Editor: Mr. Colevile’s voice is very distinctive: The Reader cannot compare him in any way to @JohnJCrace of The Guardian, as political satirist and commentator. Mr. Colevile cannot match his talent in either of these fields: of commentary and political satire, with a welcome bite! Also consider Colevil’e political propinquity with arch conservative, and the utterly notorious @Jacob_Rees_Mogg! This just a quick sketch of ‘The Worlds’ that Colevile inhabits, touches, and attemps to explaine to The Reader.
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Headline: The prize on Thursday: who do voters hate the least?
Sub-headline: In these anxious times, all our politicians are more or less equally unpopular, all at once
Editor: It can’t be a surprise, that Colevile political essay is a brief 1095 words? The question might occour, as to how The Reader might approach this bloated political itinerary? Reader consider the possibilities of naming all the political actors? Or might The Reader opt for the naming of the political operatives, that marked the 14 years of Tory Rule :David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak? Colevile’s strategy is to place himself outside the political action. Which in a way is servisable, that reminds me or just echos the book of The Committed Observer that I read in 1983.
The Committed Observer
Interviews With Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton = Le Spectateur Engage
Editor: The headline of Miranda Green’s would-be commentary is exhausted in a marriage of the headline & sub-headline, that trades on the well worn political place holders , wedded to current jargon.
Opinion UK politics
Headline: What makes ‘Reform-curious’ Labour voters so hard to woo back
Sub-headline ; Downing Street fears Starmer will lose support to Farage but imitating him will alienate other groups it needs on side
Editor: The first paragraph sets ‘the tone’ Green’s exploration of ‘Reform-curious’ in its various hues.
First we had the “red wall”, then the “blue wall” and now the “turquoise wall” — the one Nigel Farage promises to erect for his Reform UK party across traditional Labour areas. Electoral turbulence in Britain is marked by analysts repainting the political map. But these broad brush descriptions conceal complexity — and the challenge for Labour attempting to woo voters who are willing to switch allegiance. It also throws up intriguing policy dilemmas.
Editor: Green offers a textbook analysis of the emotions of the potential voters in the next two paragraphs. Could just a veiled mention of Freud added balast to this chatter?
Local elections this Thursday could increase already high jitters. So many of the voters who backed Labour in July’s general election have cooled towards the party that vast energies are being spent pondering how to tempt them back — especially those targeted by Reform UK.
These “Reform-curious” voters might be hard to retain without repelling others, however. And it’s even more of a challenge than some of the cruder stereotypes suggest. A purely “Faragist” agenda is not to their taste — according to Steve Akehurst at research initiative Persuasion UK, who commissioned polls and focus groups to find out what makes them tick.
Editor: The veiled apperance of “Faragist”to the final labored paragraph, heightens the political tension?
Concern about immigration is the main issue prioritised by both Farage’s core supporters and wavering or actively switching former Labour voters — particularly small boats and asylum hotels. But while this confirms Downing Street is right to be worried about Reform attacks on the agenda, Akehurst’s research reveals significant differences on other topics.
Editor: with the appearnce of Farage and his consern for ‘small boats and asylum hotels’ renders moot any possible discussion of British toxic Imperialism, over centuries. Miranda Green and her empolyers The Financial Times, would find that more than inconvenient, and really irelevevent, to the carefully managed political chatter of this newspaper!
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Editor: A selection of the remaining sentences and paragraphs of this would be political anlysis
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With a risk of even more support peeling off to the left of Labour’s winning 2024 coalition, Akehurst argues it’s a “free hit” to maintain momentum on the green energy agenda, keeping both sets of waverers on side.
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The research picked up unease among these voters on other aspects of Reform. They like Farage but dislike his friendship with US President Donald Trump and his stance on Ukraine, and they wonder if his party is fully respectable.
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Offering more hope to Labour MPs, there are also signs in Persuasion’s data (see chart) that anti-Farage tactical voting might buoy up support for their party: enough voters in red wall areas could decide to back the incumbent explicitly to keep Reform out — even Conservatives seem willing to do so.
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The party’s left flank is seething with discontent but gets less attention at Westminster as MPs and apparatchiks obsess over Farage. Keeping these disgruntled voters happy while appealing to the Reform-curious is possible but it will require a careful policy mix.
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Unfortunately for a government whose spending options are so constrained, there’s one more thing that Labour’s left flank and those tempted by Reform have in common: they are repelled by anything that resembles austerity. And that’s Labour’s real dilemma.
In the guise of Political Observer, my attempt to satirized Mr. Douthat: I missed the actual thinker/writer of his books, rather that his opinion columns in The New York Times?
