Article 45: Further To The Re-Casting Of Brexit As Knowledge-Only Policy.
Chapter 1 of Daniel Hannan,s book, “Why Vote Leave”, published in 2016, goes on to observe that ‘although the War had wrecked much of European infrastructure, an educated and industrious workforce remained in place to rebuild it’; that ‘its post-war boom was fuelled by unprecedented migration from the countryside to industrial centres and from the Mediterranean to northern coalfields, while it received massive external assistance with America’s Marshal Aid programme disbursing an extraordinary $13 billion on top of the $12 billion separately contributed by the US between 1948 and 1952. Even more valuable was the US defence guarantee which enabled European governments to divert military spending to civil projects’. However, we know that ‘the 1974 oil shock was the beginning of Europe’s decline which continues to the present day’; that ‘Britain’s joining-time could not have been worse with this growth ending for Europe and starting for the rest of the world’; that ‘the combined economies of the then 28 member states having shrunk, according to International Monetary Fund, from 36% of World GDP in 1973 when Britain joined, to 17% in 2015, a decline which is now accelerating’. Indeed, ‘if we count only the 15 states which were in the EU before the ex-communist countries joined in 2004, the relative contraction is even sharper’. Thus to refer to the Chapter’s title, ‘if Britain were not already in the EU at the time it was written, “Who would join the EU today”’?
In Chapter 2, The Tyranny Of The Status Quo, Daniel Hannan notes that ‘the EU would recognise the negative effect of directly funding remain campaigns within the UK’; and that ‘it would therefore continue to fund proxies in the UK to make the remain argument on its behalf, these proxies being local government bodies, universities, charities, think tanks, trade associations and other non-state actors’; that ‘such proxies would appear more disinterested than would the EU itself’; and that ‘this expectation was confirmed when, on 26 January 2016, a letter appeared in the Independentsigned by the heads of various green pressure groups, and by the immediate past chairmen of some environmental quangos, warning against ‘Brexit’ on the grounds of EU laws having a hugely positive effect on the environment but without attempting to explain why a post-EU Britain wouldn’t simply retain or replicate – or even improve – these ‘hugely positive’ laws’. What was really interesting , though, was that ‘the signatures represented universities, Natural England, the Green Alliance, the RSPB, the Natural Environmental Research Council and so on’ Of course, ‘protect our countryside’ sounds so much prettier that ‘protect our grants’.
Chapter 2 also recalls ‘how this indirect technique had been used in respect of a major transfer of power to Brussels in 2007‘. Thus, ‘when France and the Netherlands had voted ‘No’ in 2005, the document in question was renamed the Lisbon Treaty and put through without referenda (except in Ireland which voted ‘No’ and was made to vote again’. At that point, ‘Labour ministers felt vulnerable to the accusation that they had weaselled out of their referendum promise and wanted to make the treaty more palatable’. To this end, ‘they invoked supposedly neutral third-party endorsements’. Thus, ‘in 2007, the then foreign secretary David Miliband, made a great song and dance in the House of Commons’ that ‘it wasn’t just Labour Europhiles who backed the text’; that ‘a whole range of NGOs were also in favour of it’. Thus, he cited ‘the NSPCC, One World Action, Action Aid and Oxfam, Environmental organisations and the council of bishops, and claimed that this was a coalition, not of ideology, but of integrity’, whereas, ‘a few moments on Goggle revealed that every organisation thus cited was in receipt of EU subventions and most of them received government grants’. Daniel Hannan then asked the European Commission how much money it had paid these organisations and discovered that ‘in the previous year, Action Aid, the NSPCC, One World Action and Oxfam had between them been given 43,051,542.95 euros’; and that ‘while the commission of bishops was a little harder to identify, it turned out to be the Commission of Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community(COMECE) based in Brussels, with the remit ‘to promote reflections based on the Catholic Church’s social teaching on the challenges facing a united Europe’. As to other disbursements, Chapter 2 tells us that ‘other organisations supported by the EU would be in the forefront of the UK’s ‘Remain’ campaign’ that ‘the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), which has become essentially a pro-EU pressure group, had received 936,272 euros’; that again, ‘UK Universities, which campaign strenuously for the EU, frankly admit that ‘EU funding is too important to be sacrificed’; and that ‘one can almost see the point when one sees that in 2008, British universities had received 889, 889,754 (?) euros from Brussels’.
Again, Chapter 2 tells us that ‘all of this university support is deducted from Britain’s contribution to the EU’; that ‘if Britain withdrew from the EU, it could make an equivalent or larger payment directly, rather than routing it through Brussels’. Yet again, Chapter 2 reveals that ‘an official working for an EU institution is exempt from national taxation, paying instead a token rate of EU tax equivalent to around 21%, flat’; that ‘some states recoup the difference from their MEP while some don’t’; and that ‘the bureaucrats in the Commission and the Parliament make decisions which have fiscal consequences for ordinary people, while they themselves are exempt form these consequences’.
In Chapter 3, Why the EU can’t be democratic, Daniel Hannan reports that ‘in 1951 six men gathered to sign an accord unlike any other’; that ‘the Treaty of Paris which created the European Coal and Steel Community – the ancestor of to-day’s EU – would not just bind its members as states’; that ‘it would create a new legal order, superior to national jurisdictions’; that the six men were the foreign ministers of the founding EEC members: viz. Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Italy and West Germany’; that ‘this was the first treaty to which West Germany, recently under allied occupation, had acceded to in her own name, and her Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer was there, acting as his own foreign minister’; but that ‘when the time came for the formal signing, a problem arose’; that ‘last-minute negotiations and amendments left no time for a final ministerial text to be prepared’ and that ‘it was left to their officials to fill in the articles’. ‘As one historian of the EU puts it; “the spirit of the accord stood surety for the letter”’. Thus, ‘we see what has been wrong with the European project from the beginning. The politicians have left the bureaucrats, figuratively if not literally, a series of blank sheets, and the bureaucrats have filled in the blanks to suit themselves’ even if this means ‘setting aside public opinion and the clear instructions of the member states, in advancing the agenda of “more Europe”’
To exemplify further the bureaucratic fluidity of the EU, Chapter 3 notes that ‘while bailouts were patently illegal by being expressly prohibited. Indeed the Germans only agreed to join the euro on this explicit prohibition’. Yet, when it became clear that ‘the euro wouldn’t survive without cash transfusions, the Lisbon Treaty was set aside, though it was explicit; no bailouts’. Again, ‘to illustrate the lack of adherence to law and the disregard for democracy’, Chapter 3 records ‘the EU’s bureaucratic disregard for referendum results’. Thus, ‘when national referendums return a ‘No’ vote this is either ignored or the nation is made to vote again, regardless of the size of the majority, only ‘Yes’ votes being accepted’. Again, Chapter 3 notes that ‘the EU is run by a body which combines legislative and executive authority’; that ‘the 28 commissioners are unelected’; that ‘this is not an accidental design-flaw’; that ‘it is intrinsic to the whole project’; that ‘from the beginning the EU was built on undemocratic foundations’; that public opinion was regarded as an obstacle to be overcome and not as a reason to change direction’. However, I choose not to comment further on Chapter 3 which proceeds to expound the alleged benefits of what I know to be merely belief/counter-belief democracy and within which I am campaigning to replace all such belief with already available knowledge or at least with recognition of such knowledge being as yet unavailable and thus in need of being acquired before policy is made.
Thus, I pass on to Chapter 4, Euro-Corporatism, and its ability to attract funding from the EU in exchange for its support of the ensuing EU policies. This chapter draws attention to the role of lobbyists in this regard. It notes that ‘there are some 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels, some in-house, some working for several clients, some representing pressure groups or regions, most representing big business’; that ‘corporate lobbyists intuit from the moment that they arrive in Brussels, that the EU was designed by and for people like them’; and that by way of example, Daniel Hannan supplies a tabulation which shows for the first half of 2015 that ‘Microsoft, Shell Companies, and Exxon Mobile Petroleum and Chemical each received 2.5 million euros’; that ‘Deutche Bank AG received 2.962 million’; that ‘Dow Europe GmbH received 3.750 million, Google 3.5 million, General Electric 3.25 million, Siemans AG 3.23 million, Huawei Technologies 3.0 million and BP 2.5 million’; that ‘what all of these lobbies have in common whether industrial or environmental, is a preference for backroom deals’; that ‘the EU has a special name for the procedure by which it makes law: “cosmetology”’; that ‘committees and (so-called) technical experts meet and make trade-offs out of the public eye’; that ‘such a system is an invitation to lobbyists and pressure groups to reach arrangements behind closed doors that might not look very pretty if the details were known to the public’.
At this point, I would say that these trade-offs were inevitably of the belief/counter-belief type; that the public would not be aware of the inevitable absence of conclusive knowledge in these trade-offs; and that this general inability to differentiate belief from knowledge as exhibited by the public and indeed by Daniel Hannan is more than adequate to obscure any lack of prettiness in such trade-offs. 26/02/21.
