Where is the challenge to conventional thinking?

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

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

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

What is to be defended - and how?

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

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

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

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

Labour needs more than a better story-teller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education is about more than employability skills

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

Dictatorship is not the answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will the nuclear decommissioning model actually work?

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The story this week about funding the reclamation work at Ffos y Fran has wider implications than are immediately obvious. Whether the company actually has the money available to carry out the promised reclamation work is still to be determined, although some thorough forensic financial investigation suggests that it has. Whether that money has been deliberately moved around in an attempt to shelter it for the company’s shareholders is unclear, but goes to the heart of the dispute. Court proceedings will answer those questions in due course.

The underlying question, though, is how realistic it is for any company to be expected to set aside large amounts of profit during the operational years of a facility in order to pay for restoration work on completion. Clearly, the suggestion that it is a reasonable expectation was key to the consent for the site in the first place; it is the enforceability of that which is now in doubt. It doesn’t really fit the capitalist model of enterprise which involves initial capital expenditure to get a project operational and then maximum extraction of profit during the operational phase. Committing to several years of heavy expenditure requiring the time and attention of the company’s owners and managers for no return at all really doesn’t fit the model. It should be no surprise at all if any company in that position attempted to avoid – or reduce – its liabilities.

It’s a model, though, in which government seems to be placing blind faith when it effectively allows private companies to build and run major projects. In yesterday’s post, I referred to the long-term implications for an independent Welsh government of allowing Wylfa Newydd to go ahead. The assumptions around the Hinkley Point C project include that EDF will be picking up the full costs of decommissioning through a Funded Decommissioning Programme, and the agreed strike price for electricity provided by the plant includes an allowance for those costs. The problem, though, is that no-one really knows what those costs will be – and the decommissioning work will continue for decades, not just years, during which the company will no longer be receiving any income for the electricity produced. The probability of that actually happening seems to me to be vanishingly small, with the likelihood being that some or all of the cost will ultimately fall back on public funds. The same will be true for Wylfa Newydd, meaning a large potential liability for a future Welsh government. Ffos y Fran is an interesting case study, but nuclear decommissioning is on an enormously larger scale – billions rather than tens of millions. Is that being understood?

There's more to coalitions than mathematics

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For those of us who favour independence for Wales, yesterday’s opinion poll showing increased support for both Plaid and the Green Party is clearly good news. The fact that the larger of those parties has declared that independence is not on the agenda for the next Senedd term, even if there is a majority in favour amongst Senedd members, takes a little of the sheen off; although, in practical terms, getting to that point as a result of the sheer difficulties of persuading London to allow a referendum is little different from getting to that point by not trying. Nevertheless the apparent willingness of a full 50% of the population to vote for independence-supporting parties is a dramatic turnaround in Welsh politics. It’s a huge step forward, which would have been hard to believe just a few years ago.

It is, of course, just one poll, and things could change between now and May. I’ll admit that, after having spent the 40 years from 1971 heavily involved in Welsh politics, the idea that the Labour Party could really be relegated to equal fourth place on 10% of the vote is still a little hard to believe, no matter how many polls suggest it, and no matter how attractive it might be as an outcome. Previous polls had suggested that a Plaid-led government was the likeliest result in the new Senedd, as long as Labour either participated in some way or at least acquiesced, but this latest poll suggests the possibility of a Plaid/Green coalition without Labour’s involvement – a much more significant break with the past.

Certainly, there is a strong policy crossover between those two parties, probably stronger than that between Labour and Plaid, if policy statements can be taken at face value. That crossover is not total, however, and there is a danger in performing simplistic mathematics to predict a government without considering the differences as well as the similarities. One of the most obvious areas of potential difficulty, it seems to me, is over energy policy. A pragmatic approach to politics has sometimes led Plaid politicians to oppose new nuclear power stations only in the places that no-one wants to build them, whilst supporting wind and solar projects only in the places that no-one wants to build them.

