Is Reeves doomed?

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Starmer’s initial response yesterday to the question about whether Rachel Reeves will remain Chancellor for the whole term of his government was to say that she enjoyed his full confidence, a line which he repeated several times before, eventually, one of his spokespersons gave the requested confirmation. As promises go, it’s about as trustworthy as his manifesto for the last election, and the Chancellor could be forgiven for feeling a bit like a football manager who knows that the club’s owner only has to declare his complete confidence twice more before the inevitable sacking.

She may be able to defy the laws of political gravity for a while longer, but four years is a long time, and in any event defying the laws of basic arithmetic will inevitably prove to be beyond her capability. Her claim that she could repair and sustain public services, not increase taxes or borrowing, and at the same time reduce the government deficit (which is what her entirely arbitrary but ‘non-negotiable’ fiscal rules say must happen) always depended on the assumption that the UK economy would grow such that tax revenue increased without changing tax rates. And not just grow, but grow in a way which is unprecedented in recent history and for which there is no basis in policy to justify. Reality and wishful thinking aren’t the same thing, no matter how hard the spin doctors might try to convince us otherwise. Something will have to give, and the easiest thing to change, politically, is those fiscal rules. There’s nothing strange in that – they invariably change when the Chancellor changes; and even Starmer will eventually work out that that is the cost he will have to pay.

The question is about how much damage is done in the meantime, since it is becoming increasingly clear that her response will be to stick by the rules and cut spending instead. She will claim – indeed, the government is already claiming with its target of a 5% spending reduction – that this will be achieved by cutting out ‘waste’. But defining ‘waste’ isn’t as obvious as it sounds: for most politicians, ‘waste’ is any spending with which they disagree. Whether school breakfast clubs, keeping libraries and theatres open, or even implementing reduced speed limits are wasteful or not depends on your political perspective. About the only thing we can say with certainty is that an imposed budget cut – whether of 5% or any higher figure which Reeves will announce in the next month or two – is rarely effective at reducing what the average layman would call waste, and invariably ends up with cuts to services. Calling it ‘fiscal prudence’ rather than austerity is a bit like calling a hungry tiger a big cat. Big cat sounds more friendly, but it will still be happy to eat you.

The brightest and the best

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One of the developing fault lines in the Trump world is over the question of selective issue of visas for certain individuals regarded as being exceptional – the usual term used is ‘the brightest and the best’. The billionaires funding Trump, including the official First Buddy, Elon Musk, want to continue issuing such visas, whilst the MAGA purists want a complete halt to immigration and see every such visa as denying a job to an existing US citizen. At the moment, Trump seems to be siding with the billionaires (‘billionaire supports billionaires’ would hardly be a surprising headline), although history shows that he eventually falls out with everyone, and sooner rather than later in the case of anyone who might distract attention from himself.

There’s a similar, albeit not exactly parallel, debate here in the UK. By and large, businesses want more visas whilst politicians believe that the public wants fewer. Talk about attracting ‘the brightest and the best’ is the compromise adopted by those politicians who want to try and appeal to both sides of that debate, although they generally end up satisfying neither. But whether in the US or the UK that term, ‘brightest and best’, could do with more detailed scrutiny than it’s getting. Why are some people considered ‘brighter and better’ than others?

In the case of Musk and Trump, their position is clear and public – they genuinely believe that ability is first and foremost genetically determined. It’s a core belief which underpins what they believe is their inherent right to rule over the rest of us. Trump even seems to believe that his uncle’s career as a professor somehow shows that Trump himself is a genius. A stable one, of course. That belief in genetic pre-determination is less obvious in the UK, but it still underpins the argument. It’s a convenient – and ultimately lazy – belief, which saves its adherents from having to explain why one of the richest countries in the world, with one of the historically most well-regarded systems of higher education, is incapable of producing the same people, and needs, in effect, to outsource their production to others. Reluctant as I am to agree with the MAGA purists on anything, they may have a point here.

