Choosing the decor

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Sacrosanctity born of tradition is a status which plagues the entire English constitution, under which Wales and Scotland are also obliged to labour - for the time being at least. It’s a status which means that some things (such as the whole of 10 Downing Street) which are “ludicrously inappropriate for running a modern state” are essentially unchallengeable. No-one in their right mind (although that caveat might explain a great deal) would think it reasonable or sensible to run a government from a converted house which now contains a labyrinthine rabbit warren of rooms, which layout gives rise to perennial battles over who gets to sit where and in what degree of proximity to the PM of the day.

No-one in their right mind would believe that a parliamentary chamber with an inadequate number of seats for its membership, where the distance between the two sides is defined by the length of two swords, is really an optimal arrangement for the twenty-first century. No-one in their right mind would devise a system of voting which requires the members to stand up and queue to go through a specified door, sometimes repeating the process for hours on end as the chamber despatches a series of amendments to bills. No-one in their right mind would believe that a second chamber largely made up of appointees, with a sprinkling of others who owe their presence to some favour which an ancient and long-dead relative performed for the monarch of the day, along with a handful of senior clerics from one denomination of one minority religion which only operates in one of the constituent parts of the state, has any sensible place in the modern world. And there are plenty of other examples before we even start on the arcane rituals concerning the head of state. Whilst there is at least some debate about the continued existence and role of the House of Lords, there is not even any serious discussion about the rest of the nonsense.

On the scale of things, deciding what pictures should hang where is a pretty pathetic irrelevance, yet that is where one of this week’s controversies centres. What it was that possessed Gordon Brown to commission a portrait of one of the most divisive figures in modern UK history is one of life’s unexplained mysteries. But the fact that he did, and that the picture was then hung in a prominent position in one of the rooms in Downing Street, has developed – for some – its very own sense of sacrosanctity. The act of having it removed – to where has not yet been revealed – is interpreted by some of the worshippers of the former PM as having “no respect for our history and previous prime ministers”. Still, we should probably congratulate the Tory MP for doing something which few others are currently managing: identifying a difference between Labour and Tory. It might only be about the décor in a “ludicrously inappropriate” building, but we have to start somewhere.

And he thought that was offering us hope...

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Almost everyone who’s ever worked in an office environment must surely have seen the memo, or some variation on it, purporting to be from the head honcho saying that he has had reports that morale is low and that the hangings and floggings will therefore continue until it improves. Not the funniest of pre-social media memes, but most people will have understood that it was a spoof, albeit one which plays on their own confidence (or lack thereof) in the ability of management to improve the situation. Only the most humourless will have taken it as some sort of instruction manual picked up on a management course.

Every rule, allegedly, has its exception and the exception to this rule appears to be Keir Starmer. Yesterday’s speech was intended, apparently, as part of his efforts to give people hope of a better future. But his Hope Generation Apparatus appears to have been fitted with some sort of inverter mechanism, just like his Shoulder Broadness Assessment Gauge. There are circumstances in which a negative message can, paradoxically, also have a positive effect. Churchill offering only “blood, toil, tears and sweat” is perhaps the most obvious example. But a war which looked and felt to most people like an existential threat just isn’t the same as an imaginary financial black hole in an inherited budget, which needs to be plugged so that the plans laid out by the previous Tory government can be delivered. No amount of inspiring rhetoric is going to close that gap, even if inspiring rhetoric were to be on offer. Which it isn’t.

The only hope that it inspired in me was the hope that he really isn’t planning to continue with the metaphorical hangings and floggings until morale improves. And the hope that that isn’t itself a forlorn hope.

Does Starmer need a new ruler?

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In the dim and distant past, I was a member of the drama group in a youth club in Penarth, and one of the pieces we had to perform in competition with other clubs was ‘an excerpt from Shakespeare’. I was cast in the title role of what we thespians can only ever refer to as ‘the Scottish play’. An unsavoury character, on the whole, but whatever others might think, I don’t think I was typecast. I remember speaking the line about “this blasted heath” with particular vehemence, on account of the fact that there actually was a blasted Heath in Downing Street at the time.