For the occasional reader of Mr. Douthat’s New York Times columns, what Nick Burns, in his interview, is the political/intelletual sophistication of Douthat’s books, as related to his columns, which execises a kind of political blandness! A selections of examples is instructive:
Editor: Mr. Burns first question:
Your first book, Privilege, is at once a devastating take-down of Harvard, as a bastion of a self-satisfied elite careerism, and a rueful love letter to it. Since those days, you’ve always unmistakeably been an adversary of American liberalism, yet in some ways continue to be a beneficiary of it. Where would you locate yourself—politically, then intellectually—on the map of the contemporary American scene? What is it in liberalism, beyond obvious hypocrisies, that you dislike?
Editor: Mr. Douthat’s reply:
Ishare the fairly conventional conservative view that the strongest case for liberalism is as an effective technology for managing social peace in a complex society—but one that depends upon sources of meaning and purpose deeper than itself, which it struggles to generate on its own.
Editor: Mr. Burns : Liberalism as feeding off non-renewable moral resources?
Douthat:
Those resources can be self-regenerative. I don’t fully buy the argument that, with the advent of Locke, there is an automatic decline into hyper-individualism. American history provides plenty of evidence that a liberal superstructure doesn’t necessarily prevent great awakenings. To the extent that it does so, it is under particular technological conditions. The vindication of the older conservative critique of liberalism as atomization—which looks more potent today than it did when I was at Harvard in the early 2000s; and looked more potent then than it did in, say, 1955—is technologically mediated. There have been technologies that accelerate individualism, ranging from things we take for granted, like the interstate highway system and the birth-control pill, through to the internet, a particular accelerant. As a metaphor, you can think of individualism’s tending towards atomization and despair as a gene within the liberal order, which gets expressed under particular environmental conditions, but doesn’t necessarily emerge if those conditions are not present. In recent years, the internet in particular has helped that gene be expressed more fully than it was.
An alternative theory of liberalism is that it is an ambitious way of life in its own right. That would be the argument of my friend Samuel Moyn, with whom I’ve taught classes on this. He would essentially agree with the conservative critique, but argue that this means you need a liberalism that is not just managerial but ambitious, Promethean, committed to self-creation and exploration. And that form of liberalism, in my view, is subject to strong and dangerous temptations. Sometimes they’re necessary temptations—a culture may need a little Prometheanism—but they can quickly lead it badly astray. The liberalism I described in Privilege tended towards a spiritually arid form of hyper-ambition; not Whitman and Emerson communing with the glories of creation, but: how do I get a job at McKinsey? Under conditions of prosperity, liberalism as a world-view had been transmuted into a purely instrumental, self-interested meritocracy.
Liberals themselves subsequently decided this was true. A whole spate of books came out after Privilege, from Harry Lewis’s Excellence Without a Soul—he was dean of Harvard when I was there; he wrote it as soon as he retired—to William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Daniel Markovits’s Meritocracy Trap, Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit. So in a sense, I was early to a critique of meritocratic liberalism that many liberals came to think was probably correct. Of course, I was already stealing things from Christopher Lasch.
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Political Observer : call this revelatory of what Mr. Douthat is capable of thinking/writing/considering ! More time is needed to fully grasp this interview in its entirety
Editor: There can be no doubt that Stephens self-presents as a political moralist via Harold Macmillan, and that the birth of a diatribe has begun. Stephens as a Neo-Con and student of Leo Strauss, political fabulism is home territory, that synchs naturally with the party line of Trump as beyond the pale, the outlier in this political melodrama! Strauss and Trump are not just sympatico, but are fellow travelers, which renders Stephens commentary inert, yet he clings to it as sevisable in the political moment. The final paragraphs of Mr. Stephens comentary is a crowd scene, from that 21 inch screen black & white world of yester-year.
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Trump is Trump. Let’s think of him on his own terms.
Democrats wondering how to oppose Trump most effectively might consider the following. Drop the dictator comparisons. Rehearse the above facts. Promise normality and offer plans to regain it. And remember that no matter how malignant he may be, there’s no better opponent than a face-plant president stumbling over his untied laces.
Editor: It’s more like a incompetent pastish of Harold Lloyd !
Has Political Observer strayed into the most pressing question of the Historical Moment? Also, does Huntington’s ‘Who Are We’ offer an echo of Douthat in another key?
Editor: Mr. Douthat explores the perifery of this vexing question in two essay:
Headline: An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.
April 19, 2025
Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.
When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies.
When daily newspapers and mainline Protestant denominations and Elks Lodges fade into irrelevance, when sit-down restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that’s the bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence.