Article 44Article 44: The Recasting of Brexit As Knowledge-Only Policy.
I have noted previously in this website that throughout the debate for and against Brexit, none of the protagonists ever did more than offer opinions and counter-opinions which, as in all debates whatever the subject, are never more than those of beliefs/counter-beliefs respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter evidence or news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; and that such protagonists never notice the absence of conclusive knowledge, or the need to acquire and to use it to terminate these otherwise futile debates. At the current stage of this website, I now refer to the Book, Why Vote Leave which was written by Daniel Hannan prior to the Brexit referendum to provide timely reasons for leaving. However, my intention in referring to it now, is to show that Daniel Hannon presents these reasons as beliefs and opinions supported by facts and by evidence selected by him, while in this article, my intention is to recast these reasons, wherever possible, as knowledge-only policy.
Indeed, his own lack of confidence is conveyed to the reader when he states in Appendix Two of his book, that people say ‘I wish someone would set out the full objective facts’, to which he responds that ‘this would be nice’; but that ‘there is no such thing as impartiality in politics’; that ‘what one person considers objective, another regards as outrageously biased’; that ‘this is how we are made’; that ‘we all trust our hunches, pick the facts which sustain them and screen out the ones which don’t’; and that ‘if you can’t find a single neutral source, if everyone has prejudices and assumptions, then how are you supposed to get to the truth?’. To this question, he responds that ‘you do so by listening to the competing cases of the two sides’; that ‘referendums and elections work on the same basis as criminal trials‘; that ‘the two campaigns make their best case, like the prosecution and the defence, and then the voter, like the juror, comes to a balanced decision’; that ‘if neutrality is impossible, the best we can hope for is accuracy’; that ‘as you’ll have gathered from its title, his book doesn’t purport to be neutral’; but that he has ‘tried to be accurate in the sense of not using any false information or bogus statistics’. At this point, my response is that neutrality would in no way be decisive; and that the missing entity in all such cases is debate-terminating conclusive knowledge.
Let us now examine his facts and non-bogus statistics to determine the extent to which they amount to the conclusive knowledge which has thus far been unrecognised by politicians and voters alike. However, before we do so, I must clarify the phrase, ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics’, which is the title of Daniel Hannan’s Appendix 2, and which is often applied specifically to economics. Here, I recall another such assessment which jocularly claims that ‘if all economists were laid in a head-to-foot row, they would still not reach a conclusion with which all would concur’. As to why these quotes may be applied to statistics in general and to economics in particular, I observe that statistical analysis is often applied to two parameters which have no known cause-effect relationship to one another; and that conclusions drawn from such arbitrary relationships do indeed link statistics to lies, damned or not; and that my dismissal of such statistics is fully compatible with my newly definitive differentiation of the dichotomies of knowledge/belief, truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad.
On this assessment, let us now proceed to consider the extent to which the data supplied by Daniel Hannan’s book can be utilised to convert Brexit to a knowledge-only policy, despite its having thus far been treated as a subject for belief/counter-belief debate by all political parties in the manner of all political discussion since time immemorial. I start with Daniel Hannan’s Introduction, sub-titled ‘Please Sack Me’, where he describes his first-day surprise at the level of the expenses he was entitled to claim tax free as an MEP. As to ‘air travel from London to Brussels or Strasbourg where the European Parliament meets alternately, it enabled the claimant to pocket the better part of £800 per week’; that ‘for general expenses, the claimant was entitled to nearly £3,500 per month as a bock grant straight into a nominated bank account without any receipts being required’; that ‘the claimant was also entitled to more than £12,000 per month, which if you think about it, is enough to take on a secretary, a researcher and a press officer and still have a large dollop over for your wife’; and that he ‘wished he could say that the practice of hiring immediate family members was beneath British representatives, but that the reality is that people respond to incentives regardless of nationality’; and that ‘if anything, the Brits were unusually keen to keep things within the family’.
He then states that ‘he has reported the above practices to draw his readers’ attention to the gap between theory and practice within the EU’. To this end, he notes that ‘because the EU was launched from exalted motives – peace and cooperation among nations – there can be a temptation to give it the benefit of the doubt’; that ‘we half-pretend we are dealing with some fantasy EU, one which rises above the grubbiness of politics and embodies a lofty ideal’; that ‘it seems almost bad taste to look in too much detail at the EU which has, in fact, taken shape (before our eyes) with its dodgy accounts and private jets’. However, he states that ‘the way in which MEPs are remunerated is (but) one small example of how rather than being pure, the EU is often, in the exact sense, corrupting – that is, it makes otherwise good people behave in bad ways’; that he ‘knows several MEPs who came to Brussels without feeling especially strongly about closer integration, but who drank in federal assumptions as they guzzled their allowances’; but that ‘what is true of MEPs is equally true of the many giant corporations, mega charities, think tanks, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), professional associations and lobbyists, who have learned how to make a living out of the Brussels system’; that ‘these groups are the Praetorian Guard of the “Remain” campaign’; that ‘for their executives, its not about sovereignty or democracy; its about mortgages and school fees’.
Having thus set the scene by showing the means by which the EU secures support by funding individual politicians and as many other corporations, organisations, charities, think tanks, associations and individual lobbyists as possible, Daniel Hannan asks rhetorically in Chapter 1; ‘Who would join the EU today’. Here he identifies the Western European nations most comparable to Britain, being neither ex-communist nor microstates, which have not joined the EU, these being ‘Iceland, Norway and Switzerland’ and he notes that ‘all of them have solid and settled majorities for not joining. In Iceland, which formally withdrew its application for membership in 2015, voters oppose joining by 51.1% to 34.2%. In Norway, the feeling is even more emphatic: 72.0% to 18.1%, a choice which has changed little over a decade. In Switzerland, opinion polls (on this subject ) are rarer, because membership was widely seen to have been killed off when a referendum in 2001 resulted in a massive 76.8% against reopening accession talks, and the latest shows 82% of Swiss citizens being supportive of their current bi-lateral arrangements’. He then quotes Anne Enger Lahnstein who led the successful ‘No’ campaign when Norway held its accession referendum in 1994: “to what problem is the EU a solution?”
However, he concedes in Chapter 1, that ‘back in 1975 when the UK held her previous referendum on membership this question (might have) seemed to have an answer’; that ‘the European Economic Community (EEC) was supposed to be all about free trade, while Britain had the three-day week, governmental control of prices and incomes, power cuts, double-digit inflation, and frequent strikes, while the almost universal assessment of pundits and politicians was of irrevocable decline’ that ‘throughout the sixties and seventies, the UK had been outperformed by every European economy’, and to quote Henry Kissiger, ‘it has sunk to borrowing, begging and stealing, until North Sea comes in’. Indeed, ‘the Wall Street Journal in 1975, the year of the referendum, was even blunter’: ‘goodbye, Great Britain: it was nice knowing you’. Thus, ‘when the British people looked across the Channel, they saw a comparative success story’; that ‘the then six members of the EEC had suffered more damage during the Second World War than Britain had’; that ‘their factories had been bombed, their bridges thrown down, and yet they had somehow bounced back to outperform Britain and its Commonwealth’.
However Chapter 1, also recalls that ‘the UK lagged behind because she had emptied her treasury and amassed an unprecedented debt in defeating Hitler’; that ‘by 1945, Britain had borrowed £21 billion, much of it from the USA’; that ‘unlike the European states which were deemed to have started afresh after the overthrow of fascism, this debt was not remitted, whereas the UK debt repayments to the USA were a drag on UK growth for the next thirty years with the last instalment being made in 2006’; that ‘while successive governments sought to inflate this debt away, this had a knock-on negative effect on productivity and competitiveness, which by the 1970s had brought Britain close to collapse and made attractive the ‘Rhineland capitalism’ which had apparently been responsible for Western Europe’s ‘economic miracle’. Indeed, while no-one knew it at the time, this ‘miracle’ was coming to its end just as Britain joined. I myself didn’t vote to join because by then I already knew that political decisions were always belief-consensual one way or the other; and that joining the EEC would not improve the chances for UK belief/counter-belief politics to become a choice between knowledge-only alternatives.
With UKIP members having recently been invited by the leadership to contribute to a post-Brexit “Activation of UKIP”, I proposed that this re-activation could include an offer to the electorate to pursue knowledge-only policies distinct from the belief-only policies of all other political parties, and I was encouraged to hear directly that Neil Hamilton welcomed this proposal and would promote this website as a means of increasing UKIP membership and electoral support. So far so good. 20/2/21.
Article 43The Political Party Most Likely To Adopt Knowledge-Only Policies.
