Friday, 14 February 2025

Time to replace NATO?

 

The Trump administration has been roundly criticized for the approach which it is adopting to ending the war in Ukraine. But there are two things which Trump says which are surely uncontroversial in themselves. The first is that the war needs to end, on which most will surely agree. The second is that some boundary adjustments will need to be a part of that, which is much more contentious, but nevertheless a statement of an obvious truth.

Those boundary adjustments, whether permanent or temporary, will inevitably involve Ukraine ceding territory to Russia because, realistically, the only way of returning to 2014 borders is for other countries to commit large numbers of troops and resources to the war alongside Ukraine. A third Europe-wide war doesn’t necessarily have to involve nuclear oblivion, but that’s an obvious risk. And there's surely some doubt about whether the youth of Europe in the twenty-first century are willing to be conscripted and sent to Ukraine to die. Asking, let alone instructing, Ukraine to concede territory is neither fair nor just, and Trump’s rationale – which appears to be that Putin has lost a lot of soldiers to gain the territory so deserves to keep what he’s paid for in blood – is an appalling basis for making a concession to aggression. It’s also very one-sided, ignoring the cost that Ukraine has paid to resist the aggression as though Ukrainian lives don’t matter. It is, though, hardly surprising coming from a man who sees everything in terms of transactions, who believes that the strong should dominate the weak, and who has already made it very clear that he rather likes the idea of emulating Putin’s land grab himself.

Even so, for a man whose self-image is that of a master dealmaker to concede much of what the other party wants in advance of any detailed talks is incongruous, to say the least. He surely realises that any process of negotiation will only involve further concessions, and that far from being a mutual process he has to date extracted precisely nothing from Putin in return. He’s also agreed that Ukraine will not be joining NATO for the foreseeable future. At least that one is within his authority. Since new members can only be accepted by unanimous decision, he can block membership although, again, conceding that publicly in advance of any serious talks doesn’t look like a masterstroke of bargaining. Nor does it suggest that he has thought further ahead than the next news cycle.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of NATO anyway; the idea that dividing the world into hostile military blocks armed to the teeth is a rational long-term way of preventing war has always struck me as being a curious one. Trump has exposed the essential weakness of the alliance: if the most powerful member goes rogue, the alliance becomes meaningless. By declaring in advance that any peacekeeping forces deployed to Ukraine will not be acting on behalf of NATO, and that no attack on them by Russia will trigger the clause decreeing that an attack on one is an attack on all, he has rendered the alliance in its current form largely pointless and toothless, giving Putin the green light to attack the peacekeepers whenever he wishes. However, in the long term, if we can navigate our way through the period of danger which he has created, he might even be doing us a favour, albeit unintentionally.

The question is about how to respond. Whilst it would have been better to have approached the question in calmer times and with more time to work things through, challenging the whole basis of the alliance is not in itself a bad thing. European nations – including Ukraine – need to think about how best to bring about a secure and peaceful Europe which can co-exist with Russia to the east as well as with the US to the west, rather than simply depending on the military power of the US for the first and subservience to the US for the second. It’s potentially an opportunity to negotiate a mutual downsizing of military forces and to remove actual or perceived threats on both sides by re-establishing a degree of trust and co-operation, alongside a commitment to resolve disputes by negotiation within the framework of international law. It’s unclear whether Russia under Putin (or his successors – he won’t be around for ever, and we’re talking about long term solutions here) is ready to even begin such a process. Maybe it’s naïve to expect it to happen rapidly, but European states are hardly sending positive signals about their own willingness to engage in such a process either. The default position increasingly looks like some sort of attempt to build a replacement for NATO which excludes the US, and continue the armed stand-off, with Starmer's Labour in the vanguard, determined to look tough. That would be a huge missed opportunity to seek to find a long term positive in the short term chaos being unleashed by the madman in the White House.

