Curious Conservative 'logic'

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The ‘leader’ of the Scottish Conservatives, Douglas Ross, announced last week that he had withdrawn his letter of no confidence in the Prime Minister because, he said, “the middle of an international crisis is not the time to be discussing resignations”. His ‘logic’ is curious, to say the least, given that his statement shows no indication that he has changed his mind about the main issue, which is that Boris Johnson is utterly unfit to hold the job. Faced with a major international crisis, surely the need to ensure that the man at the helm is up to the job increases rather than reduces. The argument that a proven liar who, whenever he’s under pressure (and often when he isn’t) says the first thing that comes into his head, even if it's the opposite of what he said yesterday, is the best person to establish enough trust to negotiate with friends and enemies alike is a very strange one. ‘Stability’ in a crisis is a good thing, of course – but who in his or her right mind would apply the label ‘stable’ to a government led by a man who his former close confidant describes as being like a shopping trolley with defective wheels which lurches unpredictably from side to side? Insisting that we should stick with an unpredictable Johnson to face up to the even more dangerously unpredictable Putin defies all normal logic. It makes sense only if Ross believes that any conceivable Tory replacement would be even worse. Oh, hold on, perhaps he has a point after all...

Shame, not pride, is the only response

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Whenever things get to the point where I begin to think that the current government could not go any lower, there is one minister who is always willing to step forward to prove me wrong. Just about the only thing that the UK government could have done to top its abysmal and disgraceful performance to date in handling the Ukrainian refugee crisis was to turn on European neighbours and criticise them for being too generous. So, with a certain inevitability, that is exactly what the ever-dependable Priti Patel has done, with her expression of concern to the Irish government that Ireland’s decision to allow refugees in without visas, in line with the humanitarian policy of all EU states, threatens the UK’s vicious and inhumane policy by creating a potential ‘back door’ for desperate people.

I suppose one could argue that it demonstrates that she at least understands the basic principle underlying the whole war – the right of large countries to expect that smaller neighbours will know their place, do as they’re told, and never implement any policy which might annoy their larger and more powerful neighbour. It’s just that nobody seems to have told her that she’s supposed to at least pretend to be on the side of the victims of the bullying, not behave like the bully.

Her Kafkaesque decision to set up a visa processing centre in Lille, which will neither accept appointments nor walk-ins and whose location is being kept secret somehow reminds me of the scene from the old radio programme, The Men from the Ministry, where a request from another department to borrow the ‘Permission Refused’ stamp was greeted with the response “Stamp it Permission Refused and tell them we haven’t got one”. Except that was a parody of the way government works, with refusal always the first option, and was funny. There is nothing in the least bit amusing about Patel’s refusal (backed by the PM and the other pathetic apologies for ministers) to help desperate and vulnerable people at their time of greatest need.

And all the while, the government bang on about how proud we should be of the UK’s leading role in the world, freed of the constraints of EU membership, and claim that it is demonstrating the unity of the realm. Pride – real, genuine pride in a leading humanitarian role – might actually help to achieve that if they could give us any reason for feeling such pride. The increasing feeling of shame which so many are instead feeling will do quite the opposite. The Irish can and should feel proud of their efforts to date; not for the first time, their outward-looking, European perspective puts the narrow insularity of the Anglo-British nationalists to shame.

Can dancing solve Johnson's problems?

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In 1976, the UK suffered a severe and prolonged period of drought. Eventually, things got so bad that the PM at the time, James Callaghan, appointed a Minister for Drought, Denis Howell, who apparently, amongst other things, was ordered by Number 10 to do a rain dance on behalf of the whole UK. Three days later, it started raining, the UK suffered widespread flooding – and he rapidly found himself ‘promoted’ to Minister of Floods. I’m sure that I’m far from being alone in suspecting that neither his appointment nor his rain dance (if he ever did it) had much to do with the change in the weather. (In three days, the civil service had probably not even managed to find him an office or staff, let alone research the detailed etiquette of a rain dance.) However, appointing a minister to take specific responsibility for a problem area on behalf of the government has become something of a fall back position ever since. Apart from anything else, it gives the PM someone to blame instead of having to take the flak himself.

