Judge them by thir actions, not their words

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The Home Secretary has announced that because people from certain countries who come to the UK as students are more likely than those from other countries to then apply for asylum, she will ban anyone from those countries coming to the UK on a student visa. She could just as easily – and just as truthfully – have said that students coming from a country where there is conflict are more likely to apply for asylum than those from countries where there is no conflict. Who’d have thought it? It’s almost as though people coming from places where they have genuine reasons to seek asylum might be more likely to seek asylum.

Treating people on the basis of being able to place them in a certain category rather than looking at them as individuals is always going to be problematic. I’m pretty certain that people with dark skin coming to the UK on student visas are more likely to apply for asylum than people with fair skin, although I’ll admit that I don’t have hard evidence to back that up, other than the entirely coincidental fact that it is true of all the countries she has selected. If the Home Secretary banned all those of a darker hue from applying for student visas, she would be more roundly condemned than she has been. Her announcement yesterday was not as overtly racist as that would be, even if the effect might end up indirectly discriminating on race. It is, though, much the same thing – treating people on the basis of a collective attribute rather than their individual circumstances.

It is essentially a lazy response to a complex issue. “Some of that group might apply for asylum, so we’ll ban all of them from studying here” might attract a positive headline from the right wing media, but it doesn’t reflect any sense of fairness or compassion. Insofar as I understand ‘traditional British values’, it’s also deeply un-British. But then again, I’ve long stopped trying to understand those values in terms of what people say they are – actions tell an entirely different story.

Hooray for English culture...

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‘Culture’ is hard enough to define; it’s even harder to prescribe it. Yet that, apparently, is what the Tories under Badenoch are proposing to do. If only a single, universalised form of British culture could be inculcated into young people, the British nation would be more united, resolute and generally happy than it is today. Allegedly. How this would be achieved is not entirely clear, but there would be something called an ‘integration and cohesion plan’, and schools would play a role in teaching a single ‘national story’. I’m struggling a little, though, to distinguish between what she is proposing and what Russia is doing, not only in its own territory, but also in occupied areas of Ukraine.

It is, of course, heavily Anglo-centric. Whilst the culture warriors of Britishness are generally keen on promoting Shakespeare and the benefits of Empire across the whole of the UK, they’re not usually so keen on introducing Dafydd ap Gwilym or Robert Burns to English pupils. It also takes us into the realm of those ‘great British values’ which distinguish – in their eyes – the people of these islands from everyone else in the world. Things like deference to the rule of law (except international law, obviously, given Badenoch’s complaint yesterday that Starmer was too slow in supporting Trump’s illegal war against Iran). Things like parliamentary democracy (unless ‘silly people’ in parliament might dare to vote the wrong way). Things like due process (unless that process gets in the way of the government doing whatever it wishes).

Harri Webb’s somewhat irreverent caricature of English culture (“tuneless songs and tasteless jokes and blowsy bags undressing”) was not particularly complimentary; nor was it the sort of language a serious politician would use today. Refuting it, though, requires a definition of what exactly English culture is, and that is something which sound-bite Badenoch hasn’t even attempted. We shouldn’t be surprised, though. Defining culture is hard – and it’s a moving target, because no culture stands still. That statement might, however, go to the heart of the problem with Badenoch’s proposals. It’s a good rule of thumb that any politician seeking to inculcate a particular view of the world – whether it be based on values, culture, history or whatever – is usually espousing an idealised or romanticised version of how things were in some unspecified golden age in the past. Invariably, it wasn’t even accurate then.

Dealing with rogue states

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As an approach to winning the Nobel Peace Prize, starting an illegal war is certainly a novel one. Maybe Trump has abandoned all hope of ever winning the prize, or maybe he thinks that by starting a war which he can end at any time he chooses, he will shortly have another war to add to the list of the ones he’s personally ended. He certainly talks and behaves as though he assumes that no-one will remember what he did or said yesterday, never mind last year, so by the time he ends it, no-one – in his mind – will ever believe that he started it.