This website was initially intended to give the voting public a basis for encouraging its political parties to replace belief with knowledge in the formulation of party-specific policy-options and to recognise the knowledge already available on which to deliver them successfully in reality, or to recognise the need to acquire such knowledge before attempting policy formulation and implementation. However, the last paragraph of Article 40 of this section of this website indicated that if I were to invite a political party itself, to adopt my newly definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy and with it those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad, that party would be UKIP, because I would be able to re-cast Brexit as a knowledge-only policy, while all other parties have treated it as a remain/ leave debate of belief/counter-belief, and because all other parties have long histories of rejecting knowledge and of accepting this or that transient belief-consensus pending the resumption of debate to some other transient belief-consensus, and so on, ad infinitum. At this point, I choose to differentiate parties of Right, Left and Centre from UKIP, by analysing a timely article in The Sunday Telegraph of 31/01/21 by Janet Daley, entitled “Post-Covid socialism would crush the values that made Britain great”, and sub-titled, “It will be a disaster if our new spirit of solidarity gives rise to Soviet-style overreach by the state”. I chose this article because it shows that neither the labour nor the conservative party could take a leading role in my campaign for knowledge to replace belief in all future policy-making without being embarrassed by their past and current failures to do so for themselves, while UKIP would suffer no such embarrassment in being able to claim that Brexit itself, is a knowledge-only policy, while all other political parties treated remain/leave as a debate of belief/counter-belief.
Janet Daley opens her article by observing that ‘there’s nothing quite like a life-threatening national crisis to justify monumental political changes that would have been unthinkable only moments before’; that ‘during the last world war almost all levers of economic policy, the production and distribution of goods and services, and the conditions of employment, were taken under central governmental control’; that Britain became closer, than would ever have previously been imagined, to having a Soviet-style command economy’; that ‘these policies, including the rationing of food, petrol and clothing, were accepted by the population at large as being necessary if this courageous little island was to survive – and most critically – if its people were to share fairly the sacrifices which the war effort required’; and that ‘the degree of willing compliance with those extraordinary privations still stands as a historical example to the world of civic decency and private heroism’; but that ‘when the Second World War ended, things got more awkward’; that ‘the agencies and officials who had seized these unprecedented powers over the manufacture of goods and the provision of services had grown accustomed to them’; that ‘in addition, there was a very well organised political movement which saw the command economy and the collectivist society which was its natural partner, as ideal solutions to (the problems) of modern life’; that this position was helped considerably by the fact that the Soviet Union had been our ally in the War and its population had suffered horrendously from the conflict’; that ‘the shared fate of the two peoples led quite plausibly to the view (the belief) that the USSR could be a model for the future’; that ‘Churchill’s assessment of a coming Cold War with the Soviets (“an Iron Curtain having descended across the Continent”) was deeply contentious’; that ‘many of those centralised institutions and decision-making processes lasted for decades’; that even rationing of basic foods carried on into the Fifties’; that ‘almost all of the nationalised industries – mining, steel and car production – and the provision of public services such as electricity, gas, and telephones, remained in place until the Eighties; and that she ‘remembers having to join a six-month waiting list for a telephone in the Sixties’.
Thus, ‘post-war Britain remained trapped for two generations in this ideological (belief-only) model which undermined its progress at home and its ability to compete in the world’, while ‘the most generous interpretation’ is that ‘it was an attempt to ensure permanent “fairness” – the equal distribution of goods and services’; that ‘the argument against ending rationing was that people might starve if scarce food resources were not apportioned by government dictat’. ‘So what actually happened when a Conservative government scrapped the ration books’ asks Janet Daley, and her answer is that ‘food production increased to meet demand’; that ‘nobody starved’; that ‘it was an early lesson in what would be the Thatcherite principle’ that ‘you don’t have to cut the existing pie into small equal portions’; and that ‘market economies enlarge the pie’.
At this point in her article, Janet Daley looks at the present and future and observes that ‘we are again in a debate that sounds oddly familiar’; that ‘in the US and the UK, much rhetorical energy is being devoted to the idea (belief) that communal impulses and concern for others which the epidemic has invoked, should be, as it were, nationalised – taken over by government and turned into legally enforced policy’; that ‘we must move forward together- without nasty competitive inclinations – to embrace whatever opportunities the official government view (belief) decides are virtuous’; that ‘there is an uncanny similarity between the promised objectives of Boris Johnson on the Right and Joe Biden on the Left when they talk about how the economy should progress’; that ‘Green energy and the new industries which can provide it should be used to re-invigorate the post-industrial wastelands of both countries to create jobs and draw investment into the Rust Belt American states and the unemployment black spots of northern Britain by vast amounts of taxpayer funding under the supervision and direction of government departments’; that ‘the state is to be the progenitor and the funding source of a great infrastructure revolution which will create what Mr Biden called last week “good union jobs” – in other words ‘a new public sector empire: a project which he implied, as does Mr Johnson, will be a direct descendent of the national spirit fostered by the pandemic’.
Janet Daley then concludes that ‘the cry now is “Let this be a turning point”, that ‘we now realise how much we care about each other, and how much we are prepared to sacrifice for the greater good, so let’s institutionalise this and hand it over to be run by government (and the unions, in Mr Biden’s case)’; but that ‘unfortunately, there is all the difference in the world between state-administered virtue and real human communality’; that ‘the consequences of a government mistake can be far more catastrophic than an individual’s mistake’; that ‘on Biden’s list of inspirational ideas (beliefs) is the suggestion that America’s poor minorities should be encouraged to buy their own homes to “build equity”’ but that ‘this was precisely the good intention which inspired the sub-prime mortgage debacle of 2008 in which bad debts were packaged and sold on until they broke the world economy’; that ‘the road which the Biden administration and the Johnson government appear to be choosing is the one which leads to endless money-printing to pay infinite debt – and eventually to a currency which is fiction, like the Ostmark, and which is a needless tragedy’. However, she spoils her analysis (with which I agree, as far as it is quoted above), by closing with the remark that ‘the US and the UK look likely to deal well with the vaccine programme – which is the real answer to this crisis’; and that ‘they can accomplish this without destroying the political philosophy (the beliefs) which made them robust and successful’.
However, in contrast, I see Janet Daley’s analysis as demonstrating that politics remains as it always has been, a matter of debating belief/counter-belief to one or other transient belief-consensus in the absence of any recognition of the need for debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that vaccines are manifestations of conclusive scientific knowledge in that they work as intended in reality; that political philosophy is mere belief which, of itself, is incapable of producing anything workable in reality; that belief/counter-belief politics, whether of the Right or Left, is accordingly incapable of producing anything which works in reality as promised; and that consequently I have chosen UKIP as the party least in thrall to belief, and as such, most likely to adopt my campaign for the replacement of belief with knowledge in its future policy-making, having already been the instigator of Brexit, which I will re-cast as a knowledge-only, debate-terminating conclusive policy in a subsequent Article. 06/02/21.
Article 42Further To The Impossibility Of Achieving Unity Of Belief.
The Daily Telegraph of 25/01/21 carried an article by Nick Timothy, entitled ‘Joe Biden promised to unite his country, but division is more likely’ and subtitled, ‘By prioritising some identity groups and excluding others he can only sow discord’. I can only express astonishment that Nick Timothy attributes this mistake to Joe Biden as distinct from all other debaters. Surely, this mistake is characteristic of all leaders of multi-party belief-only governmental systems and of their individual voters; and that he does not recognise that these systems are tolerated by voters only by the prospect that the beliefs of the party temporarily in power will be replaced with the party of counter-beliefs at the next election: but let us analyse the extent to which Nick Timothy believes the intolerance of Joe Biden, in particular, is likely to rise beyond the prospect of his replacement at the next election.
He opens his article more generally, by stating that ‘it is fast becoming a political maxim that the more society talks about diversity, the less tolerant it becomes of difference’; that ‘the more our leaders talk about unity, the less they seem capable of bringing it about’; that ‘in his inaugural speech Joe Biden promised to unite his country’; but that ‘if his words are read closely and his first actions as president are examined, you will see confusion, contradiction and dogma which is likely to lead only to division’; that, ‘of course, absolute unity is impossible to achieve in any political system’; that ‘autocratic regimes intimidate and bully their citizens into conformity with the ideologies of their leaders and try to present an image of a united people’; but that ‘the whole point of liberal democracy is that it is supposed to tolerate difference and disagreement’; that ‘liberal democracies are built on the premise that human values and interests are unavoidably and perpetually in conflict with one another’; and that ‘the solution to these conflicts is not to grant total victory to one side or another, but to accept a system of government and civil society which allows pluralism to flourish within a common culture and single legal framework’. At this point, I repeat that this difference and disagreement is tolerated only because it will be re-presented, to some degree or other, by a change of government at the next election, despite this change doing nothing to reduce the underlying differences and disagreements, and nothing to ensure that resulting policies will deliver benefits in reality.