In the light of the appalling mismanagement, confusion, and downright lies surrounding the handling of the Ukrainian refugee crisis, Boris Johnson has this week resorted to the same sleight of hand. Despite the headline, he hasn’t created a new minister at all, merely appointed one; whatever his own wishes on the matter, creation isn’t part of his powers even under the royal prerogative. It’s come at a heavy price to him – by choosing someone outside parliament to take on the role of Minister for Refugees, he’s been forced to ennoble yet another of his mates, further expanding the unelected house of parliament. No doubt the new minister will need time to settle in, be found an office, desk, and a few staff, and determine his terms of reference as a new sub-department is carved out at Westminster, and all that before getting down to the job in hand. Somehow, I doubt that he will turn out to be quite as lucky as Denis Howell; with or without a ministerial dancing act, this is not a problem which is going to resolve itself in three days. Still, things could be worse – Johnson could have appointed an existing peer, such as Baron Lebedev of Siberia, to take on the role. Now that would have shown Putin that he means business. Whose business is a whole other question.

Time to change the rules

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One of the few things which almost everybody ‘knows’ about economics is the law of supply and demand, which crystallises the relationship between supply, demand and price. Theoretically, if supply falls or demand increases, the price rises; and if demand falls or supply increases, the price falls until, in either case, a new balance is reached (the achievement of which new state might also involve the entrance of new suppliers or substitute products, or the exit of existing suppliers and old products). But, as with most over-simplistic rules, the reality is more complex.

We are currently seeing a huge spike in oil prices as a result of a combination of fear that Russian oil will be cut off and the decision by some customers to stop buying from that source, although there is no reduction in demand. The oil market, in terms of its effects on price, is working as one might expect, leading to price increases. There is currently, though, no increase in the cost of production of oil: the same oil, at the same cost of production, is simply being traded at a higher price. We know who’s paying the increased price – all of us – so who’s getting the extra money? The answer, of course, is that it’s going in increased profits – to oil companies, speculators, market makers etc. They are, in effect, getting a huge boost in their income for no extra cost or work. The market is working to transfer money from the poor to the rich – not just within countries like the UK, but also between countries. It is working to ration the supply of oil, based on price and ability to pay. That is what markets do – unless we change the rules.

For those who argue that we should not interfere in markets, I’ll just point out that ALL markets have rules of one sort or another. The questions we need to ask are who makes those rules, and whose interests they serve. In principle, markets are the best solution that humanity has come up with for the exchange of goods and services, but we should never forget that they are in essence a human invention, and they should be there to serve us, not to enslave or impoverish us. If they’re not doing that, then they are not working for humanity, only for a section of it – and changing the rules is a wholly rational response.

All the ‘solutions’ to the current crisis that I’ve seen politicians putting forward (more nuclear, more renewables, opening up new oil fields) necessarily involve long term projects, whereas the problem is here and now. There is an alternative, but it involves those governments wanting to hit Russian oil revenues working together, even if only for the short term, to share what oil is available rather than leaving it to the market. Effectively, it means forming a temporary cartel of purchasers to deliberately ration oil on the basis of need rather than accidentally on the basis of ability to pay. There’s still an economic hit from the reduction in availability, it’s just shared more evenly rather than disproportionately affecting the poorest people and the poorest countries. It would be uncomfortable, to say the least: we’ve seen the economic results of a shortage of energy in the past (three-day week, anyone?). But it raises the questions that have been referred to here before – how serious are we about stopping Putin, what price are we prepared to pay to achieve that, and who in society should pay that price? For all the rhetoric, the answers I’ve seen to date, based on actions rather than words, are ‘not as much as we want you to think’, ‘as little as possible’, and ‘those who can least afford it’. Words are too easy – it’s action that is needed.

A Great British welcome

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Following the announcement by the Home Secretary that she had ‘surged’ the UK’s presence in Calais to deal with the exodus of Ukrainians (when did ‘surge’ become a transitive verb?), the BBC went in search of it, in the wake of a family seeking help. They eventually found “…three men at a trestle table in a deserted departure hall at the port, with bags of ready salted crisps and Kit Kats”. The way in which government ministers lie so casually and blatantly, even when they know that minimal research will expose those lies, ought to be surprising. Ought to be, but isn’t – it’s become the new normal. I guess they’re assuming that their supporters won’t care about the lies, as long as foreigners are kept out. Sadly, they’re probably right. Worse still, I have a depressing suspicion that the people to whom Patel, Johnson et al are seeking to appeal will probably  be more outraged at the excessive generosity of the crisps and Kit Kats.

