"“We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.” "


Chinese premier Wen Jiabao 12th March 2009


""We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we'd like to do our best to preserve that system."


Timothy Geithner US Secretary of the Treasury, previously President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.1/3/2009

Friday, June 13, 2008

David Davis .... touching a nerve in the country

The resignation of David Davis has shaken the kaleidoscope.

It is far too early to clearly understand the timing of the decision, the reasons for the decision and it's short and long term consequences.

The summer is a bad time for politics. The media are swamped with pictures of busty ladies in funny hats at weddings, horse races and garden parties. Men are off watching rowists, shooting pheasants or catching the dwindling fish species our polluted rivers still support.

Increasingly the TV / Press will praise to death the few Olympians amongst us , ready for their eventual slaughter when they so nobly fail in Beijing.

Not a good time to raise concerns about brown men in beards given an extended opportunity to read their Korans in the comparative ease of Paddington Policer Station whilst Plod ploughs through terabytes of trash.

Whilst Davis is not a loner, his name does not conjure up a tightly knit cabal of like minded souls anxious to slot into an alternative posse of Shadowy Ministers, ready to lever out the toff persuasion.

There is little evidence of planning - when he faced a bemused press to tell them of his decision, he appeared to have no Press release, no supporters, straining every sinew to leap into action to unfold the master plan. No Billionaires, millionaires or modestly wealthy car traders have heard the clarion call. There was no itemised list of the incursions on our liberties - which is just as well because a "bi-partisan" approach to terrists means he and his party were happy to vote for most of them.

The Press, forced to think, are consequently all over the place ... Rupe the Poop however has sprung into action and is ready to spend the odd shilling to promote as candidate, in the late summer by-election his Performing Monkey, the absurd Kelvin McKenzie (proud inventor of the News Bunny and Naked darts) - although the call is even now, sounding a little uncertain.

In the short term, Cameron and his gang of monied shysters are safe - David Davies will not unseat him , soon or easily, although his actions will unnerve him and his callow gang. It may even make them improve their act.

What is certain however is that David Davis has sniffed the faint scent of a hunted , disaffected and numerous crew. There is out there, beyond the world of the Metropolitan mutterers a less than gruntled class of sturdy voters. Over 50, educated, capable not only of reading the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail but also completing the crossword. They listen to Radio 4, Radio 7 rather than Five Live and Kiss FM, they mourn Humph and Alan Coren, would like to meet Ed Reardon and whilst earnest readers with a well used library ticket and keen on self improvement have never read a Booker Prize winner.

There is out there, an ageing , solid middle class who are feeling increasingly dispossessed, harassed, as they slide into the necessary clutches of the state through the NHS. As they and their family become entangled in the many and insanely bueaucratic branches of what are laughingly called the social services ,their concerns mount.

Bewildered, they watch the breakdown of marriage, many of their their own children, the remorseless rise in abortion, illegal drug use, urban squalor, alienation in their own home towns swamped in unwanted multiculturalism.

In Lord Patel's patch , a prosperous urban retreat on the edge of the Pennine moors , in one of the northern Greater Manchester Metropolitan Boroughs, returning Conservative councillors for periods of geological time - a BNP candidate forced the Liberals into third pace in the May elections.

They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
...

We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
......

...we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

Are some lines from G. K. Chesterton which seem somehow appropriate. Probably not what Blunkett, Charles Clarke, kebab eating, plump Mrs Smith understand by Englishness..or even Britishness.

It would be a fool who writes off the maverick David Davis. There is in the hinterlnds a voiceless throng, Mr Brown and Mr Cameron ... and even Mr Clegg would be unwise to dismiss their concerns.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was with you 100% until you told me that I could complete the Telegaph crossword.

Anonymous said...

Davis was intending to present his speech in the House of Commons, but he wasn't allowed to by the Speaker of the House. (see here.

ziz said...

Crosswords are the last refuge of the empty mind.

Anonymous said...

There's a growing awareness that all is not what it seems.
Every terrorism case appears to have connections with MI5/MI6. How was it possible for the floor of one of the trains in 7/7 to have its metal bending upwards when we're told the bomb was inside. There are increasing doubts over 9/11.
There's no compassion just merciless killing and maiming of the Iraqis and Palestinians.
Billions of pounds are leaving the country in carousel frauds, which makes us wonder if the the Costello Affidavit is correct that the money is being removed for official purposes.
There's no honour. No resignations. Just lies and deception.
Maybe the educated over 50s don't place so much value on material things.

Stef said...

Davis has come up with a peculiar way to make his point about an important issue

but, to be honest, so many people are hacked off with everything that Davis could have made his point by putting his pants on his head and received a standing ovation

Anonymous said...

"...putting his pants on his head and received a standing ovation."
Blair received a standing ovation from his fellow Parliamentarians at a time when many in the country would've been happy to see him hanging from a lampost.

David Davis appears to have a spark of decency.

Anonymous said...

