Chickens, eggs, and overseas aid

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A number of different versions of the saying, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader” have appeared over the years. It’s usually attributed to Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, although it’s unclear whether he actually said it or not. Its origin isn’t really important, but it does express a particular political issue very well. Is it the job of politicians to follow, or to lead? One of the attributes of populist politicians is that they attempt to discern what people think, and reflect that back to them (albeit frequently in a distorted or exaggerated form) in an attempt to gain and exercise power, which is really their only objective. Politicians who are part of a movement seeking to change society are more inclined to set out their beliefs and try to persuade people of their merits. But parties don’t stay in one place, and the Labour Party is a classic example. Founded to change the world, it has ended up meekly following whatever it believes the latest trend in public opinion to be.

There are few things for which I’d give Blair, Brown, or Cameron any credit, but the move to boost overseas aid to 0.7% - set as a target by Blair/Brown, in accordance with international targets, and achieved and legislated for by Cameron – is one of them. To their shame, both parties have been equally complicit in reversing the decision – Sunak took it down to 0.5%, and Sir Warmonger has further reduced it to 0.3%. And both have diverted significant sums from the overall total to expenditure within the UK on handling refugees and asylum-seekers. Both blamed a ‘lack of money’, and in both cases that was based on the fallacious argument that there is a finite amount of money available, and we have to make choices about how to use it.

Today, a Labour Trade Minister has told us, by way of justification, that the public no longer supports the idea of foreign aid. It’s a chicken-and-egg question, though. Have the public spontaneously turned against the idea of providing foreign aid allowing the politicians an excuse to cut funding, or is the change in public attitudes a result of years of propaganda telling people that the UK ‘cannot afford’ to help others? It’s probably best described as a vicious circle, with the original driver as unclear as whether the chicken came before the egg. The notable thing, though, is the lack of any effort by self-styled ‘progressive’ politicians to attempt to break out of that circle by showing some leadership. Following public opinion is just another excuse.

Making people poorer really isn't 'compassionate'

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There is a traditional image of a vicious headmaster, about to deliver a good thrashing to one of the boys in his ‘care’, declaring that ‘this will hurt me more than it hurts you’. It’s not true, of course; and it looks like an effort to turn the abuser into an unwilling victim of circumstance, in his own mind at least. I doubt that any of the recipients of such ‘loving care’ ever believed it, and if it doesn’t work on terrified boys, there is no reason to believe that it will work on adults. It is, though, the chosen strategy of the Labour Government when it comes to welfare cuts. They want us to believe that driving people deeper into poverty is something that they really and truly don’t want to do, but are left with no choice because … well, because of an arbitrary financial rule which they themselves invented, and which magically doesn't apply to spending on weapons and destruction.

This week, the Work and Pensions Secretary told us that reforming the welfare system is an act of ‘compassion’, which will restore ‘opportunity and dignity’ to those relieved of benefits to pay for their food and housing. She also told us that, “Unless we reform [the social security system], more people will be denied opportunities, and it may not be there for those who need it”.  In plain English, which it’s easy to understand why she would want to avoid, that amounts to saying that the government will deliberately choose to see some people going without the basics of life in order to save money on the budget. There is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about that; driving more people into poverty is a wholly deliberate choice that the government is willing to make.

There is nothing wrong with some of the specific elements of the proposals: helping more people to find suitable work and easing the transition from benefits to employment are sensible investments, although they don’t differ greatly from what governments of all colours have been claiming to have been doing for years. But what previous efforts have taught us is that it isn’t as simple as looking at numbers in a spreadsheet might suggest. People have complex needs, which are often only obvious when looking at individuals, and looking at individuals rather than numbers is not what governments do. There’s also an element of distraction: the changes to Personal Independence Payments have little or nothing to do with getting people back into work, yet government statements seem to be deliberately conflating the two.

It would be hard to fault a government which came up with serious and specific proposals to reduce the need for welfare payments by matching more people with suitable and worthwhile employment, and which was prepared to follow through on those in the hope that the welfare bill would be reduced in the end. That isn’t what they are doing, however: they are starting with an arbitrary target for the amount of savings that they want to make, building those savings into their forward budgets, planning to cut payments to achieve that, and then assuming that enough people will either move into employment or be deprived of the essentials of life. Maybe they have polling evidence telling them that such an approach would be ‘popular’, but when Sir Warmonger talks about doing the ’right’ thing, it’s not at all clear that he understands that there is a difference between the two words.

Trump will look after his friends - until he doesn't

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It’s probably better for the UK to have a trade deal with the US than not, even if the deal isn’t as good as some of its proponents like to claim. Still, there’s something of an achievement in finalising a deal of any sort with Trump, so Sir Starmer is probably right to feel at least a little pleased at getting the thing formally signed yesterday.

Given Trump’s propensity to change his mind without even waiting to drop a hat, there is an obvious question mark about how long the deal will last before Trump decides that he wants more. From a Trumpian perspective, any deal concluded quickly probably doesn’t extract as many concessions as he might get by reneging on it later. Assuming that he will honour his word would be very silly, and even Sir Starmer is surely bright enough to understand that.

What should particularly concern Sir Starmer were Trump’s own words about why he was doing a special deal for the UK: “The UK is very well protected, you know why? Because I like them. That’s their ultimate protection.” History shows that Trump always looks after his friends right up to the point where he decides they’re not his friends after all. As his former ‘first buddy’, Elon Musk is only too well aware. There seems to be a prevailing belief amongst the echelons of the English Establishment that Trump is so besotted with the English Royal Family that he has a soft spot for the UK. One of the reasons why they find it so easy to believe that is that it fits their own preconception of English exceptionalism. The more sceptical amongst us might just conclude that, however much he likes the odd royal (and some of them are very odd), when push comes to shove he likes money even more.

Unilateral actions can have global consequences

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In defence of his decision to launch a series of attacks on Iran, Israel’s Prime Minister has said that, by preventing Iran from ever possessing nuclear weapons, he is acting not only in the interests of Israel, but also in the interests of the world as a whole. There’s an obvious attraction in that statement: the world would indeed be a better place if a deranged old man who is crazy enough to use such a weapon is prevented from having access to one. There is a certain flaw in the logic, though: Khamenei isn’t the only leader of a state for whom the description ‘deranged old man who is crazy enough to use such a weapon’ might be appropriate. And they are not all orange-hued either. Indeed, there’s even a reasonable argument that words like ‘deranged’ and ‘crazy’ could legitimately be applied to anyone who even wants to possess such weapons, let alone solemnly announces a willingness to use them, as Sir Keir Warmonger has done in the past.

