Yesterday, the new
spokesperson for the new Prime Minister told us that the new cabinet represents the "depth and breadth of talent” in Tory party. Rarely has a truer word been
spoken by an official spokesperson, although it’s not entirely clear why they
felt they needed to spell out just how bad the situation is; most of us had
already worked that out for ourselves. It’s a refreshing level of honesty which
one suspects is unlikely to last.
Yesterday’s pantomime in two
acts as one PM flew off to Scotland to resign and his successor flew separately
off to Scotland almost immediately afterwards to be appointed in his stead has
been reported more than adequately. It seems that they needed to
take two separate flights in case anything happened to one of them on the way there,
and the outgoing one wasn't allowed to go in to see the Queen until the incoming one was
in the building, just in case. How they would have coped if anything happened
to the new one on the way home doesn’t seem to be recorded anywhere.
Not much of the reporting
seems to have asked whether it was all really necessary. Whilst it’s true that
‘tradition’ dictates that PMs are appointed in person, and, leaving aside the
question of what sort of functional state depends on the health of a 96 year
old who has been in post for more than 70 years already, it would certainly be asking a
bit much to ask her to travel from Scotland to London for two meetings neither of
which needed to be longer than five minutes. But it doesn’t follow that two
expensive separate return flights were required. Traditionally, PMs have to kiss the
monarch’s hand in a demonstration of fealty in order to be appointed, but that
ritual was replaced some years ago by a handshake, and the sky didn’t fall in
as a result. It’s equally unlikely that it would fall in if the handshake was
replaced by a Zoom-carried cheery wave, or even a simple old-fashioned
telephone call. First Ministers of the devolved administrations are also
appointed by the monarch, but it doesn’t happen in person – why should the PM
of England be an exception?
It could even have been done
by a few swift tweets:
@BoJo:
Dear @RoyalLiz, I resign #PM #Quit
#Butillbeback
@RoyalLiz:
Goodbye @Bojo #PM #Quit #Hesfinallygone #Royalrelief #Noyouwont
@RoyalLiz:
Will you @CommonerLiz form a government? #PM #Quit #Apparentlyonehasnochoice
@CommonerLiz:
Yes #PM #LizforLeader
@RoyalLiz:
Then you @CommonerLiz are hereby appointed. #PM
#Whatdidwedotodeservethis
@RoyalLiz: PS:
Just let me know when you @CommonerLiz are ready to resign. I’ve got
enough time for another two PMs at this rate. #PM #Quit #Onecanhope
It could all have been over in
about 30 seconds, and saved tens of thousands of pounds. For a new PM elected
on pledges to challenge orthodoxy and keep a tight control on government
spending, starting off by spending a whole day on this pantomime ‘because that’s
how it’s done’ is not an auspicious start.
The proposal
to require a majority of the whole electorate in any future independence
referendum is just one example of the tendency
for the Tories to announce a policy without thinking through the implications
and the practicalities.
In terms of the politics of
it, it is a fact that, had such a requirement been implemented for the
referendum on leaving the EU, the UK would
still be a member. And it’s noteworthy that the people now demanding a 50%+1 majority
for Scottish independence are, in many cases, the same people who would be
protesting bitterly had a simple majority of those voting not been considered
enough on that occasion. That’s just politics, though; they can and will
bluster their way through that one. The fact that the proposed rule can award a
resounding ‘win’ to a minority of those voting is, equally, just politics; it
doesn’t matter because it would be the ‘right’ side winning. Assuming a turnout
of around 80% (and it will never be 100%, for a variety of reasons: some people
forget to vote, some can’t be bothered, some are away, some are ill, and some
even have the temerity to die before polling day), then if 49.9% of the electorate
votes yes, only a maximum of 30.1% (allowing for spoiled or invalidated
ballots) can vote no. The patent unfairness under which a split of 62:38 of
those who vote is considered insufficiently enthusiastic to justify
independence, whilst 29% of the electorate voting against is considered to be resounding
support for the union is, again, just politics.