When moderates and centrists look around and wonder why the world isn’t going their way, why the future seems to belong to weird bespoke radicalisms, to Luigi Mangione admirers and World War II revisionists, that’s the bottleneck crushing the old forms of consensus politics, the low-key ways of relating to political debates.
When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.
And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off.
The idea that the internet carries a scythe is familiar — think of Blockbuster Video, the pay phone and other early victims of the digital transition. But the scale of the potential extinction still isn’t adequately appreciated.
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Headline: More Babies, Please
Dec. 1, 2012
IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.
It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birthrate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run.
America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the native-born).
And it clearly is an edge. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable. Thanks to our relative demographic dynamism, the America of 50 years hence may not only have more workers per retiree than countries like Japan and Germany, but also have more than emerging powers like China and Brazil.
If, that is, our dynamism persists. But that’s no longer a sure thing. American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered. Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British.
The plunge might be temporary. American fertility plummeted during the Great Depression, and more recent downturns have produced modest dips as well. This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust. Many people may simply be postponing childbearing until better times return, and a few years of swift growth could produce a miniature baby boom.
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Editor: Does Mr. Douthat’s essays express a kind of cultural/political propinquity to Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ of December 5, 2005 ?
“You can distinguish the intellect and the will. The medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect. Modern people tend to believe in the power of the will and the weakness of the intellect.”
According to Thiel, the worst mistake made by Enlightenment was sweeping crucial questions under the carpet. To forget about the turbulent years of religious wars and social unrest, the “Age of Reason“ abandoned the important question of human nature or the power of faith.
Thiel, in “The Straussian Moment“ highlighted the ineffable trait of the Enlightenment of not being brave enough to ask hard questions, bringing up the figures of crucial philosophers, for example, John Locke.
“In the place of human nature, Locke leaves us with an unknowable “X.” This awareness of ignorance provides the low but solid ground on which the American Founding takes place. The human “X” may have certain wants and preferences, but nobody is in an authoritative position from which to challenge those desires.’
John Locke is one of the most influential philosophers and a key figure of the Enlightenment. His modern “liberal“ thoughts deeply influenced the Founding Fathers of the USA and gave fresh air, spreading the grasp of optimism around Europe. Locke pioneered the ideas of natural law or social contract.
Locke, among other Enlightenment philosophers, developed a concept of the social contract. According to their concept, the government was created through the consent of the people to be ruled by the majority. Social contract theory provides a rationale justification for the notion that legitimate state power should be derived from the consent of the majority of society.
And by Thiel’s explanation, the concept of the social contract is the central lie of the Enlightenment that allows avoiding asking hard questions about human nature, white-washing problematic and often violent character of human beings. Peter Thiel considers social contract as the main myth:
“The enlightenment always white-washes violence. There are many things we can’t think about under enlightenment reasoning, and one of them is violence itself. If you go to the anthropological myth of the enlightenment, it’s the myth of the social contract. So what happens when everybody is at everybody else’s throat? The enlightenment says that everybody in the middle of the crisis sits down, has a nice legal chat, and draws up a social contract. And maybe that’s the founding myth — the central lie — of the Enlightenment. Girard says something very different must have happened. When everybody is at everybody’s throat, the violence doesn’t just resolve itself, and maybe it gets channeled against a single scapegoat where the war of all against all became a war of all against one and somehow gets resolved in a very violent way. “
According to Thiel, the end of humanity would be marked by the definitive abandonment of all the hard questions, but there would no longer be any conflict.
In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.
But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.
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Editor: collecting ready-made cliche’s is Mr. Brooke strong suit ‘The Collapse’ being his entance into ‘New York Times World’. But The Reader confronts in this 1124 word essay is these political actors:
NATO, Perkins Coie, Harvard, Columbia, Big Ten,Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, (Think of the civil rights movement at Selma.), “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond.
But note Mr. Brook’s self-descritpion in his final paragraph, that reeks of placing himself above and or beyond the frey, that somehow retains political credibility, in Brooks’ self-conception?
I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Paul D. Ryan and his self-proclaimed “young guns” in the House Republican leadership traversed the country in 2010 harnessing the energy of the Tea Party movement that would sweep them to power that November. But in failing to confront the most divisive forces of the movement, they may have set their party up for its current crisis.
Some of those insurgent winners from that year would eventually turn on the leaders one by one, setting in motion the downfall of Rep. Eric Cantor — just as Republicans were attempting to cobble together a modest immigration measure — then blocking the ascent of Rep. Kevin McCarthy after they had deposed John A. Boehner as the speaker of the House.