Even if we disregard such caveats and accept the basic truth that a nuclear-armed Iran is generally not a brilliant idea, on what basis should an individual state – especially one which is itself widely believed to have illegally developed its own nuclear weapons, and which (unlike Iran) refuses either to sign the non-proliferation treaty or to allow inspections of nuclear facilities – be free to decide to act unilaterally? Whilst the theoretical answer might reference international law and treaties, the de facto answer is much simpler – whenever the US government sees fit to allow it. It’s not much of a basis on which to build a peaceful rules-based world, and underlines humanity’s collective failure to find a way of living together on a shared planet. And, whilst Netanyahu couches his justification in terms of acting on behalf of the world, most observers suspect that it has more to do with his own political survival. Venality usually seems to trump humanity.

Leaving all of that aside, and abandoning principle for practical efficacy, the biggest question is the simplest of all: will it have the desired effect? On that, there is no consensus. For every ‘expert’ who claims that it will set Iran’s nuclear programme back years and deter it from ever seeking a nuclear bomb in the future, there is another who claims it will actually accelerate Iran’s progress in that regard, by encouraging a belief that only the possession of, and threat to use, an atom bomb will deter Israel (or anyone else) from attacking again. I don’t even pretend to know which analysis is correct; worse still, I don’t believe that anyone else ‘knows’ the answer to that question either. It’s all opinion and conjecture. The more certain someone is about the answer, the less I trust their judgement. What I am certain of is that the outcome of a unilateral action will be significant way beyond the boundaries of the state undertaking it, for people and countries given no input into the decision.

Even if Netanyahu’s opinion of the effect on Iran turns out, with the benefit of hindsight some years from now, to have been correct, it cannot be acceptable for one leader of one country to imperil so many with no input from those who might be affected. For that reason alone, Israel deserves to be sanctioned by the rest of the world, but the chances of that happening are vanishingly small. Humankind still has a long way to go to achieve real civilisation.

The Chancellor's double ended telescope only produces mirages

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When, as a child, I first discovered the wonder of telescopes, it was like a form of magic. Making far away things seem closer, or small things look bigger, was fascinating enough, but then to discover how the opposite happened when I looked through the ‘wrong’ end of one of these marvellous devices was an added bonus. But nothing that I ever discovered about telescopes could have prepared me for the amazing lenses possessed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which were on display yesterday as she announced the outcome of the spending review. She – and, apparently, most of the others around her – are in possession of a device which enables them to look through both ends simultaneously, magnifying those things which she wants to magnify, and minimising those which she would rather forget.

There can surely be no-one, not even the Chancellor herself, who seriously believes that the nuclear power station which she announced (or should that be ‘re-announced’?) will be built in anything like the costs or timescales quoted. One doesn’t need to be some sort of Nostradamus to be able to predict, with a degree of confidence indistinguishable from 100%, that the eventual costs and timescales will be higher, and considerably so, than any figure which escaped her lips yesterday. The degree of confidence that the sums quoted for all the other infrastructure projects announced yesterday will be exceeded might be slightly lower, but still a pretty safe bet. All the timescales and costs announced yesterday have been examined through the wrong end of the telescope.

When it comes to the advantages, however, the right end of the telescope has been deployed with a vengeance. The improvements to people’s standard of living, the number of jobs created: these are things which have been miraculously magnified. There will be no surprise if, like another announcement from recent years, they are quietly revised downwards in due course.

Some of the government’s over-excited comments on the flood of electricity which the new power stations will generate come close to the promise in the 1950s of electricity ‘too cheap to meter’. Even if the phrase has been misunderstood, and its original author was actually talking about fusion rather than fission, the phrase was widely used at the time – including by proponents of nuclear expansion – to describe an impossible energy utopia. In yesterday’s announcements, the costs of decommissioning the stations at the end of their lives, and of handling and storing the radioactive waste seem to have been subjected to their customary level of examination: none. Those issues remain where they have always been – a problem for future generations. Unlike the national debt, however, these are foreseeable liabilities which are not balanced by matching assets; they really are a financial black hole. Throwing good money after bad on nuclear power might look good on a spreadsheet keeping a running total of ‘investment’ spending, but the real cost is in not doing the other things that could be done instead. And probably more quickly.

If I had to pick a stand-out impression of what the government had to say yesterday, it would revolve around that timescale issue: it’s all jam tomorrow, with the lack of butter today being glossed over. The timescales – let alone the consequent benefits – of the capital spend are largely beyond the event horizon for the current government. If there’s one thing that’s almost as certain as the cost and timescale over-runs which are going to occur, it is that future governments (even if, by some miracle, of the same party) will delay or cancel some or all of the projects for which funding was announced yesterday. None of that means that some of the announcements are wrong in themselves: both Wales and the UK need the investment in infrastructure such as rail, for instance. But the belief that promising such investment over a lengthy timescale will somehow persuade people to tolerate the austerity measures baked in to yesterday’s review suggests a complete lack of connection and empathy with people who need relief today.

Rachel Reeves is no Dick Barton.

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It was 45 years ago that the Commercial Union insurance company used the slogan “we won’t make a drama out of a crisis”. In fairness, given that she wasn’t born until 1979, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has a plausible excuse for not remembering the slogan. But not being old enough to remember the advert is not much of an excuse for not understanding the meaning of the message. The handling of the winter fuel allowance (WFA) for pensioners has now gone beyond simple drama, and is rapidly becoming a long-running soap, with a cliff-hanger at the end of every episode as viewers attempt to work out how on earth she will extract herself from this week’s latest plot twist. Where’s Dick Barton’s “one bound” when you need it?

Her reluctance to give a handout to millionaires is understandable in principle, although her initial attempt to prevent that by limiting the payment to only the very worst off pensioners was something of a sledgehammer approach. Her latest approach – setting the cut-off at £35,000 a year – isn’t a whole lot better. Given that the average full time earnings before tax in the UK are a little over £37,000, the new cut-off point is going to exclude a lot more people than those who are really millionaires – unless the definition of ‘millionaire’ is now being changed to include everyone on average earnings or above, a definition which will come as something of a surprise to most working people, let alone pensioners.

