As the world reeled from the unexpected outcome of the United Kingdom’s disastrous Brexit vote on June 23, 2016, Jason Kenney notoriously tweeted: “Congratulations to the British people on choosing hope over fear by embracing a confident, sovereign future, open to the world!”
Well, we all know how that turned out.
At the time, the former Harper Government cabinet minister was still being paid to be the Conservative MP for Calgary Midnapore. He was known, though, to be seriously pondering a run for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, with an eye to bringing the province’s disunited conservative parties together and becoming premier.
In that ambition, Mr. Kenney succeeded – for a spell.
As for the suspicion Mr. Kenney’s long game was to eventually return to Ottawa as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and to occupy 24 Sussex Drive thanks to his successes in Wild Rose Country, well, the probability of such an outcome seemed much greater then than it does now.
Still, it’s worth remembering Mr. Kenney’s sly dog-whistling about Brexit, when it is evident that some of the chickens from that disastrous decision by the U.K.’s voters have now come home to roost.
Mr. Kenney presumably still stands by what he said. At any rate, his notorious tweet remains visible to this day on the social media platform now known as X.
One of those roosting chickens, obviously, was the well-deserved humiliation – if not quite the outright destruction – of the U.K. Conservative Party in Friday’s British general election.
A certain amount of schadenfreude about this is entirely justified, and I for one will not deny myself the satisfaction of enjoying the richly deserved comeuppance that has been delivered to the British Conservatives, who are largely responsible for the Brexit disaster.
One hopes, of course, that Mr. Kenney feels a little bit of reflected heat from that burn, although, being who and what he is, it is unlikely it will trouble him much.
We should hope, obviously, that the Labour Party led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer provides good government, improves the quality of life for British voters after the Brexit catastrophe, and enjoys many happy returns at the polls.
Of this, though, we cannot be so confident. By all accounts Mr. Starmer – or I should say Sir Keir – is nearly as conservative as the Tory he has replaced, just not as rich.
Is there a chance he will disappoint Labour’s natural constituency with his conservatism while at the same time gaining nothing from the well-organized and thoroughly digitized political right for essentially adopting their favoured neoliberal policies? Of course there is.
I can’t claim to be an expert on British politics, but judging from the testimony of those who are, it is likely that after a short spell at No. 10 Downing Street, Britain’s new prime minister will end up as the U.K.’s version of Rachel Notley or Justin Trudeau – who as Alberta premier and Canadian prime minister reliably delivered neoliberal policies all the while being excoriated as extreme leftists by the neoliberal propaganda machine for the effort.
Which leads us to the second British chicken that found a nice place to roost yesterday. To wit: Nigel Farage, the oleaginous leader of Britain’s “Reform” Party, previously leader of the Brexit Party, and before that of the anti-EU U.K. Independence Party, also known as Ukip.
Variously described as “a deeply unembarrassed racist,” “a power hungry narcissist,” and an outright fascist, Mr. Farage has at last secured a seat for himself in the House of Commons at Westminster.
He has only four Reform comrades with him in the House today, but this will not necessarily prevent him from ultimately succeeding with a very Canadian reverse hostile takeover of the Conservative Party.
First, consider the strategy devised by Preston Manning and eventually completed by Stephen Harper to split the Canadian conservative right into the formerly dominant centre-right faction, then known as the Progressive Conservatives, and Mr. Manning’s much more extreme Reform Party.
When the dust from that escapade finally settled at the end of 2003, the Reform Party (by then rebranded the Canadian Alliance) was in the drivers’ seat. The newly united Conservatives dropped the Progressive from their name. Eventually Mr. Harper became prime minister, which would have been an impossible outcome in the old PCs, taking the country in a distinctly un-Canadian direction from which we may never recover.
A similar strategy unfolded in Alberta, when the Wildrose Party was engineered to split the conservative movement, and eventually emerged as the dominant faction in the new United Conservative Party created by Mr. Kenney.
Disaster for Conservatives may have seemed imminent at the moment in December 2014 when Wildrose leader Danielle Smith crossed the floor of the Alberta Legislature with eight of her MLAs to join the PCs then led by Jim Prentice, with Mr. Manning in the background playing Svengali.
