Well Done David Davis (2)

David Davis has won his by-election, albeit on the basis of a 34% turnout. Parties representing more or less of the government line (when Labour refused to stand a candidate) were beaten into the margins.

This country's political culture bears every appearance of being diseased. Things will not be solved by written constitutions, or new electoral systems, or codes of conduct, or the rule of lawyers.

A political system reflects the culture of the groups who operate and sustain it, and they in turn are produced, suffered, or sustained by the society which throws them up.

This is a country where the university-based secular classes have systematically used the language of equality and non discrimination to squeeze anything not connected with their civic religion of the state out or nearly out of life.

In the name of liberation, they have destroyed, systematically, manners, discretion, and decent behaviour, and they have frequently done it by a mad combination of populist appeals to fear or envy and the theft of the dignity of movements like that for Civil Rights in the United States or Human rights and democracy in Africa.

They have been aided and abetted by a powerful and acidic individualism which brooks little compromise and which is deeply connected to the wasteful use of cheap oil, and to globalised methods of production which flow from it.

This individualism, which is exhilarating and addictive, is a form of narcississm deeply hostile to community, coexistence, or pluralism. Its proper expression is a kind of radical liberalism tinged with the progressive prejudices of civic religion.

To disagree with these people, and their often illiterate or half-formed prejudices, is to run into professional or employment roadblocks, if one is not self employed (which I am).

It is also to be accused of 'mental illness' by halfwits who are themselves characterised by cognitive dissonance and delusion, but who have half-mastered the shifting language of cognitive and behavioural psychology to exclude others.

Secularism and agnosticism have their place in a civilised society; mindless hostility to decent religion, measured by outcome, the effect on community, and the warp and woof of its logic about human nature, is simply vulgar stupidity.

So it is pleasing to me, and I write personally, when someone takes a stand against the whole culture of self-righteousness, badness, the ideology of surveillance, and the populism of gangster behaviours like torture and psuedo-trials with anonymous witnesses, restricted defence counsel, and underfunded courts, should anyone make it to charge and trial at all. Such behaviours belong to the Richardson gang more than to the best ideals of common law justice.

He may well get called an idiot for it, and the westminster village and its myrmidons, stooges and flatterers may well have turned from laughter to outrage to contempt at his romantic appeal to validate him ; his opponents may well have chosen to hide in the shadows and mutter about him rather than to fight ; but I find myself in the odd position this morning of congratulating a Tory.

Well done, David Davis. That gesture of yours will be remembered when all these ridiculous detractors have departed to the shame that proper historians are going to heap on them.