The Referendum Trap

Image by BBC Radio 4 via Flickr

There seems to be an unspoken assumption among all commentators, and even UKIP, that we couldn’t leave the European Union without a referendum. UKIP policy is to hold a referendum on EU membership, and recommend to the British people that we should leave.

Interesting.

Commentators generally seem to say that there needs to be a referendum for any major constitutional change. That simply is not true – there is ample precedence otherwise.

Ted Heath and the Conservatives took us into the European Union in the first place, without a referendum.

Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives passed the Single European Act, without a referendum.

John Major and the Conservatives accepted the Maastricht Treaty, without a referendum.

And Tony Blair and Labour accepted the Lisbon Treaty (EU Constitution), without a referendum.

The same thing has happened in other areas too. Membership of the House of Lords, for example, was reformed by Tony Blair’s government, and devolution was granted to Northern Ireland, in both cases without a referendum.

So there is a great deal of history that tells us referendums are not needed for constitutional change.

Why, then, did we have that referendum on the EU in 1975, and why did we have a referendum recently on the voting system?

The referendum on the EU in 1975 was called by Harold Wilson’s Labour government. It was a way to finesse internal party disagreements on whether to accept the decision of the previous Conservative government to go in. The government and the Establishment weighed in on the side of a “yes” vote. The “yes” campaign outspent the “no” campaign by 10 to 1. The Prime Minister of the day declared that there was no threat to British sovereignty, while knowing full well that was not the case. And the people duly voted to stay in the “common market”.

The voting system referendum was fixed from the start. Because he was in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, David Cameron had to face the issue of voting reform. But he chose an extremely strange version of proportional representation to put to the people. The AV system that he offered is used almost nowhere. And having chosen it as the system to offer, he then poured cold water on it, pointing out its eccentricities and that hardly anyone had adopted it. During the campaign, the “No to AV” campaign outspent the “Yes” campaign, and pretty much the whole Establishment campaigned for a “No” vote, mostly by subtle attempts to scare the voters off voting for change. The people duly voted to stick with “first past the post”.

Notice a pattern here? The truth is that referendums are not devices for ascertaining the will of the people.

In both cases, the referenda were used to silence dissent, by enlisting the support of a popular vote to prevent change.

Referenda are of course unpredictable. No Prime Minister can be completely certain of the result in any referendum. They are therefore a last resort. But if there is no other way for a Prime Minister to silence critics and avoid change, they can be very effective, as those two examples showed.

In the case of any EU referendum now, pro-EU politicians like David Cameron could manipulate the question to avoid a vote to take Britain out. They could muster the full power of the government (and indeed Her Majesty’s Opposition) to persuade people to vote to stay in. They could even rely on liberal dollops of funding from the EU itself to ensure the vote they wanted.

Even imagine an unlikely but not impossible scenario of a UKIP government being elected at the next general election. If that government called a referendum, the Establishment would still weigh in for a vote to stay in. A succession of “leading business people” would be wheeled out to express their extreme concern. Shadowy Bank of England figures would mutter darkly about the “risks involved”, while declaring that of course it was a decision for the people and not for them.

The EU would pour money into the “Yes to EU” campaign. The vote itself would be held several months or even a couple of years into the Parliament, allowing ample time for that UKIP government to become unpopular. In many ways the referendum would become a referendum on the government’s performance, rather than a referendum on the substantive question.

In short, the referendum would probably be lost.

That government would have fallen into the “referendum trap”.

Alex Salmond has already done so. Having won a convincing and surprising victory in the Scottish elections, he has now declared a referendum on independence. He may yet pull off a “yes” vote, but I doubt it. The vote will go against, and Scottish independence will be declared as “settled for a generation” and no longer discussed – just as voting reform has been.

Referenda are devices to stop change, not requirements before change is enacted.

We (by which I mean UKIP) should not be promising a referendum. We should be promising that a UKIP government would take Britain out of the European Union.

The 1980s, The Revolution and Today

 

Statue of Margaret Thatcher at Hillsdale College Michigan – image by cseeman via Flickr

 

The Telegraph today has an interesting article by Sarfraz Manzoor, looking back at the 1980s.

The article talks about the polarised politics of that decade, about the Cold War which was then still raging, and about the new cultural phenomena of those times.

