It shouldn't be down to the wrongdoer to take action

Tweet

 

It’s unclear whether Mandelson has committed any crimes or not in relation to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, although – to date, at least – I’ve seen no serious suggestion that he has. Folly, yes, plenty of that. Failing to declare income to parliament, maybe: he says that he can’t remember receiving money from Epstein, and it’s just about possible that there’s some other explanation for the relevant lines on bank statements. Lobbying other ministers to reduce the tax bill for a friend, yes, that seems pretty clear cut. Leaking sensitive government documents to his friend, again, yes that also seems pretty clear cut. None of it, however, appears to be criminal. It’s enough, though, for people to be demanding that he should be stripped of his peerage as well as standing down immediately from the House of Lords.

It is a ‘feature’ of the English system of governance that people appointed to the Lords cannot easily be stripped of either their membership or their title. Apparently, it requires a specific act of parliament in each and every case, and Sir Starmer appears to have concluded that that is just too much trouble and is instead simply appealing to Mandelson to voluntarily relinquish his seat, and voluntarily stop using his title, while formally retaining it. It’s the sort of compromise and cop-out which bedevils a constitution which assumes that all parliamentarians, in whichever House, are inherently honourable people.

It’s a silly assumption to make – and it’s not as if there haven’t been previous cases to underline the point. The one which immediately leaps to mind is, of course, Jeffrey Archer. Unlike (so far) Mandelson, Archer really did commit criminal acts and was sentenced to four years as a guest of Her Majesty as a result. On his release in 2003, and although not a very active member, he remained a member of the House of Lords until he voluntarily stepped down in 2024. He remains a peer today.

It’s true that the law was subsequently changed – but it took more than ten years, until 2014 – to make it easier to sack a member of the House of Lords for serious crimes (although being sentenced to prison for less than twelve months, which one might think is still rather more serious than anything Mandelson has so far been found to have done, is still considered insufficient grounds for expulsion). The point here is not to defend Mandelson – on the contrary, he deserves to be kicked out. It is, rather, to highlight the arbitrary and inconsistent way in which things work, and the laziness and incompetence which means that successive governments would prefer to leave things alone than address an obvious failing. Demanding that the man accused of poor behaviour takes action himself rather than ensuring that he could be dealt with swiftly and effectively is a less than honest political response.

When is a benefit not a benefit?

Tweet

 

‘Cutting the benefits bill’ is an answer often trotted out by politicians when asked how they are going to pay for something. They don’t often spell out precisely how they will do that – identifying who will go without food or shelter isn’t exactly the most certain way of winning electoral support. Far better just to leave people with the impression that it will affect someone else, not them, and that it’s a painless way of saving money. There is a question, though, of how we define what a benefit payment is. It’s obvious which side of the benefit/ not-benefit line some payments fall, but rather less obvious in other cases. Pensions are a case in point – whilst some see them as a benefit payment, others see them more as a contractual obligation in return for the NI contributions made over many years.

Yesterday, the Tories in the Senedd proposed a new payment for grandparents to look after their grandchildren. Superficially, it’s presented almost as though it’s a payment for work done. Whether it would be taxable or not is unclear, but added to the full state pension (and non-working grandparents able to do child care are quite likely to be pensioners), it would push most of the eligible pensioners into paying income tax unless it were to be exempted. If it is, in effect, a non-taxable payment for care provided, then that would surely make it a benefit payment (not dissimilar, perhaps, to Attendance Allowance) in the views of many – and a universal (paid regardless of other income or ‘need’) one at that. And even if it is not regarded as a ‘benefit payment’ to the grandparents concerned, if the objective is, as the Tories claim, to improve childcare provision for working parents, isn’t that simply a backdoor form of benefit payment to those parents?