But, ultimately, Mr. Kenney was able to pull off a kind of double reverse hostile takeover, first of the PCs, still struggling to come to terms with their 2015 election loss to Ms. Notley’s NDP, and then of what was left of the Wildrose Party.
The result was the UCP, created in 2017 and led to power by Mr. Kenney in 2019, a new party that the old extremist fringe now dominated, all the more so after Mr. Kenney’s traditional political instincts held him back during the pandemic, leading to his ouster and replacement by Ms. Smith.
So what does this have to do with the U.K.? Well, it is said here that the resurrection of the “Reform” brand in Britain is no coincidence.
In 2013, Mr. Farage showed up at the Manning conference, Mr. Manning’s eponymous annual conservative clambake in Ottawa, where he was feted by the gathered business bigshots, right-wing political hacks, think tank propagandists, right-leaning pundits, and other undesirables who congregated at the event.
Certainly they had some private chats about Mr. Manning’s by-then-proven strategy for uniting the right around its most extreme domestic elements.
How important was the influence of Mr. Manning to Mr. Farage’s U.K. Reform Party? “Huge, huge, huge,” Mr. Farage told a CBC reporter last month.
“Farage’s often-stated ambition is for Reform UK to eventually replace the mighty British Conservative Party,” wrote the CBC’s London reporter, Chris Brown. “He said his blueprint for doing so is modelled after what Manning did in Canada.”
In Mr. Farage’s words: “I set the Brexit Party up for a reason, to complete the Brexit process, and we were very successful. … I rebranded it Reform UK, thinking very much of our Canadian cousins. In the end they sort of ‘reverse took over’ the old Conservative Party. They are the model. That’s the plan.”
Remember, to permit the takeover of a long dominant centre-right party by the extreme right, first you must all but destroy the centre-right party. Once you have hobbled it and put it back together with its former radical fringe in charge, you rely on voters’ tribal loyalties to prevent them from thinking too much about what the change really means.
Call it the Manning Formula.
We’ve now seen it work twice in Canada.
Mr. Harper, the former Canadian prime minister who was sent packing by Justin Trudeau in 2015, now heads the misnamed International Democracy Union, the neoliberal Internationale. From his perches in Munich and Calgary, he will be happy to lend a hand to Mr. Farage.
Mr. Starmer’s victory yesterday is likely far less secure on its own merits than the number of seats won by Labour suggests.
Labour got less than 34 per cent of the of the vote. That was the lowest popular vote for any governing party in British history, nearly six points below what Labour received in the 2017 election under Jeremy Corbyn, later reviled and driven out by centrists like Prime Minister Starmer.
The outcome looks lopsided because the right-wing vote in many ridings was split between the Tories and Reform, just as happened in Canada and Alberta, and because Scotland largely abandoned the Scottish National Party to return to Labour.
Meanwhile Britons, who don’t pay much attention to Canada let alone Alberta, and who think our politics are boring and insignificant, are unlikely to realize the same thing could be about to happen to them that happened to us.
I can definitely see similarities to the United Kingdom, Canada, and Alberta. There are people who do not know what a true Conservative is. It may have the name Conservative in it, but that’s where it ends. These are Reformers, who have no concerns about the well being of the people.
The picture and the comment under it made me laugh. When I became aware of him on the national stage thought he looked creepy and a little twisted. Nothing has changed about him. Harper ditto. I’m sure the two of them like to peddle their b.s. to any country they can. If the British fall for the b.s. they will be sorry. Manning and Harper out their peddling their version of how the world ought to be run, with corporations being given advantages the rest of us will not have and children living in poverty and seniors becoming homeless.
Don’t know anything about the new British P.M beyond what you wrote. I’m not surprised the Conservatives are no longer the ruling party. It all started with Thatcher. This is what you wind up with. Britain looks like its in worse shape than other countries. Its going to be expensive to bring the country back to standard.
What I do find entertaining about British politcians is regardless of party they look like they all mostly came from the same factory.
Yes, I would not dismiss Farage and his latest UK Reform party, apparently modelled on Canada’s. He seems to be a persistent political personality there and had had some past success, although more in influencing others and public discussion, rather than in winning power himself.