Indeed, Nick Timothy goes on to state that ‘precisely how this works differs from country to country’; but that experience teaches us that we need free and fair elections and checks and balances to protect minorities from a tyranny of the majority’; that ‘we need national and local institutions to help us mediate our differences, and a common culture and shared identity to allow us to recognise familiarity in strangers and to trust one another’; that ‘we need a sense of solidarity’ in order to come together in response to collective challenges such as wars, recessions, and disease’; that ‘our tolerance for difference should allow us to unite in ways necessary for a common life’; that ‘our unity in this respect should allow us to remain committed to pluralism, tolerance and moderation’; that ‘this is something Mr Biden seemed to acknowledge in his speech, when he said that “disagreement must not lead to disunion”’; but that ‘the president soon ran into trouble’ when ‘he was asking every American to join him in the fight against the common foes we face’; but that ‘in listing these foes – “anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence’ – he was partial’. At this point, I say of course he was partial. No political activist is impartial, and no-one ever advocates knowledge-only policies which would ‘eliminate internal disunity and reduce the prevalence of ‘wars, recessions and disease’.
However, as to partiality, Nick Timothy notes that ‘while Mr Biden condemned the mob which attacked the Capitol building, there was no condemnation for the Black Lives Matter riots of last summer’; that ‘while some felt anger and resentment which must be fought’ others ‘were simply demanding “justice for all”’ Again,, ‘the foes’ that Mr Biden did ‘treat as common enemies for all Americans were disease, joblessness and hopelessness’. However, Nick Timothy says that ‘the solutions to these problems have been conspicuous by their absence’; that ‘the economic pain behind the feeling of hopelessness in many states and communities is still neglected’; that ‘the pleasure with which Democrats refer to the prosperity of their voters compared to those of the Republicans is telling for what was once the party of the working class’. Thus, Nick Timothy says that ‘on cultural issues, Mr Biden’s invitation was to unite on his terms only’; that ‘Republican voters should hear me out as we move forward’ he said; that ‘if you still disagree, so be it; that’s democracy; that’s America’. However, Nick Timothy declares that ‘this is a strange definition of democracy’. In contrast, I say that it is no way to bring a country together; that nonetheless, in the current belief/counter-belief system, it is the only available way, despite its continuous failure, correctable only by replacing belief-only policies with knowledge-only alternatives.
Further to this ‘strangeness’. Nick Timothy states that ‘Mr Biden has signed an executive order liberalising the immigration laws paving the way for illegal immigrants to gain citizenship’; that ‘he has signed another asserting that transgender students should be free to use changing rooms and participate in school sports in accordance with the gender they choose’; that ‘he has promised to address overlapping forms of discrimination and highlighted in particular the struggles of black transgender Americans’; and that ‘with his programme of economic relief for firms affected by Covid-19, the president has promised that his “priority will be Black-, Latino- and Native-American small businesses and women-owned businesses”’. In these respects, Nick Timothy notes that ‘calling for unity while prioritising some identity groups and excluding others might seem discordant’; but that ‘militant identity politics is now central to the beliefs of the modern Left’; that ‘in his inauguration speech, Mr Biden made no reference to equality, but instead promised to address growing inequity’.
At this point, Nick Timothy states that ‘the pursuit of equity is very different from the pursuit of equality’; that ‘the equity now sought by the Left is between different identity groups, and in particular, those groups defined by race, sexuality and gender’; that ‘the critical theories which lie behind this selection, claim that privilege and power are determined by exploitative hierarchies kept in place by institutions and discourse which oppress disadvantaged groups’; that ‘tackling specific acts of racial discrimination or confronting long-lasting racial disparities is therefore insufficient for the proponents of these arguments’; and that ‘as Mr Biden asserted in another executive order, the problem is “systemic racism”’; that ‘the theory of systemic racism or structural racism as Sir Keir Starmer prefers to call it in Britain, alleges that minorities suffer cumulative and chronic disadvantage’; that ‘this disadvantage is caused by society as a whole discriminating against them and in favour of white people’; that ‘inevitably, the polices which follow such critical theories are discriminatory to white people, men, heterosexuals or anyone else supposedly complicit in systemic discrimination’; that ‘they ignore individuality and play down the significance of class and geography’; that ‘they are unavoidably destructive of traditions and institutions which sustain our shared identities and the feelings of trust and solidarity they make possible’; that ‘this is why the modern Left – in Britain as well as in America – cannot hope to overcome division’; that ‘the Left cannot be the unifiers they claim to be because they attack the nativist and populist Right they so despise, and as such are the very source of discord and will remain so as long as they retain their divisive dogma’.
Thus, we must conclude from the futility of the above argument, and from all other arguments which seek to establish the supremacy of belief over counter-belief or vice versa,that knowledge must replace belief, if agreement is ever to replace the disagreement of belief/counter-belief. 01/02/21.
Article 41The Misunderstood Nature Of Debate.
The first element of this website exemplified the need for future policy-making to be knowledge-only rather than belief-only; for policy-makers to recognise this knowledge if already available; and for them to acquire it if not yet available: while the second element analysed the articles of media commentators to demonstrate that even those who recognise that all is not well, do not know how to improve it other than by offering beliefs to replace counter-beliefs, or vice versa. However, this third section now shows by reference to further media articles that freedom of speech, rational debate and democratic elections will never sort anything out, so long as all that is spoken of, debated, and electively decided, is never more than this or that transient belief-consensus pending the resumption of the debate to yet another transient belief-consensus and so ad infinitum, there never having been any recognition of the need to recognise or acquire the conclusive knowledge which would terminate the otherwise interminable debate. Furthermore this third section shows that this endless appetite for debate is of longstanding permanence, having come down to current times from the ancient Greek philosophers via the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and in particular, via the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume and John Stuart Mill who continued to aver that a certain attitude of mind could produce conclusive knowledge without reference to cause-effect reality, though they ought to have recognised that it never had in the previous two thousand odd years, though Socrates had questioned this assumption, now nearly two and a half thousand years ago. However, I am sure he would have accepted my now definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy and with those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad.
To start the third section of this website, I have thus selected an article by Douglas Murray which appeared The Daily Telegraph of 22/01/21, entitled, ‘The liberal spirit is being lost to an unswerving demand for uniformity’. In his article he clarifies the meaning he attaches to ‘Liberal’ in the party-political sense, by stating that ‘it is many years since the Liberal Democrats have been either liberals or democrats’; but that ‘like other parties across the globe, the term “liberal” lingers like a memory of a nobler instinct’; that ‘in some countries it is attached to a party of the Left, sometimes to one of the Right’; that ‘in America this shape-shifter of a term, long ago became a synonym for “Leftie” and something not dissimilar has happened in Britain’; that ‘some years ago the broadcaster Andrew Marr admitted the BBC has a “liberal” bias’; that ‘he must have known he meant something quite different’; that “labour voting”, or even “statist” would be more accurate’; that if the BBC was stuffed with liberals, it wouldn’t be in the mess it is’; that ‘the true liberal was a deeply recognisable type’; that ‘the liberal mind – the person – was discernible across party-political boundaries; that ‘the tradition of David Hume and John Stuart Mill went deeper than day-to-day politics’; that ‘it was formed by a belief in individual freedom and a scepticism of authority’; that ‘it also produced an ideal: a certain type of enquiring mind which had a faith (I would say ‘belief’) in people as well as ideas (I would say ‘beliefs’, maybe ‘hypotheses’); that ‘it had confidence in the notion (belief) that open debate was necessary to establish the truth; and that ‘in fair battle between ideas that were bad and ideas which were good’; and that ‘bad ideas could not hope to win out’. He then concludes by asserting, how dead that instinct and the type of mind which had confidence in it, now seems’. At this point, I invite my readers to count the unwarranted assumptions on which Douglas Murray bases his analysis and his conclusions and to compare them with my analysis and my conclusions which are derived from my new differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy and with those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad by observation of compliance/non-compliance with cause-effect reality.
