travel opportunities, love lives, mobile roaming charges etc. – were high-mindedly voting for the good of society and the future of our democracy. I have no time for this sanctimonious, false narrative, and it is good to see O'Neill also forcefully pushing back.
Turning to Brexit, here's Pete North, angrily rebutting those who continue to fatuously declare that "the people" voted only for their specific, idiotic brand of Brexit:
As to the assertion that remaining in the single market is not leaving the EU, this is a zombie argument used by liars. The single market as it stands now is a collaborative venture between the EU and Efta states – and Norway etc only adopt about one in five EU rules by way of a system of co-determination – laws which we will likely have to adopt even if we left the single market – but without any means of disputing council decisions. Not least since many of them are rooted in global conventions.
I won't go into the gory details because I will revisit these issues in the near future. The point of this post is simply to say that leavers do not get to call the shots on how we depart. They were given that opportunity over a year ago and declined the opportunity. It is therefore up to all of us to debate. Democracy is a continuum and though the decision to leave may well be sacrosanct the mode of departure still hangs in the balance and there is everything to play for.
You probably already know my views on this. There is no economic gain or utility in terms of sovereignty from leaving the single market. The main objective and the the single most important one is that we end political union with the EU and an off the shelf treaty is the fastest and safest path to that outcome. The rest can be sorted out later and revisited by way of EEA review.
There is no scenario where we don't have to make compromises and fetishising sovereignty for its own sake is pointless since absolute sovereignty no longer exists unless you're a regulatory superpower like China or the USA. Diverging from the existing regime brings us no efficiencies and comes at the cost of European trade. That was a tough pill to swallow for me being a long standing critic of EU regulation – but that is the reality of it nonetheless.
[..] In that regard do not let anyone tell you the debate is settled or let them interpret the result of the election for you. The question of how we leave has always been open ended and there is every reason to get involved. Plenty of people want to close down the debate by telling lies. The usual suspects. I'm not standing for it and this ain't over til it's over. The fight over Britain's destiny did not end in June last year. The referendum was only the beginning and hardline leavers do not own this debate.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker can't believe our good fortune in having inadvertently steered a course between two dangerous options (Corbynite socialism and Mayite Brexit illiteracy) with the electorate's inconclusive verdict:
After a very short night, I was woken before 8am on Friday by a call from my son Nick, 5,000 miles away in India, who had been following the drama 8,000 feet up in the Himalayan foothills. "This is yet another amazing tribute," he said, "to the unconscious political genius of the British people. They have somehow managed to steer between the Scylla of Corbyn's suicidal economic illiteracy and the Charybdis of Mrs May's hard Brexit."
"She will only be able to govern with the support of 10 Northern Irish MPs who insist that we must keep a 'frictionless border' with Ireland and the 13 Scottish Tories who, with Ruth Davidson, are equally insistent that we must somehow remain free to trade in the single market. That is brilliant for the Union, because both Northern Ireland and Scotland are crucial to her survival.
"With all the other parties also somehow committed to staying in the European market, plus many of the less reckless Tories, that means that it will be extremely difficult for her to press on with her hard-Brexit, 'walk away without a deal' line. "I am now more optimistic about Britain's future", Nick concluded, "than I have been for a long time." Many of my readers, I know, will be shocked, if not surprised, to hear that I agree with him.
Booker's son is not wrong – and this is what makes the election result so bittersweet from my own perspective. Anything that moderates the nature of Brexit and injects some light rather than heat into the debate is clearly a good thing. But Theresa May has led the Conservative Party to a very bad place, perilously close to defeat, and there is no guarantee that either she or her replacement will learn the correct lessons.
The danger is that the Tories, rather than rediscovering their ideological backbone and making the case for free markets and a less activist state to the people, instead now join Labour in a full-on race to the political left, which would be devastating for conservatism as a whole as well as being a competition which the Right can simply never win. Must the price for Brexit be the shifting of the Overton window ten degrees back toward the Corbynite Left? It looks increasingly as though this may be the case.