I raise these points not because the idea is inherently a bad one. On the contrary, good affordable childcare is a problem and this is an interesting proposal for a fairly cheap extension, although there is a lot of detail not yet spelled out. And I’m not opposed to benefit payments either. The point is, though, that it is more than a little hypocritical for a party which has spent years bemoaning the fact that a millionaire can theoretically get a 35p packet of paracetamol for nothing to propose to give any millionaire who happens to be a grandparent a couple of grand a year for doing what they may well be doing for free currently. It’s difficult to avoid concluding that the benefit payments they’re against are those which go to people unlikely to vote for them (usually the poorest), whilst they support a new benefit which is likely to go to those more likely to vote for them.

How did we get to here?

Tweet

 

Thatcher once said that she thought that her greatest success was Tony Blair’s Labour Party. Subsequent history shows that her success wasn’t so much an event as a process; a process which continues to reverberate today. Underlying the creation of Blairism was the way in which she, and those around her, succeeded in moving the parameters of acceptable political debate, often referred to as the ‘Overton Window’, sharply in one direction, and it’s a process which has been continued by her successors. Osborne’s creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility was another event during the process, an event which locked into ‘acceptable’ political discourse the utterly false notion that governments must seek to balance their income and expenditure over the long term, and pay down any accumulated debt. It’s a shibboleth which the Reeves's and Starmers of this world have adopted with enthusiasm.

They’re still at it today. Views within Labour which might have been regarded as being rather to the right of the party’s centre just a few decades ago are now routinely described as ‘soft left’ or even ‘hard left’. And Kemi Badenoch announced yesterday that there is no room in her Conservative Party for views which would have been seen as entirely mainstream until very recently. It isn’t only a success for the likes of Thatcher and Badenoch, of course; it’s also a success for a media which is owned by, and seemingly exists mostly to promote the interest of, those who own the wealth and in whose pockets and bank balances money continues to accumulate under neoliberal economics.

It didn’t have to be this way. In the immediate post-war years, a Labour government, which was rather more radical than it is often given credit for, actually shifted the Overton Window in the other direction. Whilst there was some pushback from the ‘right’ over some issues (such as nationalisation), it became generally recognised over two or three decades that the state had a role to play in industrial policy, that more homes – including council houses – should be built, that the NHS should be funded, that there should be a decent system of benefits. Albeit in a mild form, what one might call ‘social democracy’ became established as the accepted norm. Thatcher may have been the instigator-in-chief of the rupture, but Labour then played along, facilitating the conversion of an event into a process. That has brought us to a position where someone like Macmillan, Eden, Douglas-Home – and maybe even Heath – would be unwelcome in the party they once led, and where the Labour leadership seems to draw more on the thinking of Enoch Powell than of Bevan or Beveridge.

At the bottom of this lies a major question – should politicians lead or merely follow public opinion? Clearly the leaders of the UK’s three right wing parties all believe that public opinion is further to the right than they are. If they’re correct (and I’m not at all sure that they are – the most vocally-expressed opinions aren’t always the most popularly-held), then how do they think that we got from there to here? Blaming the media is a soft option, although that doesn’t make it entirely inaccurate. Ultimately, weak politicians, prepared to sacrifice any beliefs or principles in the pursuit of power, and anxious to secure the endorsement of the worst elements of the media, must take at least as much blame. It’s a tradition in which Starmer firmly sits.

Where is the challenge to conventional thinking?

Tweet

 

Although we don’t yet have the full details, the police reorganisation announced this week by the Home Secretary is already looking like a bit of a mish-mash – and a major missed opportunity for a more thorough debate around the best way of organising policing. Leaving aside the obvious own goal of not taking the opportunity to devolve policing to Wales, and the way that ends up undermining the First Minister and Labour’s Senedd election campaign, there are other ideas which seem not to have even been considered by what has shown itself to be a centralist and centralising government.