Nonetheless, Douglas Murray goes on to assert that ‘anyone doubting his analysis and conclusion should spend five minutes on any social media platform’ to see the glee with which users are willing to advocate toleration for me but not for thee’, to see ‘how they howl and scream when one of their heroes is barred from a platform like Twitter’, to see ‘how they crow and cluck with glee when one of their foes is barred’, to see ‘how eager they are to betray old hypocrisies on shiny new technologies’; that ‘meanwhile the overlords of these platforms are either crusading Left-wingers with a tenuous understanding of liberal thought or like Jack Dorsey of Twitter whose hand-wringing over the banning of Donald Trump from his platform, epitomised the corruption of contemporary liberalism’; that ‘an open internet and a “global public conversation” are our best way of achieving greater common human understanding, he conceded, except if you stray from the orthodoxy’. Again, Douglas Murray asserts that ‘there is no greater example of the disappearance of true liberalism as in the areas of our lives which have been changed most radically this past year by our enforced isolation in our homes’; that ‘at any previous stage in our British history such a move would have been almost unthinkable’; that ‘certainly the almost whole-scale obedience to it would have been un-imaginable’; that ‘as Lord Sumption has noted, in the past year the nation has undergone an invasion into our personal freedoms of a kind unprecedented throughout history’; that ‘you might be persuaded that this is necessary, but given the enormity of the cost of these economy-destroying and life-stifling efforts, a liberal mind would enquire whether they are appropriate’; that ‘it would not slavishly follow established authority’; that ‘it would not just do as it was told’; that ‘it would balance the justice of losing its freedoms against the necessity of controlling the virus which can kill certain groups’; but that ‘it would question whether it is right that our supposedly liberty-loving Government does not trust the law-abiding majority to act in the interests of themselves and others instead of denouncing them as irresponsible and relying on heavy-handed police enforcement and fines’; that ‘so few have asked these questions is indicative of how far our society has moved away from the philosophy of Mill and Hume’.
Thus, Douglas Murray goes on to state that ‘on both the Left and the Right, many evidently prize security, safety or fairness above anything’; that ‘our national broadcasters have failed to ask these questions is a scandal which explodes the myth that they are in any way liberal’; that ‘worse, the so-called liberals are complicit in another pernicious trend surrounding this debate’; that ‘an extra layer of authoritarianism is being laced over the top of these already arduous demands’; and that ‘the demand is for complete uniformity of opinion on lockdown’. He then asks, ‘why do those who ardently defend the policies of Government so fear the tiny number of figures who question the settled orthodoxy’? ‘Why do they heap abuse and put every death at the door of the few people who question any aspect of what we are doing’? He then concedes that ‘these are unusual times and extraordinary times call for unusual measures’; but that ‘we will always live in extraordinary times; that ‘what matters is the response you have to the times you find yourself in, and the principles you trust in to guide you’. He then asks ‘why has this age become so censorious’? He answers that ‘you could say it is because of the technology at our finger-tips, or because we have never seen anything like this pandemic’; but that ‘the truth is that it is these things plus one major shift’; that ‘this shift is not just the turning of the truth into relative concept, but the loss of that guiding liberal spirit which believed there was a way to get to that truth’; and that ‘open-minded, sceptical and brave disagreement was that way’; and that ‘our age seems to think that that belief was wrong: another thing to chalk up to its list of errors’.
I have analysed this article to illustrate the extent to which Douglas Murray misunderstands the nature of debate. He believes that rational minds such as those of Hume, Mill and himself, can conclusively set out the reasons why their beliefs are preferable to the beliefs of others with whom they disagree; that as an unavoidable consequence their listeners or readers will be persuaded to agree with them rather than with their debating opponents; that the debate will thus be terminated; and that the particular mind set of such as Hume, Mill and himself, if applied to all other debates of belief/counter-belief, these too will also be harmoniously resolved, despite such resolution never having been observed in reality. In contrast, I contend that such harmonious resolutions can only be achieved when belief/counter-belief debate is terminated by conclusive knowledge as advocated in this website. In my first year at the University of Glasgow, I considered joining the Debating Society in which such as Donald Dewer were leading lights. However, in listening to one debater quote an earlier MP as having said “On hearing what the honourable gentleman has to say, I can only conclude that the jawbone of an ass is not the weapon it was in Samson’s Day”. Though this quote was directed at a particular speaker in both cases, I concluded that it summarised my attitude to debate itself, and I decided to devote my spare time to competitive rowing which I had started in my schooldays. 30/01/20.
Article 40My Further Response To Toby Young’s Free Speech Union.
Having revealed in Article 39, the circularity of the Free Speech Union’s thus spurious attempt to argue the benefit of beliefs over their counter-beliefs or vice versa, I must now dispel any impression that yet another circularity is hidden in my claim that the imaginative beliefs stimulated by our sense-perception of reality are transformed to knowledge of reality by evaluation of its further experiential compliance with the reality which gave rise to the belief in the first place. I do this by emphasising that the knowledge attained, by this further compliance, is the cause-effect craft and self-knowledge of reality which ensured our group-species survival from time immemorial and the science, engineering and process technology which enhanced our welfare from the seventeenth century onwards; that this cause-effect knowledge is manifest in the causative action of tool-use and its observed effect on the work-piece; that this early craftsmanship led from time immemorial though the ages of stone, bronze and iron, to the present day; that the injunction to do unto others as you would have them do to you, codifies the cause-effect knowledge which harmonises our innate selfishness with our innate need for the cooperative social cohesion on which depends our survival as the group-species we are, and indeed the instinctive cause-effect knowledge which secures the survival of all other group-species; that in contrast, our search for knowledge through rationality alone, to the exclusion of any reference to reality, as per metaphysics, has produced precisely nothing of value; and that contending religious beliefs and counter-beliefs beyond resolution by reality-evaluation in principle, were resolved to belief-only orthodoxies by the belief-only Imperial Edicts of successive Roman Emperors.
Thus, my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation shows that both religious and secular beliefs touching on reality are resolvable to positive or negative knowledge only by my newly defined cause-effect validation or refutation by reality, initially by direct observation and later by the designed cause-effect experimentation which led to physicochemical science; that this experimentation enabled the believed (hypothetical) cause to produce the effect or not to produce it, e.g. to show that change in pressure would cause the effect of the change in the volume of a fixed mass of gas; that an apparatus was designed to enable changes in pressure to be applied to a mass of gas enclosed by an adjustable pressure-responsive boundary; to enable the changes in pressure to be applied and measured; to enable the changes in volume to be observed and measured; and to enable the relationship to be expressed as a mathematical equation which enables volumes to be calculated from known pressures and vice versa, ever after; that change in temperature was separately related to change in pressure at constant volume and to change in volume at constant pressure by suitably designed experimental apparatus; that the resulting equations involving pressure, volume and temperature have been known as Boyle’s and Charles’s Laws ever after with no intrusion of counter-belief; that their combined equation is similarly known as the Gas Law; and that science thus isolates the hypothetical cause from all other possible causes and observes changes in magnitude of effect with changes in the magnitude of the cause; that in contrast pseudoscience carries out no such isolation of cause from all other possible causes; that it simply correlates effect with believed cause without demonstrating that it is the cause, in contrast to science as exemplified by the foregoing pressure/volume/temperature experimentation.
Yet again, my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation shows how physicochemical cause-effect science transformed craftsmanship to engineering and process technology, and provided other sciences with deeper knowledge than the directly observable; that for example, it went on to explain the evolution of Universe, Earth and Life to the extent to which we now understand them within our innate capacity to imagine beliefs capable of reality-validation by designed cause-effect experimentation; that in contrast philosophy is pure belief in its reliance on rational thought to the exclusion of reality-evaluation by direct observation or designed experimentation; that the secular now implement arbitrary interpretations of belief in equality, freedom, rights, human relations, environmentalism, economics and much else to the extent of corrupting commonsense, general and specific knowledge and even the scientific method itself in ways never attempted by the religious; but that in contrast, it shows that knowledge can harmonise religion with secularism, environmentalism with industry, and economics with commonsense; and that disillusion with belief-only politics could become enthusiasm for its knowledge-only alternative to the benefit of all at home and abroad; and that the longstanding tendency to call the science of physics, ‘natural philosophy’, has been a misleading and inexcusable mistake.
Thus, my response to Toby Young’s attempt to counter the beliefs of the Woke, is to discern that the Woke can simply reply that they too are exercising the same freedom of speech as is advocated by his Union; and that those whom his Union and the Woke seek to recruit will also discern this circularity and continue to act according to their respective beliefs and counter-beliefs with no resolution either way; that were his case to be presented from the vantage point of my knowledge/belief differentiation, potential recruits would see that the knowledge-only side had an indisputable advantage over the belief-only side; that this advantage was first clarified in my print-on-demand Book, The Rational Trinity Imagination, Belief and Knowledge; that the intention of my registered company, Against Belief-Consensus Ltd (ABC for short) is to mount a public campaign for recognition of the need for politicians to replace belief with knowledge in their policy-formulations, there being no single knowledge-only political future; that the intention of this website, douglascormack.co.uk, is to be a reference point for all who wish to bring this Campaign to the attention of their parliamentary and local council representatives; that party-specific knowledge-only futures are not only possible, they would be compatible, so long as all of them have knowledge-only objectives and knowledge-only means of attaining these objectives, and so long as debates and elections themselves are aimed at cost/benefit choice from knowledge-only alternative policies and their knowledge-only means of achievement. However, were I to commend my newly definitive knowledge-only approach to a political party directly, my choice would be UKIP, because this party has a unique advantage over other parties, in that even if the others followed suit, they would be embarrassed by not having done so earlier, while UKIP as yet uncontaminated with belief-only governmental errors, would be making a unique start, in which I can show that Brexit itself was a knowledge-only alternative to the belief-only EU, while all other parties have treated Brexit/Remain as a belief/c
Article 39My Response To Toby Young’s Free Speech Union.