Ignorance as a qualification?

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Last week, the Welsh Secretary, Simon Hart, told us that he wished Wales hadn’t been able to set its own rules for handling Covid. In itself, the idea that an Anglo-British nationalist wants Wales and Scotland to do as they’re told rather than follow their own paths is about as newsworthy as the revelation that the Pope is a Catholic. In support of his position, he argued that “if you look at all of the measurements of success or failure, … actually there was precious little difference between England and Wales”. It’s one of those statements which has the veneer of truth, but where the situation is actually rather more complicated.

Leaving aside the fact that no-one could have known in advance whether different approaches would lead to different outcomes (which makes his statement a rationalisation after the event, rather than a reason for not allowing differences in the first place), one of the reasons for the differences in outcomes being small was that the English government constrained the ability of Wales to be more different, by, for example, only making furlough available when England needed it. There is also a danger in his use of headline figures, because – as the Welsh health minister has pointed out – a country with an older and often sicker population and higher levels of poverty would expect to lose a higher proportion of its vulnerable people to a pandemic where the death rate amongst those groups is higher. The very fact that the outcome was similar could itself be taken as at least a partial vindication of the Welsh approach. Statistics need to be interpreted with caution, rather than just looking at the headline figure, although, in fairness, Hart is probably just following the cavalier attitude of his boss. But leaving the numbers to one side, one thing which has stood out throughout the pandemic – and I suspect that this is what really irks Hart and his colleagues – is that the approach of Mark Drakeford and the Welsh government has been overwhelmingly supported by people in Wales, who are well able to tell the difference between a government trying its best (even if it didn’t always succeed) to keep people safe, and one more concerned for the profits of its friends and donors.

More shocking to me was the claim by Hart that, despite having been an MP for a Welsh constituency for 9 years before being appointed to the Cabinet, he had never heard of the Barnett formula. That really is an astounding admission to make, although it was probably part of what qualified him – in Johnson’s mind at least – to take on the job. Looking around the cabinet table, it is easy to conclude that ignorance is a qualification under the current regime rather than an impediment. On the other hand it could just be that whatever some of those providing him with cash were after, it wasn’t a detailed knowledge of Wales or its finances.

How serious are we?

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To date, the EU has managed to sanction 680 individuals associated with the Putin regime, whereas the UK has managed to reach the grand total of 8. This is, according to the UK government an example of the way in which post-Brexit UK is ‘leading the world’. I wouldn’t like to speculate about the result if we weren’t world-leading. Unsurprisingly, the UK’s foot-dragging is leading to a certain amount of frustration in other European capitals who cannot understand why the UK, uniquely, is so willing to give the individuals enough advance notice to move their assets out before they get frozen. They obviously don’t understand Conservative Party funding. One Home Office minister, Damian Hinds, told the BBC that “it was not a competition”, a statement which would sound a great deal more sincere if his boss wasn’t always trying to present whatever the UK does as world-leading, a description which sounds more than a little competitive to me. (And, as an aside, I find myself wondering about the wisdom of allowing Russian billionaires to sell their assets to Chinese billionaires, as some of them are reportedly trying to do, as though that might not merely be storing up new problems for the future. For Ukraine, see Taiwan.)

Whether sanctioning individuals will be effective or not is another question; it sounds to me a bit like the old “we must do something – this is something” rather than a seriously thought-out attempt to influence events. A wider and more far-reaching trade embargo is more likely to have an impact, but is being weakened by the determination of some countries to continue paying hard foreign currency to Putin’s Russia for oil and gas (even if they’ve stopped trying to get exemptions for Gucci handbags). It’s easy enough to understand why a country like Germany (which gets around 49% of its gas imports from Russia) will be more reluctant to end the trade than the UK, which gets only a few percent of its total gas supply from that source. But if Europe, collectively, wanted to make a difference (and it’s a pity that the UK no longer even has a seat at the table, let alone that it takes an entirely selfish attitude), there are surely methods of sharing the pain. The ‘default’ scenario is that, if the gas is cut off, Germany loses almost half of its total supply, whilst the UK loses only around 4% of its supply. Without crunching the numbers in detail, and pulling a figure out of the air as an example, would the world be a better or a worse place if the countries of Europe agreed, in the short term at least, to share what gas is available from non-Russian sources so that everyone gets, say 80% (or whatever the percentage is when the numbers are fully analysed) of what they need? It would be painful for all, but the pain would at least be shared, and it might be a lot easier to get buy-in to shutting down the supplies on that basis.