Now the Tea Party’s ultimate creation, Donald J. Trump, may be coming for the last young gun unscathed, Ryan.
“Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well, but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him,” Trump said as he stormed through Super Tuesday and sealed his front-runner status. “And if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price.”
Weeks before that, Trump blamed Ryan in part for Republicans losing the White House in 2012.
Facing forces he inadvertently helped unleash, Ryan finds himself confronting a potentially agonizing choice — both moral and intellectual — between the values he has spent his career promoting and the man who stands ready to repudiate them.
“If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party,” Ryan said this week, directing rare fire at Trump, though not by name, “there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry.”
On Wednesday, Ryan’s office was contacted by Trump’s campaign, but the two men did not speak, said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Ryan. “We expect the speaker to be in touch with all the remaining candidates soon to discuss our efforts to build a bold conservative policy agenda for 2017,” he said.
To Democrats, and some Republicans, Ryan and the Republican leadership have a quandary of their own making. Republican lawmakers and candidates often averted their gaze when questions were raised about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and religion. They tolerated breaches of decorum, such as Rep. Joe Wilson’s cry of “You lie” during a presidential address, and even made light of the man who brought many of those alleged conspiracies to the fore: Trump.
“The party repeatedly made myopic decisions, tolerating the intolerable views of a segment of the party unwilling to accept that problem-solving is complicated,” said Tony Fratto, a Republican consultant who served in the George W. Bush administration. “The short game was winning some midterms. The cost was creating an incoherent and unsustainable coalition.”
Democrats are now seizing on this trajectory, and trying to tie all Republican incumbents, even Ryan, to the legacy.
“Donald Trump is appealing to some of the darkest forces in America,” Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “It’s time for Republicans to stop the Frankenstein they created.”
Many Republicans reject that analysis, especially when it comes to Ryan. His aides answer questions of Obama’s birth and presidential eligibility with a form letter that includes a copy of the president’s birth certificate. “I certainly understand the importance of this issue,” the letter says, “and I hope you find the information useful.”
Instead, they pin Trump’s rise on their own failures to deliver on campaign promises, like the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and the broad shrinking of government. That helped spawn the anger propelling Trump.
“People were not totally upfront in saying as long as President Obama is in the White House, we need to be realistic about our goals,” said Brian Walsh, a former official at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “I think that contributed to the anger and disenchantment with leadership.”
While Ryan politely rejected the birth inquiries, others did not.
Asked in 2011 on the NBC program “Meet the Press” about the birth certificate conspiracy, and House members still promoting it, Boehner responded, “It really is not our job to tell the American people what to believe and what to think.” Asked on the same program about such “crazy talk,” Cantor replied, “I don’t think it’s, it’s nice to call anyone crazy, OK?”
“In Trump’s America, the Guessing Game Never Ends”
What is our policy toward Iran? Are the tariffs on or off? If they’re on—what countries are they on? And are they permanent? What’s actually going on? As a newsletter writer, it is my job to know these things, and yet when I walked to work this morning I saw a little French Bulldog peeing on the sidewalk, and I looked in his bulging bug eyes and figured he could predict the Trump administration’s next moves as well as I could.
And maybe he could. Today in our pages, Matthew Continetti says that I—like a lot of people—am thinking about the Trump administration the wrong way. Why? Because, according to Matt, we’re “looking for conceptual frameworks and policy Svengalis. None exist. In Trump’s White House, strategy documents are suggestions. Personnel is not policy. Trump is the policy.”
Editor : Its been a while since I’ve seen the name Matthew Continetti in any context, but his association with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is no surprise!
Why Does Trump’s Iran Policy Look Like Obama’s?
Over the weekend, just before Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Iranian leaders in Oman, he told The Wall Street Journal that the goal was to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, but that the “red line” is that the country can’t have nuclear weapons.
That may sound unremarkable enough. But as Eli Lake argues today, it represents a sea change in Trump’s Iran policy. And he thinks it’s an ominous sign when it comes to the kind of deal we might be about to strike with Tehran.
Editor : The Reader only need confront the first paragraph, and the use of the term ‘Activist Judges’… to follow next is the Ronald Reagan favorite ‘Welfare Queens’ ? to confront Mr. Colvile’s not so latent xenophobia!
Week after week, the reports fill the papers. “Migrant avoids deportation because he lost his phone.” “Pakistani paedophile allowed to stay in UK because he is an alcoholic.” “Rapist’s criminal record is so bad he can’t be deported.” “Criminal’s deportation case halted over son’s dislike for chicken nuggets.” “Afghan woman can’t be deported because she has back pain.”