I’m not arguing that the people concerned should not be allowed to migrate to the UK (or the US, for that matter); on the contrary, at the level of principle, I believe that people should be able to choose freely where to pursue their lives and careers. But there’s something dishonest about an advanced country like the UK with its 67 million inhabitants (and even more so the US with its 335 million people) claiming that it is unable to train and educate people to the highest level and needs to attract them from elsewhere instead – unless they truly believe that nature (genetics) plays the key role and that nurture (environment, education etc.) is always secondary. The evidence to support such a categoric belief is noticeable primarily by its absence.

What is a crash anyway?

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Whisper it quietly, but it’s entirely possible that Liz Truss is justified in arguing that she did not ‘crash the economy’ with her ill-fated non-budget. There were, after all, other people involved, and the Bank of England’s decision-taking at the time didn’t help. Above all, there is no clear definition of what ‘crash the economy’ actually means; it isn’t exactly a well-established technical term. The political wisdom of trying to recover her reputation by issuing a ‘cease-and-desist’ letter, with its implicit suggestion of potential legal action for defamation, is another question entirely. Not only does it draw attention, yet again, to the damage she managed to do, it positively invites a response along the lines of that of the defendant in the infamous case of Arkell vs Pressdram – and whilst his words avoid the choice Anglo-Saxon of the original, Starmer’s response duly obliges. I somehow doubt that the case will advance much further. The prospect of being cross-examined in the witness box as to what she did or did not do, and trying to explain why the crisis was technically not in fact a ‘crash’ at all seems likely only to draw even more attention to her perceived failures, as well as being doomed to fail.

In the meantime, ‘the markets’ are playing up again today, with Rachel Reeves on the receiving end of their activity. Or, rather, the speculators and gamblers who always have an eye open for a chance to make a few pennies on marginal price movements are betting that she cannot honour her commitments on tax and borrowing whilst sticking to her fiscal rules. If I had a million or two to spare, I might even be tempted to join them; it looks like a pretty safe bet to me. Her determination to stick to fiscal rules which she herself wrote and which are entirely arbitrary has constrained her ability to do what she has said she will do on tax and borrowing, and she has no-one to blame but herself for not only putting the rock and the hard place into position, but for then rushing to place herself between them. Sooner or later, something will give. The gamblers will walk away with their profits and Starmer may well need to find a new Chancellor.

It’s all so unnecessary. The government could order the BoE to stop its quantitative tightening; it could order the Bank to reduce interest rates; it could change its fiscal rules. It prefers to pander to the prevailing conservative/ neoliberal economic ideology which has done so much to damage prospects for most people in recent decades. And that risks facilitating those who want to double down on that ideology.

What about the inhabitants?

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Failing to rule something out isn’t the same as ruling it in, and it’s perfectly possible that Trump thinks that leaving the threat of military action hanging over Greenland and Panama will ‘encourage’ Denmark and Panama to cave in without any need to resort to actual use of force.

He is probably serious about wanting to take control of Greenland, but that doesn’t make him unique in US history. Other presidents have also had designs on the territory and various land swaps have been envisaged in the past, including his own suggestion of giving Puerto Rico to Denmark as well as the 1940’s suggestion of swapping it for land in Alaska and the 1910 proposal to exchange it for some islands in the Philippines (so that Denmark could, in turn, swap them for a chunk of what is now Germany). The UK doesn’t exactly have clean hands on the issue either, having once sought to be given first refusal should Denmark decide to sell, with a view to it becoming part of Canada in order to keep it out of the hands of the US. He’s also probably at least semi-serious about annexing Canada, and he’s not the first to think that either: the US actually invaded Canada during the 1812-1815 war with the UK, expecting (rather like Putin in Ukraine) to over-run the country in days. Buying territory along with the people who live there is hardly a new concept either, especially for the US, which bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 and a huge chunk of the mid-west from France in 1803. Describing the purchase of Greenland over the heads of its residents as ‘decolonisation’ is perverting the meaning of words somewhat, but the process itself is hardly historically novel.