I don’t doubt that some would argue that ‘we’ shouldn’t have to lose out because other European countries have allowed themselves to become dependent on an unstable trading partner (although I seem to remember them telling us in another context that ‘pooling and sharing’ is a good thing), but if that argument trumps the need to oppose blatant imperialism, then we might as well hand victory to Putin now and open negotiations about which other bits of Europe he wants. Supporting people through a period of high prices and scarcity would be expensive, but the pandemic surely proved that the availability of money really isn’t a problem in an emergency. And I note that no-one seems to be asking where we are finding the funds to ship vast amounts of armaments to Ukraine: as ever, the government can find money for things that they want to fund.

The question remains: how serious are we, really, about stopping Putin, and what are we prepared to sacrifice to achieve that?

Leadership and greatness

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There are some who believe that human history is largely shaped by the actions of a few ‘great men’, where ‘great’ refers to their influence on events rather than being a qualitative description. In this context, ‘great’ doesn’t preclude being utterly evil; indeed, the two often go together. Others argue that the so-called ‘great men’ were merely products of the social environment at the time, and that the real mover of history is more to do with social forces, or perhaps more accurately the clashes between differing social forces. It’s an interesting debate, but largely academic. Since we can’t run history twice to compare, we can never know, for instance, whether assassinating Hitler in 1938 would have completely changed history or simply led to another individual fulfilling a very similar role.

We do know – because he’s told us – that Boris Johnson is very much a supporter of the ‘great man’ theory of history. According to him, one such ‘great man’, Churchill, single-handedly saved our entire civilisation. It meshes with the British popular memory (a euphemism for fable and myth in this context) of how ‘the’ war was fought and won. To understand exactly how he claims this to have worked, I’d probably need to read his book, but given the reviews that’s not a pain I’m willing to endure. Suffice it to say that, in the real version of history, the most influential of all the armies on the battlefield – and the one suffering the greatest losses – was the Soviet Red Army, most of whose conscripts had probably never heard of Churchill, let alone been inspired by him. It’s just possible that fear of another ‘great man’ (Stalin) might have had a greater influence on them. That, and the fact that they were largely fighting, initially at least, on their own territory rather than that of someone else. Defence of the homeland and family will always feel more real in those circumstances.

In itself, Johnson’s belief is relatively harmless; writing unreadable and historically inaccurate (according to the reviews) books and believing that which is inherently unprovable at least makes a change from believing, or pretending to believe, the impossible. The bigger problem is that he believes himself to be one such ‘great man’, and in terms of the old saying “some are born to greatness, others have greatness thrust upon them”, he firmly believes himself to be in the former camp. It follows that everything he does is axiomatically ‘great’, and the country he leads is equally axiomatically ‘great’ and ‘world-leading’ in everything it does. That perspective helps to explain his dismay, nay outrage, when others challenge his actions and refuse to take him at his own self-evaluation. Great men don’t need mere facts, rhetoric is enough.

It's educational to compare him with the current president of Ukraine. Here is a man who doesn’t seem to have made any claims to be great, and who seems to have ended up where he is not as the result of his own self-belief that he should be king of the world, but more by accident as a result of life imitating art in the form of his comedy show. There is little by way of self-aggrandisement or boastfulness, there doesn’t appear to be any flowery language (although like most of us, I’ve only ever heard him in translation, so it’s hard to be certain), he manages without the cod embellishment of referring to classical tales and texts, and speaks in a direct and apparently honest way showing – rather than just talking about – immense courage and determination. Definitely a case of having greatness thrust upon him, and for all the doubts that many Ukrainians had about him prior to the start of the war, he has turned out to be the right man at the right time.

