Isn't this what they wanted?

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The government’s ‘plan’ to send thousands of asylum-seekers to Rwanda has hit another snag as it has been revealed that those houses which were being built to receive them, and which sundry Home Secretaries have visited at not insignificant public expense to inspect, have now largely been sold off to Rwandans. There is, surely, something more than a little droll about Rwanda following exactly the policy which so many supporters of the Rwanda scheme have been urging: housing ‘our own people’ before making homes available to asylum-seekers. Getting the UK to pay for it is, from a Rwandan perspective, something of a bonus.

Using common sense depends on knowing what it is

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To adapt the words of Oscar Wilde, to lose one parliamentary candidate due to unfortunate use of social media looks like misfortune, but to lose ten starts to look like carelessness. Unless, of course, we are talking about Reform UK Party Ltd, the mostly Farage-owned limited company standing over 600 candidates (although a currently unknowable number of those may have fallen by the wayside in the meantime) in the forthcoming election. It seems that selecting any old Tom, Dick, or Harry as a candidate and waiting for their past misdemeanours to be exposed is actually a deliberate strategy. They have, in effect, outsourced the vetting of candidates to the media, who are having something of a field day as they work their way through the list uncovering incriminating past statements.

Outsourcing candidate vetting is a novel approach to a difficult issue. The more cynical might even wonder whether Reform are quite happy to be associated in the mind of potential voters with some of the racism and misogyny being spouted by their candidates whilst also hoping to get some sort of credit for acting quickly to sack them when their words are exposed. Both selecting candidates and subsequently sacking them are definitely easier for a hierarchical company where one man has effective total control than for a democratic party where members might, wholly unreasonably, expect to have an input. Abolishing concepts such as membership and democracy is not without its advantages. For a control freak or would-be dictator at least. And for a party which has, according to the polls, zero probability of having anyone elected, maybe they really just aren’t that worried. The company’s puppet leader, Richard Tice, said that “Every party has their fair share frankly of muppets and morons”. From the horse’s mouth, as it were. But I almost agree with him; it’s just that some have a ‘fairer’ share than others.

He does make the entirely correct point that the vetting process is “valid the day you do it, but if the following Friday night someone has a glass or two too much and puts something out on social media they permanently regret, in a sense it never stops”. Well, yes. Although quite how that applies in the case of the candidate for Orpington whose offensive words date from 2019 is an unanswered question. A date 5 years ago is hardly between one day and the following Friday night. Not without a Tardis, anyway.

Candidate vetting is a difficult process, and can be sensitive. I recall one case of a Plaid candidate who was outraged to discover that party officials had looked at their (public) social media accounts, and claimed it was an invasion of their privacy. We thought that it was an extreme reaction, but it highlights the fairly common belief that social media accounts, even if visible to the world, are somehow also private to the individual and his or her online friends. Understanding the way in which social media can broadcast and amplify throwaway comments is still slow in developing in some quarters.

And even when candidates have been vetted, and nothing incriminating has been found, one can never be entirely sure that the individual won’t, as Tice put it, have a glass or two and say something silly. It’s not only a problem for Reform, although to date they’re the only group that have tried to turn a problem into a ‘feature’, as a software developer might describe it. Whether it’s just bad luck, or whether there is a particular propensity on the political ‘right’ to say silly things, it is the Tories who have, in recent months and years, suffered some of the biggest problems. Some of them seem to think that they are just voicing aloud ‘what everybody thinks’ and that makes it just common sense. That was, for instance, a major part of Lee Anderson’s defence. Indeed, returning to Toms, Dicks, and Harrys (and especially the second of those) it turns out that the MP who sent pictures of his body parts to a man through a dating app, and provided the contact details of other MPs so that they could also be targeted, is a fully paid-up member of the so-called Common Sense Group of Tory MPs. But then, ‘common sense’ as defined by Tice’s ‘muppets and morons’ is always going to look a bit strange to the rest of us. An inability to agree on a common sense definition of common sense is one of the reasons why vetting is so hard to do.