I do feel his expressed takeover of of the UK Conservatives is audacious and perhaps overly ambitious. While the UK Conservatives have suffered a big defeat, regional divisions like those that led to their Canadian colleagues decimation seem to not be as strong in the UK. So they still have 120 members or so, enough to be an effective opposition and carry on without needing Farage to bolster them. Although if Labour is fortunate, Farage will either force the Conservatives to far to the right or take enough support away from them. Either could help Labour stay in power for some time even with such a low percentage of popular support.
Trudeau may be envious that Starmer could win such a large majority with only a slightly higher percentage of the popular vote than Trudeau got in the last election. But it seems that the Liberals will not have that level of support in our next election, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.
UK PM Starmer is not very flashy or really popular, so I suspect his future success rests mainly on his competence in governing. Maybe that is how it should be.
All the machinations on the right are interesting and sometimes do succeed, so we should always remain on guard. But lest we forget, Manning never became PM, at this point it is unlikely Kenney will be and perhaps the leader of UK Reform will never be either.
Starmer looks like that guy who showed up at your office back in the day to fix the laser printer that kept breaking down because people didn’t know how to load the paper bin correctly.
It is interesting how so many alt-right people type words that say nothing.
I tried posting this article to Reddit and they removed it on the grounds that albertapolitics.ca prints misinformation, yet they allow countless articles from the far right Fraser Institute and the National Post. If this isn’t another example of how the fascist/corporatist media controls information in Canada, what do you know?
Interesting, I provide no links to Reddit because there’s nothing useful on it and it’s full of misinformation. DJC
A quick take on the several parties that are not “conservative”, though definitely on the Neoliberal ‘lite’ side of political economy, shows that Labour plus LibDems plus Green held about 54% of the total vote in the U.K.. Might take more than one election there to turn the Manning trick for Reform over there. However, with Starmer, whose flips within Labour over the past several years from anti- and -pro and anti- again Corbyn stances, does not bode well for Brits, Welsh, and Scots who might like policies that could bring in some sort of revival of more equitable distribution of economic wellbeing.
Definitely not getting the same sense of euphoria, joy in the streets as for Tony Blair in 1997. Well, that’s murky water under the bridge now. And maybe I’m too far away. Don’t forget tomorrow’s elections. We marched in the streets, held our noses, and voted for Chirac in 2002. Will ‘les grands principes de la République’ hold true or are we spiraling back to Vichy? Not that I think it ever really went away.
Labour presented nothing major in their platform.
It explains why there seems to be no mandate from the British people.
And Starmer’s milquetoast gov’t will mean that the right wing (Con 24% + Farage 14%) will soon have the upper-hand again, once Farage’s folks have (as you suggest) captured the coveted ‘Conservative’ brand.
David, you toss around the term “neoliberal” as a pejorative, assuming we all know why it’s so awful. It gets confusing when you even include Notley under its umbrella. In your usage, it seems that almost everyone within the “Overton Window” of mainstream acceptability is beyond your pale. More nuance, please.
Robert: From time to time I remind people of the excellent article by George Monbiot on this topic, found here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot
“So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology,” Monbiot wrote in 2016. This is a profound and deeply troubling fact. As I have said repeatedly, ALL political parties with representation in Canadian legislatures and Parliament are to a significant degree neoliberal in ideology. The nuance is that they range from “neoliberalsim with a human face” (the NDP) to harsher and more fundamentalist versions of neoliberal dogma. If you want nuance, it is in the interesting trend in North America today toward a combination of neoliberal faith in markets with neofascist corporatism and neoprimitive pure-blood racism, doctrines that would all seem at odds with each other buy seem to coexist quite comfortably in the Republican and United Conservative parties, to name two. But then, as an old-timey acquaintance of mine observed many years ago after fleeing to Canada from one of the first countries to undergo a neoliberal coup, he was both a good Catholic and a good Marxist, things that seem contradictory but coexisted quite comfortably in his heart. To get back to the key problem with neoliberalism identified by Monbiot, it is a zombie doctrine that manages to stumble on because of its covert nature. DJC
Monbiot is so very concise, a pleasure to read for befuddled minds such as mine. I was wondering if the concept of ‘the natural rate of unenemployment’ also comes from neoliberal thinking. I cannot focus long enough to understand that one.