The stand-out question in this context is whether a Plaid/Green government would be for or against Wylfa Newydd? Energy policy itself is not a devolved matter; to the probable relief of both parties, the next Welsh Government won’t have to take the yes/no decision on the project, so perhaps the parties would be able to come up with some sort of fudge. That might be more difficult if the First Minister himself takes a clear view in favour, and there are a host of other ancillary decisions which could either facilitate or frustrate the project where Welsh ministers might well need to take a position. The implications of new nuclear power for a future independent government are significant either way. I’m sure that I’m not the only voter who will be wondering, when it comes to putting the cross on that paper in May, whether I’m voting for or against expansion of nuclear power in Wales – and at the moment, we don’t have that certainty.

Which is the best way of dealing with Trump - bombs or tariffs?

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Two of the big stories in August 1968 were the Russian invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia, and the ongoing ‘troubles’ in the north of Ireland. It may be apocryphal – I’ve failed to trace the report directly – but there has long been a story about a newspaper publishing a picture of a youth throwing stones at a tank, which attracted a response from one reader asking whether the youth was a Czech patriot or an Irish hooligan. Fact or fiction, the story underlines that what we observe sometimes owes as much to our own prejudices as to objective fact.

Two stories from Trumpland yesterday underline the same phenomenon. Firstly, there was this one, with Trump officials in the wake of the apparent murder of Renee Good warning potential protesters that they will deal severely with anyone protesting against the repressive actions of the masked snatch squads which Trump has despatched to roam the streets of US cities. Then there was this one, in which Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting against the repressive actions of the Iranian authorities, threatening violence against the regime if they continue to kill protesters. Whether protest is good or bad depends on who’s doing the protesting and against what – nothing new there, it’s exactly the approach he adopted to the assault on Congress in January 2021.

He seems to have only two solutions to any problem, both of which are under consideration in relation to Iran. The first is violence: there must be somebody he can bomb. And the second is tariffs – in Trumpland, increasing the cost of goods or services for Americal consumers is axiomatically a way of seeking compliance from foreign governments. If those are the only things he understands, it gives the rest of the world a question about how we should respond to the growing lawlessness of the US authorities: should we bomb Washington, or impose tariffs on all US products? It's not a serious question, of course - but it's hard to think of anything else that he might even begin to understand.

Who is really being subsidised?

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The hospitality sector is up in arms about changes to business rates which, they say, will make their businesses unsustainable, and are asking for changes which will reduce the amount of tax that they need to pay. They are saying, in effect, that they are unable to charge a price for their products which is sufficient to cover all their costs plus returning a reasonable profit. Looked at in hard market capitalism terms, as discussed here, that means that many of those businesses are simply not viable. Left to its own devices (which is what many capitalists claim to want), a capitalist market would force a reduction in capacity (some businesses would fail) such as to achieve a new balance between supply and demand at a (higher) price which makes the remaining businesses viable.

Now I’m not a huge fan of unfettered capitalism, and whilst markets are, in general, an efficient way of allocating resources, the idea that they are or should be completely unregulated is not a sensible way of determining social priorities. Governments have always interfered, in various ways, to moderate the impact of markets in pursuit of wider goals. And the government may well be right in thinking – for reasons of employment retention, or for reasons of social cohesion, that maintaining a higher level of provision of restaurants, pubs and hotels than the market can profitably sustain is a good thing, and thus decide to offer some sort of assistance. Those in the sector want to see that assistance in the form of reduced taxation, but it isn’t the only way of achieving the aim. Tax breaks are a form of subsidy. They don’t always look like that, because it involves taking less from the business rather than giving them a handout, but a tax regime which adjusts rates for some categories of businesses in order to keep otherwise unviable businesses in existence cannot be other than a selective subsidy.

It isn’t the only way of providing a subsidy. The government could, instead, decide to take the same amount of money and issue vouchers to each household, enabling them to enjoy a discount off the bill for food and drink – subsidising the pints not the pub. It looks very different, of course, but the effect is the same: people would be able to go out and enjoy a meal or a drink which they couldn’t otherwise afford, and the businesses would be receiving an income sufficient to make them viable. Better yet – for those who are greater fans of markets than I – it would enable the consumers to choose which pubs and restaurants received the extra custom and therefore money, rather than being a blanket subsidy for all.