Thursday, 13 February 2025

Sometimes a small dose doesn't inoculate, it increases the desire

 

When it comes to traditional vaccines, the science of giving people a small dose, a dose of a milder version, or a dead sample of the pathogen in order to promote the formation of antibodies and thus protect the individuals is well-established. And whatever some of the anti-vaxxers of this world might say, the evidence is that it overwhelmingly works, with complications and harm from the vaccine being extremely rare occurrences.

It's a category error, however, to seek to apply the same principle in the world of politics, and it’s a category error which the current Starmer government is making with great enthusiasm. Feeling threatened by the potential public support for Reform’s desire for mass deportations and ever more heartless treatment of the most desperate, they seem to believe that releasing selective footage of a tiny number of individuals being shackled and escorted onto planes for deportation will somehow defeat the toxin offered by Farage and his crew. But for those who want mass deportations, action against a tiny number doesn’t protect against the desire for more, it inflames it. ‘If they can do it for a few, why not for millions’ is a more likely reaction than ‘who needs Reform when Labour are doing the same thing’.

It shouldn’t take more than a moment’s reflection to work out that legitimising the process on a small scale will only encourage those who want to implement it on a large scale to ask themselves whether, if the approach is acceptable, they shouldn’t just vote for people who actually want to do much more of it rather than someone who believes that doing a little will be enough to buy their votes. Maybe there really will be some who will conclude that, if they can get Labour to implement Reform’s policies, then they don’t need to vote for Reform at all. But implementing Reform’s policies to stop Reform from gaining power to implement its policies doesn’t look like the smartest of moves. And whether that’s where Labour should be looking for votes is a matter on which people may have different opinions. To the extent that there are still some half-decent members and supporters of the Labour Party, it might lose them more than it gains them, but these are all calculations which Labour has presumably attempted to carry out in its attempts to stave off the surge towards Reform.

That, perhaps, is the greatest condemnation of all for Labour’s approach. Gaining and retaining power by implementing whatever policies seem most likely to achieve that has elevated that aim to be the be all and end all of their approach to politics. For a party founded on noble principles it’s reaching for the absolute nadir.

Monday, 10 February 2025

If not now, when?

 

Last week, the new US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, visited Panamá for talks. After his return, the White House told the media that Panamá had agreed to allow US warships to pass through the canal without payment, a statement which the President of Panamá immediately blasted as a lie. Rubio later walked back the claim, but clarified ominously that he had ‘made US expectations clear’. Apologists for Trump keep insisting that much of what he says and threatens is just a negotiating ploy from an experienced businessman and that this sort of thing is just an example of that, but the only business negotiations which start with a threat and ‘expectations’ are those involving the Mob. ‘Nice canal you’ve got there; be a shame if anything were to happen to it’ is not a normal approach to a business negotiation. It is increasingly clear that bullying other countries, preferably picking them off one at a time using the threat of military or economic force is the preferred modus operandi of Trump 2.0.

Starmer’s response to date is understandable, even if wrong-headed, and his instinctive indecisiveness doesn’t help. As the leader of a middle-ranking power whose electorate were persuaded to opt out of a strong trading bloc under the post-imperial delusion of being a global power, he’s in an almost impossible situation. He wants a deal with both, but his claim that the UK doesn’t need to choose between the US and the EU is nonsense. (To take just one example of where it breaks down, we cannot have a deal with the EU which facilitates free movement of agricultural produce meeting agreed standards without checks or controls alongside a deal with the US which allows agricultural produce which doesn’t meet those standards into the UK.) He probably knows that in the margins of his consciousness, but is unwilling to upset any of those who favour either approach over the other, so has decided, by default, to let things drift with an occasional act of genuflection to he-who-must-be-obeyed. Even if the so-called ‘special relationship’ ever existed, it does not currently go beyond protecting and promoting the interests of US billionaires.