It's all a bit too eclectic for me

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Whether it’s entirely reasonable to describe the leader of the Conservative group in the Senedd as an idiot, as Martin Shipton has done on Nation.Cymru recently, is a matter of opinion. There is plenty of evidence to support the hypothesis, and some might regard it as simply a ‘harsh but fair’ judgement; but there is a broader question as to whether direct insult is ever a worthwhile tool in political debate, even if the evidence is both categorical and overwhelming. That again is, of course, a matter of opinion. True and fair or not, it’s unlikely that Lenin would have seen him as a ‘useful’ idiot, and not just because there is no evidence that Lenin ever actually used the phrase.

What is less contentious is that Andrew RT Davies and his not-so-merry band do seem to be somewhat obsessive about some issues, most recently about the widespread introduction of 20 mph speed limits in Wales. It’s an obsession which has led them to brand it as part of a ‘war on motorists’ (a war which, apparently, also includes ‘eclectic’ vehicles, and it wasn’t even April 1st).

They’ve even invented a few policies which Labour aren’t proposing to implement (such as reintroducing tolls on the Severn crossings) in order to inflate the extent to which Labour hates anyone who drives a car. In fairness, in doing this one might point out that the Welsh branch of the English Conservative and Unionist Party are merely aping the approach of their supreme leader, who has himself axed a good number of policies which never existed either.

Given their own previous support for the introduction of 20 mph limits, it would be hard to describe their current opposition as being in any way principled, but then that’s not something which one would really expect of them. They have interpreted the result of one by-election as an indicator that voters will support pro-car measures and are trying to apply it more widely in the forlorn hope of avoiding a wipeout; but the evidence that it will work is sketchy to say the least. They are, though, (last time I looked) still in favour of 20mph limits outside schools, hospitals and playgrounds in order to protect users of those facilities from the dangers of vehicles. Presumably, it is assumed either that people will get close to those locations by car rather than on foot, or else will have to just take their chances on pavements further from said premises where there are fewer of them to get run over.

And that leads me to wonder: if it is fair to describe Labour’s approach as a war on motorists, it is surely equally justifiable to describe the Tory approach as a war on pedestrians – and the environment. A demand for more road-building and fewer traffic control measures necessarily implies a degree of environmental damage and a change in the balance of priorities between vehicles and people in our villages, towns, and cities. If changing the balance in favour of pedestrians is equivalent to a war on motorists, isn’t changing the balance in favour of motorists equivalent to a war on pedestrians? The truth, of course, is that it’s a silly argument. Either way. It isn’t a simple question of balancing conflicting interests, even if such dramatic language added anything to rational debate. Most of us are sometimes motorists, sometimes pedestrians, and sometimes users of public transport. Striking the right balance is a good deal more complex than the simplistic Tory obsession suggests, but a party which stands no chance of ever having the responsibility for implementing its policies in Wales can feel free to ignore that. It’s hardly as though anything they do or say can do much (more) damage to their future prospects. Whether the leader is an idiot or not.

Avoiding rules made by foreigners

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Rishi Sunak continually refers to the European Court of Human Rights as a “foreign court”, despite the UK’s honourable role in creating it and writing its rules, and its equal say in appointing the judges. This week, he was asked why by an SNP MP. His brief reply was to say “Because it is based in Strasbourg”. As a statement of fact, it is unusually honest; as an argument for distancing the UK from it, or even withdrawing entirely, it’s on the weak side of pathetic. It’s probably reasonable to assume that he believes that the voters to whom he is trying to appeal regard the very fact of its being based outside the UK as being sufficient grounds for having nothing to do with it. And there are certainly a lot of those dreaded foreigners in Strasbourg.

He might even be right, but if he is, he’s surely missing a trick here politically. If withdrawing, or threatening to withdraw, from an international body based in a foreign country on the grounds of its very foreignness is a vote-winner, there are plenty of other organisations from which withdrawal might be even more popular. The one which immediately springs to mind is FIFA. To start with, it’s based in Zurich, and it would be hard to identify anywhere more closely associated with internationalism than Switzerland. As everyone (well, everyone in the Conservative Party, at least) knows, the city is fully of peace-loving leftie foreigners, some of whom even have the effrontery to be lawyers, and none of whom can be trusted further than they can be thrown.

