As Rishi Sunak fires the starting pistol on the 2024 General Election, voters are starting to look at where the parties stand on the issues. While manifestoes are yet to appear, the Mail has got in early with an overview. Here’s an excerpt:
Immigration:
Tories: The PM has made the Rwanda deportation plan the key part of his efforts to tackle the small boats crisis in the Channel. He claims this will provide the deterrent effect needed to stop migrants making the perilous journey to Britain. But Mr. Sunak has been forced to admit the first deportation flights to Rwanda will only take off after the General Election. The PM has previously admitted the level of legal migration to Britain is “too high” and has taken action to crackdown on visas for dependants of students and social care workers. He is also said to be considering curbs on graduate visas amid Tory concerns these are used as a “backdoor” for migrants to remain in Britain.
Labour: Sir Keir has branded the Rwanda scheme a “gimmick” and vowed to scrap it if he wins power. Labour is instead promising to establish a new ‘Border Security Command’ to work with Border Force, MI5 and the National Crime Agency on prosecuting people-smuggling gangs operating small boat routes. The party is also vowing to clear the asylum backlog by recruiting more staff to process claims and return people to safe countries.
Lib Dems: Sir Ed’s party wants to scrap the Tories’ Illegal Migration Act and provide safe and legal routes for asylum seekers to come to Britain. It argues this will help prevent Channel crossings. The Lib Dems also want to lift the ban on asylum seekers working in the U.K. if they have been waiting on a decision for more than three months, which will enable migrants to “support themselves, integrate in their communities and contribute through taxation”.
Reform: Mr. Tice’s party wants to see “net zero” immigration, which means the number of people legally allowed to live and work in the U.K. each year equals the number emigrating, so the overall population remains approximately the same. It also claims Britain should be picking Channel migrants out of boats in order to return them to France.
Gender:
Tories: The PM has hailed new draft guidance for schools, published by the Government last week, that states the “contested topic of gender identity” should not be taught at all. Mr. Sunak has repeatedly tried to draw a dividing line with Labour on gender issues and accused Sir Keir of changing his position on “defining a woman”. The PM told last year’s Conservative Party conference: “We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t; a man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense.”
Labour: It has recently emerged how Sir Keir’s party wants to “simplify” the process for changing gender by making it “less medicalised”. Labour’s plans, which are expected to go to consultation if the party wins the election, could include allowing a single doctor or gender specialist to sign off on a decision over a gender recognition certificate. Sir Keir has previously faced intense pressure to clarify his personal views after saying in 2021 that it is “not right” to say that only women have a cervix. Last year, the Labour leader stated that 99.9% of women “of course haven’t got a penis” – which suggested he believed one in 1,000 women have male genitalia. Sir Keir later admitted he had U-turned on his past support for self-identification for trans people following the SNP’s meltdown over new gender recognition laws in Scotland.
Lib Dems: Sir Ed’s party is promising to “respect and defend the rights and identities of all LGBT+ people, including trans and non-binary people”.
Reform: Mr. Tice’s party want to ban “transgender ideology” in schools, with Reform stating “there are two sexes and two genders”.
Security and defence:
Tories: The PM recently pledged to boost defence spending to 2.5% by 2030, which marked a return to a promise first made by Boris Johnson. Mr. Sunak has also committed to at least £3 billion in military support every year for Ukraine until 2030.
Labour: Sir Keir has failed to match the Government’s pledge on defence spending. His party has said it is “totally committed” to reaching the 2.5% goal but not yet set a date for that target to be met, only saying they will do so “as soon as resources allow that to happen”. But Labour have backed the Government’s commitment on military support for Ukraine.
Lib Dems: Sir Ed’s party is promising to work “more closely” with NATO and EU nations in the “joint development of innovative defence technologies”. The Lib Dems have also said they will cancel “the Conservative Government’s cut to the Army”.
Reform: Mr. Tice’s party is promising to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP within three years, and then boost it to 3% within six years.
Worth reading in full.
Personally, I can’t shake off the feeling that however bad a Labour Government will be, the Tories have to be punished for spending 14 years in power and doing the utter opposite of what they promised to achieve: tax at record levels, immigration at record levels, debt at record levels, worklessness at record levels, a public sector as wasteful and inefficient as ever, wokery out of control and the unending growth of new laws in place of personal freedom – none of which helped by the 18 months of ruinous and pointless lockdowns. Plus a fanatical commitment to the utopian Net Zero project that will immiserate us all. I know I’m supposed to hold my nose and vote for them to keep the loony Left out. But this time I just don’t think I can do it. How about you?
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A salient observation. Perhaps they should declare their interests in related branches of the trade, if it results in more use of legal processes!
The other (perhaps trivial) coincidence is that it is Guy Fawkes day in England on the same day as polling day across the pond.
I guess we all suffer to some extent when there is sloppy redefinition of anything, or using a word for more than one function rather than inventing a new, more precise, one. Consider the difference between Official Standards, Guidelines, Legal Requirements, optional compliance. When does it become a legal requirement to comply with this or that etc? Sometimes it depends on the practical outcome of an event, if it’s examined in an Inquiry of some kind.
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November….” – V
Underlying and overriding everything is, of course, Common Law, which is conveniently omitted by the article’s author (and most writers and lawyers).