Even allowing for a certain level of journalistic exaggeration, we clearly find it harder than we should to kick out those who shouldn’t be here. So what’s gone wrong?
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Editor: The Reader might wonder about the British Empire and how it strip-mined its Colonial Possesions over centuries: that is carefully elided from the Mr. Covle’s rant, about the undeservig grifters on the dole. It could be argued that those on the dole are the watershed of that Empire, and its criminal eterprise refracted though time? Mr. Colevile is a Thaterite of a certain political class, in sum an Oxbridger whose veration of The Iron Lady is toxic! Should The Reader pay due attention to Mr. Colvile’s arguments?
Well, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, thinks much of the blame lies with lawyers like Greg Ó Ceallaigh. Ó Ceallaigh is a crusading KC, who supports the abolition of the Illegal Migration Act, has called Tory politicians “terrible crooks” and tweeted in 2012 that the party “need to be dealt with as you would deal with the Nazis, cancer or lava”. But he also moonlights as a migration judge.
I’m not suggesting Ó Ceallaigh’s judicial verdicts are driven by his politics, though he has certainly contributed to the catalogue above. (“Covid made me commit crime, claims drug dealer spared deportation”.) But it is definitely true that the people who become migration judges tend to be migration lawyers — and that such lawyers generally got into the field to protect migrants’ rights, not borders.
Indeed, asylum and migration is widely accepted to be one of the most left-wing parts of an increasingly left-wing profession. In surveys by The Lawyer, the magazine’s readers voted overwhelmingly for the Lib Dems in 2019, and even more overwhelmingly for Labour in 2024.
Editor : Mr. Colevile presents Greg Ó Ceallaigh in a Dickensian shadow, in his utter mendacity and ‘left-wing politics’. But reader notice how the cast of characters grows into a 885 word tyrade, against a set of bad political actors in the Colvile Political Imagination! A sampler of the miscreants exhaustes the readers patience , so let me be parsimonious in my selection!
1) A few months ago, every living lord chief justice co-authored a report on prisons policy, urging more leniency and lamenting the fact that idiot politicians, egged on by the media, kept pushing for tougher sentencing.
2) The nutrient neutrality scandal has seen tens of thousands of houses blocked by a disastrously strict interpretation of habitat regulations. And the government has yet to explain why we are legally obliged to give up the Chagos islands, let alone hand billions to Mauritius for the privilege.
3) When the row over “two-tier justice” broke out, the chairman of the Sentencing Council sent the justice secretary an astonishingly high-handed letter, warning that the judiciary accepted sentencing guidelines only because they were written by the judiciary, and that for “sentencing guidelines of whatever kind …
4) Similarly, when Kemi Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer agreed it was utterly wrong for a Gazan family to be granted asylum under a scheme reserved for Ukrainians, the lady chief justice said the lack of respect for judicial independence left her “deeply troubled”.
5)As are many of his closest friends — including Philippe Sands, who has driven the Chagos case, and the attorney-general, Lord Hermer.
6)That might seem like a commendable blow for equality. But the more you dig into the equal pay rules, the less that argument convinces.
7)The clothing firm Next, for example, was punished for paying warehouse workers more than retail staff because those jobs were male and female-coded — even though it did not pay a single woman less than a man for doing the same job, and almost half of its warehouse workers were female.
8)The same legal constraints have seen the NHS grade all staff according to an impossibly complicated formula that creates arbitrary equivalence between completely different roles.
9)For example, the evidence in the Next case was very clear that there is more demand for warehouse workers than retail staff, that pay for such roles is higher, and that the firm had begged staff in its stores to shift over.
10)Rather than reflecting reality, the equal pay regime has become a charter for trade unions to milk employers. And I’ve explained it at such length because Labour is hugely expanding its scope.
11)It gives unions the right to enter workplaces where they aren’t recognised, and forces firms to give union “equality representatives” time off to attend to those duties.
12)Ministers will also activate the long-dormant “socioeconomic duty” within the Equality Act, which means every single decision made by the state must be evaluated according to its impact on disadvantage. And all of this will be policed by legal case after legal case.
13)During the Tory leadership contest, Tom Tugendhat argued that Britain is increasingly subject not to the rule of law but the rule of lawyers. That’s been great for the legal profession — but not so much for the rest of us. And sadly, the lawyers around the cabinet table are set to make things very much worse.
Editor: Though my attempt at parsimony, may have been limited by Mr. Colvile’s Thatcherite Historical Sweep, the reader is given key passages from which to reach the essentials, if that is what they be?
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