I’m reminded of something that the late Christopher Hitchens said in reply to someone asking him what he thought of Ayn Rand. Paraphrasing, he said it was rather quaint that there was an ideology and political movement the aim of which was to make Americans MORE selfish (than they already are, which is considerable).
Something like that is happening in the west with conservative parties…ideologically (if not electorally) they have won…their ideology has been in power for over 40 years. As David says, even Liberals and NDP leaders have adopted them. Yet, that’s not enough for them – they need even more power and to go even further to the right. I suppose this could mean two things:
1. They have achieved everything they wanted since Thatcher and Reagan and are drunk with power that, like spoiled teenagers, don’t even realize that they have come out ahead (given ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile).
2. They see the reaction to neo liberal policies on the streets, with massive protests, an opioid crisis, a push against economic elites*, a massive anti climate change mobilization and they are scared stiff – and thus have become radicalized to save their skin.
*I think a lot of the pushback from the right (at the grassroots) comes from the same anxieties – it’s just that right-wing parties have been more successful in mobilizing them than left wing parties. Indeed, the rhetoric I hear these days from the right regarding anti-elitism was standard talking points from the NDP back in the 1990’s and before. But the right wing version is to the classic left-wing critique of elites as a hamburger patty is to filet mignon (if you will allow me such a bourgeois comparison).
Harper and his IDU colleagues will be busy behind the scenes, too.
The b*ts have already started calling for Keir Starmer’s head. As we found out, it was impossible for Rachel Notley to turn around 44 years of Conservative governance in four years. This tactic will be used to tear Starmer down, too. He’ll be blamed for not being able to correct the huge mess left for him by the Conservatives and blamed for the Conservative mess itself.
The British people will be convinced by the time the next election rolls around that the cure for the right-wing government of the past will be to go further right to an authoritarian/totalitarian/fascist government. If they weren’t punished enough for their foolhardy decision to shoot themselves in the foot with Brexit, surely shooting themselves in the other foot will make it better. Stupid is as stupid does. It took 14 years to dig a deep hole, so hole-diggers figure that the hole should be fixed overnight, or dug deeper.
Modern Alberta voters have a Covid-inflicted urge for masochism. Are the British any different? The world will have changed by then, so they need to decide if they can live with that decision permanently. Last time was child’s play. Next time will be for keeps. Democracy or not? The Trump world will not be kind to them or any of us.
The British ARE different. Rural parochialism in such a densely populated unitarian state is particularly intense and has only fuzzy historical foundation—that is, each ‘parish’ is too long in the tooth for rural folks to recall historical detail relevant to the ‘other’ world, the rapidly changing urban one. They are more inclined to infill with mythological narremes, replete with bogeymen, threats from fifth-columnists and others from away.
The rural/urban dichotomy is also corroboratively racial/ethnic as country folk are virtually all White while towns and cities are very multiethnic and distinctly non-White. Flagel Garbage’s bigoted UKIP focused on and convinced the rural electorate to vote for Brexit, mainly on a xenophobic basis, yet he could not puncture nationalist sentiments in Scotland and Northern Ireland—both anti-Brexit regions— which are actually more rural, or have fewer urban areas than England.
Nevertheless, rural Brits—specifically England—, like their equivalents in North America, have demographic realities such as an aging farmer population, rising debt, falling incomes, and climate change which are the real fuel for their exploitable reactionary potential. As modern as some of these challenges might seem, the chief difference between UK and North America is that rural parochialism is much more deeply entrenched in the UK and therefore more fruitfully exploited by “Reform” demagoguery.
British farmers received very substantial payments from the EU to support their farms, all of which disappeared after Brexit. Their seamless access to EU markets and cheap labour also disappeared. Unlike in prairie Canada, most British farmers are serfs of the landed aristocracy who supported Brexit. But not to worry, with the capital gains tax reform from Ottawa, most Canadian family farms will soon be liquidated to pay the tax and the next generation of Canadian farmers will become serfs of the pension funds and other speculative capital pools that are driving the price of farm land well beyond its productive value.
The tax on farm land would only be collected if the land were sold to 3rd parties, i.e. to the ones bidding up the price of land.
If we had anything like functioning institutions, the solution for this would be simple. Conservative party banned until it purges itself of extremists. However, right wing extremists always ave limitless money behind them, very determined. They will always eventually find some way to take power. Only way is to end political parties, elections, politicians. Set up government by delegation, sortition.
