Duplicity isn't strong enough

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Faced with what still looks like certain defeat next week, I can understand why the Prime Minister is desperately trying to find a form of words which bridges irreconcilable propositions, but this is surely a step too far even by her own standards of twisted logic.  The agreement with the EU which she is putting before parliament includes a commitment that the so-called ‘backstop’, under which the north of Ireland remains aligned with EU rules, automatically comes into effect under certain pre-agreed conditions but is a purely temporary arrangement until such time as certain other pre-agreed conditions are met.  The problem she faces is that she, like everyone else, understands perfectly well that the second set of pre-agreed conditions can never happen unless and until the UK Government drops its red lines.

So, in order to get the House of Commons to accept the ‘only possible agreement’ (© Theresa May), the Government has accepted an amendment which means that the backstop doesn’t automatically come into effect under the agreed pre-conditions unless MPs vote for it at the time; that while it is in effect the UK (after consulting with a Legislative Assembly which is currently suspended anyway) can unilaterally reject any and every EU rule; and that the UK Parliament can unilaterally end the backstop arrangement at any time.  Even if this were enough to get the agreement through the UK Parliament (although that currently looks extremely doubtful), it would no longer be the agreement which she agreed with the EU, but a completely different beast.

One can only assume that she believes that agreeing something different domestically will strengthen her hand in going back to the EU and demanding either that the Irish know their place, or else that 26 members of the EU abandon the 27^th in favour of a deal with a troublesome departing member, something which would surely come close to destroying the cohesion of the EU since no member could ever trust the organisation to look after its interests in dealing with outsiders in the future.  And that’s without even considering the question about whether asking parliament to ratify a deal which differs from the one she’s agreed with the EU can ever really be considered to be negotiating in good faith.

If that weren’t enough, she’s trying to persuade Labour MPs and the trade unions to support a deal (which is no longer the one agreed with the EU) by making half a promise to consider retaining EU employment rights post-Brexit.  Leaving aside the question of who would ever trust anything she says given her record, any promise she makes can only be good for as long as she remains Prime Minister, under the convention that no government can bind its successors – so about six months, then, at best.  Any Labour MP foolish enough to swallow that one would deserve deselection – not for failing to follow the party whip, but for being too stupid to be in the job.

A case of theft

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It was Proudhon who argued that all property is theft, although Marx pointed out that the idea of theft itself presupposes the existence of the concept of property.  Whatever, in common everyday language, we all have an understanding that theft is the unlawful removal of one person’s property by another.  If a thief breaks into my house and makes off with my property, or if a conman turns up at my front door purporting to be someone he is not and persuades me with lies and deception to part with my property, most of us would understand that to be theft.  And any attempt using lawful means to get that property back would be regarded by most of us as entirely legitimate and reasonable.

On today’s newsstand, I noticed the banner headline in the Daily Express claiming that “They really do want to steal your Brexit”. 

It’s not the only time that I’ve seen the claim that any attempt to reverse Brexit is ‘theft’; and it isn’t only the Express which makes the claim.  I can understand why those who have spent many years campaigning for Brexit will feel dismayed and let down if their referendum victory is somehow ‘stolen’ from them; but something can only be ‘stolen’ from someone if it were that person’s legitimately obtained property in the first place.  Recovering stolen property by lawful means cannot itself be theft.  And there was more than one conman involved in the initial theft.

It doesn’t matter here that the Remain campaign may not have had entirely clean hands; there was a great deal of hyperbole and exaggeration (although, as events are turning out, perhaps rather less than I thought at the time), and a certain unwillingness to address the future direction of travel of the EU.  But none of that can excuse a campaign which those involved have subsequently admitted was based on direct and deliberate lies – some of which are still being repeated.  Returning to the question of who stole what from whom, that means that the ownership of the property in question is, at best, disputed.  And that in turn means that a means of arbitration and judgement is required.  There is no better way of meeting that requirement than an honest debate about the real facts before a further and decisive vote.

Strange outcomes

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The nomination of the Counsel General as Brexit Minister raises a number of questions, not least about the definition of a ‘minister’.  Given that Brexit is not a devolved issue; that he has no statutory responsibilities in the role; and that he will not be taking any decisions, the title ‘minister’ looks more than a little out of place.  He looks more like a monitor to me.  That’s by the by though; the criticism of the appointment seems to boil down to two issues.

