Tag Archives: Brexit

Liam Halligan loses a slice

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In March, 2018, nearly two years after the British people had handed their government their instruction to leave the EU, we still had not done so.

(Today more than two years after that, we still have not done so, though just over a week ago at the end of June we passed the deadline after which another extension of the transition may not be granted. Now, the rules state that on 31 December we leave – for better or worse – with whatever deal has been agreed, or without one. Back to 28 March 2018 …)

The Bruges Group held a conference, entitled Clean Brexit in Princess Alexandra Hall in London. One of the speakers was Liam Halligan.

If you clicked the link that I customarily attach to the speaker’s name, you will see that Halligan is a distinguished columnist and broadcaster. To most, that combination would guarantee that he crafts good arguments and can convey them to an auditorium. By no means is this necessarily true: broadcasting and public speaking are enormously different.

You need only glance at the still picture above to see that Halligan is reading his speech. Therefore before we hear a word we know that the speech is not as good as it could or should be. His website tells us he speaks often, but if he has not done himself the favour of learning how to dispense with paper then however good the words he will not do justice to their delivery – at least not to the bits that he reads. If only he knew how easy it is!

He starts well. It’s a funny opening. His self-deprecating summary of himself as an economist trips off his tongue with the smoothness of the oft-repeated, but I have no problem with that. Nor has he: thorough road-testing of such routines are what make them work. Then at 1:33 his eyes go down to his article and, no longer being spontaneous, a fat slice comes off the top of his stage presence.

As readers go, he’s a pretty good one. He’s expressive and lively, but he’s still a talking head. You could close your eyes and know from the sound alone that he’s regurgitating something he wrote previously.

But not always. At 6:26 he gets excited and doesn’t look down again for nine seconds. That may not seem much time, but for those nine seconds the whole tenor of the delivery lifts markedly.

Those nine seconds are also long enough to lose him his place in the script, and a lame pause ensues. For about the thousandth time on this blog I’m shouting at the screen, “Throw the bloody script away!” He could do it, easily: he just doesn’t know he could.

Otherwise, it’s not a bad speech.

Peter Shore is passionate

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Some speeches featured on this blog are within days of delivery, some a few years old. Today’s is possibly the oldest, yet still as topical and relevant as can be.

This week forty-five years ago in 1975 was notable for both the momentous and the trivial. You may ponder on which was which. Snow on the Monday (yes, in June) caused the abandoning of first class cricket matches, and the UK rang to the strains of Don Estelle and Windsor Davies performing Whispering Grass. The Thursday of that week saw the UK going to the polls in a referendum to decide whether the country should remain in the European Economic Community, now called the European Union.

On Tuesday June 3rd, 1975, Labour Member of Parliament, the late Peter Shore, delivered a speech in The Oxford Union in a debate ahead of that referendum.

Wearing my rhetor hat I struggle with the sense that any negative observation would be impertinent. This is really an outstanding piece of passionate oratory, but …

It is also one of the clearest examples I have heard of a particular diction flaw. I refer to disproportionate syllable stress. In raising his voice to be heard throughout the hall, he heavily emphasises those syllables that should be stressed. So far so good: Peter Shore speaks with beautiful clarity, but he sometimes neglects the non-stress syllables to the point of virtual inaudibility.

Curiously it is a flaw to be most commonly found in speakers who are especially conscientious about their speaking. (One of the finest speakers around today, Daniel Hannan, commits this, and I have said so in this blog a couple of times. Ditto Barack Obama.) Also if you point out the sin to the sinners they deny it so vehemently that without a recording it is desperately difficult to persuade them of it. I understand their incredulity. Some years before this speech I was receiving training from a genius called Kate Fleming, and when she accused me of this I ferociously denied it till circumstances forced my hand. (There’s an account of that in my booklet, Every Word Heard.)

This speech is fantastic, and is made even more entertaining through the cutaway shots of – e.g. Jeremy Thorpe and Edward Heath. We first see the latter smiling smugly, and later again when the smile has gloriously frozen after Shore’s treatment. Is that Barbara Castle sitting in the background? Anyway I commend it to you.