No, for a government whose
majority is based on English votes, and which is prepared to impose its will on
the Scots and face them down, using the full power of the absolute sovereignty
of Westminster, none of these political problems matter, and the policy will
appeal to the English nationalists on whose votes the Tory Party now depends. It’s
more the practical issues of implementing it which it seems to me that they
haven’t really thought about.
In the first place, the UK
does not have a constitution, which means that the constitution can’t be
amended to introduce the new rule. That in turn means that it can only be done
by Act of Parliament, and in the arcane world of Westminster, no Act can ever
bind any future government. At some future point, a more pragmatic and less dogmatic
government, faced with a situation in which it becomes politically impossible
to resist the demand for a new referendum could, and probably would, simply delete
or amend the requirement. Without a written constitution, accepted by the
population at large, loose rhetoric about making Scottish independence
impossible, ever, by changing the rules is just that – loose rhetoric.
Secondly, what form would this
proposed legislation take? It would be a curious act of parliament which said
something along the lines of “if there’s ever going to be a referendum,
which there isn’t because we won’t allow it, then the rules for considering a
majority to be binding shall be as follows:…”. Very Ruritanian. Passing a law to define the
rules for a hypothetical future referendum is also seriously damaging to the
hypotheticality of it.
There’s another problem with
enacting such a law as well. I don’t doubt that there would be a clear
parliamentary majority in favour of it – and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to
see Labour and the Lib Dems piling in in support of the government, making the
parliamentary majority a very healthy one. But at the last election, Scotland
elected 48 SNP MPs out of 59 – a total of 81% - and current polling suggests
that they may well do even better next time round. Whilst there’s no doubt
about the legality of the outcome of the parliamentary vote, using an English
majority to over-ride 81% or more of the duly-elected Scottish MPs doesn’t
immediately strike me as the most brilliant way of winning Scottish hearts and
minds. It plays, instead, to the narrative that Scottish wishes are being
ignored – more likely to help the independentistas than the unionists.
And then there’s one other
little complication, the one that they regularly forget about – Ireland. The question
of a border poll and how the results should be interpreted is, as I understand
it, set out in the Good Friday Agreement, and requires the Secretary of State
to arrange a border poll “…if at any time it appears likely to him that a
majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland
should cease to be part of the UK and form part of a united Ireland” (my
emphasis). Whilst it’s hard to rule anything out from a Truss government, starting
to unilaterally tinker with that international agreement is a matter of a
different order of magnitude. That leaves them imposing one rule for Scotland
(and Wales) whilst operating to a completely different rule for Northern Ireland.
Good luck to the government lawyers on arguing that case when it comes before a
court, as it almost certainly will. From the Government’s perspective, they
have the power and they make the rules. But wiser heads might well wonder
whether somebody shouldn’t take their spades away before they dig much deeper.
It’s not clear precisely when the
disease first struck. Theresa May suffered from an early onset variant with her
proposal for what became known as a dementia
tax, a proposal so poorly thought through that it was abandoned within days
of making contact with the real world. The disease, which manifests itself as a
tendency to announce policies first and think about the implications later, spread
rapidly under Johnson and seems destined to reach its zenith under Truss. The
disease vector seems to be the Conservative Party; there is no known cure and
no hope of a vaccine, not least because all those who offered any such hope were
promptly driven out. The prognosis (for the patient) varies from bad (a lengthy
period in opposition) to worse (political oblivion). For the rest of us, that’s
the good news.
The bad news is that we have a
remaining period of up to two and a half years when the disease will continue
to work its way through the body of the Conservative Party and during which we
will have increasingly bizarre announcements made. Whilst Johnson seemed to have
developed a curious form of semi-immunity under which policies would be
announced and then simply forgotten (bridges,
anyone?), it appears that Truss has a bad case and enjoys no such immunity. Instead of quietly abandoning mad proposals, it is believed that she will actually attempt to implement
them, egged on by the fringe elements in her party which have caught the even
more serious Omigod variant.