There is a huge difference between the world views of the late Ayatollah and Trump. On the one hand, the Ayatollah believed that he was god’s servant, doing god’s will by imposing his version of religion on the people of Iran and the wider world whereas, on the other hand, Trump believes that he was sent by (the same) god to impose divine will by the use of whatever force is necessary. The main lesson from that is that people in a position of power who believe that they have a unique ability to interpret god’s will, and a duty to impose that will on others by whatever means necessary, are inherently dangerous to the world. It’s not a particularly new lesson, sadly.

Trump’s actual motives are as clear as mud, and seem to change every time he opens his mouth. Preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon by destroying facilities which Trump told us had already been completely obliterated last year; revenge for terrorist acts (allegedly) carried out by or at the behest of the Iranian government; pre-empting an attack by Iran for which there was no credible evidence; ‘justice’ for the thousands of protestors killed on the streets of Iran and preventing the regime from carrying out further such killings; revenge for Iran being named in some utterly incredible conspiracy theory as being in cahoots with Venezuela to steal the 2020 election. Take your pick – any, all, or none of the above. But, to consider just one of those: killing hundreds of civilians to stop the Iranian authorities from killing civilians is a strange proposition to many of us, although as Stalin may or may not have said, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. As Trump’s rather offhand dismissal of the deaths of US service personnel to date demonstrated, for someone so lacking in human empathy as him even a single death (as long as it isn’t his own) is merely a statistic.

Underlying it all, though, there is a very serious point, which an arbitrary attack on Iran does more to disguise than to reveal. There are regimes in the world which are a danger to their own citizens and the citizens of other (mostly neighbouring) countries, and it is a mark of failure for the international order that humanity has no effective way of dealing with them. Having international laws and rules is the easy part; enforcing them is quite another matter. It’s easy enough to identify Iran, North Korea and Russia as dangerous states, but dealing only with the one which does not currently possess nuclear weapons is about the best incentive I can think of for further nuclear proliferation. And then, there’s the even bigger question – who decides what is or is not a rogue state where regime change is required for the good of humanity? I named three above, because they’re reasonably uncontroversial. But what about Israel, for instance, with its creeping annexation of the West Bank and the tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza? What, indeed, about the USA under its current administration? Kidnapping people off the streets, disappearing them, ‘repatriating’ them without due process to places they’ve never visited, interfering in the affairs of other states both politically and militarily, blowing up boats in international waters, threatening to seize territory by force, kidnapping one national leader and assassinating another? Which characteristic of a rogue state has the US failed to meet?

There is no easy or simple solution to the problem; humanity has some way to go before we recognise that we are one species sharing one planet and need to co-operate, share, and live by a common basic set of rules. It’s much easier to say what the solution isn’t than identify what it is – but it definitely isn’t allowing the biggest and most powerful to take whatever arbitrary decisions suit its own selfish interests, or those of its rulers. Trump is taking the world backwards – and the UK’s Labour government now seems set on enabling and supporting him in that endeavour.

Who split which vote?

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When the dust settled, the ‘too-close-to-call’ by-election in Gorton and Denton turned out to be no such thing, and the Green Party gained a very clear victory. That is good news, of course, but even though the margin of victory was solid, the winner only got 41% of the vote. Under a more proportional system of voting, that means that second preference votes would have needed to be counted, and the mathematician and amateur would-be psephologist in me speculated about how the result of that might look.