For a number of reasons, I wouldn’t actually propose that, but it’s interesting to note that many of those demanding tax breaks would be furious at the idea of ‘giving’ people money to eat out. It’s a universal benefit which they are getting without working for it, they would argue. Yet, in economic terms, it’s exactly the same thing: the same amount of money produces the same effect in terms of people being able to afford food and drink and businesses remaining viable. It raises an interesting and more general economic question: when the government gives a subsidy, who is it actually subsidising? Is it the business, the owners of the capital involved, the consumers, the suppliers, or the employees? In practice, all of those people benefit in some way or another, regardless of the form in which the subsidy is paid or to whom it is paid. So why is a ‘tax break’ deemed an entirely valid approach, whilst a handout to customers is some sort of undeserved freebie? The answer, of course, lies in who sets the agenda and boundaries of debate. And it isn’t the customers.

Divide and conquer is working as well as ever

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During his 2016 election campaign, Trump famously claimed that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue in New York and shoot someone and it would not affect his poll numbers. Whether it was true or not at the time is open to debate, but he certainly seemed to believe it, and all the indications are that he still does. At times, it even seems as though he is trying to test the claim empirically, even if it isn’t himself who actually pulls the trigger. The insouciance and lies with which he dismisses any criticism of the armed gangs of masked men which he has sent out to seize people off the street, or at their place of work, or even in schools and colleges, isn’t really surprising. It is entirely consistent with his character.

What is rather more depressing is the ease with which armed government employees have fallen into a culture where they regularly exceed any lawful authority and are willing to shoot first and ask questions later. And that applies as much to the individual soldiers and airmen involved in sinking boats as it does to the ICE teams roaming the streets of major cities. We know that ‘following orders’ is no defence, and that individual officers have a legal duty to question patently illegal orders rather than follow them, but some of what has been happening goes beyond mere obedience to superiors and into the realm of ‘using their own initiative’, secure in the knowledge that, even if they weren’t specifically ordered to do something, it’s what the head honcho wanted them to do. And if you can be persuaded that the Reich, or the Trumpate, will last a thousand years, the possibility of being held accountable will always look low.

We shouldn’t really be surprised: history tells us that it has happened before and contains plenty of examples of people who do what they think their bosses want them to do. It goes back at least as far as Henry II and his turbulent priest. With the greater availability of alternative (rather than solely official) news sources, it might have been hoped that a more aware population would be more resistant, but some reports suggest that the US is, probably deliberately, recruiting people who are barely literate to carry out their programme of detention and deportation. For any tyrant or despot, a poorly-educated populace always has advantages (and lest we think that we in the UK might be immune from such attitudes, think about those politicians railing against the number of people educated to degree level who they consider to be ‘over-qualified’ for their allotted station in life).

Looked at rationally, in an economy run by and for billionaires it ought to be strange that so many people who have little or nothing to gain by facilitating a kleptocracy in which wealth trickles ever more quickly upwards are so willing to act as agents of the kleptocrats. But sowing hatred and division and blaming ‘others’ for all the problems has shown itself to have extraordinary staying power as a means of cementing authority and wealth in the hands of the few. There's no sign of its power waning.

When is an agreement not an agreement?

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It was revealed today that Trump is unilaterally withdrawing the US from 66 international organisations and agencies on the basis that they are “contrary to the interests of the United States”. Whether that is actually true or not is an interesting question to which there is no absolute answer: it really depends on how one defines the ‘interests of the United States’ and over what timescale. The point, though, is that US membership of every one of those bodies will have been underpinned by a formal international agreement signed by the President of the day, and in some cases ratified by Congress. Other participating countries will have made assumptions about US sincerity and intentions in deciding the shape and nature of their own participation. Trump would probably argue that they were all signed by previous presidents, all of whom (in his eyes) were losers, incompetents, traitors or worse, but the bottom line is that he is simply reneging on agreements, often long-standing, to which others have assumed that the US would adhere.