Nice piece of reporting on the rotten to the core corruption of the vacuous, cackling puppet lady, complete with video explainer;
”KAMALA SOROS CORRUPTION: Kamala Harris as Attorney General refused to prosecute the George Soros owned OneWest Bank for over 1,000 violations of federal law. A one year investigation had uncovered evidence of widespread misconduct, but she refused to prosecute Soros and Mnuchin.
On March 19, 2009, a seven member investor group, IMB Holdco, led by Steven Mnuchin, which included billionaire George Soros, Christopher Flowers, John Paulson and Michael Dell purchased Independent National Mortgage Corporation (IndyMac Bank) of Pasadena, California for $13.65 billion from the FDIC and created OneWest from the remains of IndyMac.
In an internal memo published on Tuesday by The Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney general’s office said they had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by OneWest bank during that time, and predicted that further investigation would uncover many thousands more.
But the investigation into what the memo called “widespread misconduct” was closed after Harris’s office declined to file a civil enforcement action against the bank.
The previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.
George and Alex Soros continue to support Kamala Harris with millions of dollars. Alex Soros recently shared an image with Kamala Harris and wrote: “It’s time for us all to unite around Kamala Harris and beat Donald Trump. She is the best and most qualified candidate we have. Long live the American Dream!”
Elon Musk posted on September 17, 2023 “The Soros Organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of Western Civilization.” and posted on May 15, 2023 regarding George Soros “You assume they are good intentions. They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” Elon Musk is correct and that is why he joined President Trump in the fight for America and humanity.”
https://x.com/SpartaJustice/status/1833215615450194364
I’m sure we’re all aware of these desperate and obvious tactics already, with regards to the rushed mass immigration in the U.S, courtesy of the Biden-Harris government. They need the votes so the more illegal migrants they can legalize speedily the merrier;
”The publicly-stated goal by almost all leaders of the Democratic Party is to legalize the ~15 million illegal migrants as soon as possible, as well as bring in tens of millions more.
That would immediately make all swing states deep blue, just like happened in California with the 1986 amnesty, turning America into a permanent one-party state.
This is the last real election if Trump loses.”
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1833349210818920783
So easy for illegals to vote in the upcoming election;
”Here is how easy it is for illegal aliens to vote in U.S. elections.
This is an intentional flaw in the system. It is a loophole created to defeat election integrity.
That is why Arizona is being *SUED* to ensure that illegal aliens don’t register to vote in our elections.
The fact that nearly ALL Democrats oppose the SAVE Act to ensure illegal aliens don’t vote in our elections is the HUGE RED FLAG that this is an intentional design flaw that facilitates voter fra*d.”
https://x.com/kylenabecker/status/1833501427630497955
The quarter council (Bezirksverordnetenversammlung) of Berlin-Pankow has recently changed the bylaws for sports facilities to exclude members of the far right from the group of people being allowed to use them. That’s obviously based on a positivist interpretation of the nature of law, namely, law is whatever the people who can vote to create laws chose to make one and their power to create whichever laws they desire is only limited by their desire to legislate on something (Starmer’s proposed outdoor smoking ban would be another example of this category).
Under such a regime, individuals are in the fairly poor position of only being allowed to do what nobody has chosen to declare illegal so far and nobody can tell what will be declared illegal tomorrow. This could also be called slow motion totalitarianism: While the totality of everything is within the power of the law makers to regulate as they see fit, they haven’t yet gotten around to regulate a lot of things and individuals are thus still relatively free to do a lot of things (to wit: A ban on people speaking to other people they happen to meet in the streets was nominally in place during COVID).
Something like this can obviously not be called a free society. In a free society, the power of legislators to issue decrees must be limited according to some set of rules which respect Fuller’s inner morality of law and that’s how our political systems were supposed to work and did actually operate for a fairly long time. This only changed after Ferguson’s law (as in law of nature) “We will get away with it if we really want to!” was discovered in 2020.
The problem we’re facing is thus how to put the Ferguson positivists back into the place they were occupying prior to the Anything goes with COVID! outbreak. For this to be possible, we’ll need to neutralize their attempts to divide is into ever more splintered groups of factions warring for minor political advantages while being overseen by them.
It shall be interesting to see what caterpillars and beetles crawl out of the Kackler’s word-salad tonight.
I tend to find David’s essays too long to hold my interest but this one has been his best. It helped that I have a philosophy masters (mostly forgotten these days!), but I found it got to the essence of what’s been happening since “the madness” in a way that was genuinely enlightening. I’m sure this movement towards technocrat authoritarian rule has been building since the 90s, but it’s shown it’s hand in the last four years in a brazen, almost mocking way (think Khan) – for our own good, of course!
Have forwarded to my children
Perhaps David could write something on the difference between something being illegal and something being unlawful. It seems you can get away with acting unlawfully until you are dragged (expensively) to court. I think of unlawful arrest for example!
All these coincidences! I’m not sure I believe in coincidence any more!
If law is law only because it is possessed by an authority that can wield it, and that authority says it is law, has law become like fiat currency?
A piece of cotton paper or a piece of polymer has no intrinsic value. But if government says it has a value and everyone acts as if it does, it becomes money. What are the consequences if ‘law’ is thought of and used as such?