At the heart of the issue are two demands which appear to be in direct conflict, but that conflict is more to do with being wedded to the idea of single police forces than any practical necessity in terms of policing. Those two demands are: firstly, for a more local and accountable approach to policing; and secondly for the rationalisation of more specialist areas of policing. Even if policing were to be devolved to Wales, we would still face the same issues when debating whether to have a single Welsh force or multiple forces. However, there are plenty of international examples of an approach which does not put all ‘policing’ under a single organisation, but there seems to be a lack of willingness to learn from them. The Home Secretary’s intention to set up a national force to deal with certain crimes makes sense (although whether it should be a single EnglandandWales body or two separate bodies is an area for disagreement). But taking out those activities where a rationalisation of specialist resources is beneficial should reduce rather than increase the need for a reduction in the number of forces. An area like Dyfed Powys, for instance, is already too large for any serious degree of local control and accountability – an all-Wales force would be even less so.

Why could we not, instead, split policing between: smaller, more local forces – at county/ county borough level perhaps? – responsible for bobbies on the beat and the sort of low level activity which is most people’s experience of crime; regional forces responsible for investigating more serious crime; and a national (Welsh) force responsible for more specialist activities? And why does traffic policing have to fit into the same structure? The UK seems to be hung up on the idea that ‘policing’ is a single activity which has to fall under the remit of a single body, but abandoning that view opens up the possibility of reconciling the demand for more local accountability for community policing whilst still having resources and expertise in depth to respond to other needs. It’s what happens in many other countries, and it generally seems to work, but the centralising mindset seems unable to consider it. It’s the sort of different approach which a Senedd with control over policing could follow, although it would still require politicians willing to challenge convention.

What is to be defended - and how?

Tweet

 

It was reported a couple of weeks ago that there is a £28 billion ‘funding shortfall’ for the UK’s military forces. It underlines the way in which a careful choice of words can frame any discussion. The substance of the story is that the military needs a lot more money to do all the things that it wants to do, and is presenting the lack of that money as a ‘shortfall’. It’s not the only word that could be used. The same gap could equally be framed as a deliberately planned overspend: the expenditure plan has been drawn up in a way which requires more money than the budget has allocated. A ‘shortfall’ is the responsibility of government, but an ‘overspend’ is the responsibility of the defence chiefs. It’s all about blame avoidance.

The more substantive underlying question is about what the UK’s military needs are; establishing that is a prerequisite to talking about how the expenditure is funded. It’s not a question on which either the government or the military really wants any sort of debate, because an open discussion on the question must inevitably put the question of the Trident upgrade on the table. This enormously expensive project is a major element of the UK’s planned military spend, yet it is, in essence, a weapons system which could only ever be used as a posthumous act of revenge following a nuclear attack on the UK. Even then, there’s considerable doubt as to whether the UK could really decide to fire any of the missiles without US authorisation. The UK government always claim that it can be so used, but the phrase attributed to Mandy Rice-Davies applies. Scrapping Trident completely would free up enough funding to overcome the alleged shortfall, even if we collectively decided that we still wanted to do everything else on the military shopping list.

Meanwhile the Lib Dems have come up with an alternative funding mechanism – the issue of what they are calling ‘war bonds’, based on what the government did during the two world wars. According to Ed Davey, this could raise an additional £20 billion for military purposes, and it’s clear that he thinks that the target market is individuals across the UK, so it would be giving the public a chance to "support patriotically our defence". I suspect that he’s right in saying that the government could raise that sort of money, although it’s more likely to come from the wealthiest in society rather than the man in the street, and they’re more likely to buy such bonds for the security of the capital and the interest they would attract than out of any great patriotic fervour. Given that the government (and there is no indication that a Lib Dem government would take a different view on this) regards all bond sales as ‘borrowing’, it would blow a massive hole in any fiscal rules. But they are correct in identifying that there is a market for more government bonds, which gives the lie to the idea that bond-holders are demanding that the government redeem existing bonds, aka ‘pay off debt’.