The medical experts are clear
that the disease is unlikely to spread outside the confines of the Conservative
Party as long as we all attempt to retain some sort of hold on reality and
truth, but are unable to offer us much by way of protection from the
consequences of the actions of the infected. It is thought possible, however,
that concerted collective action might help. Escaping the asylum would be a
good start.
“Tone deaf” doesn’t begin to
describe the message
which Boris Johnson sent to the Edinburgh International Culture Summit
yesterday. It was apparently intended, primarily, as a defence of Ukraine and a
condemnation of Putin and Russia, and it started promisingly enough, with the
words, “Throughout history, we’ve seen what happens when aggressors try to
oppress and to eliminate culture. We saw it with the Nazis in the Second World
War, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban in Afghanistan”. There’s
little there with which one could disagree, but the problem is with what it
misses out. The list of miscreants over the last century or so is a reasonable
starting point, but using the phrase “throughout history” surely invites, or even requires, a
rather more comprehensive assessment of cultural genocide. And to a lot of
people, in many countries of the world, there will be one obvious, glaring
omission from the list of rogues. There is one state which, in its various
previous guises, has invaded
more of the world than anyone else, ever, and has committed extensive
cultural genocide in the process. Systematic looting of cultural treasures
and imposition of its own language was the norm for the empire in question, and
still colours the attitudes of those (such as, er, Boris
Johnson) who want to insist that English should be the first language of
everyone in the UK. From the point of view of an English exceptionalist like
the PM, there is of course, a huge difference. Whilst replacement of Ukrainian
by Russian is an act of cultural vandalism, in the case of the British Empire,
the English language was a ‘gift’ for which those who previously used other
languages should be grateful, and not an imposition at all.
There was a second sentence in
his address which also jumped out at me, when he referred to Putin’s “vile
assertion that Ukraine is somehow not a real country”. It rang a very
recent bell, because just a few days ago, Lord
Frost made the 'vile assertion' that Wales and Scotland aren’t nations
either. One can argue about the semantics of ‘country’ vs ‘nation’, but the message
is essentially the same and the clear equivalence is that, in both cases, people
are being told that they have no right to a different culture or a separate
existence. Perhaps Johnson is judging people against a very special scale of
vileness, where Putin scores highly because, well, because he’s not English,
whereas Frost scores nul points precisely because he is. That’s just the
way exceptionalism works – ‘we’ are always right and ‘they’ are always wrong.
If you start from the utter certainty that your own language and culture are inherently
superior to all others, alternative views are never going to count for much. Putin and
Johnson aren’t really so different at all.
Listening to what the two
candidates for the leadership of the Tory Party have to say (an action which
probably ought to carry some sort of health warning), one might reasonably be
excused for concluding that there are one or two small areas of disagreement
between them about policy. After all, in ordinary parlance, for one to suggest
that the other’s policy platform would represent a “moral failure” whilst the
other describes the former Chancellor’s economic policies as a failure
doesn’t exactly scream “unity”. There is one thing, though, on which they are
definitely speaking in unison – the outgoing government has been something of
an all-round disaster, not just in economic terms but also in managing to keep
the number of Covid
deaths down to an unnecessarily high 200,000 or so, a level
which either or both of them would have been happy to exceed significantly in
the interests of securing a further reduction in the cost of pensions and the NHS.