In order to implement this ‘new improved’ version (as the advertising companies would surely try and present it), she’s inventing a whole new tax rate of 100% which only applies to a tiny part of people’s incomes and which comes into effect at a completely new threshold, unused for anything else in the tax system. It’s hard to envisage any approach she could have taken which would be more complex to implement, and probably end up costing a significant chunk (in terms of staff and IT costs) of the claimed savings to implement – as well, potentially, as requiring a couple of million extra pensioners to file annual tax returns which someone will then need to process.

I’ve never been a fan of the WFA anyway; it’s always struck me as a bit of a gimmick. Simply adding £300 a year to the state pension (even if paid once annually rather than as part of the weekly pension) would mean that those who most need it get it tax-free, whilst pensioners with other income would effectively pay tax on it at up to 45% anyway. It’s true that ‘millionaire pensioners’ would still end up pocketing 55% of £300 (£165), but it would be a great deal easier and cheaper to administer using existing systems. I don’t know how many ‘pensioner millionaires’ there are, but given that a cut-off at £35,000 (well short of millionaire status) will only exclude around 2 million people, we can reasonably assume that it’s a lot less than 2 million. Even 2 million net payments of £165 would only cost £330 million – a drop in the ocean for the Treasury. And lower administration costs reduce that further.

Still, for fans of long-running dramas, where the heroine of the piece finds herself tied in ever more complex knots at the end of every episode, why cut the serial short when the pain and agony can so easily be prolonged?

Debt, per se, is not bad

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There was a story a month ago about a report from the Institute of International Finance that the total amount of global debt had reached a record height of $324 trillion. It’s a huge sum, so large as to be beyond comprehension in terms of our own daily interactions with money. It’s an estimate, of course. It could not be otherwise; human record-keeping is neither precise nor transparent enough to know for certain. Let’s just accept that it’s a very, very large number.

Whether we should be worried about it or not is another question. Since all money owed by one person or body is owed to another person or body, it is inevitably the case that a total financial debt of $324 trillion is precisely matched somewhere by a total financial asset of $324 trillion. It’s just that the debt and the asset are in different hands. And whilst estimates of how much money exists in the world vary significantly, one thing we can say is that, since ‘money’ is, in its very essence, simply a way of denominating and trading debt (“I promise to pay the bearer on demand” etc.), the amount of money in the system must match, if accurately calculated, the amount of debt. An over-simplification, for sure, but if every individual and organisation were to repay all their debts tomorrow, the world would indeed be debt-free – but it would also be money-free. There would still be a pile – many piles – of physical notes and coins somewhere, but they’d be essentially worthless. And the economy would grind to a halt. Asking how much debt is the ‘right’ amount for the world economy is like asking how much money should exist. It’s a question which has no correct answer; the only thing we know is that, as the world’s population grows and becomes more affluent, the amount needed will increase. Worrying about how much debt there is, and by how much it is increasing, is focussing on the wrong question.

The right question is about who is in debt and to whom they are in debt; it’s about the underlying economic power relationships. The reason that it worries some is not the existence of debt, nor the amount of debt, nor the increase in that amount: it is about potential default – whether those in debt will be able to repay their debts. It is a concern by the rich that the poor will not be able to continue transferring their few assets to the rich, because (almost by definition) much borrowing is by those who have no money from those who have lots. What concerns politicians about the debt mountain facing the poorest – whether individuals or countries – should not be whether they are taking on debts that they can’t cover, but how and why the need for them to do so arose in the first place. And since that inevitably leads to discussion about how resources and wealth are distributed in the world, it’s easy to see why they prefer to avoid it.

Starmer is playing with fire

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The new submarines announced by Sir Starmer yesterday are obviously a new form of stealth weapon, since no-one will be able to see them for a decade or two. Although the announcement covered 12, it turns out that seven of those are replacements for existing obsolete boats, so only five are additional. They will start rolling off the production line in the late 2030s (let’s say 2038 for the sake of argument), and will be launched at the rate of one every eighteen months. So, by about 2056, the Royal Navy will have a whole five additional submarines, built to a 30 year old specification, in its fleet.

Sir Starmer says this will ‘send a message’ to Putin. Leaving aside the huge cost of that ‘message’, the thing about messages is that the ones received may not precisely match the ones sent. In this case, telling Putin we’ll be just about ready to come for him in 30 years’ time, assuming that the schedule doesn’t get delayed and that the boats actually work when delivered (two caveats which past military procurement exercises suggest might be ‘challenging’) is more likely to lead to laughing-into-cornflakes than quaking-in-boots.

The submarines were only part of the announcement, of course. There were also the announcements about wanting to fit nuclear weapons to aircraft and resurrecting some sort of citizen’s army. But the theme running through seemed to have two main elements: how much the UK is going to strengthen its armed forces, and how slowly it’s all actually going to happen. And that matters in terms of Putin’s potential motivation (for it is surely only Putin and Russia who are the targets of all this). If one imagines Putin as some sort of Bond villain, sitting in the Kremlin stroking his cat, then all bets are off. No-one can plan to deal with insanity on that scale, although fiction might suggest that all it takes is one man with a licence to kill. If, however, we treat Putin as being a rational actor – and even if the premises of his rationality don’t always match our own, they can still be identified and planned for – then there is one, and only one, plausible reason for his wanting to start an all-out war with NATO. At its simplest, that reason is a belief (whether right or wrong doesn’t matter: he only needs to believe it) that NATO is gearing up to attack Russia, and that his best chance is to attack first, before NATO has reached full readiness.

All the talk among UK politicians and military types about being in a ‘pre-war’ stage, and needing to be ready to fight an all-out European war within the next few years might be intended to send a message of deterrence, but it’s easy to see how, from a different perspective, it might look like preparing the population and economies of ‘the west’ for an invasion of Russia. And the closer any army is to a state of readiness to fight a war, the more likely it is that that war can start by accident, or by a simple misjudgement. Reducing the time available to make a rational assessment by positioning troops and weapons close to a border increases the probability of a ‘use it or lose it’ mentality taking hold. We might indeed be in dangerous times, but Sir Starmer seems intent on increasing, rather than decreasing, the level of danger.

Perhaps I misjudge Sir Starmer. Maybe his announcement really has nothing to do with war at all, but is really about trying to sound strong, play the patriotic card for reasons of internal UK politics, and impose his own militaristic definition of Britishness on the population. After all, everything else he does is calculated and calibrated in terms of its expected impact on voting behaviour. But expecting Putin to read between the lines and understand that Sir Starmer doesn’t really mean what he’s saying at all is a big ask of someone who is more than a little paranoid to start with. Sir Starmer is playing a very dangerous game, either way.