I commend this Union’s objective of driving the Woke from the contention-field but I do not share Toby Young’s confidence in attaining this objective by merely advocating free-speech, because the Woke’s beliefs are guaranteed the same freedom of speech as those of the Union which aims to suppress them. However, I have shown that this circularity of belief/counter-belief can be broken; and that belief and counter-belief can both be suppressed by debate-terminating conclusive knowledge, now that I have differentiated the knowledge/belief dichotomy for the first time ever. This I did because throughout my civil service career which extended from my recruitment grade of senior scientific officer and from my choice of employment at Warren Spring Laboratory (WSL) of the then DTI, through my successive promotions to the grade of chief scientific officer as director of WSL, and which had previously included seven years in a DTI policy division at the grade of senior principle scientific officer, I had become progressively aware of the need for such differentiation by observing that policy-formulating administrative grades, politicians, the public, and even my scientific colleagues were never consciously aware of its absence from time immemorial; that consequently politics has never been more than the implementation of belief or counter-belief whichever political party happened to be in power; that such belief-only policies have never delivered their objectives in reality, and never will, whichever belief-only political party implements them; that the debates of opinion/counter-opinion are merely debates of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence or news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; and that the outcome is never more than a transient belief-consensus pending resumption of the debate to yet another belief-consensus and so on ad infinitum.
With this need for knowledge/belief differentiation in mind, and having requested early retirement with the intention of becoming an independent knowledge-only industrial/environmental consultant, I concluded on further reflection, that reality stimulates our imaginations through our senses to rational beliefs as to the nature of the reality in which we exist; that these beliefs are transformable to positive or negative knowledge by further experiential evaluation of their compliance or non-compliance with this reality, or to those which can only be accepted, rejected or suspended as beliefs beyond this reality-evaluation in pro tem practice or in principle, but which can not to be accepted as knowledge. Thus, having already written one book at the invitation of Elsevier on the knowledge already acquired by WSL through its application of the scientific method of experimentation (further reality-evaluation of beliefs as hypotheses), and which ought to have been seen to reality-refute at least some environmentalist beliefs, and having subsequently updated that book at the invitation of Kluwer Academic which meanwhile had acquired Elsevier’s business-interest in industrial impact/non-impact on the environment. However, when these books did not dispel environmentalist beliefs in any observable way, I wrote a third book which definitively differentiated the knowledge/belief dichotomy for the first time ever, and with it those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad, which I chose to publish on the basis of print-on-demand. However, with no publisher-publicity of this third book’s existence, there was no significant demand, though it is available from Amazon and book shops on request. It is entitled, The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge.
On the basis of my then newly definitive reality-evaluation of belief to positive or negative knowledge (compliance or non-compliance with reality), my third book demonstrated how this reality-evaluation of specific beliefs, as hypotheses, produced the cause-effect craft- and self-knowledge which secured our group-species survival from time immemorial, and the cause/effect science, engineering, and process technology which enhanced our welfare from the seventeenth century onwards to the present day and how this reality-validated knowledge-only element of our social cohesion was meanwhile variously disrupted by religious beliefs in the Beyond, (beyond reality-evaluation in principle), by knowledge-rejecting secular beliefs, and/or by the reactions of ignored reality in ways which belief cannot anticipate or avert. Thus, having achieved this newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation, I now seek to ensure that secular beliefs, whether previously implemented or not, will now be reality-validated to positive knowledge or reality-refuted to negative knowledge for implementation of the former and rejection of the latter; that acceptance of the latter will be seen to lead nowhere other than to belief-driven violence, revolution, and war; and to ensure that such beliefs can be seen to corrupt economic, behavioural, and environmental sciences to the pseudo-science now responsible for deteriorating personal behaviour, diminishing social cohesion, recurring financial crises, and un-certainty of material and energy supply by diverting resources from real to unreal problems.
Thus, my newly definitive reality-evaluation of belief to positive or negative knowledge, can now enable the voting public to conclude that our current maladies can be rectified only by a ubiquitous recognition that knowledge-only policies conducive to our group-species survival and to our social and physical welfare can now be recognised as right and good; that their counter-beliefs can now be recognised as wrong and bad; that political manifestos can now start to prioritise knowledge-only policy options; that the public can now start to recognise any belief-only policies as arising from a pro tem absence of knowledge; that this Change can render continuous our otherwise disrupted progress; that consequently my newly definitive reality-evaluation not only differentiates the knowledge/belief dichotomy, but also those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad; that the debate of opinion/counter-opinion is merely the debate of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence, and news/false-news, no set of which is debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that debate produces nothing more than one or other transient belief-consensus pending the resumption of the debate to yet another transient belief-consensus, and so on, ad infinitum; that consequently freedom of speech can produce nothing useful, when all that is spoken of is belief and counter-belief; and that the time saved by terminating all such debate could be spent in replacing belief with knowledge in policy areas where it is already available but ignored, and in acquiring knowledge where it is needed but not yet available. 15/01/2021.
Article 38Why Did We Not Leave The EU Long Since?
With four and a half years having elapsed since the referendum-vote to leave the EU, our parliamentary representatives continued to discuss the terms on which we would actually leave, (c.f. date below). At this point, I ask why did none of them nor any media commentator ever ask for a specification of what is being discussed, why it was being discussed, and to what specific ends? As I have said before in this website, even those parliamentarians who describe themselves as leavers justify themselves by referring to the referendum result without openly endorsing it by citing the failings of the EU, while those who wish to remain within the EU openly campaigned for a second referendum to overturn first. Indeed, even after a general election returned a majority government ostensibly on the leaver side, it continued to negotiate the terms under which we would leave, while true leavers expected us to have left, long ago under WTO terms. I ask, why does no-one explain this extension of negotiation?
My explanation is that under the influence of Mrs May as prime minister, the majority of conservative MPs wished to remain in the EU, while EU itself was naturally opposed to letting us leave; that accordingly, the EU would only agree to us leaving under terms and conditions which would be as close to remaining as possible; and that if this were achieved under Mrs May, and under the prevailing sentiments of the various parties in the House, there was a fair possibility of a withdrawal of the wish to leave by retracting our formal notification of intention to do so; that after Boris Johnson’s election victory the EU must have judged the possibility of remaining to have been reduced, though even he was willing to resume negotiation of the terms for leaving; that consequently he was not for leaving on WTO terms; and that the EU thus saw an opportunity of achieving terms and conditions of leaving which would be as close to remaining as to make no difference, and even to open the possibility of our actual remaining. This explanation is thus consistent with the notion that whatever aims Boris Johnson had in mind, the EU firmly intended to make leaving as close to remaining as possible.
Thus, with talks being extended yet again, Nick Timothy, whom I took to be a leaver, revealed himself as one who wants to minimise the (negative) effects of leaving rather than as one wanting to maximise the positive effects thereof, and as such is effectively a remainer, as he revealed in a Daily Telegraph article of 14/12/20, entitled ‘A deal is likely, but Britain and the EU must learn to trust again’ and subtitled ‘Whether the British are slow learners or the EU moved the goal posts, the rancour has got to end now’. Thus, he states that ‘despite the Prime Minister talking up “no deal”, a possible landing zone is beginning to emerge’; that ‘Britain should be free to diverge from the EU’; but that ‘if the divergence causes demonstrable harm to its member states, the EU would have the right to take response action on the UK’. But, I say that this is an unacceptable landing zone for a leaver, unless the referenced-response is to be taken by the EU on itself, and not on a sovereign UK; and that it would be inappropriate in any separation agreement under which both the UK and the EU were to proceed as separate sovereignties. However, Nick Timothy claims that ‘the benefit to the UK of such an agreed freedom of action by the EU on the UK would enable the EU to back down on its the so-called ratchet clauses which are currently intended to force Britain to match all EU regulations now and in future, whenever and wherever these UK initiated changes were deemed by the EU to hurt its economy’; and that ‘this would be a good result for our Prime Minister’. But I say, it would be bad for him by not being Brexit.