On top of that, FIFA demands that Ingerland use the same rules as everyone else, and even has the gall to make the Ingerland team play against assorted foreigners in a tournament, rather than simply being awarded the World Cup in perpetuity as they are entitled to expect. If half a pledge to withdraw from a court which merely stops the UK government deporting a handful of people to central Africa is as popular as he thinks, imagine how popular a pledge to withdraw from FIFA might be. It would enable Ingerland to choose who they play as well as setting their own rules: winning could become the norm rather than the exception.

I don’t understand what’s holding him back. It’s not as if this is any less honest than the Brexit prospectus, and that worked well for his party at the time. He could even hire a bus and put a slogan on the side pledging to spend the UK’s (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland would all be instructed to follow Ingerland’s lead, naturally) contributions to FIFA on the NHS instead. Or even use the simple but meaningless slogan so beloved of Ingerland fans: Football's coming home. It would give him a better chance of saving a few seats than anything else he's tried so far.

The pleasure is likely to be short-lived

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One of the many things on which government and opposition are agreed (effectively confirmed in a speech by the Shadow Chancellor a few weeks ago) is that the ‘solution’ to the UK’s problems revolves around economic growth. Rather than debate whether the current pie is fairly distributed, the answer, they say, is simply to bake a bigger pie.

The first and most obvious question is whether economic growth is really as desirable as this approach suggests. Whilst the abstract numbers might suggest so at a macro level, if current levels of economic activity are making unsustainable use of resources then more of the same simply means that we will run out sooner. Whilst it is possible to imagine types of economic growth which are not resource-dependant, that is a much more nuanced objective; and that nuance seems to be missing from both Labour and Tory analyses.

The second question it raises is how to ensure that the extra pie doesn’t simply accumulate in the hands of those who already have the biggest slices. This has, after all, been the default outcome of economic growth in recent decades, leading to increased levels of inequality. Without taking specific actions to control the way the pie is allocated, it will be the default effect of future growth as well. It’s another aspect which neither party seems to be willing to address.

But bigger and more important than either of those questions is the issue of how that growth can be ensured. And here we come to another aspect of shared ideology – both parties share an absolute faith that the answer lies in reducing taxes and regulation, especially on businesses. Empirical evidence for this proposition is 'limited' (and that's being charitable), but one of the features of blind faith is that it doesn’t need any evidence. They don’t usually spell out what they mean in any detail, preferring to hide behind neutral-sounding jargon such as ‘supply-side reforms’, but what they mean is tax cuts and less regulation. And the regulations which they usually want to cut are things like health and safety and environmental protection – cuts which, if people are asked more directly about, they are more likely to resist. And, for all the apparent logic behind the idea of helping businesses to retain more of their profit so that they can invest in new capacity, the economic reality is that most new investment is funded by borrowing, not out of profit. Yet the parties have no other plan.

There have been a number of polls recently, one of which suggested that the Tories could be reduced to fewer than 100 seats. Whilst my first reaction was along the lines of, ‘come on people, we can get them closer to zero than that’, a more considered response was ‘so what?’. Whether the balance is 350 Labour to 250 Tories, or 450 Labour to 150 Tories, or even 600 Labour to 0 Tories, we would still have 600 MPs committed to the faith-based policy of reducing tax and cutting regulation. We would also still have 600 committed to a form of austerity, and 600 committed to the folly of Trident replacement. Even if all of the other 50 MPs were to take a different view (and that’s unlikely: Sinn Fein refuse to take their seats and the DUP are even more of a faith-based cult than the Tories; and then we have the Lib Dems – who knows where they stand on anything? – leaving only the SNP, Plaid and the Greens with any possibility of taking a different view), the chances of a significant policy reset are vanishingly small. A Labour government might be more competent – they could hardly be less so – but the idea that competent austerity based on blind faith is better than incompetent austerity based on blind faith is not exactly the killer argument as which some seem to see it.

The undoubted pleasure which many will feel at the forthcoming near wipeout for the Tories is likely to be rather short-lived.

Targets against which one can never fail?