Using all the available talent

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Underpinning the Trumpian aversion to diversity programmes (DEI) is the belief that people are being appointed to jobs for which there are better quality candidates available, purely because those being appointed happen to be members of one or other under-represented group in society. It’s a short step from there to concluding that anyone who isn’t a white, heterosexual, Caucasian male is only in post because of their skin colour, gender or sexual orientation. And that seems to have been behind a number of sackings of senior people from posts under Trump’s reign. It’s no surprise to see Farage mimicking this attitude. It ought to be a surprise to see elements in the Labour Party going down the same track, but sadly it isn’t.

The issue is wider than recruitment, of course, but concentrating on that one aspect, opponents of DEI policies usually claim that they want to see appointments based purely on ‘merit’, ignoring all other considerations. Actually, so would I. The point of contention, however, is really about how we define and assess that thing to which we give the short-hand term, ‘merit’, because the observed practical outcome of an entirely ‘merit’ based system is the domination of white heterosexual Caucasian males. It’s easy enough for racists, misogynists, and homophobes to justify this – they simply choose to believe that ‘merit’ is more prevalent amongst that group. And, in a curiously circular argument, the evidence for that is that people from that group are most likely to be appointed. For those of us who take the view that ability is more likely to be evenly distributed than that, there has to be another explanation. It could be in the way that ‘merit’ is being defined or measured, but it’s more likely that there is unconscious prejudice operating, even if only of the ‘soft’ sort which leads recruiters to appoint those who are most like themselves, an almost guaranteed route to perpetuating any lack of diversity.

If it is right to say that ability is fairly distributed regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation, and given the obvious truth that that is not reflected in the outcome of appointment processes, then we are, as a society, missing out on the ability of a sizable section of the community. (Whether DEI programmes are the 'right' or even 'best' way of addressing that is a matter of opinion. I'm open to arguments in support of alternative approaches which can be shown to be effective.) That, ultimately, is what DEI programmes are about – it’s not about appointing second-rate people because of their characteristics, it’s about not discarding first-rate people because of those same characteristics. It’s a simple enough concept, but politicians who prefer to pander to prejudices are ducking their responsibility to explain that. In the case of Reform, one might expect that: playing to prejudice is what Farage does. By aping that approach, Labour would not only be ducking the responsibility, they would also be reinforcing and legitimising that prejudice.

Principles and pragmatism

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One of the big claims – perhaps the only big claim – for the difference between Sir Starmer and what went before is the idea that policy is based not on any sense of ideology or principle, but on pragmatism. As Sir Starmer himself put it, “I don’t have any ideology at all. There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be.” Instead, each and every decision is to be taken by considering only one thing – ‘what works?’.

It leaves undefined the question about what do we mean by ‘works’? The only sensible interpretation of the phrase is that it means that any decision will achieve what it sets out to achieve; there is an objective and that objective is fulfilled. He hasn’t always – or maybe ever – been entirely clear in setting out in plain language what the objective is, but over the last week or so, the debate over cuts such as the winter fuel allowance or the two-child cap have revealed what that objective is. Such policies are not to be judged as to whether they reduce pensioner poverty or child poverty; those are not the objectives. The only factors to be considered are  a) how much does the policy cost, and b) how many votes does it deliver for Labour. There’s a brutal honesty about the underlying calculation: the only objective of government policy is to ensure that the current government remains in office after the next election.

Knowing that the only factor that they are even thinking about is how many votes it will deliver helps to explain what their definition of ‘pragmatism’ really embodies. It almost even makes sense of some of their decisions. Whether the calculation is being done correctly or not is another question. Mathematical and psephological competence cannot be assumed, and maybe any given policy will win fewer, or maybe more, votes than the government thinks. But all those who thought that turfing out the Tories would bring a kinder, more principled approach, or a genuine interest in reducing poverty are being shown very starkly that the question is not whether we live in a fairer society nor whether we reduce child poverty, but whether either of those things will deliver more votes to Labour. And since we know that the least advantaged in society, those most likely to be suffering the greatest pain, are also those least likely to vote, Labour’s willingness to ignore them becomes a lot easier to understand. There was a time when Labour believed in social solidarity and doing the right thing for all citizens. It’s a concept which is totally alien to Sir Starmer’s party.

Taxes and violins

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In its reporting (paywall) on the publication of the annual ‘Rich List’, the Sunday Times told us that some ‘business leaders’ are unhappy with the Chancellor’s proposals to impose tax on the transfer of shares in ‘family businesses’ to the next generation. Apparently, some family businesses don’t have the cash available to pay such a tax, which means that the individuals might need to sell some or all of the business to someone else in order to pay it. It would be cruel, but wholly true, to point out that exactly the same is true of anyone inheriting anything from a large estate: if the estate does not include enough cash to pay the tax, then assets would need to be sold. Whether the shares are in a ‘family firm’ or merely shares in a random company doesn’t look to be an entirely relevant distinction: the fact is that assets are being inherited and that tax falls due on an estate.

Those impacted are arguing that ‘family firms’ provide a lot of employment and contribute to the UK’s economy. It’s true, of course, but it fails to explain why that would not continue to be true if the company were no longer to be owned and run by the same family, and that the damage would be such that giving family members an effective subsidy to continue their ownership delivers more benefit to the economy. No-one has yet identified a genetic basis on which the descendants of the founder are somehow better equipped to run a company than anyone else. Experience shows that whilst such a company often continues working as well (or as poorly) under the next generation, sometimes a member of the next generation proves him or herself to be highly successful and turns a sleepy company into a giant, and sometimes those of the next generation taking over prove to be utterly inadequate at the job and end up destroying the company. None of those outcomes is pre-determined by breeding or genetics; inheritance does not presuppose merit. In short, there is nothing about inheriting a family company which distinguishes its future prospects from those of a company which is bought by an outsider.

What inheritance does do, however, is ensure that wealth created by one generation passes to the next generation and is kept within the family. Meritocracy it ain’t; and tax concessions are a direct subsidy which enables families to hold on to wealth amassed by their ancestors, regardless of any talent or ability that they themselves might possess. There are those who argue against the whole principle of an inheritance tax. There is a coherent argument to be made for such a proposition, although it’s not one with which I would agree. But there is no rational economic basis for distinguishing between wealth held in a company which some ancestor founded and wealth invested in a publicly quoted company. The sympathetic violins for the poor hard-done by descendants can be safely stood down.

