Category: Disaster planning

Disaster planning – 1

An election a little over a year away, and if the polls hold out, the lunatics will indeed be taking over the asylum. Conservatives in Parliament need to work fast on that assumption. Business owners too need to protect themselves against what is coming.

This will be a continuing series of thoughts.

Parliament must start, hurriedly, making laws for the good of the nation not the party, on the assumption that Labour will be in power soon with a large majority, their benches filled with haters, antisemites and fruitcakes of all descriptions, as the Labour benches are at present. This puts two things in mid at once: take powers out of the hands of government ministers, and make laws in a libertarian frame, so that when Keir, Angela and Diane want to make tyrannical rules, they must explicitly change to law against personal and commercial freedom.

For one things, Conservatives have always played with a straight bat, and Labour do not. They are rarely in power, and will use all the powers of the state to cling on in power when finally they get there: the tone of loathing from their MPs is a clear signal that the expression of Tory opinions will be choked off as hard as they can. Even during the thirteen years of Conservative-led government, the socialists have been outraged whenever anyone of conservative views has been appointed to a proment post and have chased several worthy men and women from their posts by slander and confected rage: imagine how they will be when they actually have formal power, with lawful authority, indeed duty, to hire and to fire.

Most voters oppose the Labour line on social issues, and will be outraged when they start to do what they have promised, but those sane voters will vote Labour in because there is no alternative to get rid of the Tories with who they have grown frustrated. Therefore, things must be prepared so that the dissonance between Labour views and normal people’s understanding of the world is obvious.

One prominent target is the Online Harms Bill. There is a need for something to try to curb social media bullying of vulnerable children (which is to say all children), but it can be a Trojan Horse. Labour spokesmen have said explicitly that they want to ban all expressions they disagree with, and that they would write into the Bill the outlawing of anything they deem offensive, and we have seen what that means in the way they treat even their own MPs.  If therefore the Bill leaves an open door, allowing minsters to lay down codes of what is and is not acceptable, Labour ministers will kick that door open. All  that they would rather not be said will be muzzled tight.

Outside Parliament, action can be taken to protect the free flow of information and debate: a web provider can move operations abroad: we have tax havens, so can we have free speech havens? It is not just the online world that is  affected: publishers of books and magazines may need to move abroad.

Going back to Parliament, the Great Repeal being applied to Brussels laws can spur a review of all those open doors left on the domestic statute book. As the repeal of Brussels rules needs a more efficient approach, apply the same to those British laws which Labour will use and abuse to their ends.

Above all, Conservatives are meant to care for the welfare of the nation, whether in office or out.  That means trying to moderate or slow down Labour’s ability to wreck all that is good.

Certainly a Labour-dominated House of Commons can do what it likes to make new, damaging laws, but Conservatives, in what may be the last months, should not make it easy for them: force Labour (if they get in) to change things openly and explicitly, where they can be exposed for what they are doing (if media channels are still allowed to be free to expose them).

See also

Books