Playing games

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Apparently, the revolting Tories who failed to depose the Prime Criminal a few weeks ago are coming back for a second go. The Guardian claims that they are ‘ruthlessly organised’ this time, but if they were remotely capable of achieving such a state, they wouldn’t be in a situation of needing a second attempt. When it comes to ruthless organising, one thing that can be said for Johnson, on the basis of hard empirical evidence (to say nothing of his home receiving more fixed penalty notices than any other address in the UK) is that he is very capable of ruthlessly organising a party in a brewery (or indeed anywhere else), unlike those seeking to displace him. Their latest cunning plan consists of arranging a slate of anti-Johnson MPs to fill all the places on the 1922 Committee, the organisation for backbench Tory MPs. It really shouldn’t be that difficult: since only backbench MPs are allowed to vote in the election, and we already know from the numbers in the no confidence ballot that the overwhelming majority of those are against him, they’re aiming at an open, barn-door sized, goal. Their performance to date doesn’t guarantee that they won’t miss, though.

Apparently, some of those who voted to retain him as leader in the latest ballot did so on the basis that there would be enough other people voting against him for him to do the decent thing and resign anyway, as happened with his immediate predecessor. That cunning plan avoided them putting their heads above the parapet as well as playing to their own cowardice, but depended on the assumption that a man who has ignored convention, rules, decency and honour his whole life would suddenly discover an attachment to such values when it became clear that four out of every ten of his followers were no longer willing to follow. Anyone believing that really is too stupid to be an MP, another reason to doubt the effectiveness of their organising skills. Others apparently only discovered how venal and dishonest Johnson is when they saw the scale of last week’s by-election defeats and realised that their own seats might be in danger. Self-preservation is a strong instinct, but it isn’t known for encouraging organisational skills in those who had lacked them previously.

The man himself has drawn a line – cleverly using invisible ink so no-one can see where it is – and has moved on. From his perspective, he never did anything remotely wrong; issuing apologies and taking responsibility are just words to be deployed as and when their use can no longer be avoided. The real villains are journalists and reporters who insist on reporting what they want to report rather than regurgitating his press releases. Is there more scandal to come? Almost certainly. Any Tory MP who thinks for a moment that there will be no further revelations about Johnson’s actions is living in the same fantasy land as the man himself. The best that they can hope for is that people are so accustomed to his dishonest behaviour that new revelations receive scant attention. It may be working: attempting to appoint Carrie to senior posts and asking a Tory donor to cough up £150,000 to build a tree house for a six-month old in the garden of a house where his tenure is neither secure nor long term have both received far less coverage than the inherent corruption involved would deserve. He can always divert attention with another emergency phone call to President Zelensky.

The Tory MPs are treating the whole thing as some sort of Westminster parlour game, but by their actions – or inactions – they are complicit in facilitating the most corrupt and dishonest government which the UK has ever seen. This is no game.

Height, gender, and tyranny

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According to the latest despatches from the fantasy world inhabited by the UK’s Prime Criminal, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is all down to the gender of the president, Vladimir Putin. If only he’d been a woman all this unpleasantness could have been avoided. We don’t know much else about this imaginary female Russian president, although we might be better able to guess at Johnson’s assessment of her physical appearance if we knew whether she also had an imaginary husband who voted Conservative. We do know that, assuming Ms Putin turned out to be roughly the same size as Mr Putin, a shorter than average man would have become a taller than average woman, a fact which grows in importance when we learn from the Defence Secretary that Putin suffers from something called ‘small man syndrome’. It's a diagnosis which his former experience as a ski instructor and army officer clearly leave him entirely qualified to make. On the other hand, it could be his personal experience as a man only a few inches taller than Putin which gives him this amazing insight into Putin’s character; we can only guess. There is, of course, nothing new about disseminating derogatory information about the physical attributes of opponents; it can surely only be a matter of time before allegations about the imagined deficiencies of Putin’s assets in the genital department begin to circulate.