Colonialism doesn't always involve invasion or conquest

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Sir Starmer’s speech on immigration earlier this week had obvious echoes of the words of Enoch Powell more than half a century ago, and repeated attempts to pretend that there is no similarity between the words used by the two men look like simply digging an already big hole a bit deeper. I accept that it was almost certainly unintentional. Starmer would have been about 6 in 1968 when Powell delivered his infamous speech, and the coterie of advisers and speech writers around him probably even younger. Lack of a direct memory of Powell’s speech – or even of the man himself – is understandable, even if it demonstrates a certain lack of knowledge of political history. The bigger problem isn’t about whether he was or was not aping an odious politician of the past, deliberately or otherwise – it’s about the extent to which what looked like extreme views in 1968 have become part of the political mainstream, not just for Reform Ltd but also for the Tories and even Labour. Starmer’s words would have been anathema to Wilson and the Labour Party back then, yet their modern-day counterparts are falling over themselves to justify and amplify them.

There is another unpleasant aspect to the words used by UK parties when referring to migrants, which is that it sees them largely in terms of their value (or cost) to the UK economy. So, low-paid (which isn’t the same as low-skilled, although one would be hard-pressed to glean that from Starmer’s words) bad, high-paid good. Rarely do any of our politicians seem to see migrants or would-be migrants as human beings with aspirations and needs. There’s also an interesting paradox in the fact that the low-paid are doing work for which it is proving difficult to recruit UK labour, whilst at least some of the higher-paid jobs are easier to fill locally. Who is ‘stealing’ whose jobs? Whether the higher-paid jobs can or cannot be filled locally, and whilst bearing in mind the caveat that high-paid isn’t always the same as high-skilled, attracting what are seen as being the ‘brightest and best’ from elsewhere has an inevitable knock-on effect on the society and economy of those countries losing those people to the UK. It’s a modern form of colonialism.

Even amongst those brave souls in the Labour Party who are speaking out against the proposed changes, there is a degree of objectification of the people involved. Take the words of a former adviser to Mark Drakeford, quoted here: “To have a sustainable indigenous population requires a fertility rate 2.1. The UK rate is 1.4. This means our indigenous population is shrinking and aging and we are completely dependent on immigrants to remain a viable country”. What could be more neo-colonialist than outsourcing the responsibility for maintaining population levels (even supposing that to be a good thing anyway, but that’s a subject for another day)? And where is the consideration of the impact on those other countries of losing the people of an age group likely to be child-bearing? Moving a perceived problem elsewhere doesn’t ‘solve’ it.

Migration is a complex issue which involves real people living real lives. Reducing it to a cost-benefit analysis, and treating migrants as units of economic production is dehumanising. But it’s what we get when politicians decide that playing to prejudice is more likely to win them votes than attempting to conduct a serious conversation around the issue. Starmer is part of the problem, and what he has to offer is no solution.

Imposing sanctions in baby steps

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The UK and EU are seriously discussing further packages of sanctions against Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, and trying to pressurise Trump into implementing further US sanctions as well. There does seem to be a feeling that the US Congress might be willing to impose further sanctions, although there is considerable doubt as to whether Trump will support it. Sir Starmer is doing his best to sound tough as he talks about ‘ramping up’ (one of his favourite phrases) economic sanctions against Putin and Russia. But hold on a minute. Over three years into a disastrous war in which hundreds of thousands have died, and there are still more sanctions which haven’t been applied yet? When he says ‘we will apply more sanctions unless you…’, what I hear is ‘we haven’t yet done everything we could’.

How effective sanctions have been – indeed, how effective they can ever be – is a question which people who can’t think of anything else to do don’t really want to discuss. The reasons for that are entirely understandable: if countries are unwilling to move to direct military aid of Ukraine, and if sanctions don’t force Russia to back down, then all that is left is a negotiation which will inevitably make concessions to Russia. It represents neither fairness nor justice, but if all that we can think of are sanctions, then we should seriously have been applying them to the maximum already. Tough talk without tough action simply condemns more Ukrainians to fight and die.

But here is the truth that they can’t or won’t admit: sanctions aren’t forcing Russia into backing down and probably never will. Telling members of the Russian regime that they can’t come to London (one form of sanctions which has been applied) isn’t actually the sort of punishment which makes them quake in their boots, and they are still obtaining most of the goods they require by other routes. There are three main reasons why sanctions are probably doomed to failure.

The first is that Russia is big. It has an abundance of natural resources, and is able to produce much of what it needs; maybe not in the cheapest or most efficient way, maybe not always to the same standards, but a big country will always be more resilient in the face of sanctions than a smaller one.

The second is that they are not being universally applied. There are still plenty of countries (including, of course, China) willing and able to supply Russia with the goods it needs. That actually reflects a deeper problem, which remains unaddressed: not all countries see the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the same simple terms as the EU / UK, namely an unprovoked invasion of one country by another. That’s not to say that they’re right in coming to a different interpretation, but whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant to the ground fact that they are continuing to both buy and supply goods which are subject to sanctions by others. Many of us might regret that the world does not have an effective means of disciplining a rogue state, but regret doesn’t change the facts.

The third reason is that sanctions hurt the economies of those applying them, so companies are finding ways around sanctions. As trade with Russia has dropped, demand from countries aligned with Russia for the same goods has miraculously increased. Some of those countries are landlocked and the goods can only reach them by traversing Russia. The idea that they all get to their planned destination, or even that they all stay there when they arrive, is for the birds. Western companies are supplying sanctioned goods to Russia and pretending not to know, and their governments are pretending not to notice. And the capitalists make their sales and take their profits.

That sanctions will not, and probably cannot, achieve their aim is a dismal conclusion to draw, but if it’s what we are going to depend on, then implementing them in packages over a period of years and turning a blind eye to alternative supply routes doesn’t cut it. Sir Starmer’s projected strength is actually a cover for weakness.

Ends and means

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The letter sent by the Trump administration to the authorities in Stockholm instructing them to drop all schemes related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or else explain themselves to US federal lawyers, was mildly amusing to start with. It appears that the US Embassy has occasionally needed permits from the authority for building activity, there is a fee involved, and the only way of paying such a fee is to set the authority up as a supplier (and thus payee) on US systems. A simple case of someone pressing a computer button to send a letter to all payees without giving the matter any real thought. It’s hardly as though the US can simply ask someone else to give it the relevant building permits (although it’s possible that some members of the US government don’t actually realise that).