People tend to forget that most – maybe all – of the world’s political boundaries between states are the result of war, or treaties agreed between nominally equal parties (even though, in reality, many of those treaties were effectively imposed on the weak by the strong). The boundary between Canada and the US, like Danish ownership of Greenland, are both accidents of history. Trump’s mindset in this context isn’t radically different from that of Putin – both think that the boundaries of the states which they govern should be drawn differently to include more territory, and both are willing to consider, at least, the use of force to bring about those changes. It is, unfortunately, far from inconceivable that an early meeting between Trump and Putin – which both want, apparently: Putin because he thinks he can outwit Trump, and Trump because he believes his own hype about his abilities as a dealmaker and his friendship with Putin – will lead to something akin to the Yalta conference after the second world war, in which the so-called great powers (now reduced to two, in the eyes of both of those involved) carve up Europe and the Americas between them.

As for the people of Greenland themselves, such evidence as exists suggests that their preferred status is independence. In a world where invading the territory of the EU is not ruled out, and an invasion of the UK is floated as an option, the chance that the Greenlanders’ voice will be heard seems slim.

Loopholes and principles are not easy bedfellows

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The ill-starred romance between Farage and Musk didn’t last long, which presumably means that the enormous donation which had been mooted might not arrive after all. It turns out that a mega-rich man actually expects something in return for his patronage. Who’d have thought it? In this case, the expectation was slavish support for his views on issues of the day (including the immediate release of a convicted criminal) however unfounded in mere facts and evidence those views might be. It leaves Farage with a difficult choice – stay in post and beg for money elsewhere, or make way for his Musk-anointed successor. Farage is claiming that he would “never sell out my principles”, but telling us that he won’t sell something he has never possessed doesn’t actually tell us a lot about his next moves.

The real debate about political funding should be examining the mysterious process of transubstantiation, during which profit generated elsewhere and then funnelled through a UK-based company magically becomes British money and therefore a legitimate source of political donations in a state which theoretically only allows such donations from UK sources. Interestingly, it only becomes British money for the purposes of political donations, and apparently doesn’t also become liable for UK taxes. As I say, it is truly a mysterious process. It’s a loophole, of course, and one which a party committed to eliminating sleaze and dubious funding might be seeking to close, particularly if the sums are so large as to completely tip the scales. However, a party which happily accepts a large donation from a company registered in a tax haven will inevitably find itself more than a little compromised on the issue. Dodgy funding is only an issue when other parties benefit from it, it would seem. In the meantime, all is well as long as ‘no rules are broken’, the only basis on which most politicians seem to consider the issue of morality, rather ignoring the fact that it is they who make the rules in the first place. Those who deliberately leave loopholes in rules from which they can benefit themselves can’t really complain if someone else uses the same loopholes.

Counting the members

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The response by the leader of the English Conservative and Unionist Party to the growth of the membership of Farage’s Reform was a masterful demonstration of how to ensure that your enemy’s successes receive maximum media coverage, underlining in the process the true extent of her political acumen. Whether her claims of fakery are true or not has yet to be fully resolved, although such evidence as has been produced suggests that a party led by Farage may have broken his habit of a lifetime by actually bearing at least a passing resemblance to truth, an outcome at which few can have been as surprised as Farage himself. We are told that, if the growth in membership numbers continues at its current pace, then Reform will have double the number of members in the Tory Party by the end of January. That’s mathematically true, but it’s also mathematically true that at the current rate of growth, the entire population of the UK will be Reform members in only 38 years from now. Simplistic mathematical truth isn’t always a useful or meaningful metric.

Given the lack of clarity about what ‘membership’ actually means for a ‘party’ which still appears to be legally owned and controlled by the man himself, and the suggestion that few of those ‘members’ are actually likely to end up pounding the streets, let alone ringing the doorbells of unsuspecting voters, membership numbers in themselves, whether accurate or not, probably don’t tell us a great deal about Reform’s electoral prospects, even if they do help to reinforce the idea that Badenoch could start a fight about nothing in an empty room.