Anyway, it was the three witches which came to mind yesterday as Heath’s latest successor spoke in the garden at number 10; and most particularly the bit about “double, double, toil and trouble”. Whether the witches were actively evil, deliberately guiding the path of frail and gullible humans towards murder and treachery, or whether they were simply using their supernatural powers to prophesy what was going to happen anyway is one of those unresolvable literary debates about the correct interpretation of words written by a long-dead author. Similarly, turning to yesterday, those of a kinder disposition might think that Starmer was simply using his less-than-supernatural powers to predict the inevitable; others might instead choose to think that he is actively setting out to cause misery and poverty for many, as some sort of object lesson to deter people from ever voting Tory again. But then again, perhaps I’m making it too complex: the explanation doesn’t lie with the English bard – it lies instead with Frankie Howerd’s line about “woe, woe and thrice woe” which seems more apt to describe Starmer’s dismal and depressing performance.

SirKeith did set out to emphasise that it was those with the broadest shoulders who should take the most pain in the forthcoming budget. There is, though, a mismatch between words and actions here – to date it is some of the poorest pensioners and the hundreds of thousand of children officially living in poverty who have borne the brunt of his actions, or in some cases his inactions. It led me to wonder how, exactly, he is measuring shoulder width. Reading a ruler is a simple enough task, even for a non-mathematician, so is he merely reading the ruler from the wrong end, or is his ruler in some way defective? For the ruler to possess a defective ruler isn’t the best of starts.

Being tough

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There are a few lonely voices within the Labour Party calling on Starmer and Reeves to reverse their decision on the Winter Fuel Allowance for pensioners as the implications, particularly for those just above the threshold for claiming pension credit, become clearer. But with Starmer declaring that things are going to get worse before they start to get better, it seems highly unlikely that there is any sort of U-turn on the horizon. We can forget the detail of the argument; a new government which has declared that it will take tough decisions isn’t going to reverse one of the toughest just weeks into its term of office, no matter how silly the decision comes to look. The same is true about the two-child cap on benefits and none of the signals emerging from Downing Street suggest any likelihood of an early change in that policy either. We’re more likely to get a committee or a commission to look at a long term solution to poverty and, in the meantime, Labour have decided that pushing a large number of pensioners into fuel poverty (and keeping hundreds of thousands of children in poverty), is an essential element of demonstrating their willingness to be tough.

It's not even clear that there is any particular political benefit to their actions either. With the Tories – and even Reform – criticising the decision on the fuel allowance, Labour are hardly going to prise votes away from those parties by their performative toughness. Whilst it’s true that pensioners are the only demographic still more likely to vote Tory rather than Labour, it doesn’t follow that all pensioners vote Tory. That demographic is itself split by income: the poorest pensioners are the ones most likely to vote Labour. Cutting their income is a policy which seems to be deliberately designed to hurt the party’s own supporters. But if the policy itself is cruel and unnecessary, and it has no obvious political benefit (indeed, it has a clear political downside), why stick as doggedly to it as Reeves seems determined to do? It appears that being tough, being seen to be tough, and refusing to reconsider a decision – whatever the evidence might say – have now become ends in themselves, and depriving pensioners (as well as children) of a decent lifestyle is the price that has to be paid for that. It’s part of their self-image, it is what they think distinguishes them from others, it is how they now define themselves. It’s an expression of what has become their only core political philosophy. And it’s a thoroughly depressing prospect.

Who's asking 'why'?

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In another sign of the extent to which the Labour government is engaged in continuity politics rather than facilitating real change, it was announced this week that London City airport would be allowed to expand its number of flights, and that the government was ‘open’ to bids from other airports to increase the number of flights as well, and expand their facilities to permit that. It’s true, of course, that expansion of aviation will add to GDP growth (at least, to the extent that it doesn’t simply redirect expenditure from other sectors), but it highlights the danger of setting GDP growth as an over-riding objective, with no consideration as to whether it’s the ‘right type’ of economic growth, i.e. growth which meets other objectives, such as environmental ones. Balancing growth with meeting environmental obligations and targets is much, much harder. So hard, in fact, that it appears that they’re not even going to attempt it.