The first is that it creates a potential conflict of interest, in that as Counsel General he is charged with giving impartial legal advice to ministers and can hardly give impartial legal advice to himself.  I’m not convinced on this one.  In the first place, if he really does have no decisions to make in the role, what exactly would be the purpose of any legal advice that he gave himself?  But secondly, I find the idea of an expectation that a politician appointed to a political post as a member of the Welsh Government by the First Minister would give entirely impartial legal advice to the government of which he is a member to be a strange one.  Yes, there are aspects of his role which require him to act independently of the government, and he is duty-bound to uphold the law; but that is not the same as saying that he must be politically neutral when it comes to policy issues.  There are sound political arguments both for and against him combining the two roles, and whether it is a ‘good’ thing or a ‘bad’ thing is an entirely legitimate topic for political debate between parties.

The second is that it is in direct conflict with the primary legislation establishing the role of Counsel General which specifically requires that the incumbent shall not be a minister.  Arguing that he isn’t really a ‘minister’ because he has no duties or responsibilities is an attempt to create wiggle room around the legislation (although it would have been much easier to give him some other title), but it looks more like an open-and-shut case to me.  What’s curious, though, is the politics of it.  This restriction on a dual role isn’t anything which the Assembly has discussed and voted on, it’s a result of primary legislation in Westminster.  It’s a rule imposed on the Welsh Government and the National Assembly from London, in effect.  And I find it strange that it’s a unionist party trying to find a creative way around the restriction, whilst those who are nominally independentistas are demanding total compliance with the letter of the imposed law.  Politics produces some odd outcomes on occasions.

Proving the opposite

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Yesterday’s ‘dry run’ for post-Brexit chaos at the ports turned into farce as those involved pretended that 89 lorries could adequately demonstrate the impact of 6000.  There were supposed to be 150, which isn’t much better, but only 60% turned up.  It’s tempting to assume that the other 61 were hired from a start-up haulage company which doesn’t actually have any lorries yet, but that might just be too close to the truth.

It wasn’t the complete disaster as which some have painted it, though; it’s just that the lessons learned weren’t the intended ones.  I thought that it demonstrated rather well the potential impact of contracting out transportation to companies which don’t have any lorries or ships – a significant percentage of the planned traffic will never arrive.  If only they’d planned it better, they could also have allocated specific pretend loads to each of the 150 lorries, and then modelled the impact on business and consumers of 40% failing to arrive in time, or even at all.  That would have taught us all much more about the potential impact.  I suspect, though, that the government would really rather we didn’t know the answer to that one.

Still, it showed those EU types the level of organisation and planning which the UK government is putting into no deal planning, albeit rather more accurately than intended.  Letting them know how ready we are is supposed to frighten them, but after yesterday’s performance they’re more likely to die laughing than of fright.

Symptoms and causes

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Before Christmas, it did seem quite certain that parliament would be voting on the Brexit deal next week.  However, the PM has said today that it will ‘definitely’ happen, and one of the few near-certainties in politics is that anything that she says at least three times will ‘definitely’ happen won’t.  Her spokesperson has also used similar wording today, so the probability that the vote will be pulled is steadily increasing.  With the current PM, everything is always definite right up until the moment when it isn’t.  ‘Definite’ is, for her, a time-limited concept rather like what she would wish the ‘backstop’ to be.  It is this flexible and time-limited approach to the meaning of words which also enables her to insist that nothing has changed since she said the opposite thing yesterday.  It’s another of those things about which she is ‘very clear’.

She’s concentrating her efforts on trying to wheedle the EU into agreeing a form of words on the Irish ‘backstop’ which will enable her to say that she very clearly hasn’t agreed to what she very clearly did agree in December 2017 and again last year.  But her increasingly plaintive, not to say desperate, pleas to the EU to cut her some slack seem doomed to failure; it’s hard to think of anything that the EU can say or do which will get her off the hook on which her own peculiar combination of intransigence and consistent inconsistency has placed her.  Even worse, she seems to have got it into her head that if only she can get some legally-binding form of words saying that the backstop can only ever be temporary, then her problem is solved.  But the existing form of words already makes it entirely clear (albeit not in the vague and uncertain May sense of ‘clear’) that the intention is for it to be temporary, and to be in force only until such time as it is replaced by a shiny new agreement on trade which keeps the border open.