Conservative Home's Paul Goodman looks at the mechanics of the Conservative Party's current predicament:
Better by far, say the wise old owls, to hang on. An arrangement with the DUP would give the new Government a majority, they say. There is no prospect of a no confidence vote succeeding. And May can find shelter behind our old friend, the Fixed Terms Parliament Act. Maybe she should see the Brexit talks through, some muse, and then depart with the thanks of a grateful nation.
Perhaps the old birds are right. But this site is nagged by the uncomfortable feeling that they may be failing to see the wood for the trees. May won the biggest Tory share of the vote since Margaret Thatcher, but the landslide she anticipated did not take place. Voters seem to have mulled her refusal to level with them over social care, her reluctance to debate, her lack of ease with campaigning and engagement – and, having weighed her in the balance, found her wanting. It is not certain that she has the flexibility and adaptability to share power with her Cabinet and Party and Parliament, as she must now do to survive.
It is all very well to take refuge behind fixed terms plus hope in the DUP. David Cameron had a majority, and his government was crippled by rebellions. May was at mercy of the Commons even before the election: remember the Budget and national insurance? Conservative MPs may not yet have grasped that we face the possibility of five years of a Do Nothing Government – with all that this implies for the proper management of the country's finances. On paper, such an administration may be able to stagger on – at the mercy of tide and chance, with a Party leader vulnerable at any moment to a leadership challenge via letters to Graham Brady. But in practice?
No, Theresa May needs to go now. None of the pieces I have read since that exit poll came out have convinced me otherwise, well argued though some of them are. In a sense, it doesn't really matter that none of the likely options to replace her are any better (and Pete North forcefully explains why this is the case). The key is that the contenders could hardly be any worse, either in their zeal for a particularly destructive form of Brexit with almost no real thinking behind it, or in their dubious commitment to free markets and restraining the size of the state. And recall, May's successor will be equally constrained in their Brexit approach by parliamentary arithmetic, so there is no need to keep May around for fear of a more hardline approach to Brexit.
Theresa May needs to go because she single-handedly destroyed her own authority, not just within her party or the country at large, but on the world stage too. These are momentous times, and with the metro-Left political elites of most countries currently scoffing at Britain for supposedly relegating ourselves from the ranks of serious countries by voting for Brexit, we need a strong, charismatic leader who is capable of going toe to toe with Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Donald Trump. Not a weak supplicant caretaker PM whose permission to continue representing us is extended only one day or one week at a time.
Perception matters, and right now Theresa May is correctly perceived as a loser with no authority. Better to make the change now, even if it means enduring five more years of aggrieved leftists who don't understand how our system of government works (or make any effort to change it) moaning about another unelected Tory prime minister. Better to make the switch now rather than changing horses midstream in the middle of Brexit negotiations. And while whoever replaces Theresa May will probably be just as, uh, problematic from a conservative viewpoint, we should compensate by using the turmoil to finally promote some of the more Thatcherite, liberty-minded backbenchers – the likes of James Cleverly or Kwasi Kwarteng – to cabinet positions so that next time around we have a better talent pool to fish in.
The only problem is that by the time of the next general election, the Tories will have been in government (mostly in coalition / confidence and supply agreement, but also alone) for the past seven-plus years. The window for making radical changes to the way the country operates, tantalisingly opened after the Great Recession but stymied by David Cameron's failure to win an outright majority against Gordon Brown, will have fully closed again. How many political parties or administrations can you think of which suddenly burst to life with original ideas and bold new policies 7+ years after first coming to power? Surely none. Anything radical must happen at the beginning, before the impetus wears off, steady state sets in and the people ultimately tire of the party of government and demand a change.