Yes, that was an interesting week. The snow on the Monday cleared quickly, and by the weekend there had started a heatwave and accompanying drought. The drought continued, on and off – chiefly on – till the August Bank Holiday more than a year later.

The effects of that referendum are only just finishing now (Deus Volent).

Ian Duncan Smith: humour and passion

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I have a stock of speeches on which I draw when the supply of topical material thins. That supply is drying up. I wonder why…

Today we look at a speech from the beginning of last year, January 2019. A meeting of the Brexit Party, with its slogan “Leave Means Leave”, was addressed by the Rt Hon Ian Duncan Smith – widely known in Britain as IDS.

He makes early reference to an invasion by a mob which, during the previous speech, had invaded, chanted, and been invited to depart. I thought I’d tell you that, because otherwise a couple of seconds near the beginning of his speech would make no sense.

Then he pays deserved tribute to Kate Hoey, sitting behind him. She was on this blog not so long ago.

IDS does humour! More than twenty years ago he had a brief spell as leader of the Conservative party, and the Mainstream Media swung into their customary smear-fest. He was painted as being devoid of personality. Since stepping down from that he has studied, researched, and campaigned passionately on Work & Pensions, a brief not known to be all-singing-all-dancing, so that dreary image of him has rather stuck. How refreshing to see him opening with a very humorous passage, excellently delivered with skilled timing, several interim laughs and ultimately leading to a stunning punchline.

Then he turns to the passion, and very passionate it is. I tell my trainees that passion is worth bucketfuls of technique, but the dream ticket is to have both. IDS has both.

Even though the matter of Brexit is not currently headlines, it’s interesting to note those of his observations that still apply to our current predicament.

For instance, at 6:40 he talks of how the Establishment and its media echo-chamber delight in denigrating Britain. Every day during this current pandemic fiasco we are repeatedly misled about how the UK has Europe’s highest death-rate. In absolute terms, maybe, but not per capita. Taken per unit of population we are somewhere around the middle of the league table, but the bottom-feeders in the media never say so. If they wonder why readership and viewing figures are plummeting, it’s because the truth that belies their fake news is easily available on line.

The media also screams that USA has the world’s highest death rate, whereas again per capita it’s near the UK in the middle of the world’s league table. The unenviable top of the European table is San Marino, with a per capita death rate almost three times Britain’s; and if you take Manhattan out of the sample USA’s death rate is very low. The media never tell you that. It has long been said that a free press is a bedrock of a civilised society. It’s time to add a free internet to that; and even now the internet is threatened.

At 8:15 IDS has another go at the Establishment’s hatred for Britain, and swings into talking of his father’s generation in the war. They fought for freedom.

Hmmm. Freedom. Remember that stuff? Various wise people have made the observation over the ages that any society that endangers freedom, in favour of safety, winds up with neither.

Douglas Murray is characteristically excellent

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A National Conservatism conference was held in Rome in February 2020. One of their speakers was Douglas Murray.

Murray has, I suspect, been on this blog more often than anyone else, the most recent outing being here in May of last year. I make no apology for seeking a regular dose of his speaking. He is just so damn good!

Hmm! Either he has failed to stand close enough to his razor or we are looking at an embryonic beard. If the latter I look forward to seeing it once it has grown up. Is he seeking to adjust his image from brittle, surgical, forensic enfant terrible to cuddly uncle? If so that beard will classify as camouflage: not all beardies are avuncular, however cuddly they may look. Future adversaries beware.

What an opening! Beautifully conceived, and delivered dead-pan. Murray, the still image for this video notwithstanding, is habitually dead-pan and it works very well for him. In fact the weakest I have seen his presentation of arguments was not in a speech but once when interviewed by Mark Steyn. Being in the company of a good friend, and a funny one, he was smiling a lot and it seemed to take some of the edge off the points he was promoting.

He remains surgical. At 08:43 his withering, dismissive, dismantling of a fatuous children’s programme that the embarrassing BBC screened on the day Britain left the EU is a copybook example.