It isn’t just on food products that the UK will have to give ground in pursuit of a trade deal with the US. Trump has decided that taxing the tech companies and the billionaires who own them is an act of discrimination against US companies, and has made an implicit threat of tariffs unless the UK backs down. The Brexit ‘freedom to set our own rules’ apparently contains a previously unstated caveat saying ‘unless the US decides otherwise’. Trump is also capricious. One of his latest rants concerns the replacement of paper straws with plastic ones. Paper ones, he claims, don’t work: they disintegrate during use. And you can get your drink on your tie. But his real objection seems to be that the move against single-use plastics was instigated by Biden; that is enough to make it axiomatically wrong and in need of reversal. What if he decides that any country which mandates paper straws is discriminating against US-owned companies and franchises, such as MacDonalds, or KFC? Does that become another reason for introducing tariffs?

In truth, his repeated statements suggest that he wants tariffs anyway as a basic part of his policy to reduce the income tax paid by billionaires, and that he will find an excuse to introduce them in the end. If he can extract a series of concessions by alternatively threatening and then delaying in the meantime, all the better – he still gets his tariffs and others have kneeled before him. That’s the thing about a bully like Trump. Every concession reinforces his own belief that he is strong and that others are weak; and if it comes too easily, he assumes that he simply didn’t demand enough. Thus, every demand met encourages new and bigger demands. And when he thinks that he’s extracted all he can get, he’ll do what he always intended to do anyway.

The first question for governments in the rest of the world – and this is particularly acute for any state which has deluded itself into thinking that it’s so special and unique that it can stand alone – is where and when to draw the line and call out this behaviour. Before or after the invasion of Panamá? Before or after the seizure of Greenland? Before or after the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza? Before or after Trump and Putin carve up Ukraine? Maybe, as some of those supportive of him claim, he won’t actually do any of those things, but assuming that he won’t do what he has repeatedly said that he wants to do only works until he does it – and then it’s too late. Lack of vocalised opposition in advance or any consequences after the event looks a lot like acquiescence. Because that’s what it is.

The bigger question is how to stop the president of the most powerful state the world has ever seen from doing whatever he wants. It’s not a question to which there is a simple answer. We should know, however, that there is one very obvious wrong answer, and that is that each country has to fight its own battles (or, more likely, make its own concessions), which is the choice Starmer seems to be making. Strength lies in, at the very least, coordination of actions and responses. Maybe there really isn’t any way of stopping what’s happening, and we have no choice but to roll over. It would be better, though, for that to be a conclusion reached by thought and analysis and accompanied by a credible mitigation strategy rather than through complacent assumptions along the lines of ‘he really wouldn’t, would he?’.

One other thing. Assuming that we don’t need to worry because he’s only got four years and we can sort it out when he’s gone is a huge mistake. Partly, that’s because some of his changes will be hard to reverse, or even completely irreversible, including changes to voting practices in ways that benefit him and his supporters or impeaching non-compliant judges. But even if he can’t find a way of winning a third term or cancelling elections, there can still be no guarantee that it ends in four years. Whilst the constitution rules out his being elected again, it doesn’t prevent him installing a puppet and pulling the strings from the sidelines. One of his progeny, perhaps – I suspect that the idea of a hereditary presidency might well appeal to him. The only limit on his direct potential influence is his age and mortality. And even after he’s gone, he has already changed the Republican Party so much that there are plenty of others willing to carry on. Deciding to ‘wait and see’ what he does is tantamount to licensing whatever he decides to do. Yet that’s where Starmer is choosing to place the UK.

Friday, 7 February 2025

The oldest tricks still work for some

 

Boxer’s response to everything was always “I will work harder”. His belief that working harder would solve all problems was unshakeable. It’s a belief shared by many of the UK’s politicians as well as some ‘business leaders’, although they work to the slightly different version: “You must work harder”. The underlying problem of the UK economy, in their eyes, is simply that people aren’t working hard enough. Last week it was the Tories, with Chris Philp claiming that the UK was lacking a proper work ethic. This week, Labour are at it, with ministers threatening to make redundant any civil servants who don’t achieve more with fewer staff and less money.