Since we have a functioning Constitution the right of assembly or association—which includes political parties—is protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We can’t ‘ban’ parties, but we can deny them enough of our votes to elect them to a parliament, elect an insufficient number of them to have much influence in a parliament or hold them to minority government.
The quickest way to disempower extremist elements in today’s pseudoCon parties is for their remaining moderates to abandon the irredeemable and start their own centre-right parties—call them “New Conservative Party”, NCP, or something like that. An NCP would be a junior party in its first couple of parliaments but, minus extremists, I’m confident their brand would soon become workably popular.
Chicken **** or chicken salad? You choose! https://youtu.be/KUNQl5sanHM
It is impossible for modern conservatives to behave in good faith. They prove it with their actions every day.
This scenario could be possible I suppose. But the political culture of the U.K. is rather different than Canada. Ours is
a politics based on regions, so I was always taught. The U.K. voting lines are still very much based on class, economic position, and most importantly your accent and where you were educated. Your accent still determines your future. Don’t believe it, check out Margaret Thatcher’s before
and after accents after her elocution lessons.
Nigel Farage is clearly lower middle class, and I suspect has little appeal to the Conservative Party either high or low church.
But having said that, actual turn out at a bit less than 60 percent for this election and Labour getting less vote percentage than Tony Blair’s first election do suggest the voting patterns are as volatile in the U.K. as many other democracies today. So the scenario outlined could come about. This Labour Government has clearly been elected with such a vast majority because of a split vote.
Hasn’t politics become a farce? No such thing as true Conservatives you can trust anymore while we watch these Reformers deliberately destroying our children and grandchildren’s future and not caring a damn about looking after the well-being of the people.
Who are the fools supporting them? The same easy to fool seniors that Bankers and Police Officers talk about having watched them allowing con-artists and politician’s screw them out of their money and aren’t smart enough to help us try to stop them. They aren’t interested in the true facts ,because they can’t handle the truth ,they aren’t man enough.
Reform U.K. is a private limited company which has fifteen shares of which Farage owns eight. Supporters cannot be members and Farage controls every aspect of the “party”.
CovKid: Reform UK’s corporate structure is a very interesting factoid that, not being an expert n British politics, I had missed. It almost sounds like something Preston Manning would think up with that malignantly fertile imagination of his, doesn’t it? Be that as it may, I wonder when Canadian parties of the right, like the UCP, will attempt to convert to a structure like that. From the perspective of the need to exert tight ideological and dictatorial control, it would be ideal. DJC
Isn’t that the structure of TBA?
Refugee: No! No! It’s “a grassroots movement … supported by a vast, grassroots volunteer network of freedom-loving Albertans from all walks of life.” Oh, wait. I’ve been reading its web page. As I understand it, yes, basically, except that it is not a registered political party. It is, however, registered as a third-party election advertiser, a fact that has caused some difficulties for its founder since he has declined to product the financial records required of TPAs by Alberta law. DJC
It sounds very similar to our illustrious Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation which claims to speak for everyone but only has, what, six directors who decide policy and pronouncements? Of course, their financial supporters are the usual stooges of the entitled embarked on their usual voyage of enabling.
CovKid: At the moment, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has five members. The board of the CTF (the organization’s only members) seems to change quite frequently and the numbers of members grow and shrink, but the baseline seems to be five members. The most interesting new addition to the Board is my fellow University of Victoria alumnus Tim McMillan, late of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, a factoid that for some reason the CTF didn’t see the need to mention in his potted biography. As for whom the CTF’s financial supporters may be, that is unknown. What is the nature of its relationship to the Atlas Network, for example? I would say the real question is what percentage of the CTF’s support comes from individual donors and what percentage comes from business and funding agencies, some like Atlas based in the United States? The answer is a closely guarded secret. DJC
So Alberta wants to be Texas. Fine! And dandy! But Alberta needs to embrace Texas culture! Here’s some! Take sip! https://youtu.be/uu7haLxD2WM
While there are those who will see the crushing Labour victory over the hapless and decency-challenged Tories as proof the time they are a changin’, think again. Keir Starmer is a far cry from the Labour leaders of old. (Maybe not as bad as B-liar, but we’ll see.) He can’t help but provide better government. Compared to the gang of idiots that governed the UK for fourteen years, putting a straw dummy in charge would be a huge, overwhelming, embarrassment of riches of an improvement.