What they are all doing, though, is talking about the issue as though the constraint is a lack of money, when it really isn’t. The constraints on government spending on the military are firstly whether the spare physical resources (labour, materials, etc.) exist, and secondly, if they don’t, to what extent do we wish to prioritise weaponry over wellbeing by redirecting those resources. Treating money as the constraint serves only the few in society, and makes it more or less inevitable that the cost of increasing military expenditure falls, ultimately, on the wellbeing of the many. Destroying that which we wish to defend is no defence at all. It’s easy to see why the purveyors of war all want to avoid that question.

Labour needs more than a better story-teller

Tweet

 

Nobody really knows how much impact an individual has on the outcome of an election. I can say from experience as a candidate that a number of electors will tell candidates something along the lines of ‘I don’t usually vote for your party, but I’m going to vote for you’. I can also say from experience as a canvasser on behalf of other candidates that a similar number of electors will tell canvassers something along the lines of ‘I usually vote for your party, but I won’t vote for X’. Whether they net down to zero is an unanswered – and unanswerable – question, but the overall effect is that most candidates (guilty as charged!) end up believing that their own personality and ability is having a greater effect than it actually is. What we simply can’t do is run the same election twice and see what the impact of different candidates might be. Martin Shipton, on Nation.Cymru, wrote a timely reminder last week about the dangers of believing in political Messiahs.

It’s clear that Andy Burnham, to say nothing of his friends and supporters, believes that he is uniquely placed to win the pending by-election in Manchester – or would be, if he were allowed to stand. Those same friends and allies are now warning of the dire consequences of blocking his candidature, claiming that the seat will be lost to Labour as a result. There is a danger, for Labour, of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, which will leave Burnham and pals on the sidelines declaring that it all could have been so different if only he’d been allowed to stand. He might well have lost anyway, of course; which outcome we choose to believe depends on the extent to which we believe that the personality and profile of candidates makes a net difference in one direction or the other. In blocking the candidature of one individual, Sir Starmer and his allies might well have blocked one potential source of challenge at the expense of making a challenge from another direction even more probable. It was a gamble either way.

For those of us not party to the drama, intrigue, and machinations of the Labour Party at its worst, the bigger question is about policy rather than personality. Clearly, Burnham is a more effective communicator than Starmer, although most would probably agree that that is not a particularly high bar. But how different is he really in terms of a policy agenda? Not as much as the spin suggests, would be my assessment. That is the real problem for Labour – they’re so committed to their self-imposed fiscal rules that a minor tweak to those rules would make little real difference; they need to do more than tell the story a bit better. Those who are arguing that the answer is a change of leader are asking the wrong question.

Maybe we'll never know what Rutte said to Trump...

Tweet

 

Over the years, I’ve attended many meetings in which one attendee or another has set out his or her (usually his) views on whatever the issue is and then simply assumed the agreement of everyone else, sometimes even leaving immediately after speaking. ‘The boss (even if he wasn’t the boss in any formal sense) has spoken’ as an approach to ‘consensus’. Perhaps we’ll never know exactly what happened at the meeting between Trump and Rutte yesterday, but it sounds a lot like the same sort of thing: Trump has expounded his views and assumed agreement – in his mind, ‘sorting out the detail’ is all about agreeing the precise terms of his takeover. Certainly, Rutte cannot have agreed to any handover, or even a framework, or even the concept of an idea for a framework (to use the convoluted language which Trump seems to favour), for any handover; he simply doesn’t have the authority. All the indications are that Rutte has done little more than spell out to Trump the terms and detail of existing treaties, all of which His Orangeness will have forgotten by tomorrow.