Regrettably, the Tories have wasted their years of potential firstly in coalition with the LibDems, then alone after the 2015 victory and now in some still-to-be-decided arrangement with the DUP, and accomplished very little save holding the EU referendum which gave us Brexit and presiding over a reduction (but not eradication) of the budget deficit. It is now quite possible that we must soon suffer through some form of left-wing government – perhaps a progressive alliance of the childlike Left, though who can now put it past Jeremy Corbyn to secure a majority of his own if May's government falls? – before the Tories can then return once again to fix or limit the damage.
And yet in mitigation of this depressing fact, there is now a fighting chance that the new parliamentary arithmetic will see Brexit taking a more sensible, palatable and less destructive form, which is what this blog wanted all along.
Politics giveth and politics taketh away.
These are my current thoughts on the fluid post-election situation, together with some reactions from other people which have resonated with me since election night. I have quite a busy few days coming up so the blog may go a little bit quiet for the next week with only an occasional sporadic update, but normal service should be resumed by next weekend.
Stay tuned to the Twitter feed @SamHooper for more short-form ranting in the interim.
Brexit, LeftWatch, UK Current Affairs, UK Election 2017, UK Politics, What Conservative Government?Brendan O'Neill, Christopher Booker, Coke Zero Conservatism, Conservatism, Conservative Party, Daniel Hannan, General Election, General Election 2017, Jeremy Corbyn, Pete North, Socialism, Theresa May, Tories, Youth Vote
George Orwell's "1984" Will Receive A Public Reading In London – But Have We Forgotten The Message?
June 2, 2017 June 21, 2017 Samuel Hooper7 Comments
On June 6, hundreds of people will gather at London's Senate House as a parade of actors, politicians and other notables read George Orwell's dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in its entirety. But how many of us actually understand Orwell's message?
Besides a few posts on Twitter, I haven't written anything about the heinous Manchester terrorist attack. What more is there to say? The locations change, as do the names and backgrounds of the victims, but the rote mourning processes, the denialism and the furious virtue-signalling always remains the same. Why jump into that toxic mêlée all over again?
But I did watch the BBC general election leaders' debate on television earlier this week, when naturally the subject of terrorism and Britain's proper response came up, and I was depressed as ever by the paucity of the "discussion" that took place.
Brendan O'Neill picked up on the section of the debate which also caught my attention, writing in Spiked:
Consider BBC TV's General Election debate this week, which brought together leading figures from the main parties to talk about the problems facing Britain. There was an extraordinary moment during the debate. A member of the audience asked a question about security post-Manchester and the leaders talked about the need for better policing and intelligence and also for rethinking British foreign policy. It is possible, said Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and SNP deputy leader Angus Robertson, that our meddling overseas has exacerbated the terror problem.
Then UKIP leader Paul Nuttall chimed in, and he said this: 'Politicians need to have the courage to name [the problem]: it's Islamist extremism.' The reaction was swift and pretty scary. Nuttall was jeered at by the other panellists. 'NO!', one said. 'Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul', interjected Lib Dem leader Tim Farron. Nuttall has gone 'straight for Muslims', said a furious Robertson. Green leader Caroline Lucas said Nuttall was being 'completely outrageous' with this suggestion that 'the violence in Manchester was somehow representative of Islam'.
Nuttall tried to explain himself. 'Islamism, Islamism, Islamism', he said over the din that his comments provoked. His point was that he had not said the word 'Islam'. He hadn't even used the phrase Islamic terrorism; he had said Islamist extremism. But his protests went unheard. The other leaders and some in the audience continued to shout over him and drown him out; to accuse him of being outrageous and prejudiced for using the phrase 'Islamist extremism'.
This is an almost Orwellian level of linguistic denialism. For 'Islamist' is a perfectly legitimate and apt word for the terrorism that is impacting on cities in Western Europe. The Oxford dictionary's definition of 'Islamist' is an 'advocate or supporter of Islamic militancy or fundamentalism'. Is this not the right name for those in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Manchester and elsewhere who have carried out extreme acts of violence in the name of the Islamic State or radical Islamist ideology? To boo and demonise Nuttall for using the word 'Islamist' to describe those who blow themselves up in the name of ISIS is as nuts as it would be to boo and demonise someone for saying Oswald Moseley was a fascist: these are simply the correct words.