Exactly what the observations of Johnson (another not exactly giant of a man) and Wallace add to the sum total of human knowledge remains to be determined. There is an outside chance that ridiculing men who happen to be on the short size may rebound on its perpetrators which might bring some benefit in the form of light relief to observers of the UK political scene, although it could easily come at the expense of harm and hurt to innocent bystanders who also happen to be vertically challenged. And that is surely the danger in making overgeneralizations, whether they be about height or gender. 

There’s also a question about their accuracy. History tells us that some dictators and tyrants were short – we tend to think of Napoleon or Hitler – but it also tells us that some were tall. Peter the Great – one of Putin’s heroes, apparently – was 6 foot 4 inches; Syria’s al-Assad is 6 foot 2, and Saddam Hussein was 6 foot 1. And history can be misleading – most of those dictators who we tend to think of as being short were actually very close to male average height (5 foot 7) – a statement which applies to Hitler, Putin and Napoleon for instance. In truth, there is no correlation between height and propensity to tyranny observable in the world’s historical records, it’s all in the fevered imaginations of those who want to belittle (pun intended) their opponents.

So, returning to Johnson, does his suggestion that the problem is Putin’s gender bear any greater relationship with the truth? It’s certainly true that there have been fewer female tyrants than male ones, but any objective analysis ought to start by recognising that females have largely been excluded from leadership roles in most of the world for most of human history. A lack of opportunity to produce their fair share of dictators does not, in itself, prove a lack of propensity. It is, though, probably true that certain attributes are more common in males than in females – and vice versa. It is quite possible that the desire for war and conquest is more predominant amongst males than females, but greater prevalence isn’t at all the same thing as gender being an absolute determinant. It depends on the individual rather than simply on gender. To choose just two examples on daily display, being a woman doesn’t stop Liz Truss being one of the Cabinet's biggest warmongers, and being female doesn’t stop Priti Patel being probably the nastiest person ever to hold the office of Home Secretary. Whilst Johnson may be clutching at the germ of a sensible point, his innate misogyny and inability to apply any sort of subtlety to his analysis make it, ultimately, next to worthless. If Johnson had been female, would he still have become Prime Criminal - and would he still have performed even more badly than a reincarnated olive? It's one of those things which are unknowable.

Mine's smaller than yours

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In scenes vaguely reminiscent of the Four Yorkshiremen, it seems that the so-called ‘leaders’ of the UK and Canada got themselves into a debate in Germany over who had arrived in the smallest private jet. At a mere 45 metres long, Johnson’s A321 Airbus beat Trudeau’s 47 metre Airbus CC-150 in the aircraft poverty stakes. How many people were in Johnson’s retinue is not recorded, but it’s doubtful whether it was anywhere near the 170 – 220 which an A321 is normally capable of carrying.

Johnson did, however, cheat in order to win the game. (Nothing new there of course.) It seems that he only won because he was in the backup aircraft, rather than his usual transport, which is a 60 metre long Voyager variant of the Airbus A330 (normally configured, in civilian use, for anything up to 406 passengers). That, however, was unavailable, because the monarchy have first call on its use, and Charles Windsor had exercised his royal privilege to bag the plane for himself. Presumably to make sure that there was adequate space for his official toilet seat, and enough cupboards to hold carrier bags full of cash should he happen, in the course of his travels, to bump into any rich sheiks looking to relieve themselves of a spare few million quid.

Johnson’s victory over Trudeau because of the use of the royal trump card does, however, bring us to the question that no-one seems to have asked. Both Johnson and Windsor travelled from the same starting point (London) to the same destination (Rwanda) to attend the same meeting, and each used a separate enormous aircraft to do so. And while Johnson then travelled on to Germany leaving the heir to the throne in Kigale, the bigger plane continued to sit on the runway at Kigale until such time as its passenger returns home. Whilst we know that the two men are not exactly the best of bosom buddies at the moment, they both claim to be strong supporters of action on climate change, something which is not exactly easy to square with use of large private jets. Surely either one of the planes would have been quite large enough for them to sit far enough apart that they didn’t even need to acknowledge each other. One each side of the cash cupboards perhaps. Is it really beyond the wit of those purporting to run the UK to organise itineraries such that one plane would have sufficed?