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Sometimes governments choose the targets that define their success or failure, sometimes the indicators of success are chosen by others, and often they just somehow become part of the collective consciousness as if by magic. One of the most potent of current indicators in that last category is that the UK government is considered a failure because it is led by Rishi Sunak. However, if Sunak is replaced in a coup by another member of his party, it will be judged a failure because it is led by someone other than Rishi Sunak. None of that is either fair nor rational, but collective consciousness is no slave to either fairness or rationality.

The man himself is keen to choose his own indicators of success or failure, although to date he’s shown that his success rate in choosing targets that he can actually achieve is somewhat wanting. Unless his objective was to mirror Cnut, and demonstrate the limits of his powers, he’s succeeded in showing only how bad his judgement of what he can do really is. It could be a cunning plan to turn himself into the underdog. He’s probably read somewhere that ‘the British’ love an underdog, but failed to understand that it’s one of those claimed values which really is no longer true, even if it ever was. In the real world, more people mock underdogs than sympathise with them; that’s just one of the cultural ‘successes’ of his party since the 1980s.

It is remarkable, though, that all the targets he chooses against which he wants to be judged share one amazing characteristic, which is that when the numbers are moving in the ‘wrong’ direction it’s all a result of global trends and matters outside the government’s control, but when they’re moving in the ‘right’ direction it’s down to firm and resolute government action, following a ‘plan’ which does no more than state the desired outcome with no actions identified to achieve it.

Take his oft-repeated mantra of ‘stop the boats’. In June last year, when the number of people crossing La Manche in small boats was temporarily lower than in the previous year, the PM was quick to claim that it was nothing at all to do with the bad weather at the time, it was all down to the actions being taken by the government – actions which basically consisted of trying and failing to deport a random small selection of people to central Africa. This year, with the numbers going up again, suddenly it seems that it is the weather which is to blame after all.

Then there’s inflation. When it went up, it was all about war in Ukraine and other far-away events, but when it came down again, it was all down to government action, although one would be hard pressed to find a government minister prepared to identify precisely which government actions led to reduced inflation. ‘Sticking to the plan’ when the plan consists only of a desired end point hardly counts as ‘action’ for most users of language.

Or economic growth. In the few recent months when there has been any, it’s been a result of unspecified government actions, but when there hasn’t been any – or even when it’s been negative – it’s a result of global factors which allegedly affect every other country as well, just as long as no-one looks too closely at the figures.

One could see this as an example of Sunak’s brilliance in selecting measures against which he can only ever succeed, because any and every failure is down to things outside his control. Occam might suggest a simpler and more plausible explanation which doesn’t require this mystical property to exist at all, merely the identification of mendacity.

Is lack of imagination also to become a crime?

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It’s a funny old world. Prior to this morning, I would have been hard pressed to think of any circumstances in which cabinet ministers would find themselves obliged to take to the airwaves to issue reassurances that people would not be arrested because they were a bit smelly. But then I would also have found it difficult to imagine circumstances in which a UK government would actually write down draft legislation which enabled the police to arrest anyone who ponged a bit. The current government have excelled themselves (and rendered satire irrelevant) by doing both. They haven’t so much lost the plot as torn it up, put the pieces through a shredder and come up with a new plot line so utterly incredible that the relevant authorities must have assumed it was an early parody for April 1st and published it as though it were a genuine parliamentary Bill, chuckling quietly as they did so. The problem is – it is real, very real.

For anyone who gives it more than a moment’s thought, homelessness is a complex issue with no single or simple cause. But the idea of giving anything a ‘moment’s thought’ is a major problem for members of the twenty-first century Tory Party, for whom what passes as thought processes are currently rather more reminiscent of chickens after suffering an unfortunate incident with an axe. It’s just a few months ago that Suella Braverman brought opprobrium down on her head by suggesting homelessness was simply a lifestyle choice, a statement which opposition parties – to say nothing of charities working in the field – were quick to criticise. She probably saw that reaction as a plus, polishing her already substantial credentials as one of the nastiest people ever to have been elected to parliament. It’s not entirely impossible that a thorough survey of all rough sleepers might indeed find one or two who prefer to live that way, but the idea that it’s the norm is as divorced from reality as Braverman herself. Clearly, mental health issues are also part of the problem, but even that isn’t straightforward – those issues themselves are often the result of a range of other factors. Inadequate levels of benefit are another. Lack of suitable housing, in the right places and at an affordable cost are also part of the mix (although it’s easy to understand why people who think that £100,000 a year is difficult to live on might struggle to understand the abject level of poverty in which some end up living).