It isn’t just an amusing little gaffe, however. What it reveals is that the US government is attempting to force any organisation which receives any money, for whatever purposes, from the US government to drop any attempts at building a more balanced and representative workforce, not just in relation to the specific US government related activities, but to all its activities, world wide. There is room for some doubt as to whether the presidential directive is entirely lawful when employed solely to US companies operating solely in the US, but the idea that it can be extended to any activity carried out by any organisation anywhere in the world just because they might be in receipt of a small payment for goods or services supplied to the US government is a dramatic piece of over-reach. It assumes, for example, that US law and Trump’s authority automatically over-rides the laws and mores of whichever country in which an organisation might be based. We’ve already seen some UK companies start to remove all mention of diversity from their websites, and one wonders how many others are quietly complying without making any public statement, as though – heaven forfend! – having a diverse workforce was never really important to them, but was seen as a means to present themselves in a good light and thus make money in a particular marketplace (the UK/EU).

The reaction of some of Trump’s UK acolytes in the UK, praising his actions despite their impact on UK companies, betrays a belief that ends are more important than means to them. The much-vaunted ‘sovereignty’ to ‘make our own laws’ that they sought through Brexit is only important to them if it delivers on their agenda. Who’d have thought it?

Short term wins aren't always victories

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The precise details of the ‘trade deal’ agreed between Trump and Sir Starmer are less than entirely clear at present, but it appears that the UK has conceded rather more than it has gained, in order to get back to a position which is not quite as bad as the current one, but not quite as good as the one which pertained before Trump started his tariff campaign. I was rather taken by this description from Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian:

“This has been less a trade deal between allies – a process of give and take that in the long run hopefully leaves both sides better off – than a hostage negotiation. Pay Trump what he feels he’s due, and you get your economy back in roughly the state it was before, though missing a few fingers and probably traumatised.”

The bigger question is how long it will last. With someone as fickle as Trump in charge, today’s best deal ever can easily be redefined tomorrow as the work of a complete loser, and it will all be the fault of the groundwork that the Biden administration carried out. Sir Starmer is in a bind, even if he doesn’t realise it yet. The more he proclaims it as a good deal for the UK, the more His Orangeness will think that he didn’t demand enough – and reneging on deals that he himself negotiated and signed is always an option, as Canada and Mexico have already discovered. Bullies who think that they can get more will always come back and try for it. Assuming that your negotiating partner is honest and trustworthy simply doesn’t work with someone like Trump – and there are plenty of victims willing to attest to that.

Is it better to have done a deal than not done it? In principle, yes, of course. Being slightly less worse off is obviously an improvement – for an individual participant. Whether allowing and facilitating a strategy of divide and conquer is better than forming alliances with a bloc (the EU), which has rather more clout, to deal with the orange menace collectively is a much harder question to answer. The impact of the deal, when we know the detail (which will have some good things and some bad things in it), will be relatively small in economic terms. The bigger significance is whether it encourages or discourages Trump’s approach of bullying his way around the world. I suspect the former is more likely than the latter.

Greenland might be a useful diversion

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Long-described as the world’s second-oldest profession, spying is something which most states above a certain, albeit undefined, size undertake on a regular basis. Understanding the thinking of other states seen as potential adversaries is something which many rulers over the centuries have found useful. Spying on ‘friends’ is also common – who knows when friends might turn into enemies or what they might be holding back? There’s something more than a little disingenuous in the Danish Foreign Minister’s claim this week that “we don’t spy between friends”, given that the Danish intelligence services actively assisted the US to spy on Germany’s former Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

It's still more than a little strange, however, that Trump should have decided that a major priority for the US intelligence services should be Greenland. It’s not as though the country actually poses any immediate danger to the US – a country of 56,000 inhabitants is hardly likely to invade New York. And a dispassionate observer might well believe that there are one or two rather more significant potential threats to the US.

The focus of espionage activity is apparently to be twofold: intelligence gathering on the independence movement and identifying individuals likely to welcome a US takeover. In theory, it should be an easy task to resource. The three US intelligence agencies (CIA: 21,500; DIA: 16,500; NSA: 30-40,000) employ more than 68,000 people between them (unless Elon Musk has fired most of them by now); allocating a few thousand to monitor 56,000 Greenlanders shouldn’t be too much of an ask. How many of those are Greenland specialists, though, might be more of a problem. Some 70% of the population speak only Greenlandic, and I’d be surprised if as many as 1 of those 68,000 ‘spies’ could understand what they are saying. And when it comes to intelligence ‘on the ground’ (as opposed to remote electronic monitoring), someone unable to communicate in the language might just stand out a little.

A country planning a takeover might well find it useful to identify in advance a sufficiently large cohort of people who would welcome the invasion (and perhaps fill posts in the new government) in order to give it a gloss of respectability, but previous attempts at going door-to-door to find someone who would welcome the Vice-President and his wife were less than entirely successful. They found no-one. On another occasion they had to resort to handing out MAGA hats to homeless people as a reward for eating a Trump(Jr)-provided meal. Even the CIA, with its renowned ability to destabilise and topple governments, will find it a challenge to make a coup look like some sort of popular uprising.

Trump’s obsession with Greenland is an odd one, especially given that he could get most of what he really wants (which is about US corporations getting access to valuable mineral rights – and maybe building a hotel and a few golf courses?) by friendly negotiation, but that, it seems, is not the way that the ‘art of the deal’ works. Still, whilst sympathising with Greenlanders, there’s something mildly reassuring about seeing him give so much of his limited attention span to the question.

Defining the task helps

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The standard advice for anyone finding themselves in a hole is to stop digging, but the ability to follow that advice depends on the ability to recognise a hole when you see one. Not all holes are immediately recognisable, especially if the digger believes he’s engaged on an entirely different task, such as laying the foundations for a really strong and robust wall.

That may be at the heart of Sir Starmer’s problem over things like the winter fuel allowance. Everyone watching him can see the hole getting deeper and deeper, with his probability of being able to escape it rapidly diminishing, and the likelihood of others being dragged in increasing with equal rapidity. His own loyal troops are increasingly bewildered about his enthusiasm for shifting earth, and even the Labour-supporting Mirror is now telling him that it’s time to stop. To no avail. Every call to lay down his shovel simply results in him expending even more elbow grease – and credibility – on throwing even more soil out of the hole.