Denying history

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One of the oldest ploys of colonial and imperial powers is to deny the existence of other nations which might be in any way inconvenient to them - by, for instance, daring to occupy territory in an area coveted by the colonial power. It’s often accompanied by an argument that the people concerned had no meaningful history before they were colonised. It's an approach which has been on display today from the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, who said that Ukraine “… does not have a history without the Russian people, none at all”. It’s an arrogant and dismissive thing to have said, but it reminded me of the Welsh politician who said that “…between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century Wales had practically no history at all, and even before that it was the history of rural brigands who have been ennobled by being called princes”. Lavrov is clearly a mere amateur; such a statement would have been much more effective had he found a tame Ukrainian to say it. But perhaps the Ukrainians have more self-respect.

An over-powered jet of hot air

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Apparently, Jacob Rees-Mogg believes that one of the most important benefits of Brexit would be the ability to sell higher powered vacuum cleaners. Why any manufacturer would want to produce and sell over-powered and inefficient machines specifically for a small market like the UK when they can just as easily sell the same efficient and equally effective machines that they are selling elsewhere is unanswered question. Still, given that engineering and economics weren’t even subjects when Jake was a lad, we should probably overlook his ignorance of both.

It reminded me of the cleaner in our house when I was young – so around 60 years ago, I guess. The flexible hose could optionally be attached at either end, with one end providing suction for cleaning, and the other a jet of air for … well, no-one was quite sure what it was for, which is presumably why they don’t make them like that any longer. Perhaps they should reintroduce them though. An inefficient and over- powered device producing a jet of hot air of little use to anyone seems like a deserving first entry on the list of Brexit benefits. It’s quite a good analogy for Jake as well.

Seizing the opportunity?

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One of the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been increasing speculation about the possible break-up of the Russian Federation. From the Washington Post, through Bloomberg, to the i, columnists have been analysing the situation and wondering aloud whether the war could provide the spur needed for some of the 22 autonomous republics currently part of the Federation to seize the opportunity to break free. It comes against a background of increasing centralisation as Moscow accretes power from the far-flung parts of its empire, and increasing Russification, as the centre tries to impose a common identity and language on a very disparate group of nationalities, and the theory is that weakening a large colonial power by breaking it up into smaller states would generally be a good thing for the world at large. But only in the case of Russia, of course. Brave patriots seeking to escape the clutch of Russia are an entirely different thing from the dangerous separatists seeking to break up other established states, such as the ‘most successful political union in history’, as unionists like to refer to the UK, without a shred of hard evidence to back up the claim. It’s worth noting in passing that some of Russia’s possessions have, in one form or another, been part of ‘Russia’ since before the UK came into existence – historical longevity is clearly not the factor which accounts for the difference in perception.

Attempted Russification is nothing new – and nor is the concept unfamiliar to us here in Wales. It’s happening in the occupied parts of Ukraine right now (and for balance, it’s worth noting that the Ukrainian government is also attempting a process of Ukrainification as well). The remaining residents are issued with Russian passports, school curriculums are being aligned with those in Russia, and the rouble replaces the Ukrainian currency. It’s something that many states have attempted to do at many times in history, usually under autocratic rulers (who tend to be rather more effective, due to their innate ruthlessness, in enforcing the rules, using as much violence as is required). And despite all the lessons of history, such rulers always tend to believe that they can succeed in rapidly eliminating any sense of national feeling which does not align with the ‘official’ state view.

History has almost invariably proved them wrong. In Spain under Franco, the Catalan and Basque nationalities and languages were viciously suppressed for a generation; it didn’t work. Whilst the personality – and ruthlessness – of Marshall Tito kept the different nationalities of the former Yugoslavia together for decades, the country rapidly imploded after his death. Closer to home, despite the Welsh language being effectively outlawed for all official purposes for centuries, a fifth of the population stubbornly persist in using it, and we now have a government committed to expanding its use. Eliminating national identity by force takes consistent effort over a long period. Conversely, gaining independence and elevating the status of the Irish language seems to have been something of a disaster for the language. Perhaps the lesson is that, in many circumstances, the oppression itself provokes a reaction, meaning that oppression may not be the best means of achieving the unity of identity that the state demands of its citizens.