The problem is not the form of words used to describe ‘temporary’ but that the PM has not the faintest idea about how she can negotiate an agreement with the EU which achieves that underlying aim.  And even if she could, her most fractious backbenchers would not support any deal which achieves that aim because there is no deal available which simultaneously allows complete regulatory divergence between two trading areas and an open border.  Seeking reassurances about the meaning of the word ‘temporary’ is addressing the symptom, not the problem.

Chasing the succession

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One of the problems which results from having a lame duck Prime Minister who everyone knows is going to resign at some point in the comparatively near future is that those around her are inevitably focussing more on how to put themselves in the best position to succeed her than on anything else.  In the same way that Brexit itself has come to dominate the PM’s every waking hour (and quite a few of the sleeping ones as well, I wouldn’t be surprised), and destroyed her domestic agenda (insofar as she ever had one), so the timing and nature of her departure and the succession have come to dominate the time and thoughts of the host of backstabbers loyal allies around her.

Over the past week, the threat to Sajid Javid’s chances of succeeding Theresa May posed by a handful of migrants crossing to the UK from France has clearly caused him a great deal of concern.  Far more concern, in fact, than the fate of the people involved.  Apparently, he believes that those MPs (and, if he gets into the final two, the party members) who will make the choice of leader will be suitably impressed if he is seen to be tough on migration (I’d be tempted to add the Blairite rider ‘and tough on the causes of migration’, except that I don’t believe he cares a fig about those).  In this, he is deluded; those involved are less concerned with whether he is or is not tough on anything than about whether they can spin a story that he is simply not up to speed with what is happening.  It’s not about the substance of either policy or action; it’s about finding a way of discrediting him.  The migrants are just what the military might call 'collateral damage' in the continuing internal Tory intrigues.

But mistakenly believing that the facts of the situation are of any relevance at all to that small electorate which he is targeting, he is tying himself further in knots with every utterance.  He has managed to suggest an approach which is illegal in international law, and his determination to work closely with the French to uphold the EU rule that asylum-seekers must apply for asylum in the first country which they reach appears to ignore the fact that the government of which he is a part is actively seeking to extricate itself from any obligation to follow the relevant EU rules.  He seems to be assuming that just because the UK is no longer going to be part of the relevant agreement, that’s no reason for the French not to abide by it and accept that it is somehow ‘their’ problem.

His claim that those involved are not ‘real’ asylum-seekers makes him sound more like a railway company blaming ‘the wrong type of snow’ than a government minister seeking to address the reasons why people put themselves through a perilous journey to reach these shores.  I struggle to understand why an attempt to escape poverty in some way makes people less deserving of our assistance than an attempt to escape war – particularly when both poverty and war are largely caused or facilitated by countries such as the UK in the first place – yet it’s a distinction which trickles casually from the mouths of people like Javid, who would prefer to send people back into poverty and an early death than do anything to address the problems which provoke people into migration.  Labelling the victims as the ‘wrong type of migrant’ is a shameful distraction from the real issues.

Reality is slipping even further away

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If there was one positive thing that I had hoped might come out of Brexit, it was that Anglo-British nationalists would finally be forced to face up the fact that the UK’s place and status in the world aren’t as they have believed to date.  Perhaps it will still happen; but at the moment it almost seems as if the whole process is having quite the opposite effect.  They seem to be just doubling down on their fantasy view of how the world is.

This week, we’ve had the Defence Secretary telling us that, post-Brexit, the UK could build new military bases in the Far East and the Caribbean, becoming once again a global power.  There is, of course, nothing about membership of the EU which prevents the UK from building such bases now; the link with Brexit is tenuous to say the least.  The prime obstacle to building and maintaining such bases is the same reason given for closing such bases in the 1960s and 1970s – the disproportionate cost in relation to the perceived benefits.  The attempt to pretend that the UK was still a global power was a drag on the economy.  That cost issue hasn’t gone away; and the non-existent Brexit dividend has already been spent at least twice over.  Still, there’s always that magic tree in the garden of number 10.