It makes little sense unless the task he thinks he’s undertaking has nothing to with fuel or pensioners, it’s all about demonstrating toughness. Sticking to a decision as support for it drains away reinforces his self-image as someone willing to take unpopular decisions (or ‘difficult’ decisions to use his preferred euphemism). From that perspective, the more unpopular the decision, the better; the greater the criticism, the more he feels encouraged. Every siren call to stop, every vote lost as a result of the policy, merely strengthens his perception that he’s showing his strength and determination.

I may have read somewhere that his father was a tool-maker, although I suspect that the tools were a little more sophisticated than mere spades. Maybe he imparted some knowledge about choosing the right tools for the job. But one little life lesson that Sir Starmer appears not to have learnt is about correctly defining the job before selecting the tools. Unless he’s actually a Tory plant whose real task is to destroy the Labour Party from within. Now there’s another possible explanation which makes some sense of his actions.

They're not all that different

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During the last week, who said “I actually think overall the British Empire did much more good for the world than it did bad”, and who thinks that “the British Empire was a force for good in the world”? For those who might not have kept up, the answer, of course, is those two famous peas-in-a-pod, namely Fromage and Sir Starmer. The point that they are both trying to make is that ‘we’ should be proud of ‘our’ history rather than ashamed of it, an aspiration which completely fails to understand the nuance between being proud of one’s country on the one hand and supporting everything it has ever done on the other.

They’re not alone, of course; there are plenty of other politicians, Labour and Tory alike, whose views on the issue are little different from those of Reform Ltd, but there are at least some of us who might be more likely to take pride in a country which recognised its chequered past, was able to admit and face up to the fact that its history hasn’t always been covered in glory, and that much of its wealth is based on theft and expropriation. It’s easy enough to identify the bad things that were done in the Empire like the occasional massacre, and the exploitation of people and territories to seize the wealth for the colonialists. Finding things that are unequivocally 'good' is a lot harder. Claiming that one of the good things was the abolition of slavery rather overlooks the fact that much of the wealth extracted from the empire was extracted on the back of slavery: reversing a policy and compensating the slave owners (but not the slaves) after more than two centuries of benefiting from slavery is rather hard to present as being a ‘net good thing’ for anyone taking an objective view.

The other ‘benefits’ usually claimed by empire apologists are the building of railways (all the better to extract goods and resources), the introduction of English law, Christianity, and the spread of the English language. Implicit in the claim that they are all ‘good’ things is the inherently racist belief that all of those things are better than anything that the mere natives had developed, or might have gone on to develop, for themselves. Whilst there is a clear advantage to being able to speak what has become the world’s lingua franca, claiming that as a benefit of imperial rule ignores the fact that English only achieved that status because it was imposed on so many conquered peoples by the imperial rulers or (in the case of the other great driver of English linguistic dominance) by white settlers driving native Americans from their lands. Presenting that as an unarguable net benefit is problematic, to say the least.

What the convergence of views between Sir Starmer and Fromage (to say nothing of all the others in between) does tell us is that English nationalism is based on a highly ethnocentric view of the world, a view based on an innate sense of superiority and exceptionalism. It’s a world view in which lesser peoples (and that includes the Welsh, Scots and Irish) should know their place and be grateful for that which was forced on them by military conquest. It’s a world view from which they are unable to escape, and in which it is incomprehensible to them why anyone might see things differently. It shouldn’t go unquestioned.

Not the epitaph Starmer would choose

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Sometimes, people talk about aspects of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system used for most elections in the UK as though they were design features. But the system was never really ‘designed’ at all; what we have today has evolved over a period from a system which was used when the number of people voting was strictly limited and elections were more about choosing an individual to carry the banner of the wealthiest in parliament than about choosing a government. Having said that, if it had been designed by what have been for the best part of a century the two main UK parties, they would almost certainly have included the ‘feature’ that the system should work to preserve the dominance of those two parties and freeze out, as far as possible, any challengers.

In that regard it has worked as it would have been intended to work, giving those two parties turns at being in government (with a built-in bias, obviously, in favour of one of them – nothing says that the turns have to be of equal duration). If that is the intention, then the system works really well. Right up to the point at which it doesn’t. Inherent within the system is the possibility of reaching a tipping point. As long as a challenger party’s overall support remains below about 25%, and is evenly spread across constituencies, whichever of the two incumbent parties can achieve a little over 30% with their support irregularly distributed can achieve an overall majority of seats in parliament, and the other can form HM's loyal opposition. Democracy it ain’t, but it serves its intended beneficiaries (Labour and the Tories) well, and explains why they are both so reluctant to change it.

However, if the tipping point is ever reached (and the whole point is that it isn’t supposed to happen), the system facilitates a challenger party sweeping the board, with an even lower percentage of the vote. We’ve seen the consequences of that this week in the English local elections. Labour and Tory alike are behaving as though the way to freeze Reform Ltd out is to adopt their policies and be more like them. More rational souls might wonder what the point of keeping them out is if you’re going to do the same as them anyway – and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that if their views are thus legitimized, many voters might conclude that they should simply vote for the real thing.

A far better approach (which also has the not-exactly-inconsequential advantage of being more democratic as well) would be to adopt a proportional electoral system. The Lib Dems, Plaid, and the SNP would support such a change, and even the head Fromage is on record as saying he supports it (although if he thinks he might stand a better chance of becoming PM under the existing system, that might change – politicians’ principles have been known to become flexible when political advantage is at stake, and Fromage didn’t exactly have a lot of principles to start with). The Labour Party membership have supported the idea in party conferences, and with his current majority, Sir Starmer has a superb one-off opportunity to make a change which would be game-changing (as well as being likely to give Labour a share in power for more of the time). It seems, though, that he’d prefer to alternate between acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights and outright panic. Labour accused the Tories this week of gifting the by-election to Reform Ltd by not campaigning, but the person who is really gifting the next election to them is Sir Starmer himself. ‘The man who facilitated the UK’s slide into authoritarianism’ is probably not the epitaph Sir Starmer would choose. But then I suppose few of us get to choose our own epitaphs.

It's not just a game

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Most people are familiar with the game called ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. Thee are variations on it, and whilst it was originally conceived as a two-player game, the theory can be applied to any number of players. In the game, the most rational action for any individual player is to compete with others (because (s)he doesn’t know whether the others are going to compete or co-operate), but the most rational approach for the group of players as a whole is to co-operate, and maximise the total rewards gained. That co-operation implies communication and trust, things which don’t always happen in real life.