It’s a lesson that it’s unreasonable to expect Putin to learn any time soon. Dictators are far too easily convinced that they can simply will things to be as they wish and impose them if necessary; by the time they realise that they’ve got it wrong, it’s already too late. A similar rule applies to world kings – imposing their will on their distant possessions in the teeth of local opposition is usually counter-productive in the end, but their misplaced sense of self-belief makes it impossible for them to realise that fact until it's too late.

Will Russia fall apart as a result of the war in Ukraine? In truth, nobody knows. It wouldn’t be the first time a movement for national independence saw the imperial power’s difficulty as their own opportunity. On the other hand – as we also know only too well – killing an empire and all the exceptionalism which goes with it is no short term project either.

Still dividing, still ruling

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Divide and rule is probably the oldest trick in the book for the ruling elite, yet still they get away with it. It is such an obvious trick that one might think people would start to see through it, but enough people seem to fall for it every time to allow the elite to maintain their grip on society. Control of the media is clearly a part of the trick, but the gullibility of large numbers is probably more important. And social media – which theoretically provide an opportunity for alternative views to those expressed in the main stream media – are filled with the views of the gullible, acting as willing shills in their own oppression. The rail dispute is more complex than much of the more simplistic reporting suggests; arguments over the replacement of people with technology and new working methods are in the mix as well as the pay dispute as such. But at the heart of the dispute is an argument over whether holding down pay – and thus imposing a real cut in living standards – on working people is the only or even the best way to prevent a wage-price inflation spiral.

The first problem with even presenting it in that way is that current inflation is not the result of a wage-price spiral at all. It’s understandable that those who remember the inflation of the late 1970s would be keen not to return there, although it’s just possible that a government whose whole approach depends on expecting people to forget what they’ve done in the last 12 years might be pinning rather a lot of its hopes on people remembering what happened almost half a century ago and being suitably afraid as a result. The point, though, is that the causes of inflation now are rather different; even if the solution was the right one in the 1980s (itself highly debateable), it doesn’t follow that it’s the right one today.

The government are largely getting away with framing the terms of the argument, and Labour’s absolute terror of being seen to be supporting working people defending their standard of living is a complete gift to the Tories. Not only does it reinforce the Tory framing of the dispute, it also assists Tory stereotypes about the evil trades unions and alienates Labour from many of its own members and supporters. Dominic Raab has told us today that the government (which claims not to be a party to the dispute or to have any role in its resolution) “can’t allow … the unions … to win this argument”, as though ‘the unions’ are somehow an entity completely different from and divorced from the working people they represent. The Tory line is accompanied by misleadingly selected figures about how much the employees in dispute currently earn, in an attempt to suggest that they don’t ‘need’ an increase at all – a dishonest way of stating that they must accept a cut in living standards. The figures have, of course, been seized upon and repeated ad nauseum by people complaining that they (or nurses or some other ‘deserving’ group) earn less and aren’t getting a pay rise at all. They’ve been conned into a silly and ultimately self-defeating argument which focuses their ire on a different group of working people rather than on those who are orchestrating the attack on living standards.

It's true, of course, that some people earn less than some rail workers. It’s true, equally, that some of those lower paid people will get a wage rise lower than that asked for by the rail workers. It’s true that there may be some unfairness in both of those things. But extrapolating those facts to an argument that rail salaries must not be allowed to keep pace with inflation is an argument which justifies and supports the attack on their own living standards. Their ire would be better directed at those who are doing very well out of the misnamed ‘cost-of-living crisis’; the bankers gaining as a result of interest rate rises which generate extra profits for no extra work, or the oil giants benefiting from a wholly speculative price increase when their costs of extraction have changed not one iota. And, of course, the speculators and gamblers who so heavily fund the Tory Party. Just what does it take for the working people criticising the rail strike to realise that their own interests align more closely with those of the rail workers than those feeding them the lies?

Dulce et Decorum?