Here in Wales, the Welsh government seems to be similarly minded when it comes to Cardiff Airport, with its plans to pump in hundreds of millions of pounds in the coming years in an attempt to grow traffic from the airport. Interestingly, the Conservative opposition in the Senedd opposes this expenditure and proposes instead that the airport should be transferred back to private ownership. Given past experience – the airport was only taken back into public ownership because it was failing badly under its private owners – just how putting private owners back in charge would help is unclear, and the Tories’ proposal was remarkably light on detail in respect of that. There is only one way that I can think of in which private ownership of such a prime piece of land on the outskirts of Cardiff could turn a decent profit in the short to medium term, and that’s to close the airport and develop the land for other purposes. Perhaps that’s what the Tories want, but a call for a sell-off isn’t an entirely honest way of calling for closure.

What Wales needs in terms of airport coverage is something of a taboo subject. Because of the airport’s location, and the population distribution in Wales, it’s never likely to be able to compete with Manchester or Liverpool for travellers from the north of Wales, or with Birmingham for travellers from the Welsh midlands. And in the south-east of Wales, passengers have a realistic choice between Cardiff and Bristol, meaning that the only real ‘captive’ market, for which using Cardiff if flights are available will almost always make more sense than going elsewhere, is Glamorgan and most of Dyfed. It’s not a large market, but experience shows that it’s enough to sustain regular holiday flights to a range of popular destinations. Based on population growth, and assuming an increased level of affluence which has not exactly been visible recently, there is potential for slow but solid growth in the number of such flights and the range of destinations served.

However, a strategy based on a large and rapid increase in passenger numbers depends on rather more than that. Effectively, that means persuading carriers to use Cardiff instead of other airports (such as Bristol and Birmingham), either for existing flights or for any increase in flights in the future – and then persuading passengers, including those from outside Wales, to use those flights. The proposition that it could become a significant international airport with a large range of destinations being served depends on an increase in scheduled flights, rather than flights by holiday operators. It seems that the prestige of becoming that sort of international airport is what drives the Welsh government, and there are plenty of others as well who will argue that without that, Wales is somehow not a proper nation. But the extent to which becoming such an airport will drive wider economic growth is arguable at best; the idea seems to be based more on blind faith in ‘the markets’ than any real analysis of potential. For the foreseeable future, at least, it would also depend on an ongoing level of public subsidy – whether to the airport or to the carriers is irrelevant here – about which there is a lack of honesty and transparency. The latest £200 million will not be the last.

How do we measure ‘success’ for the airport? For UK Labour, it seems to be in terms of turnover and the contribution that makes to GDP; for Welsh Labour it’s the number of passengers and flights; for the Tories it’s eliminating any cost to the public purse, even if the logical conclusion is complete closure. None of those seem to be based on any thought-through assessment of whether Wales needs an airport in Cardiff, and for what. Yet the answer to those questions provides the only sound basis for assessing success. We are a small country – having pretensions beyond our capabilities is merely aping the UK’s approach. Maybe slow, organic growth serving the needs of passengers in a limited area of Wales should be enough.

Could we get that lucky?

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It’s long struck me as being a curious aspect of the world of football that a manager who leads one team to trophy after trophy turns out to be an utter failure when he transfers to another team, and that a manager who has a hopeless record with one team goes on to have a huge run of success with another. It’s almost as if what matters is whether the team is functioning well or not rather than the attributes of the manager. If the team is dysfunctional, it doesn’t matter how good the manager is, the team will continue to fail.

None of that only applies in football, of course; and that latter point about appointing a new manager not making any difference to an utterly dysfunctional team is one which the English Conservative and Unionist Party has already tested to destruction. Although that hasn’t deterred them from seizing the current contest as an opportunity to add further proof to the theorem.