He and I have both recently been interviewed on the same podcast, though in different episodes. I wouldn’t presume to compare myself with him: he researches profoundly and has wonderful things to say whereas I am by nature a listener and tend to interview the interviewer. But we had something in common. Though both anxious about much in the world, we shared and expressed overall optimism. I said that I believed in people, which the interviewer paraphrased as “the wisdom of crowds”, the title of a book by James Surowiecki who may be appearing before long on this blog.

The title of Douglas Murray’s latest book, which I heartily recommend, is The Madness of Crowds. If that title seems to contradict my view of people the book’s content doesn’t, and nor do the closing stages of this characteristically excellent speech.

Martin Howe pulls no punches.

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The British Conservative Party Conference at the beginning of October 2019 was an interesting affair. Parliament had been turned, by those bent on betraying the biggest democratic mandate in Britain’s history, into a bad joke. A disgustingly partisan Speaker in the House of Commons had assisted opposition parties in breaking many traditions, including that of suspending parliament during conference season. Other parties had been able to hold their conferences without their members of parliament needing to be in London to debate legislation, but not the governing Conservatives. Not only was parliament sitting while their conference was on, but crucially important business was in hand. Nevertheless the conference did happen, and much of the talk was about the foregoing in this paragraph.

During the conference the Bruges Group held a meeting which was addressed by Martin Howe.

The introduction by Barry Legg, Chairman of the Bruges Group, is delivered in tones that barely disguise desperation. There is an air of persecution. The fight to honour the people’s instruction to secure Britain’s independence from the EU is looking to be in peril. Britain’s Establishment has shown that it is prepared to descend to whatever depths are necessary, breaking any rule to thwart it, and its scrupulousness has seemed to be winning.

Howe reveals his early nerves by clinging umbilically to his script. He even looks down to be prompted to say the words, “this afternoon”. He knows that every syllable spoken at this meeting will be picked over. It is a measure of the seriousness of the political environment when a highly experienced legal advocate feels himself to need such strict circumspection.

Nevertheless he does not pull his punches. Parliament has made itself illegitimate; its activities are unconstitutional; the administration is entitled to ignore its instructions. I take this as meaning that, on 31st October 2019, the Surrender Act notwithstanding, the Prime Minister is entitled to use the Royal Prerogative to break with the EU, something he has repeatedly promised –

“No ifs or buts”

– to do. That, and the same in other equally uncompromising terms, he has made more times than I care to count.

Yet on 31st October he didn’t. Why not? What other pressures were brought to bear? It seems that the principal one was that this wretched excuse for a parliament, rotten from the Speaker upwards, would not allow a General Election to take place unless the PM undertook to break that promise he had repeatedly made. He had been rendered powerless – at least that was the story we were persuaded to understand.

So now we are into a General Election, still haven’t left the EU; and I for one know not what, or whom, to believe. It barely matters because the only feasible alternative to his party is so horrendous, that we have no choice but to elect him.

Unless the PM is party to a very deep conspiracy, and the people are being duped into believing his new assurances to return him to power only to have him renege yet again on everything he has said and lock us deeper into the EU, Boris Johnson will form a new government with a bigger majority and take us out. If he reneges, I shudder to think what will happen. The anger of the people will be ugly, just as it has been in France for the past year; and as in France we could have EU armoured vehicles on the streets of Britain. And I fear that I will not be too surprised: why do we suppose that the mainstream media in Britain has avoided showing us what has been going on in France?

But while we still can, let us try to remain optimistic and assume that the PM is sincere. High on his agenda then should be root-and-branch reformation of the Establishment. It makes the Augean Stables look like a sterile operating theatre.

Ann Widdecombe rants

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This blog has been quiet for the past week because I’ve been away, and not only have I not posted but I have largely avoided following what has been going on. Nevertheless I was not holed up in a cave, and Ann Widdecombe‘s rant in the EU parliament got itself noticed. It was instantly filed in the back of my mind as something to enjoy upon my return.

This blog has periodically featured ballsy women from all parts of the world, principally because I like speakers who are bold enough to take on all comers. Ann Widdecombe surely has a claim to the title of doyenne.

Two minutes and eight seconds of rant seems suitably brief in current temperatures, and most people could blast away inconsequentially for that duration. But to insert seven meaty details into it takes skill.