It’s not the only example. Having signed an agreement with Keir Starmer just a few months ago, Trump has paused all work on the deal, demanding concessions in other areas first. It seems to be fairly typical of his approach to business as well as politics – if people give him everything he wants, he assumes that he didn’t ask for enough, banks what he’s got and then withdraws from the agreement until he gets more. All agreements are conditional and temporary until he decides he no longer likes them.

It’s a point which the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ needs to bear in mind. In tiptoeing around the easily-bruised Trump ego in order to keep him engaged and signed up to a peace plan for Ukraine, they are making an implicit assumption that he will consider himself bound by whatever document he signs. It’s a foolish assumption to be making – any security guarantees to Ukraine based on commitments made by Trump are likely to be worthless. If Putin could be persuaded to believe that Trump might honour his word, the ‘guarantees’ might have some sort of deterrent effect, but all the signs are that Putin has a much better understanding of Trump than do Starmer or Macron.

Given his past statements, it seems unlikely that Putin will sign up to any peace proposal involving the stationing of troops from NATO countries in Ukraine anyway (even if Trump gives him a nod and a wink to say he’s not serious, a scenario which is far from unlikely) so perhaps it will never be tested in practice. If he does agree, it could well end up meaning that Starmer and Macron are leading their countries into a shooting war with Russia without the essential intelligence and back up from the US. It underlines again how foolish it is, under the current US administration, to regard the US as an ally rather than a hostile power.

Is NATO nailed to the perch?

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Whether NATO is merely slumbering while it waits for the end of Trumpism in the US, or whether it has been nailed to its perch to give a misleading impression of life is an academic question, since in neither case can it be relied on (in the short term at least) to meet its stated objective of providing a collective system of defence. The Prime Minister of Denmark told us this week that it would be dead if the US launched a military attempt to take over Greenland. That sounds logical, although NATO ‘allies’ behaving aggressively towards each other isn’t exactly new. Think of the Cod Wars between NATO members Iceland and the UK in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, or the recurrent near-wars between Greece and Türkiye, occasionally involving the firing of real bullets. Threats by right-wing UK politicians against France or Spain were perhaps never really a practical proposition, but the mere fact that they were expressed shows that not everyone takes the alliance very seriously.

Invading and seizing part of the internationally-recognised territory of a fellow member state is on a different level, though. And when the invading force belongs to the largest and most powerful member of the alliance – the one which has been seen as the ultimate backstop since the founding of the alliance – that puts a more serious perspective on the question. Perhaps Trump will hold back from the military option. There are other approaches to getting what he wants (which seems – just like in Venezuela – to be more about oil and natural resources than about national security) although his love of macho action suggests he’d sooner deploy the military whether he needs to or not. Whether bullying, intimidation, and threats are any less of a danger to the NATO alliance than an actual military intervention is an interesting question; but one rather suspects that most of the members would prefer to keep their mouths shut and put the alliance on some sort of life support than pronounce it dead in such circumstances.

The wider question, though, is whether the alliance is already dead, de facto if not de jure. Trump has already made it clear that he will not come to the aid of any European country which hasn’t spent as much money as he declares necessary on buying US military hardware defence, and it's not at all clear that he would aid even those that do. In fairness to Trump – not a phrase which trips easily off the keyboard – I’ve long held doubts about the reliability of the US as a backstop under previous administrations, as well as about the role of the alliance itself. The difference between Trump and his predecessors is that he can’t help blurting things out where others preferred to maintain a more ambiguous silence. The bottom line is that an alliance dominated by one member and unable to operate effectively without that member ceases to be of any value if that one member goes rogue. Waiting for Trump to invade a fellow NATO member before declaring the organisation dead is pretending that the decaying corpse in front of us still shows signs of life. The question which European leaders should be debating is about building a new international order, starting in Europe, which does not depend on the dubious commitment of the military might of the US, and which is oriented towards avoiding wars rather than fighting them.