The conspiratwit/conspiratwat in me (conspiratwit = a completely irrational conspiraloon, conspiratwat = a conspiraloon whose self-importance deludes them into thinking that 'they' are out to get them) thought that George Osborne's recent visit to the Bilderberg conference shattered any illusions DD had about an Old Etonian front bench being anything other than the Lizard People's graduation class of the mid to late 80s, leading him to conclude that he was kidding himself to think he had a chance of making any real difference in a potential future Tory Govt front bench. Meet the new lizard people, same as the old lizard people, just recently moulted. No longer should we talk about skeletons in the cupboard but shed skins in the fortnightly rubbish collection.

Anonymous said...

Ziz.

I do not do crosswords. Perhaps I should start.

Stef said...

@underdoug

it's interesting isn't it how few commentators have pointed out that Davis' background made him the odd man out in Cameron's line up

ziz said...

The Press / commentariat were , it is now evident (as was the establishment) totally wrong footed by DD's announcement.

Now having whispered together they have decoded that DD is a non person. This hapened about mid da Friday. he disappeared from BBC ONline and news stories, comment started melting away in the summer sunshine.

He did not help himself appearing (on News / Newsnight) at Howden offices, (VO Cons Party not paying his exopenses) grinning like a schoolboy in a scruffy open necked shirt as though he had a monster hangover (probably because he did have a monster hangover)surrounded by the cast from One flew over the Cucckoo's Nest.

The Indy raise a point of interest however . DD hasn't actually resignd yet.

Boris Johnson was the last MP to resign and became the new Crown Steward of the Manor of Northstead on 4 June 2008.

By Tradition this laternates with the office of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern (Stoke, Desborough, and Burnham)the last holder was his sainthood Tony Blair.

It appears that DD has until next week to apply to the Chancellor of the Exchequer .. before which he may be "persuaded" by Tory grandees says the Indy.

For the record when Saint Tony resigned the Treasury issued a PressNotice

http://tinyurl.com/2dezee

"27 June 2007

Three Hundreds of Chiltern
The Chancellor of the Exchequer has this day appointed the Right Honourable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair to be Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern."


So perhaps we are all getting our undergarments ina tangle over nothing

Anonymous said...

Stef.

Like yourself, I've not observed much of the plainly obvious 'odd-man-out' scenario amongst the commentariat (hey, not even on your last blogpost with its offering to be a handmaiden). But once the Murdoch press and the Mail/Express bloc (notice what I did there? I tarred them with the same brush - and managed to avoid mentioning the Mirror/Indy) had agreed the narrative of the day, it was inevitable that inconvenient salient background info would get left by the wayside.

But that's just politics: the national lottery of hope.
The national lottery: the crude and cruel privitisation of hope (hope used to be free, but now costs a shiny coin of the realm).

Anonymous said...

Would it not be a very good idea for the over 50s disgusted with what is happening to form some sort of cohesive organisation to oppose/protest/start a revolution?

Stef said...

I know just the place

Stef said...

who'd be a Baby Boomer right now eh?

just coming up to retirement and faced by the prospect of the implosion of property and share prices, rising food and utility costs and a corporatised health system which has figured out they're more cost-effective dead than alive

and it all seemed to be going so well

ziz said...

"Would it not be a very good idea for the over 50s disgusted with what is happening to form some sort of cohesive organisation to oppose/protest/start a revolution?"

Lord Patel is all for it ... volunteers contact zizania (at) gmail(dot)com

Anonymous said...

Too right Patel. As an over 50 and probably the new 30 I am just totally hacked off that the "mother of all parliaments" has become a WHORE.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't go as far as calling it a whore. A cross between a puppet show and Punch and Judy. It's make believe; an illusion to make us think we're part of a democracy because we can change parties but a party in power is subservient to the real force that controls policy.

Anonymous said...

Fellow Chestertonians will also know his novel 'The Flying Inn' which posits the banning of alcohol in an Islamicised Britain, a notion which must have seemed totally impossible when he wrote it...

Anonymous said...

I, too, don't believe the government is the policy/decision maker

Anonymous said...

Lord Patel is all for it ... volunteers contact zizania (at) gmail(dot)com
I emailed this address to volunteer but got my offer sent back.

Anonymous said...

G K Chesterton The Flying Inn 1914

"There are crowds who do not care to revolt; but there are no crowds who do not like some one else to do it for them; a fact which the safest oligarchies may be wise to learn."
CH XV111 The Republic of Peaceways

Stef said...

@tom c

I suggest that the 'threat' of Islamic/ Shia domination is just the teensiest of red herrings

Taking the example of alcohol - the last time I looked, pub opening hours are the longest they've been since WW1 and full-strength lager is cheaper than fizzy water in the supermarkets

and, as for usury...

Anonymous said...

The parking will be terrible

(C) Very Seriously Disorganised Criminals 2002/3/4/5/6/7/8/9 - copy anything you wish