  • She noted that she represented the biggest party there,
  • She scorned the absurdity of the “election” of EU officials
  • She pointed out that this parody of democracy betrayed all countries represented
  • She spoke of the historic pattern of oppressed people rising up against oppressors
  • She slipped in a dig at the leaked video of EU pound-store bigwigs congratulating themselves on maintaining the UK as a “colony”
  • She attacked a new ruling concerning fishing net meshes
  • She declared the UK’s departure in three languages.

I’ve seen twenty-minute speeches that said less. The EU probably can’t wait to be rid her, and that’s the whole point.

Daithi O’Ceallaigh is sincere

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A reader/trainee/friend, who happens to be Irish, emailed me to complain that I was banging on too much about Brexit. It was amusing not just because most of my blog correspondents tell me the opposite, but because of all my reader/trainee/friends the most ardently pro-Brexit is likewise Irish.

The principal reason that I’ve recently explored so many speeches about Brexit is that there are so many currently around; and I surely don’t have to explain why that is.

Nevertheless that email did prompt me to pull out a speech from my ‘to-do’ pile. It is pro-EU, and delivered by a distinguished Irishman.

Speaking in February 2018, here is Daithi O’Ceallaigh.

Instantly I warm to him. That lectern is a handy piece of furniture to lean on, as distinct from a repository for a script. And he leans on it in a manner that suggests that he just wants to feel closer to his audience – excellent body language! From the outset it is clear that he is speaking with us, not to or at. Also as time goes on it is confirmed that he is shooting from the hip, and any paper on that lectern will hold no more than bullet points.

A proper speaker.

When David Cameron first announced the EU Referendum I welcomed it on this blog, saying that I looked forward to hearing the arguments in the campaign. I was pro-Brexit, but wanted to hear well-reasoned attempts to sway me. In the event I was disappointed by Project Fear and puerile name-calling. That trend has continued ever since, and the current move towards political betrayal is a scandal that besmirches both Westminster and Whitehall. I would add the BBC to that, except they were already an embarassment.

This speech by O’Ceallaigh is the sort of thing I wanted to hear. He is evidently intelligent, sincere, and has proper arguments.

Has he swayed me? No, but if I were Irish, he would have come closer. Being patriotic doesn’t mean you hate other countries, or you’re doing it wrong; but where there’s a conflict of interest we all have to look after our own first. In the event of the oxygen mask being deployed, put on your own before your child’s. Nevertheless it’s more than self-interest.

Every one of his arguments is predicated by the assumption that if it’s not ordered by Brussels it won’t be done (or done properly). It is a variety of bureaucritis, a condition suffered by nearly all bureaucrats: essentially tunnel-vision. It is understandable that when all your working life is spent in a bubble of bureaucracies they assume in your mind an aura of indispensability; but history repeatedly shows that to be false. Bureaucracies are dispensable. They are a luxury, occasionally welcome but always expensive. They make excellent servants but dreadful masters.

If you dispute my term “tunnel vision” I refer you to his dismissal of the Irish Republic’s Irexit movement which he describes as a minority sport. At 1:30 –

There’s absolutely no doubt about the commitment of the Irish government, and the complete Irish political class, to staying within Europe.

I believe him. It is evidently also true of Britain. But the political class – riddled with bureaucritis – is not the country. The people are the country, and in Britain the country spoke and over-ruled the political class. And the political class continue to try to thwart the country.

I like this man, not just as a speaker – as a person; but I believe his misgivings, considered and sincere as they are, to be misguided.

Patrick O’Flynn tells the EP

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On 3 April in the European Parliament, there was a short speech delivered by Patrick O’Flynn MEP.

Only a couple of weeks ago I received an email from a trainee, a well-known accountant, who did a course with me more than a decade ago. He was telling me with satisfaction that feedback after his speeches nearly always marvelled at how he spoke without notes.

All my trainees can speak without notes.

Readers of this blog will know that I do not consider anyone a proper speaker unless they speak without notes, whether for five minutes or sixty.