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In an article in yesterday’s Sunday Times, Boris Johnson confirmed in his own words the point made here on Saturday – the decisions that he and others have taken (or as his acolytes insist on putting it, ‘getting the big calls right’), to encourage Ukraine to fight for total victory over Russia rather then seeking a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement, whilst at the same time denying them the types of weaponry which might give them a chance of doing that, will lead, as Johnson himself says, to a long drawn-out war of attrition, as lives and materiel are expended by both sides in return for marginal gains of devastated territory. Johnson’s latest ‘solution’ is to provide more help training Ukrainians who can be sent to the front line to replace those being killed or wounded. Between 100 and 200 Ukrainian soldiers are currently dying every day, according to government sources there, but the true number is probably higher – whilst any war is in progress, both sides exaggerate the number of enemy dead and understate their own losses. Training 10,000 every 120 days – the target Johnson seems to be setting – doesn’t even replace the numbers being killed, let alone those being wounded as well. It’s an approach to war which keeps the conflict going until, eventually, they run out of Ukrainians to train.

I wonder if Johnson sees – or is even capable of seeing – these trainees as real people rather than numbers. They are all somebody’s sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters; they are individual human beings with hopes, dreams and aspirations. Yes, of course, the ‘fault’ lies with Putin and Russia, for launching an unprovoked, illegal and immoral assault on a neighbouring country. But that doesn’t make it right to stand on the side-lines and encourage the defenders to fight to the last Ukrainian, whilst taking the soft option of selectively supplying weaponry, training replacement soldiers, and implementing economic sanctions at a snail’s pace against the aggressor. Neither the losses being inflicted by the Ukrainian defenders nor the inadequate and patchy sanctions will be enough to force Russia to the table, which is the only way the killing can be brought to an end. In the meantime, and not for the first time in human history, a nation is left mourning the loss of a generation, as this story from Ukraine relates. The immediate priority should be to stop the slaughter rather than prolong it, but Johnson’s response sounds more like harking back to what Wilfred Owen called the old lie than a serious attempt to stop the killing.

Getting the big calls right

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The PM’s decision yesterday to cancel his attendance and speech at a conference of his own MPs and activists in Doncaster in order to visit Kyiv has not gone down well with those he was due to address. I’m not at all sure that the attendees have missed much, but I can certainly understand why Johnson might think that a city under regular attack by bombs and rockets is currently a friendlier and safer place for him than a Conservative conference. One of his northern MPs said visiting Kyiv wasn’t much of an excuse because the PM “could have gone there any time”, but that perhaps misses the importance of the timing from Johnson’s perspective. The previous day, the EU’s ‘big three’ (the leaders of the three biggest economies in the EU: Germany, France, and Italy) visited Kyiv. Pre-Brexit, the ‘big three’ would either have included the UK rather than Italy or else would have been expanded to become the ‘big four’. Either way, from Johnson’s perspective, he was in danger of being sidelined – and it would be a huge mistake to think that anything Johnson does would have been motivated by anything other than meeting Johnson’s personal need for attention and recognition.

It also helps him to turn the news coverage away from his own misdemeanours and crimes to one of the issues on which both he and his supporters are regularly claiming that ‘he got the big calls right’. It’s a claim which, notwithstanding the natural outpouring of sympathy for a European country subjected to a vicious, illegal, and unprovoked attack by a neighbour, deserves to be analysed rather more carefully than it has been.

There are, ultimately, only two ways in which wars come to an end: either one side wins a clear victory, or else a ceasefire is agreed, followed by negotiations (which may take years or even decades) aimed at signing a formal treaty. Johnson’s ‘big call’ (and that of much of what is called ‘the west’ as well) seems to be to encourage the Ukrainians to continue fighting in pursuit of complete victory whilst providing them with enough armaments only to slow the Russian advance, and denying them the key weapons which would make a victory on the battlefield possible. That is backed up by the painfully slow incremental imposition of sanctions which seem more aimed at hurting selected individuals than at rapidly destroying or undermining Russia’s ability to wage war. It’s a recipe for a lengthy war of attrition in which many more, soldiers and civilians alike, will be killed or wounded until, eventually, the losses become so great that one side or the other sues for peace. Putin is probably assuming that ‘the west’ will eventually tire of the cost and impact of underwriting Ukraine’s war effort: he may well be right; the issue is already dropping down the news schedules, to be at least partially replaced by concerns over the so-called cost of living crisis which is itself partly driven by the costs of the war. Unless ‘western’ policy (or Russian policy) changes, it’s fairly obvious which side will end up making the concessions  – the only question is over how much death and destruction it will take to get to that point. Any conclusion about whether Johnson has got this particular ‘big call’ right ought properly to be based on the extent to which the likely outcome is acceptable, and rather less on the publicity and rhetoric of the man himself.