Climate change can be represented as a version of the game, in which former PM Tony Blair participated yesterday. He is right, of course, when he says that people "feel they're being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know the impact on global emissions is minimal". For all the talk of taking individual responsibility or ‘think global, act local’, no one individual can make a significant difference to climate change overall. And it isn’t just individuals – no single nation can make enough difference acting alone, even the very biggest nations. We’ve seen people arguing on a Wales level or UK level along the lines of ‘our contribution to carbon emissions is so small that stopping it will make no difference’. It’s true. In a world population of 8 billion, 3 million Welsh people, or even 66 million UK residents can only make a minuscule difference. It follows that the rational thing for any group of 3 million (or 66 million), let alone any individual, to do is to ignore the impacts and carry on as usual. After all, 66 million is only 120th of 8 billion.

What the game also teaches us, though, is that if every player decides to compete rather than co-operate, we all lose out in the end, compared to what would have happened had we all co-operated. The first vicious twist in the game is that if some attempt to play co-operatively, whilst others attempt to play competitively, the co-operators lose out by even more than they would have done had they played competitively. It is, therefore, entirely rational to compete unless and until everyone decides to co-operate. That, it seems to me, is ultimately the argument of those who accept the reality of man-made climate change, but reject taking the necessary action to address it. (Those who reject the overwhelming evidence of man-made climate change are, of course, in a separate category entirely, where rationality at any level no longer necessarily applies.)

The second vicious twist is that, applying it to the question of climate change, we end up collectively taking the wholly irrational decision to make the world uninhabitable for humanity as a direct result of individuals and countries making entirely rational choices about their own actions and behaviours. How we get to a world in which acting for the good of all is seen as a better choice than pursuing individual greed and desires is another question entirely. Climate change isn’t the only issue where that question arises, but it’s not a question which the Blairs of this world seem to be capable of even considering.

Markets and casinos shouldn't be the same thing

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Here’s a statement that some might be surprised at me making: Markets work. As a way of matching buyers and sellers, or capital with investment opportunities, markets are an effective and efficient method, better than anything else humanity has managed to devise thus far. There are, however, two caveats.

The first is that there is no such thing as a completely ‘free’ market. All markets have rules by which they operate. One of the reasons for that is that the assumptions used by theoretical economists when considering markets – that all participants have equal power and that all have perfect knowledge of what is happening – are blatantly inaccurate. Markets can only work effectively if those (and other defects) are corrected, so we have rules which must be followed. There will always be disagreements about what those rules should be, but the key issues are who makes the rules and in whose interests they operate. Those arguing for completely ‘free’ markets are invariably arguing for markets which are slanted in favour of those with the most power and the most knowledge. No surprise there.

The second caveat is that a real market is about those basics mentioned above, such as matching real buyers with real sellers, exchanging real things. Yet, when it comes to the world’s financial markets, most trading is nothing to do with that; it is, instead about gambling and speculation, with people trying to leverage large trades for very small profit margins on a day-by-day or even hour-by-hour basis. And in some cases, what is being ‘traded’ (i.e. being bet on) isn’t even something with any real existence beyond acting as a gambling chip. Crypto currency is a case in point. It has no real ‘value’ and its price fluctuates wildly. As a means of winning (or losing) a fortune in  short time, it’s ideal, but its value as any sort of ‘investment’ is doubtful, to say the least. Yet, lured by the improbable apparent ‘value’ of these ethereal ‘assets’, some governments are trying to pretend that they are real enough to be treated as investments by the man or woman in the street.

It's perhaps obvious why Trump would wish to do this – he has after all issued his own bit of crypto, from which he’s made a lot of money at the expense of his cult followers. It’s less obvious why the UK Chancellor would be considering anything similar. There’s nothing wrong with seeking to regulate crypto currencies as such (although the whole point of some of them is to set them up in such a way that they are very difficult to regulate effectively, not least in order to facilitate tax evasion), just as other types of gambling are regulated, including for the safety and protection of the punters. Seeking to regulate them as though they were ‘investments’, however (which is what she seems to have in mind) is dangerous, and risks creating the impression that an inherently risky proposition has somehow been rendered safe. It’s a bad message to be giving out.

People are more important than land

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If Donald Trump were to content himself with annexing the southern part of Ontario Province rather than the whole of Canada (initially at least, always reserving the option to return for more at some future date), he would probably see that as being a major concession to Canada. From such a perspective, Putin only seizing 20% of Ukrainian territory also looks like a huge concession. It may look like a strange definition of ‘concession’ to most of us, but it’s easy enough to see how it would look different to someone who believes that the strong and powerful should be free to exercise their strength to get whatever they want. A bully who settles for less than he could take will always see himself as being generous.

That doesn’t alter the fact that the reality remains that, unless other states are willing to commit their own armed forces on the side of Ukraine (and I really hope that they’re not), sooner or later the country will either be swallowed up by Russia or else a negotiated peace settlement will involve the de facto, if not the de jure, surrender of lands, leaving the world with another of those long term frozen territorial disputes around borders. It’s neither fair nor just, but in the absence of any means of compelling the surrender of conquered territory, it’s a hard fact. Encouraging Ukraine to fight on merely adds to the terrible death toll which has already occurred – one of the few things on which I agree with what Trump says.

It's still somewhat depressing that, even recognising that harsh reality, the debate and negotiation all seems to revolve around what land and territory should be ceded to whom, with little consideration for the people living, whether currently or formerly, in those areas. One of Putin’s demands is for Ukraine to respect the rights of Russian-speakers living in Ukraine. (Being a native Russian speaker in Ukraine doesn’t make someone a Russian of course, any more than being a native English speaker in Wales makes someone English, although it's a distinction lost on Putin.) But what about the equivalent rights of Ukrainian speakers in the occupied territories? Or even those living in those territories whose native tongue is Russian but who nevertheless consider themselves Ukrainian? What about the citizens of those territories who have been forcibly removed to remote regions of Russia – to say nothing of the children who have been abducted, adopted, and who Russia has attempted to indoctrinate into hating their own families and nation?

Land and territory are tangible; people can swap maps with different proposals as to where lines should be drawn. But land and territory have always been moved between states, usually by the exercise of force. They are ultimately less important, however, than the lives and wellbeing of people, and the right of those people to choose their own nationality and identity. I’m far from convinced that that relative importance is receiving due attention in any negotiation process, but then neither Trump nor Putin are individuals who particularly care about people.