Again, despite this “remainer” concession, Nick Timothy goes on to say ‘with apologies to those exhausted by the past four years’ that ‘it will not mark the end of the story, for uncertainty will be baked into the new relationship’; that this should not be a surprise’; that ‘agreements last as long as the contracting parties want them’; that ‘even with established trading frameworks, such as the agreement between the EU and Switzerland, disputes with one side threatening retaliation against the other for apparent transgressions’; that ‘this is why the detail of any agreement – principles setting out the circumstances in which retaliation may occur, the process, proportionality, parity between the two sides, the independence of any arbitration and enforcement mechanisms and so on – are vital’; but that ‘this is also true of trust, and of a recognition that despite Britain choosing to leave the laws and institutions of the European Union, we should remain friends and allies sharing history, values and interests’; that ‘the process of negotiating in an adversarial situation with no shortage of emotion on both sides, has undermined this sense of friendship, but it will need to be restored’; and that ‘even if we end up with a deal, it will take time and effort to put the pieces back together’. But, I say all of the foregoing is beside the point, given that we have a national majority for leaving the institutions of the EU and for trading with it as an independent sovereign state on WTO terms.
The remainder of Nick Timothy’s article offers reasons for the mistrust which he alleges the EU has of the intentions and actions of the UK, while for balance he also offers reasons for the intentions and actions of the EU, in the belief/counter-belief manner of all past and current media commentators. However, I say that the preceding four and a half years is understandable only on our knowledge that the UK wants to leave on the votes of a referendum and of the last general election and to continue to trade with the EU on WTO terms or on terms such as we could agree with any other sovereign state; on our knowledge that the EU does not want us to leave at all; and on the knowledge that if we do leave it will not be on terms which enable the EU to control our internal management as closely as possible to that which EU membership currently enables them to do, and which would enable them to do in future as the EU itself develops its future control of members beyond their trading relationships and into their internal managements in the way that sovereign democratic states do now, on this or that internally elective belief-consensus.
When EU membership was first mooted, my attitude was, if we cannot improve our own internal management as an independent state, we would be even less able to do so when subordinated as a single member of a United Europe. Again, when my then MP revealed himself to be a leaver, I wrote to him suggesting that when we left we should base our policies on knowledge rather than on this or that belief-consensus, otherwise we would come out as we went in, and continue as ineffectually as before we went in and as we did while we were in. He responded with a copy of a paper he had recently presented to All Souls which argued that leaving the EU on WTO terms would be a dawdle, but he did not respond to my proposal to use my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation to ensure that available knowledge would replace belief in future policy-making by a newly independent UK, freedom of speech being of little or no value, if all that is thus debated is belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge, instead of debating the relative benefits of knowledge-only alternative policies either of which will work in reality if implemented, while recognising that belief-only alternatives never work in reality whichever is implemented. 17/12/20.
Article 37What Now With Brexit?
In an article in the Daily Telegraph of7/12/20,entitled ‘Leavers have won, but can our politicians lead us to prosperity?’: and sub-titled ‘Britain will soon be free of the EU, but if Brexit is to be a success we must rethink the way we run things’, Nick Timothy observes that ‘as the year ends, the last vestiges of Britain’s membership of the European Union end with it’; that ‘deal or no deal, the Brexit transition will soon be over, and Britain will be fully outside the EU, its institutions and laws’; that ‘anxious Leavers, disbelieving that Brexit really means Brexit, need only look to leading Remainers to understand that their victory is complete’; that those who spent the last four and a half years fighting to overturn the referendum, or make Britain a prisoner to European law, are fighting like ferrets in a sack’; that ‘as the Brexit negotiations reach their final stages, Rory Stewart is lambasting former allies for failing to vote for a customs union, while Anna Soubry lashes back’; that ‘already forgotten MEPs tweet furiously, mocking the very notion of sovereignty and attacking what they still erroneously call a “Hard Brexit”’; that ‘as they do so, the mask slips’; that ‘Matthew Paris has admitted that Remainers harbour “guilty half-thoughts of economic disaster and a gratifying opportunity for chorusing “we told you so”’; and that ‘despite spending years denying they were trying to stop Brexit itself, Peter Mandelson has casually confessed that Remainers were “trying to reverse the referendum decision rather than to achieve the least damaging form of Brexit”’.
Nick Timothy goes on to observe that ‘the lies and hypocrisies are not limited to Britain of course’; that ‘throughout Theresa May’s premiership, Michel Barnier, the EU chief negotiator, said that Britain’s so-called red lines meant it could have only a Canada-style trade deal, only to renege when Boris Johnson said Canada was what he wanted’; that ‘France has insisted it wants a Brexit deal, but not if it loses certain fishing rights and so is willing to bring about no deal, in which it would lose all fishing rights’; that ‘the European Union itself has spent several years arrogantly asserting that Britain would suffer great economic pain if it left the single market and customs union’; that ‘it has also fought hard to the very end to limit the extent to which Britain can diverge from its regulations because it fears that outside the EU we will gain a competitive advantage’; and that ‘as Angela Merkel once said, “with the departure of Great Britain, a potential competitor will emerge for us”’; He then concludes that ‘indeed we must depart’; that ‘much of the logic behind Brexit for many Leavers was about democracy and sovereignty, a belief that EU membership was fundamentally incompatible with parliamentary democracy and national self-determination’; but that ‘of course leaving the EU radically changes our economic reality’; that we are leaving a self-regulatory superpower which governs a market of almost 450 million people and is a powerful trading negotiator’; that ‘if we go on with our existing economic model, but with more friction in our trade with the Continent, the Remainers will be right: we will end up slightly poorer than had we stayed in after all’; and that ‘Brexit means we (will) need to do things differently’. I have italicised “a belief” as used above, for I would have used “the knowledge”. (c.f. my concluding paragraph).
However, Nick Timothy does go on to ask, ‘do we have a political culture mature enough to live up to this monumentally important mission?’ He answers that ‘we need our political leaders and the state itself to become more competent, strategic, long-term, and focussed on the issues that will make Britain more prosperous, resilient, globally relevant and secure in the years ahead’; that ‘in leaving the EU, we are swapping scale for agility, and uniformity for innovation’; but he also asks’ ‘how can we turn these principles into reality?’ He thus goes on to suggest that ‘one way is to become a first-mover and world leader in the regulation of new and high-growth industries’; that ‘while the EU tends to move slowly on questions of regulation, and its decisions often reflect the interest of established firms, Britain can be faster out of the blocks’; that ‘on artificial intelligence, automated vehicles, life sciences’ and many other sectors of the future, Britain can develop a new and more agile model of regulation and attract investment and a global expertise by getting ahead of cumbersome competitors, like the EU, and reluctant regulators, like the United States’. Further to this line of hopeful expectation, he adds that ‘another example is that of international trade policy’; that much is made of the EU’s size when it negotiates trade deals with third counties’; but that ‘the flip side for member states is that their specific needs come far down the priority list, or just as bad, that the interests of other member states are difficult or not possible to agree with certain markets’; that Britain’s newly independent trade policy can mean deals are tailored to our own economic priorities’; and that ‘a confident Britain can breathe new life into a struggling international trading system’.
He goes on to assert that ‘on industrial strategy and regional growth, Brexit offers other opportunities’; that ‘freedom from EU regulations will allow for innovative new policies like free ports – an idea close to the heart of Rishi Sunak – more effective procurement policies and more interventionist consumer policies and industrial strategies’; that ‘the replacement of EU structural fund payments which are difficult to coordinate across different communities, hard to access, and too bureaucratic, is another opportunity’ that ‘if the Government gets its successor scheme right, and works with the devolved governments, metro mayors and local councils, it could direct billions of pounds into better regional development, creating jobs and increasing pay beyond the South East’; that there are, of course, many other changes from infrastructure investment to technical education and training that can and should be made’; that ‘the mission for ministers is to completely re-imagine the way we run our economy’; but that ‘with a chaotic model of partial devolution, a still over-centralised state, a Civil Service more determined to protect its privileges than to professionalise itself, a House of Commons too often resembling a council chamber or student debating hall, and a House of Lords stuffed full of cronies, we will need to reform the state just as we reform the economy’; and that ‘herein lies our national challenge’; that ‘ get Brexit done might have been the slogan, but the truth is that Brexit is only about to begin’; that ‘the test of success will be in the years and decades to come’; that ‘if we want to succeed, it is time to get serious’; that ‘with independence comes responsibility’; and that ‘the infantilism of our politics must end’.
My writing the above transcription of Nick Timothy’s article gave me enormous satisfaction. I could not have produced such a comprehensive summary of what is wrong and needs to be corrected. However, I say that as with all other such commentators, he does not specify how these corrections are to be achieved; other than by implying that substitution of successful policies for the currently unsuccessful versions is difficult because politics itself, since time immemorial, has never been anything other than political; but I also say that politics has never been more than the implementation of a series of one or other belief-consensual policies arrived at by the debate of opinion/counter-opinion which themselves are merely beliefs/counter-beliefs respectively supported by partially selected facts/ counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/or news/false news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that this why I undertook the task of definitively differentiating the knowledge/belief dichotomy, and with it those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad; and why, after the referendum result had been announced, I proposed to my then MP (now in the House of Lords) that Brexit would provide an opportunity to replace beliefs which don’t work in reality with knowledge which would thus work; that belief-alone had taken us in; and that leaving would be futile, if belief-consensual policies continued after we left. In reply he sent me a paper he had recently presented to All Souls, Oxford, in which he claimed that ‘replacing the EU with WTO would be a dawdle’, but he didn’t respond to my proposal that knowledge should replace belief in all future policy-making or to hold fire until the missing knowledge had been acquired; and that given this deficient response, I have created this website to acquire the support of the voting public for this long overdue replacement in all future party-specific political policy-making, wherever and whenever the appropriate knowledge is available and otherwise to wait until such knowledge is acquired. 9/12/20.