It's a gloomy assessment, which has nothing to do with justice or fairness. There is, however, nothing particularly defeatist about asking which is the most important – the location of lines drawn on a map, or the lives of those living on either side of those lines? Stopping wars after they have started is a major challenge, but the bigger one is preventing them from starting in the first place, and investing an increasing proportion of the world’s resources in armaments doesn’t obviously seem to be the best way of promoting peace. What humanity needs is a rule-based international order accepted by all under which disputes can be resolved peacefully. One of the few certainties is that it’s too late to establish one of those once a war has started. It certainly does not help, though, when the leader of a rogue state like the UK spends so much time and effort trashing such order as does exist. Expecting others to abide by the rules in such circumstances is wholly unrealistic. ‘Getting the big calls right’ is about more than generating a few headlines which can be used as dead cats. And it’s a lot harder. Especially so for a lazy narcissist like Johnson.

Scoring own goals

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When presented with an open goal, the usual response of a footballer is to kick the ball into it. Politics doesn’t work that way, especially for Labour leader Keir Starmer. With large swathes of the establishment, including the heir to the throne and the established church, lining up to criticise the scheme to send refugees to Rwanda as unjust, immoral and illegal, and with a number of Labour MPs leading the charge in the House of Commons, the office of the leader of the opposition manages to kick the ball towards his own net instead, by declining to say whether Labour would reverse the policy if it were in government, or even whether Starmer believes it to be morally wrong. Ultimately, it seems that fear of being seen by racist voters to be ‘soft on immigration’ ends up trumping any sense of principled policy making.

It also ends up helping to enable the disingenuous argument, as put forward by Johnson and Patel, that anyone opposing the policy of sending refugees to Rwanda is aiding and abetting the people smugglers who are placing so many vulnerable and desperate people in small boats and sending them on a risky journey across the world’s busiest shipping lane. According to their interpretation, the only way to stop people smugglers is to deter their potential ‘customers’ by convincing them that taking the risk will leave them in an even worse situation than staying where they are (although attempting to implement the policy without first jumping through all the necessary legal hoops might actually have the opposite effect when those ‘customers’ see that no-one really gets sent anywhere). The possibility of doing more to intercept and catch the smugglers themselves doesn’t seem to have even crossed their minds, probably because it might mean having to work with the French, which might amount to a tacit and very un-Brexity admission that co-operation with neighbours could be more effective than confrontation.

Patel’s claim that there is no other way of dealing with the problem than acting illegally sounds a bit like someone telling a court, “I was broke and couldn’t think of another way of getting any money, so I robbed the bank”. Whether there are practical alternatives or not depends on how the problem is defined. If the problem is defined – and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that this is the working definition being used by Patel and Johnson – as ‘how do we get massive headlines and appeal to the basest instincts of our core electors?’, then there is a degree of truth in their claim that opponents are not coming up with alternative solutions. Opponents simply aren’t defining the problem in the same way. Defining the problem as ‘what can we do about a situation where so many people are rendered so desperate by war, famine, oppression and economic inequality that they are prepared to risk their own and their children’s lives by travelling thousand of miles to a place where they can escape those things?’, would lead absolutely no-one, ever, to suggest putting some of those people on a plane and flying them from one of the world’s richest countries to one of the poorest. And that means, according to Patel, that they are not offering any alternative solutions. In the remaining neuron which serves as her logic circuit, she even has some claim to be right.

What’s unclear is which definition ‘Keith’ Starmer is using. Some of the language used by some Labour people suggests that they might actually be looking at the plight of the individuals, but Starmer’s reticence to state, straight out, that the policy is utterly unacceptable in any civilised society and would be immediately scrapped by an incoming Labour government suggests that he, too, might be more fixated on the headlines than on the people involved. Allowing the Mail and the Express to determine Labour policy shows just how far that party has fallen.