There is another strange parallel between the two worlds as well. No matter how badly a manager does with one team before being sacked, there will always be some fans who believe either that he should be brought back to try again, or else that, despite all the evidence, he is the obvious candidate for any management job which comes along. And that brings us to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Having wrecked what rather likes to call itself “the world’s most successful party”, he is still being suggested and promoted for other jobs, where he would be free to wreck other organisations. Last week, we were told that he was being lined up to wreck the Daily Telegraph. Don’t get me wrong here – wrecking the Torygraph would be almost as big a favour to the UK as wrecking the Tory Party – it’s just that I somehow doubt that that is quite what his backers have in mind. Although, given his demonstrated propensity to swing between giving Johnson his total support and then pulling the rug from under him, perhaps Zahawi is really planning to sack him a day or two after taking control.

Ten months ago, it was reported that Johnson was going to become a presenter on GB News, although he has yet to make his debut performance. I don’t know whether he’s been paid for that ten months, but it’s at least possible that GB News would prefer to pay him for not turning up and wrecking their channel. It would almost be a sign of intelligence amongst channel bosses. And taking the money without doing very much for it isn’t exactly new. Johnson was, apparently, paid an advance of £88,000 for a book on Shakespeare for publication in 2016. The publishers are still waiting. Fortunately, he’s found a different publisher for his memoirs, who have apparently stumped up £510,000 for the privilege of publishing the tome, if it’s ever finished. That last may turn out to be another triumph of hope over experience.

Throughout it all, his long-term fans and sycophants still hold on to dreams about him returning to once again take the reins of a party in crisis, forgetting his role in creating that existential crisis in the first place. Perhaps their dreams will come true in the next or next but one leadership election (they can surely fit at least two more in before the next election) – but could we really get that lucky?

Labour ministers encourage hostility to migrants

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Ministers in the Labour government have rightly condemned those who have been whipping up hatred against migrants in general and refugees and asylum-seekers in particular, especially on social media, but they seem to be completely blind to the effect that their own words and deeds are having. Their own words may not be as blunt and direct, but that simply makes them all the more insidious.

I cannot be alone in having noticed a recent increase in the number of memes circulating drawing comparisons between the cut to the winter fuel allowance or the failure to remove the two-child benefit cap on the one hand, and paying for food and accommodation for migrants on the other. It’s a silly comparison to make, of course; an economy like that of the UK can easily do both. But the government has made a deliberate choice not to do both, and in its insistence on the nonsensical household analogy for government debt has effectively encouraged people to believe that doing one thing necessarily prevents them doing another, because of a ‘lack of money’.

Cutting the state pension by at least 2.5% for most pensioners (which is the effect of the change to the winter fuel allowance) is a deliberate political choice. Keeping 300,000 children in poverty for at least a few months longer (which is the effect of failing to scrap the 2 child benefit cap, even if they change it in the budget) is another deliberate political choice. They weren’t forced to do either, but have chosen to do both because of a blind adherence to a fiscal rule based on Tory ideology about the size of the state and the protection of private wealth. But if you tell people often enough that the old and the young must suffer because of a non-existent ‘lack of money’, it should hardly be a surprise if some people draw comparisons with other items of expenditure and suggest cutting those instead. The result is that Labour’s dishonesty over government finances makes them as guilty as others of inflaming attitudes towards desperate people seeking a better life for themselves and their families. It doesn’t excuse the attacks on hotels, mosques, businesses or individuals – nothing can excuse that – but the false claim that the government ‘has no choice’ is an active encouragement to people to put the blame elsewhere. It turns out that divide and rule is an approach to government which isn’t ended by throwing out the Tories.

Pretending to have a policy

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Workers in the old Soviet Union used to say that “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”. It was a cutting summary of the state of the economy at the time. But ‘pretending’, when it comes to matters economic, wasn’t (and never has been) limited to the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union. It has also been practiced here, by Labour and Conservative governments alike – and it looks as though the new Chancellor is determined to restore pretence to a position of centrality in her handling of the economy. I refer, of course, to the idea of what was variously labelled the Private Finance Initiative, or Public Private Partnerships; a system in which the government pretends not to be borrowing any money to build schools, roads, hospitals or whatever, and the private partner pretends not to be charging any interest on the money it pretends not to have loaned to the government, recovering its costs instead by issuing extortionate bills for changing lightbulbs.