Any government which was serious about tackling rough sleeping and homelessness would be looking at all those factors and identifying methods and resources to tackle them, rather than treating the people involved as just a nuisance to be criminalised and dealt with by the police. Those resources aren’t always simply financial either, although properly funding services would inevitably be a part of any solution. But criminalising people isn’t a zero cost option either: it requires time and effort from the police and the criminal justice system, two more services already under considerable stress.

Perhaps they’re privy to some private polling data or focus group outcomes which have led them to believe that creating a new offence of being malodorous whilst in possession of a sleeping bag, and issuing all police officers with official smell-o-meters to objectively assess the pong factor, will net them millions of votes which might otherwise go to that Farage chappie’s party. And if they have, then they may also have a list of other things which they’ll get round to criminalising, given half a chance. The first part of that seems unlikely to me, although the idea that they’ll find a way of criminalising anyone who doesn’t vote Tory is no longer as absurd as it should be. But then what do I know? I am clearly insufficiently imaginative: I never imagined that anyone would seriously attempt to criminalise BO.

Representing who to whom?

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According to some Tories, the best way of preventing Nigel Farage from getting elected to a seat in parliament for a five year term is to give him a seat in parliament for life, by sending him to the institution for sufferers of Post Imperial Stress Disorder. The logic is curious, but then logic has long ceased to be their strong point. Others think Farage should be made the official representative of the UK in Washington. And some of the most desperate actually want to do both.

It’s true, of course, that if Trump were to be re-elected in November, he would be quite keen on the idea of having Farage as the UK ambassador. Doubtless, Farage would be well-placed to suck up to him on behalf of the UK to form a close working relationship with him, but supporters of the plan seem to be rather overlooking the fact that the main job of the ambassador is to represent the UK in Washington, not the USA in London. Assuming that Labour win the UK general election sometime between now and November, it seems highly unlikely that Farage could successfully represent the views of a Labour government, even under a not-so-lite Tory like Starmer. And even less likely that he’d try. Further, since the objective is to deter Farage from standing in the UK election, he’d have to be appointed very soon. That in turn means that, in the meantime, he’d be dealing with the Biden administration. It really is hard to conceive of a better way to p*ss off Biden, and damage UK-US relations, than to appoint a cheerleader for his opponent, an ambassador whose idea of tact and diplomacy invariably involves the use of the biggest megaphone he can lay his hands on.

On the other hand, Sunak seems to have given up trying to avoid upsetting anyone other than the extremists in his own party. Appointing Farage is a suggestion that the Tory high command have apparently rejected, but that’s only what they’re saying this week. Given the extent to which consistency has become an unfamiliar and unwanted virtue in the Tory Party, who  knows what they’ll say next week if Reform’s poll ratings continue to climb? Given the increasing likelihood of some sort of reverse takeover of the Tories by Reform after the election, keeping on the right side of the probable next, or next-but-one, leader might even appeal to the PM, at least until he can escape the nightmare and take up a new and better-paid job in sunny California.

Offering someone a direct bribe not to stand in an election is, of course, illegal under electoral law, but mere legality is, like consistency, another discarded value for what used to be known as the party of Laura Norder. It’s not an insurmountable barrier anyway. All they need to do is to present membership of the Lords as a punishment rather than a reward – and that’s not exactly an unrealistic assessment. Ennobling Farage might even help to prod Labour into reversing its previous U-turn on abolition of the Lords: Farage might yet turn out to have some useful function after all. The thing that still makes it all highly unlikely, however, is that it would require Sunak to make a decision rather than prevaricate. So probably not going to happen unless the desperate supporters of this mad proposal depose him in May.