Mr Manzoor was eight years old in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came to power, which he identifies as the moment the 1980s began.

I was 16. I had joined the Conservative Party two years earlier around the time that Mrs Thatcher won the leadership. I can remember listening in my bedroom to the result of the “No Confidence” motion that she put in the House of Commons against Jim Callaghan’s Labour government. She won by just one vote. How different things might have been if one of those Tory MPs had not been present!

The resulting election ushered in an era of huge change in Britain, of course. There was a massive sweep of privatisation and of deregulation. There was restraint on public spending growth (though not the “cuts” that are common perception).

There were the council house sales – in my opinion Mrs Thatcher’s most lasting legacy of change. They brought the middle classes and the working classes together really for the first time. At the beginning of the 80s those classes were using different toilets in the factory where they worked. By the end of the decade they were next door neighbours, since ex-council houses had become a standard first time buy for home-owners. This single reform did more to disrupt Britain’s class system and increase social mobility than any actions by the Socialists had ever done.

There was the close personal relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, that enhanced the alliance between Britain and the US, and helped Mr Reagan finally win the Cold War.

And I remember all the other things that Mr Manzoor talks about in his article – Madonna, Ben Elton, Steve Davies at snooker, and My Beautiful Launderette. Reading the article I was struck by the similarity between my recollections of the decade and Mr Manzoor’s. I am a white British man; he is a British Asian. And we have this shared history, as part of this shared country of ours.

True, he seems in his article to be more sympathetic to people like Ben Elton than to Mrs Thatcher. For me, Mr Elton and others like him were “the other side”, the people trying to stop our Thatcherite revolution.

Ironically, Mr Elton thought of himself as “anti-Establishment”, and yet he was fighting against the revolution. By opposing the revolution, he was effectively fighting in support of the class system and the traditional ways of doing things.

Mr Manzoor touches on this in one paragraph:

One can reduce the decade into a neat set of clichés as if everyone spent their time weighed down by giant shoulder pads, cruising the streets in a Sinclair C5 with a breeze-block-sized mobile phone stuck to their ear. The Eighties were more subtle and significant: there would be no Katie Price without Samantha Fox, no Lady Gaga without Madonna, no Simon Cowell without Stock, Aitken and Waterman and no David Cameron without Margaret Thatcher. The Eighties marked the death of one Britain and they hinted at another Britain busy being born.

Exactly so – except the bit about David Cameron. Because Mrs Thatcher’s reign did not end in glory. It ended in a counter-coup by the Establishment, who ousted her as party leader. She was replaced by John Major, certainly not a revolutionary (although Mrs Thatcher herself initially thought he would carry forward her legacy). And without John Major there would be no Tony Blair, or David Cameron.

The idea that David Cameron is the heir to Mrs Thatcher is risible. It is much more true to see him as part of the Establishment counter-revolution against everything that Mrs Thatcher and the 80s Tories stood for. That is why it is so important for our country’s future to destroy Mr Cameron’s premiership.

We started so well, we Thatcherites. We changed Britain for ever. Let’s not let that Establishment wreck what we worked for and send us all back to the cosy decline that she inherited.

The Establishment that fought against Mrs Thatcher from the first to the last has overrun once more the seats of power in our country. But it is not over. Their position is unsteady. The people are not on their side. The people have been empowered by the Thatcher revolution to speak up for themselves and not request, but demand that the government do what they want, not what those Establishment figures want.

I have said before that Nigel Farage is much more the heir to Mrs Thatcher than Mr Cameron will ever be. And that, in short, is why I belong to UKIP now and not to the Conservative Party. The fight we began in the 1980s is still raging, and I still have the stomach for it.

The Result of All That Hard Work

It’s finally election night. So here was my result (in a three-member Ward):

Adam Collyer (UKIP) – 245 (25.7%)
David Earles (Conservative) – 336 (35.3%)
Gloria Edwards-Davidson (Conservative) – 335 (35.2%)
David James (Labour) – 358 (37.6%)
Chris Long (Conservative) – 397 (41.7%)
Maureen Luke (Labour) – 379 (39.8%)
Andrew Piercy (Liberal Democrat) – 86 (9.0%)
Ken Ritchie (Labour) – 308 (32.3%)

Well done to the winners and commiserations to the losers. And many thanks to all who lent me their vote!