It was the Major government which came up with the scheme, although Blair and Brown adopted it with gusto after replacing Major. And it was Cameron/Osborne who ended the practice, when it became clear just how bad a deal it really was over the long term. It did, though, achieve its main stated aim, which was to hide the extent of government borrowing by pretending it wasn’t happening. Instead of loans, debts and interest payments, the government’s accounts showed only ongoing maintenance and rental costs.

The FT reported yesterday that the Chancellor is considering reviving some version of the scheme to build a new Thames crossing in London at a cost of around £9 billion. No doubt the details will be tweaked in the light of past experience, but the underlying truths will remain, whatever those details might suggest, and the development cost will miraculously not appear as a loan in the government’s accounts whilst, over the long term, those pretending not to be lending the money will make a killing.

It's dishonest, of course, but probably the inevitable conclusion of a government which thinks that being seen to adhere to an arbitrary and inflexible fiscal rule is more important than the underlying financial reality. The issue isn’t just about that dishonesty though, nor the resulting inflated costs compared with a more straightforward approach to borrowing the money; it’s about the way priorities are determined. Schemes prioritised for progress using such an approach will be those which produce the best return for those not lending the money to the government; it is they who will, effectively, decide the priorities. Maybe the two things sometimes align – perhaps Reeves really believes that, if the government were to find a spare £9 billion down the back of the sofa, a new Thames crossing would be its top priority. There is, though, no obvious evidence that any thought has been given to the best way of spending such a large windfall. The thinking seems, instead, to have started from asking which schemes will be most likely to attract the finance sector to pretend not to lend the government money. It’s not only the construction which is potentially being outsourced, it’s the determination of policy as well.

Understanding the difference

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The Foreign Secretary isn’t the first English politician to get confused over the difference between English and British, and he won’t be the last. Perhaps he does, however, deserve some sort of award for the speed with which he moved from one to the other in an article he wrote for yesterday’s Sunday Times (referenced here in today’s Guardian). The far right rioters, he wrote, have “forgotten about what it means to be English”, before going on to say that they “need to integrate back into Britishness”. The values from which he claims that they have opted out are thus, according to him, English; the society of which they have ceased to be a part is British. He probably sees no difference between being English and being British, and he’s far from being alone in that. But being unable to understand the difference is precisely the point – understanding anything about modern culture and identity in the UK requires a basic understanding that there isn’t one single universal definition. It’s an understanding whose absence he has so clearly demonstrated.

The sausage roll road to fascism

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One of the more absurd images to emerge over the past week was the one of the topless guy liberating a tray of sausage rolls from a Greggs shop during the riots in Hull. Whilst we cannot be completely sure that it wasn’t a carefully-planned intention to arm himself with sausage rolls to wave in the face of Muslims whose religion does not permit the consumption of pork, rather in the manner of pointing kryptonite at Superman, it seems much more probable that he was just feeling a little peckish. And we have no conclusive evidence to suggest that he’d know the difference between a pork sausage roll and a vegan one anyway.

Some politicians – and not just those of the political right – have suggested that stopping the riots depends at least in part on dealing with the so-called ‘legitimate concerns’ of the protesters about immigration. I don’t really understand what those ‘legitimate concerns’ might be, but I struggle even more to comprehend the link between a concern about immigration and a daring raid on purveyors of sausage rolls (delicious though they may be). It’s true that some services in the UK are under pressure – such as housing, education, social care and health. But the last two of those would be under even more pressure if it were not for staff who have come from elsewhere in the world to work in those sectors. And in more general terms, those pressures are more to do with underfunding by successive governments – a policy which Labour apparently intends to continue – than with such increase in demand as results from migration. Deliberately creating a shortage and then finding a convenient group to scapegoat is a divide-and-rule tactic which is as old as the hills.