And it looks like ‘Mr. Toad’ himself — Nigel Farage — actually has a crack at being an MP in the UK. Unlike that circus called the European Parliament, Britons are actually going to give him some responsibility? I guess Lord Bulging Eyes needs a job, otherwise he’ll be sleeping on the sidewalk. Though his Reform group of MPs is tiny by any measure, I suspect they will gain the attention of onlookers, but not for the right reasons. The attention they will receive will be because the moment the Reform MPs take their seats, the infighting will begin. No doubt someone will challenge Farage for the leadership, denouncing his extremism, and that his name rhymes with ‘garage’. In any case, CON voters stayed home; and those that showed up voted, cast ballots for the slightly fined, somewhat slight demented version of UKiP.
While Britons await the resurrection of Boris Johnson, Canadians can look on with wonder at the utter electoral hammering that awaits. In the next sixteen months, I suspect PMJT is going to pull out all the stops in the effort to save his own hide. And there’s no doubt that Skippy Pollivere is, also, going to ramp up his own deposits of vacuous hot air. At least Trudeau can back up what he aspires to real policy actions, which is amazing because he has long been the master of over-promising and under-delivering. It takes impressive brass to make electoral reform a significant part of one’s election platform, only to deny you showed any interest in it in the first place. Trudeau tends to do this a lot. While his flighty attention to certain aspects of governance is cause for amusement, former Foreign Minister Marc Garneau found Trudeau’s interest in foreign affairs shallow or non-existent. For some, this might explain why Trudeau would rather not have foreign interference in Canadian elections investigated at all. There is the claim that Trudeau checked out after the 2019 Federal Election, which may explain why everything seems like a shite show since.
Things will get more interesting everywhere very soon. Too bad, but there’s always popcorn.
To my mind, the current state of the UK should serve as a warning to the rest of the democratic world about the dangers of taking to heart the ramblings of right-wing political commentators. Commentators have to rail against something to keep their ratings up; in the case of the UK they railed against the UK’s membership in the EU.
The problem gets serious when politicians, seeing the ill-thought-out beliefs the commentators have instilled in the population, embrace the same ideas, and offer them as part of their platform. Once elected, the politicians are then expected to implement policies that were created by a commentator who will, when pressed, acknowledge that the idea was only created as entertainment.*
Boris Johnson did this when he facilitated a referendum on Brexit and the UK is suffering from the consequences of pulling out of the EU. Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre have promised similar action with regards to the World Economic Forum.
*Just before the last provincial election Danielle Smith attempted to distance herself from some of the ideas she advocated for as a radio/podcast host with the entertainment argument, saying her objective was to get (mouse) clicks. Likewise, Rebel News used the entertainment argument as a defense in court when they were sued for what they had written.
The hilarity about those who attack Klaus Schwab and his WEF as the masters of the universe are demented in the extreme. For one thing, the WEF is nothing more than an annual social event that has perfectly ineffectual education sessions that are taken far too seriously. When the conspiracy-minded start going on about the latest plot from the WEF, it’s usually borne of one of these education/gab fests that no one is interested in, including those that attended. More than anything, the WEF is a grift, founded by Schwab, to make himself seem more important than he really is. But when Foxnews, NewsMax, or X latches onto the latest bon mots for the hysterical, Schwab must be falling over on his arse laughing. Who’s wagging the dog now?
Where’s the Trilateral Commission now that we need it? DJC
The Trilateral Commission is alive and kicking, as are the prescriptive ideas that are certainly the background or framework for the policies that are subsumed under the principles of ‘elite management’. That is simple enough as is the following:
“The very existence of the commission, meanwhile, seems predicated on the question of whether governing should be left to the people. It is a question the commission itself has tackled head-on since 1975: Is democracy functioning? Or does someone need to guide it?
That year, three scholars — Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki — wrote a report for The Trilateral Commission titled “The Crisis of Democracy.” In it, Huntington wrote that some of the problems of governance in the U.S. stem from an “excess of democracy.”