More significant are the opinion polling numbers which have been appearing recently, showing that Reform has a certain momentum at present, to which Badenoch has kindly, if rather incompetently, added. But if a week is a long time in politics, it’s a very long time indeed until the next Senedd election, let alone the next UK election, and parties led by Farage have in the past shown an uncanny ability to self-destruct, so we should be careful about over-reacting to a few opinion polls. But neither should we be overcomplacent in the face of the rise of a political movement dedicated to the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, aided and abetted enthusiastically be those who will pay the price: sometimes, it seems, turkeys really do vote for Christmas. Especially when the media seem so determined to talk up the possibility in order to give themselves something to talk about.

Much of the talking heads reaction seems to be about the policies and philosophies underpinning political debate in the UK, and whether ‘the right’ will somehow transition from Tory to Reform or come together in some sort of takeover of one by the other. That misses the point, almost as much as the comforting suggestion that Wales is somehow a ‘left-wing’ nation which will reject the even-more-extreme Toryism of Reform just as it has traditionally rejected the more mainstream Toryism of the Tory Party itself. None of that stuff about left and right is what drives Reform’s members, voters and supporters. Whilst those at the top of the party might have a clear vision about concentrating power and wealth in the hands of a few by impoverishing the many, it’s not one that they’re going to share – for obvious reasons. The rest are driven more by a ‘plague on all your houses’ mentality, an appeal to outdated English jingoism (yes, even in Wales), and a good dash of racism, albeit increasingly presented in terms of a clash of cultural perspectives. None of this is amenable to pragmatic argument about the detail of policies and promises which no-one believes are going to be enacted anyway.

But if it isn’t easy to counter these attitudes, it really is extremely easy to reinforce them, and it’s something which the Labour government manages to do regularly. Every time they tell us that there is not enough money for things such as winter fuel payments, they tell us implicitly that those things on which they do spend are higher priorities. It’s no surprise that some people see every penny spent on dealing with the desperate people arriving on these shores as being money which could be used for something else, if only it weren’t for these immigrants. Ask yourselves how many times you’ve seen memes suggesting that the homeless, or veterans, or pensioners are more deserving of our support than immigrants, with a strapline along the lines of ‘we should look after our own people first’. It’s a narrative which Labour’s own words and actions reinforce daily, even if not entirely intentionally – and it’s utter nonsense. The UK is one of the world’s richest countries, and it also has one of the largest gaps between the richest and the poorest – those two facts are not unrelated. The question we should be asking is how we use the wealth which exists. It’s a question which the Labour Party used to ask, but stopped asking decades ago in its rush to follow the Tories in their adoption of a wholly false theory of economics which just happens to benefit the few.

We can’t yet know whether the momentum which Reform currently has will continue and carry them into electoral success in future contests. But we can be pretty certain that if it does happen, the current Labour government will have facilitated and enabled it with its blind adherence to self-imposed fiscal rules and an unwillingness to challenge inequality in any meaningful way.

Can even Trump get something right?

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The Western Mail carried a story earlier this week (which I can’t find online, but basically seems to be a fairly minor edit of this story from three weeks ago) about the problem of desertion facing the Ukrainian armed forces. We knew, of course, that the Russian armed forces were suffering from desertion as well as draft avoidance in the light of the serious level of casualties, but the media in ‘the west’ have seemingly been reluctant to report that the same issue is impacting the Ukrainian armed forces. Whilst it’s credible that Russian problems have been greater than those faced by Ukraine, it’s reasonable to suspect that the gap might not be as large as a less-than-entirely-unbiased media might have us believe. And the fact that Ukraine is suffering its own problem with a high level of desertion should come as no surprise.

It raises a much bigger – and more general – question as to whether the sort of large scale ground war for which the generals and some politicians keep telling us we should be preparing will ever be possible in the future in the same way as it was in the past. The report tells us that the US has been urging Ukraine “to draft more troops, and allow for the conscription of those as young as 18”, since the current minimum age for conscription is 25. Leaving to one side the moral issue of whether anyone should be urging a country to send even more of its people, and at an even younger age, into a vicious and bloody war where many of them will be killed or injured, I found myself wondering how realistic it is in the modern world to expect that people, particularly young people, will willingly comply with an order to go out and kill ‘for their country’. We’re not in the first half of the twentieth century when information flows could be easily controlled, and where jingoism was a fairly normal phenomenon. People – even in dictatorships like Russia – have much easier access to information about what’s happening. Pro patria mori has never been particularly dulce or decorum whatever the politicians might tell us, and that was precisely the point which Wilfred Owen was making more than a century ago. Mass conscription for a major war in the twenty-first century is likely to be problematic for any country which attempts it, with resistance running very high.