However, whilst the Tory Party
might appear to have become a bit like Four Feather Falls –
a place where “anything can happen, anything at all”, and where reality
or truth are rarely allowed to intrude – in truth we are just witnessing a
temporary interlude of summer madness before they return in a fortnight, under
what will purport to be new management, to the comfortable incompetence to
which we have been accustomed, albeit with the added ingredient of a PM who can’t
even attempt an occasional racist or misogynist ‘joke’ as a diversion. Sunak’s apparent
conversion to the idea of taking a moral stance will be shown to be exactly
what it is, ‘apparent’, before it dissipates in a cloud of smoke. We will have
a budget, which they’re not allowed to call a budget because if they did, the
Office of Budget Responsibility (established by a foolish government led by
some has-been called Cameron in the far distant past before the Great Purge)
would be required to assess the proposals and can be more-or-less guaranteed
not to give the answer that the new PM wants to hear. Far better to use out of
date numbers which give the ‘right’ answer than accurate ones which do not. Sunak
will loyally vote
in favour of a budget with almost every proposal in which he claims to disagree,
because it is, from what he considers to be his highly moral viewpoint, better
to have a Conservative government doing all the completely wrong things than
risk the possibility of an alternative government getting some things almost
half right. Interestingly, no-one (as far as I’m aware) seems to have asked Truss
whether she would similarly vote for a not-a-budget-at-all produced by Sunak, presumably
because that has become too much of a hypothetical question, but we can
probably assume that the answer would also be in the affirmative. And her hated
‘Treasury orthodoxy’ would probably turn out to be a splendid thing after all, if
a willingness to say so kept her in the Cabinet.
How long can it last? Well,
assuming that Truss doesn’t decide to start a nuclear
war over cheese imports with France (which, unbeknownst to many of us, may be
our
deadliest enemy), she can theoretically avoid calling a general election
until the beginning of 2025. She might decide to go earlier than that, but it’s
hard to believe that even she is stupid enough to do that in the middle of an
energy and cost of living crisis which has all the signs of persisting
throughout the winter at the very least. It would be nice to be able to believe
that there is, waiting in the wings, some sort of credible alternative government
which knows what it would do instead and is able to articulate a programme for
reform and change. Sadly, we’re not in Four Feather Falls at all, and the
phrase “anything can happen” does not apply. Some things simply aren’t
credible, even in the land of make-believe. Best we escape from the asylum now.
Many people find arithmetic
challenging, and the harder the sums, the more difficulty they have.
Politicians have always struggled with sums (although their mathematical blind
spot never quite seems to extend to an inability to add up the columns on their
expenses claims), none more so than those who govern us in the post-truth era.
It’s not unique to the UK; former President Trump still seems to have
difficulty understanding why most of the rest of the world considers 306
electoral college votes is a bigger number than 232, or why 81 million votes is
more than 74 million. Another group which has a similar difficulty (although
with a remarkably similar exception when it comes to totting up their fees) is
the legal profession, although we should always remember that they have been
especially and extensively trained to argue that black is white if that’s what
the paying client wants.
Put the two together, and what
do we get? Allow me to present the probably-soon-to-be ex-Secretary of State for Wales, Sir Robert Buckland KBE QC MP, who seems to be
labouring under the delusion that winning 14 Welsh seats out of 40 constitutes a
majority. In defending his appointment (as an MP for a seat in England) as the
Secretary of State for Wales, he has come up with the
remarkable assertion that, “If the people of Wales want to get rid of me as
the Secretary of State for Wales, then they need to vote for different parties
at elections and help get a different government elected”. Unusually for a Tory
MP, the advice to not vote Tory if you live in Wales is exceptionally sound,
albeit perhaps not quite what he intended. The glaring flaw in the argument,
however, is that the electors of Wales have conscientiously followed his
advice, in every
election for the last century, and, not to put too fine a point on it,
failing to vote for the Conservatives does not, in practice, mean that we don’t
get a Tory MP for an English seat as Secretary of State. Indeed, experience (to
say nothing of mere logic) shows that his suggestion is the complete reverse of
the truth – the fewer Tory MPs Wales elects, the less likely it is that any of
them will be considered up to the job, and consequently the more likely it is
that an MP from England will be appointed to the role. The complete elimination
of all Welsh Tories would turn that probability into an absolute certainty.
What he should have said, but
perhaps lacked the courage to say, was that “If the people of Wales want to
get rid of me as the Secretary of State for Wales, then they need to elect more
Tory MPs in the vague hope that the PM of England will consider at least one of
them to be up the job”. It’s easy to understand why even a lawyer might
balk at saying that the way to get rid of a Tory Secretary of State is to vote
for more Tories; It isn’t the most immediately obvious approach. And it doesn’t
necessarily work in practice either – even if all 40 Welsh MPs were Tories,
there’s no guarantee that an English PM would appoint any of them. It would be
marginally more honest, though, even if the probability is that the Welsh
electorate would ignore the advice, as they have done for the last century.