VOTE UKIP TODAY!!!

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It’s local election day today. If you have elections where you are, it’s your chance to vote UKIP.

Let’s show them we can light up Britain!

 

The Onward March of Academies – Will They Make Our Schools Better?

 

Image by aldisley via Flickr

The Telegraph tells us that half of all secondary schools have converted, or are in the process of converting, to Academies.

Lord Hill, the Schools Minister, said: “In academies, head teachers – not politicians or bureaucrats – are in charge of what happens in the school. I am delighted that the majority of secondary schools in England are seizing this independence by becoming an academy.

“With greater freedoms, these state funded schools can truly meet the needs of local parents and pupils.”

Academies are schools that are funded directly from central government, rather than being funded by Local Education Authorities (a.k.a. local councils). To be more accurate, central government takes the money from local education authorities and gives it to the Academies. The Academies get a little more funding than normal State schools, but have to provide for themselves the services that local authorities provide for normal State schools.

Academies are set up with a “sponsor”, who pays a small part of the capital cost for the school. That sponsor might be a large company, a charitable organisation, or even an individual. That sponsor is supposed to take an interest in the running of the school, and has the right to appoint governors to the school governing body.

The head teachers of Academies also have more authority over the curriculum and the running of the school than head teachers of normal State schools do.

The Academy programme was set up by Tony Blair’s government, but was supported from the start by the Conservatives, and is now supported by the Liberal Democrats as well.

That in itself sets alarm bells ringing. Initiatives with cross-party support are often wrong-headed. After all, with no party opposing, the opportunity for effective political challenge to the initiative is limited, and its failings can go unremarked. What is more, such policies that are championed by successive governments often turn out to be the policies of the bureaucracy rather than the policies of elected representative government.

On the other hand, perhaps we should celebrate a political consensus on the way forward to overhaul our education system. And the opposition of teaching unions has more to do with the threat to the collective bargaining power of the unions, than it does with educational standards.

It is pretty clear that the government’s eventual aim is to abolish local education authorities. Once almost all schools have converted, and we are well on the way to that, the LEA’s will serve little useful purpose. The case for their abolition will become compelling.

There is a problem with that though. LEA’s don’t only run schools. That is the main part of their function, but not the only part. They are also responsible for the admissions system, and importantly, have the legal responsibility to provide a school place for all children. There will still be a need for that function.

I suspect, therefore, that we will see LEA’s being replaced by something like local school boards. The big danger is that those boards will be set up as subsidiaries of the Department for Education, rather than of local councils. Once that happens, they will begin to agitate for more powers over schools. They will argue that they need those powers to fulfil their duty to ensure education for all. That agitation will not be in public, where the press and the public can stand up against it. It will be done behind the scenes, in cosy chats with their fellow bureaucrats in Whitehall.

Conservatives appear to think that the end game is a system of free and independent schools, funded by grants from Whitehall based on the number of pupils they attract, and inspected by Ofsted to ensure standards,

The actual end game may well be a National Education Service, organised along exactly the same lines as the National Health Service currently is. Those local school boards would look remarkably like local health authorities do, and the Academies would look remarkably like Hospital Trusts. Our education system could well end up not only failing, but almost completely unaccountable as well, just like the NHS.

There is, of course, another way. Education vouchers have been proposed for years, and universally rubbished by the education experts who have wrecked our school system. In that system, every child gets a voucher to the value of a State education. They can spend it on a school place in a State school, in which case it covers the full cost. Or they can spend it on a private school education – in which case they would have to top up its value to the price of the private school place.

The bureaucrats don’t like that. It would bring real competition into the system and expose their own failings. The stampede of kids out of the State schools would give the lie to the idea that the people are happy with the education system that the bureaucrats have provided.

The other side of that coin is the reintroduction of grammar schools. Critics of the selective education system claim that it brands children who fail the 11-plus as “failures”, and that concentration on the grammar schools means that all the other schools become second rate.

The truth in practice is the reverse. The standards in grammar schools are extremely high – often higher even than those in private schools. Crucially, in areas where grammar schools are still retained, the presence of the grammar schools actually seems to lift the performance of the other schools. You end up with elite grammar schools, and other schools scrambling to prove that they are good enough even for bright pupils to attend.