Trump has said that he will end the war on day 1 of his renewed presidency. I struggle to understand his drivers. He says it is to stop the killing, which would be a noble enough aim; but coming from a man who has no previous record of concern for anyone other than himself, it doesn’t immediately strike me as being likely. After himself, those about whom he most seems to care are other billionaires, but we know that capitalist billionaires are amongst those who most benefit from war through their investments in the arms industry. It might simply be, for Trump, a case of not spending US money to support another country. That would certainly seem to fit with his ‘America First’ outlook, even if it shows a certain ignorance of the relationship between US government spending on armaments and the overall value of shares on the New York Stock Exchange, which seems to be Trump’s only metric of economic success.

However, whatever his rationale is (to the extent that he has one at all) his conclusion that the immediate priority should be to stop the fighting and killing is difficult to disagree with. And since Ukraine does not have – and without a massive injection of military manpower and firepower from friends and allies is unlikely ever to have – sufficient forces to recapture all its lost territory, an end to the fighting necessarily implies a redrawing of boundaries, on at least a temporary basis. Expecting Ukraine to cede vast swathes of territory in order to buy peace is neither fair nor just, but in the absence of any other basis for agreeing a peace deal, it is surely no worse than the current US position of telling Ukraine to simply conscript more young people who can be ‘expended’ in an ongoing war with no obviously better outcome in sight. There aren’t many boundaries in the world which aren’t the result of a war, a treaty following a war, or arbitrary lines drawn on a map by colonial masters. 

‘Might is right’ is a lousy basis on which to run a planet, but unless and until we collectively find a better way, it’s the basis on which almost all of the world’s current boundaries exist. Supporting the idea that a free and independent country should cede territory to one autocratic bully at the behest of another autocratic bully is uncomfortable, to say the least; but encouraging Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian would feel even less comfortable. The devil will, of course, lie in the detail and in the mechanisms for ensuring the integrity of any new boundaries. But on the principle, even Trump might be able to get something right, even if not based entirely on rational analysis or concern for fellow humans.

Nuance is sometimes a way of avoiding hard facts

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When the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol a few years ago, reactions were mixed, to say the least. In general terms, views fell into two main camps: those who felt that we should not be celebrating the lives of those who were responsible for a cruel and despicable trade and those who felt that, like him or loathe him, he was a part of history which should not be, to use one of their current favourite words, ‘cancelled’. The compromise, ultimately, was to place the statue in a museum with an appropriate explanation of his role in the past. It’s a nuanced response, which attempts to placate both sides in the debate about statues. It does little, however, to resolve the underlying debate about what history is and whether – and to what extent – we should feel ‘proud’ of it.

No such nuance was observed when it came to the toppling of statues of Lenin or Stalin in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, nor in the case of the toppling of statues of Hussain in Iraq or, this week, those of Assad in Syria. I don’t recall any great outpouring of outrage about the rewriting of history or about the attempts at ‘cancelling’ the role of dictators in the history of those countries, only pleasure at their fall.

That underlines the hypocrisy and deceit at the heart of the arguments of those in the UK who oppose the removal of statues and symbols of those whom history no longer treats so kindly as attitudes and values change. It isn’t just about slavery, it’s about imperialism, colonialism and militarism, with all of which slavery was inextricably bound up. Those who opposed the removal of the statue of Colston and other such statues are actually proud (and believe the rest of us should be too) of Britain’s imperial, colonial, and militaristic past, and it is that – rather than the celebration of slavery – which they don’t want to see ‘cancelled’ or revised. Most of them (but I’m not convinced that this is true of all of them) might see slavery as something of a blot on that history, which is why they want to divert attention to Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery rather than dwelling on its role in creating the trade, but they are unable or unwilling to accept or understand that slavery was actually a key element in the accumulation of wealth from colonial activities. What Colston was actually being celebrated for was what he did with the wealth which he brought back to Britain, as though the means by which he acquired that wealth is somehow irrelevant or unimportant.