You do not even need to see Patrick O’Flynn here to know that – worse than notes – he is actually reading a script. You can hear it clearly in his intonation. Two and a half lousy minutes, and he has to read a script!

It’s a hugely important speech, with a hugely important message that I hope dearly all listeners will heed, yet he robbed it of a frightening amount of its impact by not having learnt how properly to speak in public.

Tucker Carlson: Ship of Fools

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Trump and Brexit, Brexit and Trump, it is almost spooky how these two polarising disruptions have shadowed each other on either side of the Atlantic. Feelings on both run frighteningly high, and for me it has meant that speeches delivered about one of them almost always have had resonances towards the other.

Tucker Carlson, Fox News talk-show host, has published a book called Ship of Fools which attempts to answer why USA unexpectedly elected Donald Trump. I haven’t yet got around to reading it, though I want to. Here he is, promoting the book at a talk hosted by the Independent Institute in Alameda, California, in October 2018.

The introduction by David J. Theroux, President of the Institute, raises reactions from the audience that leave us in no doubt that Carlson will be addressing a friendly audience. That is worth noting because California’s political climate has moved so overwhelmingly left that these people almost qualify as a persecuted minority. Carlson comes to the microphone at 05:40, the speech finishes at 36:06, and the Q&A that follows is worth watching also.

He is very skilled, very audience friendly, qualities that are not necessarily a ‘given’ with a TV personality. He comes across as relaxed, friendly, funny, and shoots the speech from the hip.

But the skill doesn’t end there, he neatly melds his warm greeting of the audience with reminiscences of growing up in California (he now lives in Washington DC). He throws in references to places, using their local nicknames. In the process he piles up good ethos, leaving them feeling that this famous man who comes into their homes everyday via the TV is definitely one of them. All his humour, and there’s lots of it, is thrown away – even to the extent of his appearing to try to suppress laughs and thereby actually stoke them. I don’t want to paint him cynical because though he’s good he has me convinced he’s sincere.

The narrative is brilliant, he sweeps you along.

As for the transatlantic parallels concerning the way our countries have been moving, I invite my fellow brits to listen to his summary of US education at 17:17, and cast their minds back a couple of weeks to the school pupils’ “strike”. I put that in quotes because of the number of teachers that seemed to be leading the march through London, and seemed quite comfortable with the appalling things being chanted.

Likewise his account, beginning at 29:50 of the Republican Party official who said that if Trump got nominated he’d see that they took it away, has pretty strong resonances with a referendum in the UK which everyone in the elite from the Prime Minister downwards said would be respected, till it came to it; and as of now from the Prime Minister downwards are busting a gut to find a way to stop it or steer it towards something else with a ‘withdrawal agreement’ that is all about agreement and not about withdrawal.

What Carlson is talking about is the cavernous disconnect between The People and their political representatives (and the mainstream media). The US has it: the UK has it. The US has an Orange Man who has made astonishingly good progress (about which the media remain very quiet). The UK should be on the brink of greatly increased freedom, but not if the elite can help it.

I think that is what Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools is about, which is why I want to read it.

Tim Martin should give paper the bullet

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Leave Means Leave, an organisation whose name gives us a strong clue that it is pro-Brexit, has been holding rallies around the UK for some months. On 14 December they held one in London, and on the bill was Tim Martin of Wetherspoons.

He claims that his accent is an amalgam of Northern Ireland and New Zealand. Those countries may be where he has spent most of his life, but I hear neither of those in his accent which is a one-off, but then Tim Martin is a one-off.

He has delivered speeches at other Leave Means Leave rallies and, having watched some, I can tell you that they essentially bear the same message. But they are not the same speech because the words he is using are different.

He is using a list of bullet points and then trusting himself to say the words that come to him. That causes glorious episodes of Martin speaking spontaneously with his audience, with all the desired symptoms of sincerity and command of his subject, but those glorious episodes are separated by self interruptions while he dons his specs and peers at his list of bullet points. I itch to show him how easily he could bin that bloody paper and then shoot the whole speech from the hip. He’s almost there already.

His audience loves him because he’s such a refreshing personality, and that personality pours across the footlights onto the floor of the hall.

Except while he’s peering at his bloody paper.