It's also more than a little strange that an allegedly non-racist concern about total numbers manifests itself in the form of direct and violent action against the adherents of one particular religion. Even if the original rumour about the religion and background of the alleged assailant in Southport had been true, the leap to blaming, and then seeking to punish, all adherents of that religion surely owes more to prejudice than to logic. If I recall correctly, Marx once said something along the lines of: ‘anger in the multitude is enough – just give me six in the country who understand’. It’s not something which applies only to the political ‘left’. Those out on the streets attacking immigrants don’t need to have a worked-though political philosophy; they don’t need to be fascists themselves. They merely need to express their anger, whipped up by those who would use that anger for their own ends. And even some of those doing the fomenting don’t need any sort of ideology to underpin their actions. If the UK were to descend into fascism, it wouldn’t be the likes of ‘Tommy Robinson’ who would end up as dictator, it would be one or other of those who offer ‘solutions’ to the ‘problems’ which they themselves have blown up in the minds of the many. Locking up the pawns who are ‘merely’ angry might be a necessary step in the short term, but it’s dealing with the symptom. The ones we should really beware of are those whose ‘solutions’ involve authoritarian rule and restrictions of freedom.

"We're not racist, but..."

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One of the threads running through some reporting of the disorder in English towns and cities in recent days has been the strong denial by some of the participants that they are in any way racist or far-right in their views. Sometimes there’s a ‘but’ though, and in one case reported in yesterday’s Sunday Times, the ‘but’ was that in his town (Holyhead, for those who might be thinking Wales is somehow immune to what we have seen in England) “seven out of eight corner shops are owned by Muslims”. Now it is, of course, entirely possible that the person in question is an expert and well-schooled theologian, who has questioned all the shopkeepers concerned about their religious beliefs, and whose deep study of religious teachings has led him to the conclusion that buying his milk or newspapers from a Muslim is a serious threat to his own religion and culture which can only be countered by travelling to Liverpool to join an anti-Islam protest. It does seem rather more likely, however, that he has made a judgement about their religion from their appearance.

That does, though, leave unanswered the question of why anyone might see Muslims running shops as such a bad thing that it requires people to attack the most convenient mosque. Let us take it as read that at least some of those involved really do believe that there is nothing racist or right-wing about attacking anyone who happens to ‘look like’ a Muslim, along with their places of worship, their businesses, and places where they might be living, because to do so is actually defending Britishness, or what they assume Britishness to be, from the threat posed by ‘outsiders’. Where could such a belief possibly have come from? A major part of the answer to that question must surely turn around the way in which certain politicians have normalised terms like ‘invasion’ and ‘swamping’ in relation to migration. When the propositions that immigrants do not share ‘our’ values, and that immigration threatens ‘our’ way of life become part of mainstream political debate, why would anyone expect that those whose prejudices are thus validated would see such positions as being politically extreme? It would be unfair to accuse such politicians of egging on those participating in the violence, even if their ritualistic condemnations of it are invariably accompanied by a ’but’ of their own, in this case about failing to be sufficiently harsh with refugees. But not actively encouraging the riots doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t see the potential value to themselves in the ensuing disorder. There is, apparently, no evidence to support the widespread belief that Lenin coined the term ‘useful idiots’, but somebody did, and from the point of view of the far right the rioters fit the definition.

It isn’t only the rioters who are useful to the far right – immigrants also serve a similar function, albeit even less consciously. I’m not convinced that the far right themselves are always or necessarily racists. A belief that society should be run by authoritarians in the interests of the few does not in itself require the othering of any particular group. But ‘vote for me so that I can impose my will on you and concentrate wealth even further in the hands of myself and my friends’ isn’t exactly an election-winning slogan. Identifying and promoting conflict between groups in society, blaming some of those groups for the fact that others feel relatively poor or dispossessed, and then offering to resolve the situation in favour of one of those groups is a much more powerful way of achieving the same objective. Persecution of those who have been othered is more of a means to an end than an end in itself.

An authoritarian response to rioters looks and sounds like firm action, but also serves to strengthen the belief that authoritarianism provides solutions. Resolving the artificially induced conflicts is more about getting people to understand that the interests of the ‘useful idiots’ and the othered groups have more in common with each other than they do with the right wing authoritarians who are pulling the strings.