We can probably take it as read that most of us believe that, in most situations, it’s better to use resources – whether financial or human – as efficiently as possible (although it’s worth noting that efficiency at a micro-economic level isn’t always the same thing as efficiency at a macro-economic level). But how is that efficiency to be measured and assessed? It’s not easy to measure the output of the average civil servant – or indeed, any employee who isn’t directly producing something which can be counted. But without measuring output, it’s impossible to measure productivity, which in this context is a cypher for efficiency. In that situation, lazy employers (in which category, we can generally count governments and public authorities as well as many private companies) fall back on simply cutting the resources available to do a job and insisting that the workers continue to do everything asked of them.

It isn’t really improving ‘efficiency’, although it often seems to ‘work’, at a simplistic level. The staff involved may suffer more stress, and may resort to working extra hours, but as long as those hours are ‘free’ – and in many situations that is what employers insist upon, although that’s a trend more common in the private sector than the public – then achieving the same output with less input counts as an increase in productivity, and it doesn’t even require measurement of the output to conclude that. Maybe corners have been cut, regulations ignored, staff well-being damaged, but none of that matters in economic terms. If 8 people each working 10 hours a day (whilst being paid for 8) can achieve as much as 10 people working 8 hours a day, economists will proclaim that productivity has improved. It hasn’t really, of course. The work done has still taken 80 person-hours, it’s just that the employer has only paid for 64 of those. People haven’t worked any harder – just longer.

‘Sweating the resources’, squeezing more out of people in order to improve profitability – it’s obvious who benefits from that, and it ain’t the employees. Yet somehow, the all-pervasive idea that the ‘problem’ is that workers aren’t working hard enough diverts attention from the underlying economic power relationship, and encourages people to blame themselves rather than their masters for poor economic performance, even if, in reality, that poor performance is often due to a lack of investment and innovation, issues which lie more in the hands of employers than employees.

Boxer accepted responsibility enthusiastically, and eventually collapsed from overwork. His reward for his service to his masters was to be sold to the knacker’s yard. What worked for Napoleon seems to be still working today.

Thursday, 6 February 2025

Keeping 'them' at arms length is deliberate policy

 

It turns out that Starmer’s much-vaunted ‘reset’ with the EU amounts to little more than changing the colour of the icing on the imaginary cake. Just like his predecessors, he believes that the UK is so important to everyone that it can have the advantages of membership of the EU without having to abide by the same rules, or make any concessions in return. Little Englander cakeism is alive and well in the English Labour Party; it’s just a little more polite and diplomatic in its language.

One of the issues surrounds the idea of some sort of youth mobility scheme, under which young people from the UK and young people from the EU would be given the right, for a limited period of time, to travel to each other’s countries and experience a little of life there. Getting to know and understand each other better is one of the aims of the whole European project, which began in the aftermath of a war in which a lack of common understanding led to millions of deaths. Youth mobility is one of those things which, taken in isolation, many would consider entirely unobjectionable. Not so the Home Secretary, who sees it as allowing ‘migration’ and is strongly opposing it in cabinet, even if the consequence is a lack of movement on the PM’s stated objective of smoothing trade between the EU and the UK. Given that it’s a mutual scheme – traffic is supposed to be two ways – what is the objection to such a reasonable proposal?

The Home Secretary clearly believes that there would be a large difference between the numbers coming here from the EU and the numbers travelling from the UK to the EU, which would show in the statistics as an increase in net migration. There are two reasons why she might be right.

The first is language. Whilst proficiency in two or more languages is common in most of Europe, with English being the second language of choice in most cases, modern foreign language teaching has largely been gutted in the UK. Other Europeans find it easier to adapt to the UK than young people from the UK do in the rest of Europe. That makes the UK a destination of choice for young Europeans (and, of course, part of the reason that the EU is pushing the idea so hard).

The second is to do with class and affluence. In the UK, the desire to allow young people to broaden their experiences and learn about other peoples and cultures is largely a middle-class obsession. Look at who supports it – the liberal and middle class elites. It just doesn’t have the same resonance and attraction for young working class people in the so-called ‘red wall’ or post-industrial areas. It’s not something that they see as relevant to them. The political opposition comes overwhelmingly from the Little Englanders who very much want those young people not to mingle with foreigners in case they do find a commonality of interest and understanding. And it’s that political opposition which is the real obstacle.