Syrians cannot change the history of their country; the Assad dictatorship is something which will always be taught in their schools. But knowing history, understanding history, interpreting history – these are not the same as celebrating history. Those who tore down statues implicitly understand that better than most, even if it was not the uppermost thought in their minds at the time. There’s no nuance around the idea that ‘he did some good things as well’. It’s an attitude from which we can learn something ourselves.

The enemy's enemy isn't always a friend

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The UK’s Prime Minister has taken time out of his busy schedule appeasing a brutal dictator who has his opponents killed and chopped up, and whose regime treats women as second class citizens and executes those who protest against his rule, in order to welcome the fall of a brutal dictator in another country in the neighbourhood. It’s almost as though what matters is not how brutal and barbaric a dictator is, but whether or not he has money available to be laundered by being invested in the UK.

In his rush to celebrate the end of one dictatorship (aided and abetted by his deputy back home) in the middle of a visit to another, the question which he doesn’t seem to be asking is whether, and to what extent, whatever replaces Assad will be any better. If their concern is really, as Rayner put it, ‘the protection of civilians’, the signs are not good. Whilst there might be at least some hope of a more enlightened approach from the Kurdish authorities who control a large chunk of Syria, it’s more than probable that the rather more ruthless rebels who have taken over the rest of the country – aided and abetted by NATO member Türkiye – will merely refocus the civil war along the lines of control between the disparate rebel groups, with the Kurds as a particular target. And within the areas that some of those groups control, the outlook for women and minority groups may end up being even more repressive than what went before.

Our enemy’s enemy isn’t always our friend, and the replacement of one brutal regime by another may not look like such a blessing to those who suffer its excesses. Still, if they can find some money to invest in the UK, Starmer and the rest of the UK government may yet end up appeasing them too.

When prevention becomes cause

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The military mind seems quite fond of developing different euphemisms and phrases which do more to obscure what it being said than to elucidate it. ‘Friendly fire’ and ‘collateral damage’ are two of the obvious ones. There was another one this week: ‘expended’. It seems that the military and the defence ministry are a little worried that, in the event of an all-out war, the UK’s entire army would be ‘expended’ in only six months. Whilst the rational response would be to say that, in that case, we’d better make absolutely certain that we don’t ever get into such a war, the military mind seeks instead to explore ways in which the number of people available to be ‘expended’ can be increased rapidly, in order to add a few months to that period. Whether people are going to be as enthusiastic about being ‘expended’ in the twenty-first century as they were at times in the past is another question: the military, as ever, always seem to believe that they’re going to re-fight the last war, and there does seem to be an assumption that attitudes to participating in a war are unchanged.

Their response to the point about avoiding such a war would probably be something along the lines of, ‘Ah yes, but the best way of doing so is to possess such overwhelming military strength that they would never dare attack in the first place’. But here’s a question: if Russia (to choose a putative enemy not-at-all-at-random) were to seek to build up its forces such that they were capable of deploying overwhelming force against ‘the west’, would ‘the west’ see that as a deterrent or a threat? And if the answer is the latter, why would ‘the west’ expect Russia not to see a military build-up by ‘the west’ in the same light? Underpinning the mindset is a belief, on both sides, that ‘the enemy’ is just waiting for a chance to attack ‘us’, in order to seize land and resources, and to subjugate people.

Historically, it’s not an entirely bad assumption. Looking at empires of the past (whether Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Spanish, Portuguese, French or British, for instance), expansion of territory and control of resources – including the ‘right’ to conscript people from the new territories into the army to further expand the empire’s control – has been a key driving factor. But that was then and this is now: what if that isn’t the main driver any more, and the real danger of war stems from a belief on one side or the other that they are under threat and the best response is to strike first? What is presented as a way to prevent war then becomes the likeliest cause of war. And it isn’t just military personnel who will be ‘expended’ if that happens.