The threat of using force and imposing extra tariffs has been removed, a statement greeted by a huge sigh of relief all round, but whether that threat has really been removed remains to be seen. After all, until a few days ago, Trump supported the handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. In Trumpland, any statement or agreement is valid only until it isn’t. Maybe it’s true, as some have suggested, that Trump has backed down because of the impact of his actions and statements on the stock market. Stock markets are an extremely poor indicator of the success of any economy, and are generally thought to be over-valued anyway, but to Trump, stock markets seem to be his main, or even only, indicator of success. To billionaires whose wealth is measured by the ‘value’ of their stock holdings, there’s a certain logic in that. Maybe one of the wilder stories I’ve seen – that he had ordered the military to prepare plans for a Greenland takeover only for the order to be refused as illegal – is true, although it seems unlikely to me that he could not find at least one general prepared to act on his instructions.

Or perhaps another basic truth has been demonstrated empirically – bullies back down when faced with strong united push-back. Certainly, one of the few tariff battles on which Trump has caved was that with China, which stood up to him resolutely. It would be nice to believe this version of events, with its corollary that Starmer and others have learned that resistance is better than appeasement. The problem with unpredictability is that it’s unpredictable; even if something ‘worked’ once, that doesn’t mean it will ‘work’ again. The biggest takeaway from Davos was surely the speech by Mark Carney of Canada and its message that countries need to stand together rather than be dominated individually. Whether the sort of international agreement and co-ordination which that requires can be achieved in a suitably rapid timescale is an open question, but signs that Starmer and others recognise the need and are working in that direction are sadly lacking at the moment. Carney was talking primarily about ‘middle-sized’ countries, but for those of us living in smaller countries which may not all yet be independent, the Carney approach offers us more hope for the future than any alternative currently on the table.

Education is about more than employability skills

Tweet

 

The research showing a link between education level, attitudes towards immigration, and right wing politics makes for interesting reading. It seems that non-graduates are far more likely than graduates to be both hostile to immigration and vote for the Tories or Reform Ltd. Could that, I wonder, be why those parties are so keen to reduce the number of young people going to university? For those of us who see a better educated population as a valid and worthwhile end in itself, rather than treating universities as simply a means of matching ‘resources’ to the requirements of multi-national capital, having a more tolerant population which is better able to analyse facts rather than follow prejudices is just one of the many benefits. I can see why those who seek to build a politics based on prejudice might not agree.

Dictatorship is not the answer

Tweet

 

It seems as though Trump’s proposed ‘Peace Board’, initially mooted as part of the ‘peace plan’ for Gaza, is being given a much wider remit by its sole owner and proprietor, one Donald Trump. It looks more like an attempt to replace the UN with a handpicked core membership (to include a chair for life appointed because he’s called Donald Trump, as well as that well-known purveyor of peace, former UK PM Tony Blair, and Trump’s son-in-law, Secretary of State, and special envoy), and a wider membership to be invited to participate by the chair. This wider group includes one Vladimir Putin, a man particularly well-known for his love of peace, and that staunch defender of democracy, Lukashenko of Belarus. Those accepting membership can opt to upgrade to a premium membership in exchange for handing the chair a mere $1 billion (to be spent as decided unilaterally by the chair), whilst anybody who turns down an invitation can expect to be hit with further tariffs (such as the proposed 200% tariff on French wines and champagne which Macron has earned by politely declining. Like any good mafia don, Trump is making people offers that he thinks they can’t refuse.

That there are problems with the UN is undeniable. Reaching a consensus is a difficult and time-consuming task, especially when five permanent members of the Security Council have a veto. It’s not entirely clear exactly how Trump’s proposal overcomes that weakness, although he presumably expects all members to simply accept his ultimate authority on all decisions. Theoretically, that works, but practically it’s problematic even when he’s president of the US; if he remains as chair when (or if) he ceases to be president, by what power exactly does he impose compliance? That problem of seeking and achieving consensus, leading to painfully slow decision-making, isn’t confined to the UN, of course: the EU suffers from the same issue. The question we are faced with is whether we accept that as a cost of seeking consensus and agreement through negotiation, or whether we simply vest all power in an individual – or rather, in Trump’s case, allow an individual to vest all power in himself. For all the frustrations of dealing with a multitude of different parties with different interests and agendas, I’m sure that I’m not alone in rejecting the dictatorship which is what the alternative amounts to.