The response proved Nuttall's point, which was that few politicians have the nerve even to say the word 'Islamist', even though it's a political term in the actual dictionary. This live-TV pummelling of Nuttall for saying 'Islamist' really confirmed what the accusation of Islamophobia is all about today: it isn't about protecting Muslims from genuine prejudice or abuse but rather has become a means for suppressing difficult political and moral questions about our society, its values and the divisions that exist either between communities or within them. That someone can be called 'outrageous' and anti-Muslim for using the phrase 'Islamist extremism' shows how deep and worrying our instinct to silence discussion about terrorism has become.
There isn't much I would add to Brendan O'Neill's warning, except for this: on 6 June, there will be a live public reading of the entirety of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four", given at London's Senate House. There has of course been a significant spike in interest in reading 1984, driven predominantly by people who believe that Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump herald the end to what was apparently a Utopian liberal era, and the start of an unprecedentedly authoritarian dystopian future.
The new converts to George Orwell seem to believe either that the architects of these particular geopolitical events used 1984 as some kind of How To guide, or that they themselves might find some clues within the novel to aid their survival during the coming apocalypse.
But here's the thing. I'll wager all the money in my pocket that many of the people who show up to this public reading of 1984, or who watch the live stream, will be the same people who never really had much to say about civil liberties violations in the War on Terror (at least when Democratic presidents and Labour prime ministers were in charge), or about the extra-judicial killing of American citizens by drone strike under Barack Obama.
I'll wager that many of them will have said nothing when their fellow citizens have been tried and imprisoned for singing songs, writing offensive signs, asking impertinent or stupid questions, posting "offensive" tweets or expressing conservative religious views in the town square.
But I'll also wager that a fair number of them will have reported posts that they found "offensive" on social media in an attempt to get the offending statements removed and the posters banned. I'll wager that many of the younger student types will have called for The Sun and The Daily Mail to be banned from their university campuses, and for their Students Unions to stop playing certain songs with "problematic" lyrics. I'll wager that they were the first to demand that boxer Tyson Fury be banned from boxing for holding the wrong views on family values, and to call for attention-seeking ex-LBC radio host/troll Katie Hopkins to lose her job last week.
And I'll wager that a good number of these 1984 listeners, fearless young defenders of society against creeping authoritarianism that they are, will have cheered along when Tim Farron, Angus Robertson, Caroline Lucas and the rest of the lefty nodding head brigade ripped into Paul Nuttall for the high crime of correctly identifying the deadly ideology which killed 22 young people at an Ariana Grande concert, maiming 116 more.
I'm sure their hearts just swelled with pride and warm affirmation as their left-wing political heroes put that nasty, evil brute Paul Nuttall in his place and shouted down his vile, dangerous hate speech. I bet they sincerely believed that doing so was a great victory for Hope over Hate, that this was how society should best respond to terror attacks. By furiously avoiding looking at the source, assigning the blame to unidentifiable random "evil", singing some John Lennon and angrily vilifying anybody who dared to react in a different way (such as by looking to identify and name the real problem so that it might be tackled and reduced).
And hearts aglow with courage and moral righteousness, many of these same people will assemble at the foot of London's Senate House on June 6 and fortify themselves by listening to George Orwell's stern literary warning about the dangers of groupthink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak and censorship, utterly oblivious to the fact that they are actively serving as advance guard to the Ministry of Truth.
Culture, LeftWatch, Terrorism, UK Current Affairs, UK Politics1984, Authoritarianism, BBC Debate, Brendan O'Neill, Dystopia, Free Speech, George Orwell, Islamic State, Islamist, Manchester Attack, Paul Nuttall, Radical Islam, Spiked, Television Debate, Terrorism

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