The fact that the Home Secretary might be right about the imbalance in numbers is not, however, a reason for simply dismissing the idea completely. The language problem could be overcome, in time, by investing more in the teaching of European languages, and the problem of relevance only to middle-class children could be overcome by a system of grants, scholarships, and encouragement for those not following a more academic path in life. But both of those things require political will and a consistent policy over many years; and that is the problem. If your political strategy depends on stoking hatred and fear of difference, to say nothing of an inherent belief in your own group’s natural superiority, the last thing you want is to encourage any mingling with ‘them’.

Sadly, such Little Englandism isn’t confined to the ranks of Reform and the Tories; it seems to have found a very comfortable home in the Labour Party as well. Worse, within the UK it isn’t even wholly confined to England either. In Wales, however, we do have a route to escape it if we choose. It wouldn’t take long for an independent Wales to understand that our longer term interests have more in common with those of a number of other small nations and regions on the mainland than with our large neighbour, stuck as it is in a distorted dream of past glory.

Wednesday, 5 February 2025

Taking one for the team?

 

Assuming that Trump succeeds with his desire to annex Canada, would it really be merged into the US as a single new state, number 51? In simple geographic terms, Canada covers a greater area (9.99 square kilometres) than the whole of the US (9.15 square kilometres), and a single state covering a greater area than the other 50 looks unbalanced, to say the least. In population terms, it’s true that the total population of Canada (about 37 million) is less that the population of California (about 39.5 million). But it’s also true that eight of Canada’s ten provinces each have a population greater than the smallest US state, and one of them, Ontario, has a population which would make it the fifth largest US state. The other two, along with the three ‘territories’, have lower populations than even the smallest US state, but the constitution, as far as I’m aware, sets neither a minimum or a maximum.

The difference between joining as one state or as a number of new states is important, electorally. Canada as a single additional state would only add 2 members to the Senate, although even that might make a difference given the closeness of Senate elections in recent years. However, adding between 8 and 13 new states would add 16 to 26 new members; potentially making a huge difference to political outcomes in an enlarged US. We don’t know, of course, how Canadians would vote; politics in Canada is much more complex than the overtly two-party system in the US. However, given the generally more liberal attitudes amongst Canadians, it’s not wholly unreasonable to speculate that they might break decisively in favour of the Democrats rather than the Republicans. It would probably be enough to keep the Republicans out of power for the foreseeable future. I guess that might explain why everything Trump says refers to Canada as a single additional state: even if two extra Democrats made Senate control harder to achieve for the Republicans, it doesn’t look as impossible as adding as many as 26.

If Canadians were given a choice about merging with the US (and we cannot, of course, simply assume that Trump would allow that), it’s hard to see them – and this is especially true of Quebeckers – agreeing to do so as one state rather than as several. For Trump, it looks like a double-edged sword – expand the territory at the cost of a loss of political control. It’s almost tempting to suggest that the rest of the world should ask Canadians to take one for the team in order to prevent any recurrence of the current madness. The only problem is that I’m not entirely convinced that the same thing couldn’t happen under the Democrats. The differences between the two are smaller than many think. Trump, after all, could have decided to stand as a Democrat rather than a Republican: in a political system largely devoid of ideological differences and based almost entirely around individuals, party labels aren’t particularly meaningful. Assuming that the problem is only one for Republicans is a big mistake.

Tuesday, 4 February 2025

How are the benefits of trade to be shared?

 

After a few days of chaos, it’s still unclear exactly what Trump wants from Canada in exchange for not imposing tariffs in a month’s time. He claims it’s about three things: drugs, migrants, and trade imbalances but, as is ever the case, any numbers he quotes are at variance with any objective analysis. There have been some suggestions that, on both drugs and migrants, the flow from the US to Canada is greater than the flow from Canada to the US. The nature of illegal flows is that we can never be certain of their true extent, but such a conclusion meets the ‘common sense’ test; it certainly sounds credible.