Here in the UK, another former UK PM has weighed in with his own take on the solution. It’s full of fine words, as in this paragraph: “The democracies of the world should draft a short values statement, echoing the UN charter’s starting point – “We the peoples …” – and this time showing we mean it. Its first section would assert our full support for self-determination and the mutual recognition of nation states*; for the outlawing of war and coercion; and for the primacy of law, civil rights and democratic accountability as the essential means by which human dignity is advanced. A second section would outline the rules that govern the cooperation essential to guarantee food, water and security, economic opportunity and social justice, and climate resilience and health for all, including pandemic prevention”. But it, too, is short on telling us how this can be enforced.

Both Trump and Brown have identified a real problem when it comes to taking international decisions, but only Trump has come up with a ‘solution’ – personal dictatorship by one D. Trump. The reality is that, if we reject the ‘might is right’ approach of Trump, there is no simple solution. Not electing people who are clearly deranged would help a little, but there’s no obvious way of preventing that either.

^* Obviously, Gordon Brown does not intend this to be taken as being in any way support for nations not currently regarded as states – Wales, Scotland, Catalunya etc. – having any right to self-determination. That would never do.

For Trump, there is no such thing as an 'ally'

Tweet

 

As part of his justification for gaining total control over Greenland, the Guardian reports that Trump “has insisted that Denmark cannot be relied upon to protect Greenland in the case of a confrontation with China or Russia”. He’s right, of course: there is no way that Denmark acting alone can mobilise sufficient resources to defend Greenland against an all-out assault by Russia or China (although the idea of an all-out assault by China seems even more far-fetched than an assault by Russia). I’d go further: there is no way that Denmark could mobilise sufficient resources to defend the territory of Denmark itself from an all-out assault by Russia or China – or even the US. And Denmark is far from being the only country in that position. The Danes might foolishly have thought that that was precisely why they joined the NATO alliance – so that they would not be left alone to face such a threat, never really expecting that it would come from their supposed ally rather than their supposed enemy.

Some of Trump’s acolytes have taken the analogy even further by arguing, in effect, that any country unable to defend itself, acting alone, from an assault by one of the big powers has no right to exist – and that any power which is able to overcome another country by dint of superior force has the right to do exactly that. But when the mightiest military power the world has ever seen is run by people who believe that they have the right to take whatever they can take, it is time for the rest of the world to recognise that the US can no longer be regarded as any sort of ally, let alone a reliable one. No agreement can be taken as being worth anything from the day it is signed; the bully is always likely to come back for more. Trump himself seems to see the world as divided into three great powers each with its own sphere of influence, with all other countries being either supplicants or enemies. There is no other status in between supplicant and enemy. Pretending that the UK somehow has some special influence or relationship with this version of the US is turning a blind eye to reality. Yet that is where Starmer has placed the UK.

Options are limited, and not instant. If we assume that we want to avoid getting into a shooting war with the US – a reasonable, not to say wise, assumption – then any defence against the fascist state into which the US is descending has to be primarily economic, and it has to involve collective action. Part of Starmer’s reluctance to go down that route is probably that agreeing collective action takes time, and economic action is in any event slow-acting: sanctions against Iran, North Korea, Russia etc. aren’t exactly notable for their success. Needing the agreement of no-one, and protected from any restraining action from Congress or the courts, Trumpism is, on the other hand, fast-acting, as well as arbitrary, capricious, and unpredictable. I rather suspect that part of the calculus of Starmer and others is that Trump will be gone in three years, and the US will return to ‘normal’: still the world’s bully, but a little less blunt and obvious about it. That, though, depends on some key assumptions: that Trump will not carry on past the end of his term; that any successor won’t be as bad or even worse; and that elections will actually take place at all. None of these seem to be worth betting the farm on, yet that’s where Europe, and especially the UK, seem to be.