The real point in all this,
however – and the one which his comment studiously avoids – is that if we want those
representing Wales to be elected by and answerable to the people of Wales, we
need first to opt out of Westminster. The Tory habit of appointing MPs from
England to rule over us (think Peter Thomas, Peter Walker, David Hunt, John Redwood,
William Hague, Cheryl Gillan) is not just an occasional exception. It’s easy
enough to understand why he wouldn’t want to tell us what we really need to do
to avoid having Secretaries of State who represent seats outside Wales, but it’s
actually not so hard to work it out for ourselves.
The prisons, so they say, are
full of innocent people. Not really, of course, but it’s a way of expressing
the fact that an awful lot of prisoners continue to protest their innocence
years after their convictions. A few of them are telling the truth; there are
more miscarriages of justice than anyone would really wish. But the vast
majority of those ‘innocent’ people are merely frustrated that their claimed
innocence has collided with what the courts foolishly like to think of as provable,
demonstrable fact. For the minority of truly innocent victims of miscarriages
of justice, it is, I suppose, fortunate that they weren’t sentenced to death
and executed. If I understand the argument
promulgated by the current Home Secretary, Priti Patel, in 2011, hanging a few
innocents is a price worth paying because of its deterrent effect. One can
never be entirely sure with Patel, but it did sound a lot like she was saying that
hanging innocent people will deter others from being innocent, although I may
be missing something there.
Anyway, back to all those ‘innocents’
currently banged up in jail. The potential for savings if the police and courts
simply took their word for the fact that they know the difference between wrong
and right is immense. And it would rapidly clear the backlog of outstanding
cases as well as resolving the barristers' strike. Far fetched? Maybe not, under a Truss government. She appeared
to argue
yesterday that a government led by her would have no need of an independent
ethics adviser, because she knows the difference between right and wrong and
always behaves with integrity. Leaving aside the remote possibility that she
might not be telling the whole truth there (see this
article, from earlier today, about an alleged misuse of government
facilities by, er, Liz Truss), it certainly helps to explain her proposals
for ‘simplifying’ (i.e. reducing) the regulation on banks and financial
services companies. After all, we all know that we can trust bankers, hedge
funds and speculators with our lives; it’s not as if any regulatory
deficiencies have ever allowed them to cause any serious
problems. And why stop there? We all know that we can trust the bosses and
owners of water companies to address leaks and pollution, so letting them regulate
themselves, as a certain, er, Liz Truss, did
in 2015 (since when sewage discharges have rocketed) was obviously more
sensible than spending government money and resources on monitoring them.
Perhaps preventing rentiers
and exploiters from pocketing vast profits at our expense imposing unnecessary
regulation on honourable people who can always be trusted to do the right thing
by the people as a whole is one of those functions which Jake argues
that the state no longer needs to do. Rules are not for the likes of him. Or
Johnson. Or Truss. Those of us who might think otherwise are obviously misunderstanding some basic concepts. Like right, wrong, honour and integrity, just for starters.
Some people are being very
unkind about the proposal
floated by the Treasury to allow doctors to write prescriptions giving people a
reduction in their energy bills. Suggesting that a 10 minute consultation with
a GP is not only hard to come by but might not be the most accurate way of assessing
the financial situation of the patient, or that overworked doctors might not
welcome having a host of people seeking extra appointments to deal with their heating
bills, misses the point completely. These are mere practicalities; but we had a
vote about that in 2016 and the majority of those voting clearly decided that
we should no longer allow ourselves to be held back by practical considerations. Or facts, come to that. It was agreed that we should take back control from the
tyranny of truth.