That leaves us with a trade imbalance. There certainly is one, even if not as large as Trump claims, but the logic (insofar as that word can be used) of Trump’s position, with his threat to impose tariffs on any country or bloc which has a trade surplus with the US, is that all bilateral trade should be at or near a point of balance between imports and exports - or else favourable to the US. It’s an impossible target, and even if it were desirable, unilateral tariffs followed by retaliatory tariffs will not achieve it. They will merely increase prices for consumers in all the countries involved.

Maybe his real agenda is the one he’s now stated often enough – the annexation of Canada, and its incorporation into the US. That would certainly make the trade imbalance disappear – or rather give a good impression of disappearing. It wouldn’t really disappear at all, of course – it would merely be internalised. The ‘51st state’ would still be selling more to the other 50 states than it was buying from them, but no-one would notice any more. It’s equally true today that, within the current 50 states, some ‘export’ more to other states than they ‘import’ from them, but no-one cares very much because it’s all internal to the US.

Well, I say that no-one cares very much, but that’s not exactly true; it’s more that those who do care don’t realise what it is that they care about. To the extent that importing more than they export impacts the prosperity of the state concerned, that imbalance makes some US states poorer than others. Job opportunities are elsewhere, and young people often migrate out in pursuit of them. More economic migrants. In this respect, the economic relationship between some states and their fellow states within the US is not entirely unlike that between Wales and England (or more precisely, Wales and the south-east of England). But as long as all the international trade statistics treat the US (or the UK) as a single entity, those economic disparities disappear into the overall average. Annexing Canada would, in itself, make no difference whatsoever to the economic relationship between Canada and the 50 states – or to the people within those 50 states. It would merely make the discrepancy dissolve into the US average.

Taking the world as a whole, trade is always in balance. Total exports match total imports. It cannot mathematically be otherwise, because at a global level, it’s a closed system. Drawing arbitrary lines on a map and trying to balance trade across them is then a pointless exercise. The issue is, or should be, about how the economic benefits within that global closed system are distributed. It’s a question that the Trumps of this world can’t even understand, let alone answer.

Monday, 3 February 2025

Does Trump have a cunning plan to reduce the number of people flying?

 

Trump’s comments in the wake of the air disaster last week were appalling by any civilised standard. Declaring, without evidence, that it was the result of diversity policies, along with his suggestion that the job of Air Traffic Controller can only be done by geniuses and that those geniuses are exclusively to be found in one particular demographic, managed to showcase his racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia and homophobia almost in fewer words than it takes to list them. Like other opponents of diversity programmes, he seeks to deliberately mislead people about the nature of such programs, suggesting that they imply employing people who can’t do the job but match an under-represented demographic, rather than seeking to ensure that, in identifying and appointing people who can do the job, there is no direct or indirect discrimination against certain demographics and that employers attempt to reflect the diverse nature of the society in which they operate within their workforce.

His comment that people need to be geniuses to become Air Traffic Controllers rather begs the question about who decides what a genius is, and on what basis. We already know, of course, that Trump is himself a genius and a very stable one at that. We know that because he has told us so. Is his definition good enough? To put the question another way, if you were about to take a flight into US airspace, and you knew that the Air Traffic Controller handling the landing at your destination airport was only in post because he was an able-bodied white heterosexual male in possession of an official certificate stating that he is a Trump-level genius, would you still want to board the plane? It might help to reduce aviation-derived emissions in the US, I suppose.

Thursday, 30 January 2025

Identifying the right target

 

Former Welsh Secretary, David Davies, was busy earlier this week blaming AI for his failure to land a lot of jobs for which he applied. Some unkind souls might think that rejecting Davies for a job was actually a feather in the cap of AI, showing it to be a good judge of his suitability for employment. I suspect that the truth is more mundane: there is a valid point in what he has to say about his repeated rejections, but he’s aiming at the wrong target. Then again, grabbing hold of the wrong end of the stick is hardly out of character.