What military forces would be deployed to such bases?  We discovered last week that there are no proper warships available to send as far as the Black Sea, let alone Singapore.  Still, for a country that is building aircraft carriers without aircraft, and hiring ferry companies with no ships, there is, I suppose, a certain consistency in building military bases with no military presence.  And paying for those imaginary forces with imaginary money looks almost coherent in that context.

The most delusional part of all this is the statement that these new bases will enable the UK to “play the role on the world stage that the world expects us to play”, because, apparently, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Caribbean states and nations across Africa will be looking to the UK for “the moral leadership, the military leadership and the global leadership”.  Really?  Comedy leadership, maybe; showing others how to engage in serious self-harm, definitely.  But only an Anglo-British exceptionalist could really believe that those former colonies are all waiting with bated breath for the UK to resume the ‘leadership’ which it showed them in the past.  Just what does it take for reality to sink in?

The power of words

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Just after Christmas, the Home Office published this advice to ‘EU citizens’ about the requirement to register if they want to stay in the UK after Brexit.  

The wording is very clear – “If you are an EU citizen living in the UK and want to stay in the UK after the 31 December 2020…”.  I’m not alone in spotting the problem with the use of words here, because I think that I – along with the overwhelming majority of the UK’s population, fall into that category (although I’ll admit that I do sometimes start to wonder about the ‘want to stay’ part given the trajectory on which the UK government has placed us).  But I’m unquestionably an EU citizen as things currently stand.

Professor Richard Murphy has already blogged on this, suggesting that we should all follow the UK Government’s clear advice as EU citizens and register our desire to stay after Brexit.  It’s an interesting form of protest, and it’s hard to see how the UK Government can really complain if millions of those of us who are currently EU citizens simply comply with their poorly-worded demand that we should register.

But underlying this is a rather more general, and slightly sinister, misuse of terminology to describe people.  Here’s another example from Parliament’s website, talking about the proportion of NHS staff who are EU citizens.  It claims that 5.6% of NHS staff are EU nationals but goes on to say that all but 12.7% (i.e. 87.3%) are UK nationals.  But at what point did that 87.3% cease being EU citizens?  The answer is that they did not – they might cease to be such on 29^th March, but as of today, and at the time that this research report was published in October, the proportion of EU citizens working in the NHS was 92.9%, and there was and is effectively no legal distinction between those who happen also to be UK nationals and those who happen to be nationals of other EU member states.

These are far from being the only examples; the BBC and media are full of reports about ‘EU citizens’ which invariably, it seems, is a reference only to non-UK EU citizens.  Does this blurring of terminology matter?  At one level, of course not.  I know what they are trying to say and understand why they are drawing a distinction when talking about the situation which will exist post-Brexit.  But at another level it does matter, partly because (as Prof Murphy pointed out) it’s about creating difference and ‘otherness’ where none currently exists, but also because it diverts attention away from what the government is actually doing here.  The truth isn’t that we are not currently EU citizens, it is that that citizenship is going to be stripped from us at the end of March by deliberate government action.  The form of words which has gained widespread currency treats all other EU citizens as though they are the odd ones, when the reality is that it’s UK nationals whose status is changing the most.

For services to music and light entertainment

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The knighthood is definitely a joke, right?

Mistaken messages

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The UK has a long and far from honourable tradition of ‘gunboat diplomacy’; sending warships to other countries as a visible demonstration of military power and the willingness to use it.  For ‘visible demonstration’ one can also read ‘sending a message’, which was the wording used by UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson to describe the despatch of HMS Echo to Ukraine.  The big problem with ‘sending messages’ however is that the message received may not be quite the one intended.  Whilst in theory sending a heavily-armed military vessel to a trouble spot might be intended to tell Putin not to further provoke Ukraine or else the UK might be willing to take action against him, sending a hydrographic survey vessel is more likely to be interpreted as ‘we haven’t actually got a proper military ship available at the moment’.  The effect on Putin is more likely to be laughing his socks off than quaking in his boots.

“…and then he said ‘any more nonsense from you and I’ll order the Royal Navy to undertake a hydrographic survey in the Black Sea’”