Life has taught me not to place too much trust in heroes – all too often they turn out, eventually, to have feet of clay. But I surely can’t be the only one wondering if we might not be better off with a self-effacing leader who got there by accident rather than an arrogant narcissist who got there by deploying dishonesty on a grand scale, who believes that rhetorical flourishes count for more than actions and that promises made are valid only until the end of the sentence making them.

Can sanctions really work?

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Some reports have suggested that the sanctions being imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine are having a major impact on the Russian economy already, with interest rates rising, and banks running out of cash. It is comforting to believe that the sanctions taken to date are having a dramatic effect, but there is a danger of seeing what we want to see. The initial impact may be more a result of the suddenness than of any real underlying impact – and they certainly are nowhere near leading to any rethink by Putin. Some estimates – and it’s difficult to estimate accurately – suggest that the impact overall will be a hit of something like 4-6% to Russian GDP. That’s significant, but hardly crippling. As a comparison, the best estimates of the impact of Brexit on the UK are that it will reduce GDP by around 4%. That’s bad news – especially for those on lowest incomes, who will (as always) bear the brunt – but no-one is suggesting that it’s akin to the sort of economic collapse which would ‘force’ the UK to go begging to Brussels for readmission, to the Single Market if not to the Union itself. And a government which cares even less about the fate of ordinary people than the Johnson government, which is where Russia finds itself, is hardly going to lose much sleep over even the worst case 6% drop in GDP.

In any event, Russia has plenty of chance to mitigate the effects of at least some of the sanctions. The UK has kindly given the oligarchs sufficient advance notice for them to be liquidating their assets and moving them out of the UK, and those who keep their assets hidden behind nominee and shell companies in the UK’s myriad of tax havens have been given even more time to prepare by the snail’s pace progress of legislation to deal with those tax havens. Add to that those states in the world which are prepared to try and find ways around the sanctions, and the apparent determination of some European countries to continue buying – and paying for – supplies of Russian hydrocarbons, and the reports of the damage being done to the Russian economy look hopelessly over-optimistic.

Accepting the argument that military intervention leading to direct armed conflict with Russia is too dangerous to contemplate, we are left with nothing better than sanctions. But whilst sanctions could be strengthened considerably (moving rapidly towards a complete trade embargo) and action could be taken faster (preventing the movement of assets), sanctions have never proved to be an effective mechanism, and certainly not in a short time frame. More extreme sanctions, such as a complete trade embargo would hurt more. There would be a cost to ourselves as well as to ordinary Russians, of course – although nothing remotely comparable to the price currently being paid by the Ukrainian people. The biggest problem we face is international disunity as individual states try to protect their own peoples and interests. And the underlying cause of that comes down to the fact that we have a competitive world order rather than a collaborative one – it's driven, in effect, by an ideology which encourages selfishness. All of the problems likely to be faced by individual states as a result of more resolute international action against Russia could be resolved – or at least mitigated – by a willingness to share the pain equally rather than protect individual interests. Without that, we’re probably doomed to a long term war of resistance and attrition from which the biggest losers are the Ukrainian people and the only winners are the suppliers of armaments.

Global Gobbiness

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Words can have consequences. Sometimes, that’s because they’re taken seriously; at other times it’s because they provide people with an excuse to do or say what they wanted to do or say anyway. The Foreign Secretary’s words this week fall into the latter category. Linking the threat of nuclear escalation to something she said is absolutely unjustified; and the Kremlin must surely know as well as most of us do that it is ludicrous to take anything she says seriously. Even if it’s only about cheese. She has proved herself to be ‘geographically challenged’ in distinguishing between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea (both starting with ‘B’ and both being in Europe somewhere doesn’t make them the same thing) and under-briefed, having declared that the UK will never accept Russian sovereignty over parts of, um, Russia. And this week, she had to be publicly corrected by her boss over her suggestion that the government would support anyone choosing to go and fight in Ukraine, despite the little matter of that being illegal under UK law.

But words do have consequences, whether we like it or not. And having a gaffe-prone Foreign Secretary at a time of major international crisis is a really, really bad idea. As bad as having a clown for a PM and a Home Secretary lacking in any sense of human empathy. She cannot be held responsible for the way her words are interpreted or used – but she can be, and is, responsible for saying them. Opening the mouth before the brain is engaged is unhelpful in most situations; it’s potentially disastrous in the current one.