We should, instead, look at
the potential of this latest proposal. Why stop at heating bills? Why not let
doctors issue prescriptions for the payment of universal credit, allowing them
to decide not just who should get it, but how much they should get? It would be
a huge simplification of a complex bureaucratic system in which an army of
civil servants, backed up by complicated and expensive IT systems, carries out
a detailed assessment of needs and then forces people to wait weeks before they
get anything. Just think how much easier it would all be if a 10 minute
consultation at the GP’s surgery led to an instant pay out.
What about allowing GPs to
prescribe food for the hungry (in the form of supermarket vouchers, perhaps?).
We could abolish the need for foodbanks overnight. Let’s be even more imaginative: the
GP surgery could become a single point of contact for just about anything. We
might need a few more doctors of course. But think of all the civil servants we’d
no longer need to carry out assessments and impose delays. Surely some of them,
at least, could become doctors, with a few hours training. The rest can join
the queue at the surgery.
In fact, the more I think
about it, the more advantages I can see in the idea. Perhaps I can get my GP to
prescribe a general election. That must surely be worth 10 minutes of his time,
although, returning briefly to the world of fact and truth, there has to be at
least a possibility that, as with any sort of prescription drugs, the cure may
turn out to be not much better than the disease.
History – or rather, the way history is
interpreted – has a lot to answer for. And most especially, the choice of when ‘history’
starts. His own interpretation of history is at the heart of Putin’s claims that Ukraine is historically part of Russia and that Russia and Ukraine are a
single people and a single country, artificially separated by their common
enemy. The Chinese interpretation of history is at the heart of China’s claim that
the island of Taiwan is a province of China, sovereignty over which the mainland
has an absolute right to regain, by force if necessary. There was an interesting
analysis
of that latter claim on the Guardian’s website yesterday. Neither the Russian
claim nor the Chinese claim are entirely without merit, given the understanding
of history on which they are based, but both are based on a nationalist interpretation
and are selective about which parts of history count. And, as the writer puts it:
“Nationalist renderings of history are always suspect”. It’s something
of an understatement: as the war in Ukraine and the military forces being
deployed by China tell us, a selective view of history deployed in the
interests of a particular political position is not only suspect, it’s
positively dangerous.
We’re not exactly immune to the same
considerations closer to home. Whilst many independentistas in both
Wales and Scotland deploy their own interpretation of history, which stresses
that which went before the establishment of the UK, the Anglo-British
nationalists argue that history effectively started in 1707 with the Act of
Union, under which the previous kingdoms of England (already incorporating the territory
which we now know as Wales) and Scotland were abolished (‘for ever’ according
to them) to be replaced by a new United Kingdom of Great Britain (Liz Truss’s ‘single
country’). In truth, neither tell the full story, which is about movements of
people and conquests of territory dating back to before there is any recorded
history to tell us what happened, let alone any concept of nationhood or even
country. For nationalists, there has to be a starting point: a date of some
sort which is regarded as the foundation of the ‘country’, before which ‘history’
doesn’t count and after which there is only one ‘right’ way of ordering states.
It’s just that different nationalists choose different starting points. But those
are all essentially arbitrary.
The above-referenced article on Taiwan
poses a very pertinent question: “One has to wonder why ancient, pre-modern
history seems to trump the contemporary will of the Taiwanese people for
self-determination…”. It’s posed in a way which is specific to Taiwan, but
the question it raises is of much more general application. Welsh and Scottish independentistas
and Anglo-British nationalists alike seek to use history to define nations and
borders, starting from the assumption that whether the people in a given
territory are, or are not, considered to be a nation is the determinant of
their right to self-determination. Certainly, feelings of nationhood may be a
factor in deciding whether or not they want self-determination, but
ultimately why should a selective view of history (and all views of history are
ultimately selective) ever trump contemporary will? It is, of course, useful –
to say the least – if the people in any territory share a common interpretation
of their history, a common sense of nationality, or even a common language –
but none of those are necessary prerequisites to self-determination. If sovereignty
belongs to the people, and the people in Ukraine, Taiwan, Wales, Scotland or
even Ynys Môn want to establish an independent state covering their territory,
on what moral basis should that ever be denied?
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