Part of his complaint is that he was applying for degree-level jobs without being in possession of a degree, and AI was rejecting him automatically as a result. In breaking news, and speaking as someone who has done a great deal of recruiting in my time, I can reveal that before AI was even a twinkle in the eye of its inventors, it was customary for employers, using only human perusal processes, to reject such applications. Even if only on the basis that the applicant, by applying for a job for which (s)he didn’t meet the basic criteria was displaying an inability either to read or else to understand the job ad. Recruiters, increasingly faced with a large number of applicants, will usually take a very simple approach to eliminating many of them without further consideration, and that doesn’t require the use of any fancy computer systems.

The bigger question, which he seems to be grasping for but can’t quite articulate effectively, is whether a degree is really necessary for many of those jobs. On that, he has a point. I would agree with him that there are people whose experience gained in the various roles which they’ve performed probably makes their skill set as good as, or even better than, someone who has a piece of paper but little real experience of anything (although I make no judgement here as to whether Davies falls into that category or not). But many employers take the easy way out. Rather than attempt to assess what alternative routes might make someone suitable for a particular job, they simply demand a degree (or some other qualification) and use that as a filter to reduce the number of applications which they receive and then have to peruse. Perhaps his real complaint is that the employers to which he has applied are just too lazy to consider him properly. It might even be fair comment.

If they were using a really good AI system, then AI might well be able to analyse CVs and compare them against job descriptions in great detail, faster than any human could, and identify candidates who might be suitable regardless of their formal qualifications. That would mean that his real complaint ought to be that the AI systems being used aren’t intelligent enough to spot what he clearly believes to be his exceptional talents. It surely couldn’t be that they are indeed using such systems and there just aren’t enough exceptional talents to spot.

Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Economic migration is neither new nor unique

 

For generation after generation, Wales has lost people, particularly young people, who have left to seek a better future elsewhere. The immediate cause is well-understood: a lack of opportunity here, coupled with greater opportunity elsewhere. Within the UK, it’s not a phenomenon unique to Wales of course; Scotland and much of England outside the south-east corner have suffered the same fate. The wider reasons for that economic imbalance are well-understood as well: a centralised state which concentrates power, wealth and talent in the centre by sucking it in from the peripheries. The extractive and exploitative nature of the Welsh economy is easily seen by looking at transport links – the best ones overwhelmingly run from west to east rather than north to south, historically facilitating the extraction of mineral and other wealth.

The fact that Wales has not been an independent country during that time, and the consequent lack of a recognised international border obscures the basic fact: most of those who left Wales were (and are) what are today called, usually pejoratively, economic migrants. People who live in an area denuded of much of its wealth by far-away rulers migrate in search of a share of what was originally theirs anyway. We’re not good at recognising it, but it is the same imperative which drives many of the migrants reaching these shores currently. Coming from countries which were systematically exploited and robbed by their colonialists, they travel to where the wealth now resides in search of opportunity. And it should be no surprise that the country of choice for many of them will be the one which colonised them, and whose language was imposed upon them. So, for example, Algerians tend to favour France and those from the former British Empire tend to favour the UK.

If anyone should be able to understand and empathise with economic migrants, it is us here in Wales. But by and large, many amongst us don’t. Perhaps it’s due to a lack of understanding of our own history, coupled with an acceptance of the version of history with which we are fed. But the bottom line is that, whilst many in Wales blame the exploiters for the loss of those who leave, they blame the individuals for the new arrivals. In truth, our interests have more in common. If it’s an unfair distribution of wealth which drives economic migration, it is a fairer distribution which will reduce it. It’s no accident that, in the UK as in the US, anti-immigrant sentiment is being driven and funded by some of the richest political donors. We only have to ask ourselves who might feel most threatened by any suggestion of a fairer distribution of wealth, whether within a state or more globally, to understand why.