This is true, for example, in Warwickshire, whereas in neighbouring Northamptonshire, the comprehensive schools are so poor that the local education authority took legal action to try and stop people living near the border sending their kids across to grammar schools in Warwickshire.

The Conservative Party used to believe in grammar schools, until it was hijacked by the Cameroons. In 2005, they went into the general election with a policy of “a grammar school in every town”. Today their policy is to keep the existing law, where it is illegal to open a new grammar school. David Cameron called grammar school supporters “intellectually self-indulgent”. He feels more in common with the bureaucrats who run the education system, than he does with ordinary people who can see that selective education works.

Tory Party leaders might say, “Ah yes, but we got heavily defeated in 2005, and in 2010, with the new policy, we won!”

Actually, in 2005 Michael Howard’s Tories got 31.7% of the vote, and ended up with 198 – 31% – of the seats. A fair result. In 2010, David Cameron managed 36.1% of the vote and got 306 – 47% – of the seats. Their vote was only up a little – their much better result in terms of seats was down to Britain’s rigged electoral system. There is no evidence from that result of any enthusiasm for them from the electorate.

The Tories are busy changing constituency boundaries because the current system, they say, is unfair to them – whereas the truth is that the current system with the current boundaries gave them 71 more seats than their vote share warrants!

But back to schools.

The current Academies policy, supported by the three old parties, could end up with a good system – or it could easily make things worse.

A really serious reform of our school system would include education vouchers and support for new grammar schools. And that just so happens to be the policy of UKIP, and anathema to the Tories.

Great Post from Roger Helmer MEP

explaining what is wrong with the Conservatives and the background to his decision to defect to UKIP.

Tory MEP Defects to UKIP

Roger Helmer, Conservative Member of the “European Parliament”, has resigned from the Conservative Party and joined UKIP. (Hat-tip: Bloggers for UKIP.) Said Mr Helmer:

UKIP is closer than the Tory Party to the conservative principles and values that brought many of us into politics in the first place. It is right on Europe, right on climate and energy, and much closer to the views of most Conservatives on a range of issues including tax policy, immigration, “human rights”, foreign aid, University admissions and defence.

Nice to see yet another politician realising what is really going on in British politics. Mr Helmer, you are most welcome!

We Know Who is the Heir to Blair – But Who is the Heir to Thatcher?

 

Image by BBC Radio 4 via Flickr

Margaret Thatcher – Winner of Three Election Victories

Benedict Brogan in the Telegraph was asking a couple of days ago where are the voters who will turn David Cameron into a winner in 2015. He asks:

Where does he find the votes he needs to increase his share of support from the 38 per cent he enjoys now, or even the 36 per cent he scored in 2010, to the 43 per cent he needs to be sure of governing on his own account? Could it be that whatever Mr Osborne says, the politics are not great but terrible for the Tories, and have been for 20 years?

He concludes that

The centre of gravity [in British politics] remains to the Left of the Conservatives.

This seems a common theme in debates among Conservative Party supporters – a view that their Party has lost support since the 1980s because it is seen as “the nasty party” and too right wing to reflect popular opinion.

And yet, as Mr Brogan himself notes:

one thing the polls do show is that on certain issues most closely associated with unmodernised Tory views, the public are on board – the cap on benefits, the clampdown on immigration, the “No” to Europe.

Conservative Party commentators seem still to be bewitched by that “Cameronite” analysis of British politics, in which the aim for the Conservatives must be to appeal to “the centre ground” and be seen as moderate, caring and decent.

That analysis does not bear examination.

Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) transformed Britain. (Even her enemies agree that is true. They just don’t like the changes she brought about.)

She transformed Britain by following policies that are commonly identified as “right wing”. She was keen on lower taxes and on reducing public spending, although in reality she only succeeded in cutting the State as a proportion of the economy, and not in absolute terms. During her time in office, huge swathes of British industry were removed from the public sector and “privatised”. It is astonishing now to think that it was controversial at the time to put BP or Pickfords Removals into private hands.

Her government introduced the NHS internal market (scrapped by Tony Blair) and created OFSTED to start holding State schools to account for their performance.

On foreign policy, she was famously Eurosceptic – at least once experience had taught her the dangers to British national independence of the EU.

