A cat and a red herring

“She played me false
Though she called me ‘honey’
My love was a misty waltz —
Her romance was with money...”
From Song of the Elderly Millionaire by Bachchoo
In September, known as the “silly season” in Britain as Parliament is in recess, bankers are on yachts, readers are plied with the happenings in soap operas and petty scandals concerning their actors off-screen, and the political parties hold their annual conferences.

These are rallies of the faithful, funded mostly by finance institutions lobbying the government and even the Opposition to influence policy. Conferences, apart from riots and sudden sunny spells, are the only news.
They are rarely used for dynamic policy announcements. Nick Clegg of the Lib-Dems, the junior party in the coalition government, used his platform to say how different he and his merry men are from the majority Tories. He and the other Lib-Dems in government chalked up their achievements, mostly in terms of how they had obstructed the more ruthlessly free-market policies favoured by the Tory Right.
His conference celebrated the statement of Nadine Dorries, a Tory MP who stood up in Parliament and accused David Cameron, her Prime Minister, of being led by the minority partner. She said the tail was wagging the dog and she was heartily toasted for it at the tail’s conference.
The Labour Party conference threw up the idea that there were two sorts of capitalism: the good sort and the predatory sort, declaring that when they were re-elected they would regulate the nasty one. No dogs and tails, but the three little pigs declaring war on the big bad wolf for eating their porridge without permission. (Have I got my fairy tales mixed up? — fd. Yes! Take a cut in pay — Ed.)
At the Tory conference, the only difference of opinion or breach in the ranks was over a cat — or the mention of a cat. Home secretary Theresa May pledged to the gathered Conservatives that the government would seek to revise or abolish the Human Rights Act 1998, which the British Parliament passed at the behest or diktat of the European Union which had asked all member governments to comply, through appropriate national legislation, with its European Convention on Human Rights.
Mrs May said it had given rise to absurdities in the law. She cited cases in which criminals who were not British citizens couldn’t be deported to their native countries because British judges had ruled that their human rights would be violated by such rendition. The extreme case she quoted was that of a criminal convicted of a serious crime who couldn’t be deported because he had a pet cat who would be deprived of his care.
Her Tory colleague and justice secretary, the veteran Kenneth Clark, told TV reporters immediately after her speech that she was talking rot. He is indeed responsible for the executive’s dealings with the judiciary and he said no judge had ever denied a deportation order because of the care of a cat. He challenged Mrs May to provide the evidence.
It was subsequently discovered that Mr Clark was right and that Mrs May had deliberately stretched her information even though in her speech she preceded the story with “...and I am not making this up...” or words to that effect.
The truth is that Mr Clark is a pro-Europe Tory and Mrs May is what they call a Euro-sceptic, as are the majority of the members of her party. The ministerial bench speaking at the conference to the faithful, in the hall and out in the country, feel obliged to make anti-European noises.
The truth is that today Europe and membership of the European Union should be as central to British political debate as corruption is to the Indian one. But for any governing party, especially one which governs with the help of the Liberal Democrats who are very pro-Europe, this is dangerous territory. The most vociferous demand from the Tory rank and file is for a nationwide referendum on withdrawing from membership of the European Union. From the opinion polls it is evident that, regardless of party allegiance, such a referendum would result in a vote to withdraw.
This would be one of the pitfalls of democracy because such a vote would not and could not be perfectly informed about the consequence of Britain’s withdrawal. In fact, any informed opinion knows that it can’t be done without disastrous effect on Britain’s economy and markets.
Britain, though in the Union, is not a member of the Eurozone and retains Sterling as its currency. Even so, if the countries of the Eurozone such as Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy renege on the debts they owe their own and international banks, it will not only affect the Eurozone but will certainly drag Britain into the maelstrom.
George Osborne, the Tory Chancellor, said as much when he talked about the interdependence of the world’s banks and the fact that British banks would go down with the rest in a universal crash.
Acknowledging this and harping on it in very clear terms would stimulate a public demand for very severe regulation of the banks, which is something the Tories and their capitalist and usurer sponsors don’t want to contemplate or debate.
Hence the red herring of the cat. Which cat won’t remain a red herring. There is one clause of the Human Rights Act, Clause 8, which ensures the “right to family life”. This has been used — and I am not making this up — to allow offenders, known terrorists etc. who are not citizens to stay in the country because they have a wife and family here and deporting them would violate the protection this clause affords.
The Tories will, through the agency of the home secretary Mrs May, seek to amend this clause and use the amendment as the banner behind which they rally their anti-European troops. That’ll go some way, but will it bell the cat?