Article 36Yet Further Media Recognition Of The Need For Change.
Formerly, I noticed that media commentators write in favour of one side of any debate or argument, and refer to the other side only to oppose it; and that they thus treat all issues as subjects for on-going debate of opinion/counter-opinion which I have shown to be the debate of belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence or news/false-news, no set of which is debate-terminating conclusive knowledge. However, in contrast, I have recently noticed that some such commentators are beginning to recognise the need for a more fundamental change, though they do not specify its nature: they merely imply that it should be the opposite of the situation they are deploring, though again they do not specify the means by which this un-specified change is to be delivered’ (c.f. Articles 34 and 35); and that ‘another example of this recognition of the need for change, without specifying the means of its achievement, has been provided by Sherelle Jacobs in a Daily Telegraph article of 3/12/20, entitled ‘Conservatives haven’t a clue about radical feminism.’ and subtitled ‘From Eton to universities, it’s vital to defend free speech, but the Right also needs to win the argument’, though, again, she does not specify the means by which such arguments are to be won.
She begins by stating that ‘you couldn’t find a more damning symbol of the reality that the Right has lost the argument, than that a master at that bastion of male debating prowess, Eton, has been derided and pitied as a free speech martyr’; that ‘the story of Will Knowland – dismissed for refusing to take down a You Tube video in which he challenges radical feminism – has it all’; that ‘the woke hauteur of the headmaster, the “Trendy Hendy”, has us salivating with outrage’; that ‘the revelation that the factual difference between men and women is now deemed controversial opinion chills us to the bones’; that ‘the tale still hits on something else disturbing’; that ‘the centre-Right has become incapable of winning intellectual disputes’; that ‘the Mr. Knowlands of this world of reasonable – if not flawless – intelligence, are elbowed out of respectable society as swivel-eyed loons’; that meanwhile, ‘proponents of “Marxapocalyptic” pap have gone mainstream as reasoned centrists;’ that ‘our only defence against this double standard seems to be pieties about the need to defend the maiden of free speech’; that ‘this, with the fidgety disclaimer that we might not always agree with her (ibid) dodgier claims – for example, Mr Knowlands suggestion that men are more vulnerable than women to rape – but that we defend her (ibid) inalienable right to make them’; that ‘the uneasy truth is that, at some point, the Right stopped being a challenge to the Left and faded into a force worthy only of its contempt’; that ‘the Left pulled this off by ensuring that arguments are evaluated not by their veracity, but by their implications’; that ‘in the Left’s long march through the institutions over the past 70 years, academic inquiry has become drastically utilitarian’; that ‘the reputable scholar has morphed from the objective interrogator of evidence into an activist devoted to dismantling patriarchal capitalism’; that ‘free speech – with its potential to challenge the moral supremacy of this new orthodoxy- has become undesirable’; but that ‘Society cannot be indiscriminate in its tolerance of speech, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake, as Herbert Marcuse railed’; and that ‘the modern, educated mind, in all its pompous rationalism, nodded sagely’. Here, I would ask Sherelle Jacobs how she establishes “veracity” and how she defines “utilitarian”.
However, she thus continues, that ‘the Will Knowlands are vilified, not because their views are wrong, but because they are considered revolting’; that ‘this is the secret to the Left’s success’; that ‘this is why academics don’t dare point out the holes in the concept of patriarchy’; that ‘it is also why scientists who undermine pro-lockdown modelling have been rejected by leading journals on the basis that their maths is dangerous rather than wrong’; that ‘it is not enough to say that our opponents’ views are technically incorrect, when their response is that our propositions are immoral’; and that ‘perhaps, we need to beat the left at their own game’; that ‘we need to prove their views are harmful’. Reverting to radical feminism, she claims that ‘if we are too careful, we will soon live in a world where manly rushes of adrenalin are considered as biologically shameful as menstruation, where boys are inculcated to believe that they are despicable and expendable, and where more will surely then behave as if they are’; and that ‘society will have more psychopaths and absent fathers’; that ‘radical feminists will welcome the latter’; and that ‘they wish to smash the nuclear family as the foundation of patriarchy’.
Thus, she states that ‘the most dangerous tenet of radical feminism is that man is a destructive force that will annihilate the world unless his aggressive, completive spirit can be de-programmed’; that ‘by the way, this apocalyptic view of history has hung like a millstone around the neck of Western thinking since we stole it from the Zoroastrian Manichaeans’; that ‘when Extinction Rebellion prophesises lakes of fire lit by man’s abominations, they preach from the Book of Revelation’; and that ‘this is the only section of the Bible that has survived the proto-Marxist secular era, passed down through Engels who lusted over it with a passion’.
Thus, Sherelle Jacobs recounts some experts who say that ‘what makes men – and women human, is not our wanton destruction’ but our unique talent for, and cognitive pleasure derived from, problem solving – from making stone-age tools and finishing crosswords, to tacking climate change, to inventing vaccines from biological quirks, like our astonishing hands evolved from primates which pre-dispose us to adapt to obstacles’; that ‘as the world becomes more complex we should thus be trying to grasp the various strengths and weaknesses of the sexes for solving super massive crises – and not delighting in self-fulfilling prophesy of our own extinction, and lambasting maleness’; that ‘perhaps women are not pulling their weight in mathematics and science because, socially conditioned to feign perfection and biologically wired to protect rather than to explore, women live in terror of failure’; that ‘it is time to move out of their comfort zone of softer subjects where there isn’t a wrong answer’; that ‘perhaps the most dangerous male flaw in this era of complex risk’ is not aggression, but a tendency to tunnel vision – bound up partly in man’s hunting instinct and partly in the archetype of the decisive male leader’; that ‘maybe society suffers not from toxic masculinity, but a toxic modernity that combines the worst flaws in the sexes: excessive risk aversion and one-dimensional thinking’; that ‘Will Knowland is right’; that ‘the radical feminists in all their prejudice and pessimism, have got it wrong’; but that ‘their attempt at factual takedown does not get at just how wrong they are’; and that ‘it is not the truth – but our very survival – that we are arguing for’. At this point, I ask how does she differentiate right from wrong and truth from falsehood?
Thus, I say again, as I have done throughout this website, that Sherelle Jacobs remains trapped in the ubiquitous debate of opinion/counter-opinion which is never more than the debate of belief/counter-belief, respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/ or news/false-news, no set of which ever amounts to debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that only when beliefs are recognised as hypotheses for evaluation of their compatibility or non-compatibility with the reality in which we exist and have our being, do they become positive or negative knowledge respectively; that this evaluation of their cause-effect relationship with reality provides us with our only means of converting beliefs to positive knowledge (validation of belief) or to negative knowledge (refutation of belief); that the source of craftsmanship is always reality as observed by tool- cause and tool-effect on the work-piece, and that science is always the experimentation designed and constructed to isolate the believed (hypothetical) cause of the effect observed in reality from all other possible causes by such experimentation by which he/she observes the effect or not, and thus confirms the hypothetical cause’ or chooses another hypothetical cause to be thus evaluated, until one is validated by causing the effect; that when the cause/effect relationship is thus validated by relating measured cause to measured effect, the scientist derives a mathematical equation by which the magnitude of effects can be calculated from the magnitude of the corresponding cause and vice versa,ever after; and that such experimentation is not utilised when effects are simply correlated with believed causes in what I thus define as pseudoscience, as exemplified at present by the belief in humanity being the sole cause of the global-warming effect, the hypothetical cause, having not yet been recognised by its believers to be in need of the reality-evaluation of cause/effect on which science is unerringly based.
Again, I say that the message of this website is that knowledge is non-acquirable by rational thought in the absence of reality-evaluation; that debate produces only a transient belief-consensus pending resumption of the debate; and that I am astounded that the belief in knowledge being produced by rational debate has survived to the present day, given that it was first doubted by Socrates some two and a half thousand years ago. Yet again, I say that the feminist-/patriarchy-debate can be terminated by the knowledge of reality that male and female are complementary rather than equal in all mammal species; and that all such species avoid self-destruction, only because enough of their individuals (both male and female) naturally abide by the injunction to do unto others as you would have them do to you, this being a summary of the reality-validated knowledge which harmonises our innate selfishness with our innate need for the hierarchical/cooperative social cohesion on which our species survival depends. 7/12/20.