She was robust on immigration, talking about indigenous people feeling “swamped” when immigration rates were high.

On issue after issue, she took a robust, populist stance. As a result, she won three general elections, each time receiving more than 40% of the vote and a big overall majority.

Who made up her votes then? Certainly, a part was made up of the Conservative “core vote” – people with whom David Cameron and the Tory High Command feel comfortable. As Mr Cameron is finding, though, that core vote is not enough to win.

Any Tory leader who wants an overall majority must build a coalition. He needs more than that core vote. David Cameron (and it seems Benedict Brogan) believe that those extra votes will be found in the centre. But that is a poor seam of votes to mine, not least because the territory is already occupied by the Liberal Democrats.

Lady Thatcher’s electoral success came from building a coalition, not with the centre, but with that often-overlooked part of the British electorate – what the Telegraph at the time christened “Mondeo man”. People like small builders, electricians and plumbers. Daily Mail readers. People who lived in council houses, and grabbed the opportunity to buy them and thus own a stake in the country that they had previously believed they would never have.

People who work hard, support their families, and are upset at the poor quality of their children’s schools – but can’t afford to send them to private schools.

Hard-working people who are hardest hit by paying taxes. The rich – or indeed, Ed Miliband’s “squeezed middle” – are not hurt as hard by those taxes. They can afford to pay them. Mondeo man – Thatcher’s constituency – can’t afford it. They aren’t hurt by rubbish State schools, because their children go to private schools. Mondeo man – Thatcher’s constituency – is patronised and ignored when he complains about lack of discipline. They aren’t hurt when the NHS lets them down, because BUPA looks after their medical care. Mondeo man – Thatcher’s constituency – has to wait for weeks to find out whether he has cancer.

Those people – what she used to call the “lower middle class” – were Thatcher’s people. She instinctively identified with them. And the Tory Party hierarchy despised her for it. Her opponents in the party – people exactly like David Cameron – thought her a mean-minded little fishwife for it. They eventually pushed her out of the party leadership in no small part because of it. But she it was who won those three elections outright, and it was her people who gave her the votes to do so.

So here, I believe, is the reason for David Cameron’s miserable lack of electoral success. (He won hardly any more votes in 2010 than the Tories got under Michael Howard in 2005.) His analysis of British politics is dead wrong.

David Cameron memorably called himself “the heir to Blair”, and acts as such, thinking that he can win votes in the centre by doing so. In the process, he alienates Mondeo man. In contrast, Margaret Thatcher offered him the chance to buy his council house, and the hope of lower taxes. She offered support for people working hard to support their families and praised them for doing so. She offered them lower taxes and a spirited economy in which getting ahead was respected not spat upon.

I don’t believe British politics has changed all that much. I don’t share Benedict Brogan’s analysis that the country has somehow magically swung to the Left in the last 20 years, and now wants a nanny state to look after it.

David Cameron talks of austerity in terms of how much people are hurt by public spending cuts. But Mondeo man wants the cuts – bring them on! – if they mean the taxman can get off his back a bit.

So where does Mondeo man turn? His response so far has been to turn his back on politics, because no politicians offer anything for him. Except that one party does offer him everything he wants – UKIP. In practically every policy area, UKIP is aligned with his ideas. They have failed to get that message across to him, and right now he believes UKIP only cares about the EU. Sure, he agrees with UKIP about that – but what about his taxes?

Thus if UKIP reach out to him, there is a rich seam of votes to be had. UKIP will not win its first MPs by proclaiming that Britain should leave the EU (though of course it should). They will win them with that much simpler and more fundamental message: LOW TAXES AND SMALL GOVERNMENT.

That section of the electorate to whom Lady Thatcher reached out, and whom she took away from the Labour Party, would like a bit of that, please.

David Cameron is the heir to Blair, and has therefore made the Conservative Party unelectable in its own right.

Image by European Parliament via Flickr

Nigel Farage is the heir to Thatcher. He has been reluctant to claim that mantle so far. He should have the courage to do so. There are millions of votes for his party in reaching out to that disenfranchised group in British politics who carried Lady Thatcher on her way.

The Tories Still Opposing Grammar Schools

 

Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall - Only UKIP Want More Schools Like This

The Coalition Government is still dead set against grammar schools.

Labour have been claiming that the Tories want to expand grammar school provision.