That Venezuelan trip

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A couple of weeks ago, it emerged that Boris Johnson had undertaken what was described as a ‘private’ trip to see the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. The extent to which this was genuinely an ‘unofficial’ trip seemed to me at the time to be doubtful, given the reports that the Foreign Office had ‘supported and briefed’ the disgraced former PM before the visit, even if it was really true that the Foreign Secretary knew nothing about it until Johnson was already en route to Caracas. It still seems unlikely to me that he would have been briefed and supported without the knowledge of Cameron, and it does seem as if the Foreign Office are less than forthcoming over what advice and support they did or did not give.

Doubts about the idea that Johnson would have paid for the trip himself were entirely well-founded, since it turns out that it was being paid for by the boss of a hedge fund. Classic Boris Johnson. Better yet, it turns out that he was actually being paid by the hedge fund to undertake the trip. Again, classic Boris Johnson. And that it was part of a job which he’s taken on without going through the normal vetting process for former ministers. Classic Boris Johnson squared.

It's easy to understand why the president of Venezuela, the hedgie, and Johnson would like to normalise relations between Venezuela and the West – in the first case because poor relationships are damaging to his country, in the second because poor relationships reduce the opportunities to make money, and in the third because he was being paid to attend the meeting, and he can’t resist the pull of being thought important. It remains a lot less clear why any of those involved thought that a meeting with a disgraced former PM, with no influence over anything, would help to achieve any of those aims except those of Johnson himself. If nobody had given Maduro the impression that Johnson still had some influence, why on earth would he have agreed to meet him?

The Labour Party seem to be concentrating their fire on Johnson’s apparent breach of the rules, but that’s just Johnson being Johnson. He’s never believed that any rules apply to him, so of course he breaks them. And given that he has form on precisely this particular rule, it’s reasonable to conclude that the breach was entirely conscious and deliberate. So what? Another breach of the rules is just business as usual for the man. The bigger question is about what the Foreign Office were up to. Did they really brief and support Johnson for the visit, and do so without informing the Foreign Secretary? Did they really believe that Johnson was a suitable person to carry out a potentially delicate diplomatic task? And put their resources to work in support of a hedge fund’s profit aspirations? Did they really lead Maduro to believe that Johnson was acting in at least a semi-official capacity in order to facilitate the meeting? It seems unlikely that the meeting would have taken place otherwise. Helping to organise and prepare for a meeting whose main aim is to further the accumulation of private profit for a hedge fund that happens to employ an ex-PM seems to me a much bigger scandal than Johnson merely breaking a few rules. Again.

Finding PISD sufferers an appropriate home

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Parliament suffered an outburst of outrage yesterday as the dinosaurs who still don’t recognize that the UK no longer rules the waves fulminated against the audacity of the Chinese for daring to engage in illicit hacking activities. They’ve even dared to hack their way into the publicly available electoral registers. In the olden days, the response would have been to send a gunboat or two up the Yangtze river to teach the natives a lesson, but an aircraft carrier which struggles to get out of port without breaking down somehow doesn’t really cut it. Post Imperial Stress Disorder is, apparently, a thing. And it seems to be quite widespread, even amongst those who never knew Empire. It’s easy to understand how PISD sufferers might feel frustrated when the serious and dramatic UK response is a few meaningless sanctions against two named individuals and a small and obscure company.

The demands to be told exactly what the Chinese have been up to are reasonable, up to a point – but it raises a question about reciprocity. Does anyone seriously believe, for instance, that the UK’s security services are not hacking their way into Chinese computer systems with malicious intent? (If they’re not, that is probably an even bigger scandal.) Should the demand for openness and honesty be applied to the UK’s nefarious cyber activities as well? It’s a silly question, of course. We all know that the UK is special and unique, and therefore entitled to use whatever means are appropriate to protect its interests, including breaking international law whenever the fancy takes it. And not just in a ‘specific and limited way’ either.

The demand that others be held to a higher standard than ‘us’ is one of the main visible symptoms of PISD, but the disorder itself is incurable, sadly. The best we can do is try to isolate sufferers from the rest of society, and let them see out their days in comparative solitude. Somewhere they can rant to their hearts’ content and influence very little. That may, in fact, be the best justification anyone has ever come up with for the existence of the House of Lords. Seen as part of the selection process for membership of that institution, yesterday’s performance in parliament might even start to make sense.