“In many situations the claims of expertise, seniority, experience and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority,” he controversially wrote, giving the analogy of a university where teaching appointments are subject to approval by students. Such a school “may be a more democratic university but it is not likely to be a better university,” he stated.””
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Inside-the-Trilateral-Commission-Power-elites-grapple-with-China-s-rise
Like everything else in this world the fine grained details are open to various interpretations, that is for example,
1. “To put it simply, trilateralists are saying: (1) the people, governments, and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations; (2) control over economic resources spells power in modern politics (of course, good citizens are supposed to believe as they are taught; namely, that political equality exists in Western democracies whatever the degree of economic inequality); and (3) the leaders of capitalist democracies-systems where economic control and profit, and thus political power, rest with the few-must resist movement toward a truly popular democracy. In short, trilateralism is the current attempt by ruling elites to manage both dependence and democracy-at home and abroad…”
https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Trilateralism/Trilateralism_overview.html
https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Trilateralism/Trilateralism_Sklar.html
2. “In the wake of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s, many members of the Bilderberg Group were concerned that the unilateralist foreign and economic policies of U.S. President Richard Nixon (1913–1994) were jeopardizing the cold war liberal order. Launched in 1946, the system was constituted by a set of multilaterally agreed-upon rules for regulating commercial and financial relations among the world’s most powerful states. Given the rise of Japan and West Germany as economic powers and the decreased capacity of the U.S. state to direct world affairs, they feared a return to the “beggar-thy-neighbor” interstate rivalry that had characterized the interwar years. As such, they believed that the responsibility to lead would now have to be shared among the advanced nations.” [Which somehow seems to conflict with the more general idea of US hegemony and the desire for ongoing global US military, economic, and ideological dominance.]
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/trilateral-commission
Ok, curiosity peaked– what is the Trilateral Commission– after slogging through alot of information that needs revisiting; came to members on the board. So scrolling through and first name I recognized was
–Anthony Blinken (ok)
–Jean Chretien ( hmmm, obviously outdated)
–Jeffrey Epstein (wait- what??)
There were more names, but that one made me feel like I was being lead in a different direction from where I thought that organization was going.
So to the back burner for now, I need the light of day if I am going to continue pursuing that topic.
There’s a lot to unpack in the UK election results. One is the lopsidedness of FPTP elections, in which a slim plurality in the popular vote can give one a massive majority of seats if the vote distribution is efficient enough.
I plugged the popular vote percentages into a Numbers* spreadsheet and had it perform two Proportional Representation calculations, one for the UK as a whole, and another for each of the four “nations” that make up the not-really-a-federation that is the post-devolution UK – i.e England (543 seats), Scotland (57), Wales (32) and Northern Ireland (18).
Both versions of ProRep yielded virtually identical hypothetical Parliaments (actual FPTP seat counts in parentheses; 326 needed for a majority):
– Labour, 219 seats (412)
– Cons, 154 seats (121)
– Lib-Dems, 79 seats (71)
– SNP, either 16 or 17 seats (9)
– Reform UK, either 93 or 92 seats (5)
– Greens, either 44 or 43 (4)
There are a few smaller parties that got single-digit numbers of seats that would do no better under PR, so I’ve omitted them here.
Another is the lack of huge swaths of the country going solidly one way or the other, the way we see here with the federal Conservatives’ utter domination of the Prairies and the B.C. Interior. The British electoral map is far more patchwork than ours. Have a look: https://www.bbc.com/news/election/2024/uk/results
Then there’s this past weekend’s French second round of parliamentary elections, which apparently saw a repudiation of the hard right Ralliement National (National Rally). I haven’t done a deep dive into those results, although I might yet … if my French is up to the task lol. From what I’ve read, France doesn’t have ProRep, but to win a seat in the first round of elections you have to gain a genuine majority of the votes, not just a plurality. Seats with no majority winner are included in the runoff second round of elections that occurred this past weekend.
Sorry, I neglected to explain the asterisk on the word “Numbers”: it was to be a brief note that the Apple spreadsheet app Numbers is far easier to use than Micro$oft’s behemoth Excel, especially on a tablet.
Jerry: Personally, I find both Excel and Numbers horrible. DJC
Further to your mention of a definition of “neoliberalism”, Monbiot has co-authored a book with Peter Hutchison titled “Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism”, 2024.