Did the Government reply, “Yes, indeed. Grammar schools are the most excellent part of our education system and we want to expand them”?

No, they did not. They “reassured” their socialist friends that the Tory Government too is opposed to grammar schools.

The education department also restated that new grammar schools could not be opened.

“It remains illegal for any new grammar or partially selective schools to open. Admission by ability cannot be extended outside the tiny number of existing selective schools.”

Polls generally show huge support for grammar schools. But only UKIP want to expand them beyond the current 164.  (There are 3,300 Secondary Schools in England.)

As usual, it is the people – and UKIP – against the Establishment Lib-Lab-Con.

The Politicians Want More of Your Money – This Time to Subsidise Their Campaigns

Image by Scotriani (Scott Evans Photography) via Flickr

 

The Committee on Standards in Public Life has produced its report on party funding.

The Committee is led by Sir Christopher Kelly, former career civil servant, Chairman of the NSPCC, Chairman of the Financial Obmudsman Service, Chairman of the King’s Fund and Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath.

The report reads like a last gasp from the old discredited political order, trying to cling on to power.

• They want a cap on individual donations, of £10,000.
• They suggest that trade union donations should be regarded as a collection of individual donations from trade union members who opted in to the donation.
• They suggest that the existing limits on spending by the parties in the run-up to an election should be cut by 15%.
• And they suggest that an additional £23 million a year of taxpayers’ money should be directed to subsidise the parties.

They are quite happy their proposals are fair:

Our expectation is that the financial impact of our proposals is likely to be reasonably even-handed between the largest two parties.

Er…what about the impact on other parties then? UKIP, for example, got nearly 1 million votes at the last general election. That compares with the Conservatives’ 10.7 million.

So will UKIP get taxpayers’ money?

Existing public support to the political parties should be supplemented by the addition of a new form of public support paid to every party with two or more representatives in the Westminster Parliament or the devolved legislatures.

So UKIP are excluded, because our rigged voting system has prevented them getting any seats despite their 1,000,000 votes.

What’s more, the taxpayer funding would depend on the number of votes received. So generally, the current governing party would get more than the Opposition. (I say “generally” because in our electoral system, a party can get the biggest number of MPs without getting the largest number of votes overall.)

The whole set of proposals is basically designed to entrench the status quo, to put taxpayers’ money behind the parties who already have the power.

And why the 15% reduction in the spending limits? Here’s how the report explains that:

Our view is that it would be unacceptable, in current circumstances, to ask taxpayers to provide a higher subsidy without simultaneously obliging the parties to cut their spending.

So that reduction is designed to provide a smokescreen for the old parties as they start troughing those taxpayer subsidies.

Why, you may ask, is this report suddenly coming out now? The answer is that party memberships of the establishment parties have been wilting for years. They need more money to keep their parties in the campaigning style to which they are accustomed.

The report is yet another insult to British democracy from the political establishment, and ought to be killed off as soon as possible.

Mind you, if the establishment parties don’t kill it, it will be used against them in the campaigns of the “outsider” parties like UKIP and the Greens. As such, it would hasten the demise of the established parties – while completely putting a spanner in the works of the outsider parties who might replace them.

Labour and the Tories can, it seems, see the dangers.

Labour said it would “study in detail” the report’s proposals but said “in the current economic environment” that increased state funding for parties was “not a priority”. Shadow minister Michael Dugher also said the party had “concerns” regarding trade union affiliation fees.

For the Conservatives, party co-chairman Baroness Warsi told the BBC she “broadly welcomes the report” but expressed concern about increased state funding for parties: “I’m not convinced, even in better economic circumstances … that that is a wise way for us to be spending taxpayers’ money.”

The Lib Dems, as ever, as the politicians’ political party, are all in favour of these moves to further insulate the political class from the concerns of voters:

Lib Dem party president Tim Farron said any move “to limit undue influence on the political process by private individuals, businesses and the trade unions can only be a good thing”.

He said: “While it is clear now is not the time for more public money to be spent on politicians, that shouldn’t stop us taking immediate action to reform political funding.”

Public money!!! By which he means our money, that we could otherwise spend on our families.

Message for our political class: kill those proposals. Now. Otherwise the resulting row will make the MPs’ expenses row look like a Sunday picnic.