Farage is the consequence of limited ambition

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The owner and proprietor of Reform Ltd seems rather pleased that so many people are referring to him as a racist based on the overt racism he allegedly displayed as a schoolboy half a century ago. His argument is that it increases the probability that racist voters (or, to use the term which he seems to prefer, “our core support”) will vote for his company in a future election. It should be no surprise either that overt expressions of racism or non-denial denials thereof would motivate racists to vote for a racist, nor that so many of those most likely to vote for Reform fall into that category. He might choose his words ever so slightly more carefully these days, but no-one who listens to what he says can be in much doubt about his distaste for foreigners, particularly those of a different hue or religion or who dare to speak a language other than English.

The question is about how to respond. If calling him out as a racist solidifies his core support, does that mean we should all cease calling out his racism? Part of the answer to that is that, outside what he calls his ‘core support’, there are many people who are not racist: contrary to what some seem to believe, voting for Farage doesn’t necessarily make someone a racist. There must be at least some in that category who will be deterred by a better understanding of the nature of what it is that they are planning to vote for. But more widely than that, failure to address expressions of racism tends to normalise those views, and that, in turn, shifts the mainstream of political discourse towards, rather than away from, Farageism.

In effect, normalising Farage’s political views is exactly what the leadership of Labour (to say nothing of the Tories) has been doing for some time. Building a tolerant society depends, ultimately, not on what politicians do or say, but on building a wider consensus in society. But building consensus around the type of society which we might wish to see is a project which politicians, and especially Labour ones, have long since abandoned in favour of building a coalition of voters, whatever their views, which is large enough to secure power. Providing politicians with careers who can then exercise the power of the state is a much narrower project, and will change little. That does, though, seem to be the limit of their ambition.

Pragmatism, Law, and Justice aren't the same thing

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Some managers are good at running things, but hopeless in a crisis; others are good in a crisis, but hopeless at running things when there is no crisis. However, for life’s ‘firefighters’ to be seen to be doing well, there need to be fires, and if there aren’t any, then they will generally find ways to start some. There are other managers who are good at neither, but somehow manage to convince others (or at least themselves) of their efficacy. Trump is clearly in that third category, but fondly imagines that he is actually one of the world's greatest firefighters.

When you run out of wars to resolve (even if some of them were never wars in the first place, and others have not really been resolved at all), the only thing a man determined to win the Nobel Peace Prize can reasonably do is to start a few himself. Give it a week or two and he’ll be adding Venezuela to the list of wars that he has personally ended. Shortly to be followed by his ending of the wars in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Greenland. He probably thinks that will actually impress the committee awarding the prize.

Here in the UK, meanwhile, the PM is still waiting to be advised as to whether one country bombing another country, sending troops in, capturing the leader and taking him abroad, and reallocating that country’s natural resources to foreign companies, might possibly constitute some sort of crime or not. In fairness, it’s hardly as if he’s a highly trained and experienced lawyer with specific expertise in human rights issues who might be expected to be able to come to an opinion of his own on the matter, is it?

There are, of course, times and circumstances when adopting a pragmatic approach to events which are out of the UK’s control and about which we can do nothing (we’re hardly going to support either a retaliatory strike or even a few limited sanctions) makes sense, but it increasingly appears that the ‘expert legal mind’ currently running the UK actually doesn’t understand the differences between pragmatism, law, and justice. It’s not a first offence, either – we’ve seen much the same thing with his repeated description of a possible pragmatic end to the war in Ukraine involving the ceding of territory as a ‘just’ settlement.

Maduro has hardly been an angel in his approach to governing Venezuela (although his regime has achieved more in terms of reducing poverty and extending education than it is usually given credit for) – and the fact that there are worse leaders around the globe is not much of an excuse for supporting him. His last re-election may well have been rigged (although hard evidence, rather than anecdotal evidence from a sore loser, to justify that assertion is not exactly easy to come by).

But failing to call out a blatant breach of established international law purely in order to placate His Orangeness in the White House does us no favours in the long term, and merely helps to cement a new international order in which the powerful are allowed to do whatever they wish, and the rest are there to be exploited. Those not sitting at the table are likely to be on the menu, as the saying goes. Starmer’s assertion that he has “been a lifelong advocate of international law and the importance of compliance with international law” is just a joke. And not a very good one.