Of the 11 candidates, eight (accounting for 1892 votes in total) would have been eliminated fairly rapidly and, unless we choose to believe that they would have overwhelmingly (including the 706 Tory votes) gone to Labour, the second choices of those voters would have made no difference to the order of the first three candidates. The final stage of counting would thus have seen the Labour candidate eliminated as well, meaning that there were then 11,256 voters whose second choices would have determined whether the victor was the Green Party or Reform Ltd. With a margin of 4402 between those two parties, those 11,000 votes would have to split something like 2.3:1 in favour of Reform Ltd for their candidate to overtake the Green Party’s candidate and seize the seat. We don’t know, of course, how they would have split in practice. Unless and until someone does some detailed research, it’s all speculation. But the key element of that speculation is a very simple question: of those who voted Labour, despite everything that has happened since the last General Election, would they have tended towards the Green Party or towards Reform Ltd?

Those who cling to the notion that the Labour Party is still a progressive force, and that its supporters are committed to a progressive platform (whatever the word ‘progressive’ means) will be utterly convinced that they would have gone with the Greens, leaving the outcome unchanged. I’m not at all sure that they’re right. Much of the support which Reform Ltd have picked up over the past few years has come from Labour – amongst Labour voters, there is a deeply conservative streak when it comes to issues such as immigration. I don’t think it at all impossible that Reform Ltd would have won the seat in that scenario. (That doesn't make me reconsider supporting Proportional Representation - we need to win the arguments against the likes of Reform Ltd, not rig the voting system to keep them out.)

That brings us to an interesting alternative view of the ‘vote-splitting’ concept. The worry of some before the election was that the Greens and Labour would split the ‘progressive’ vote and allow Reform Ltd to win. What if the real story here is that Labour and Reform split the reactionary, neoliberal, authoritarian, anti-immigrant vote and thus allowed the progressive candidate to win? Those who are still clinging to the idea that Labour is somehow on the side of the good guys might be blinding themselves to the true extent of the danger.

Cutting wages is no solution

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As a simple fact of mathematics, any organisation which can cut the salaries it pays to its employees will ‘save’ money. Whether it’s a sensible thing to do, whether it’s the right thing to do, whether the employees will calmly accept the reduction without resorting to industrial action – none of those things affect the simple mathematical truth that reducing salaries means the employer spends less to achieve the same result. For those of us lucky enough to be part of an occupational pension scheme (which is most people by now, even if some of the schemes aren’t particularly good), the employers’ contribution to those schemes is part of the overall remuneration package: it’s a form of deferred salary. Cutting the amount employers pay for pensions is, therefore, a wage cut by another name – it’s just that the impact won’t be felt immediately.

One of Reform Ltd’s latest wheezes to ‘save’ money involves doing just that – cutting back on the benefits paid out in pension schemes, and thus reducing the amount of the deferred salary due to employees. It’s a not very well disguised salary cut. Whether it’s quite the pain-free saving as which it appears in the short term is another question, however. Reducing the incomes of future pensioners will reduce their retirement standard of living. By how much depends on the circumstances of the individuals, but we can be certain that at least some will end up applying for extra benefits as a result, and it will also reduce the amount of income tax collected from pensioners – it’s not a ‘no-cost’ proposal. Looking at the wider economic impact, people with less money spend less as a result, and that in turn reduces demand in the economy.

The fact that none of this is immediately obvious to many is down to the fact that the real impact won’t happen for years – or even decades – when those with a reduced pension reach retirement age. Maybe those proposing it believe that it will be so effective in deterring people from retiring at all that the impact will be insignificant. In a world which increasingly treats only ‘working people’ as having any validity whilst all others are to be regarded as a ‘burden’, that’s a perfectly possible interpretation. It’s a view of the world which isn’t restricted to Reform Ltd – it will probably be mainstream Labour-Tory policy in a year or two. It highlights a feature of politics – and indeed, the capitalist economic system – which is the increasingly short term views which prevail. A society which works for all people throughout their lives has to take a long term view, considering the first 18 years of life, as well as the last 20-30, when people are likely to be ‘unproductive’ in economic terms, but are still part of the society in which they live. Squeezing out costs in the short term might be good micro-economics, but it’s lousy macro-economics, quite apart from being a lousy way of treating individual members of society. It’s a distinction which those who benefit directly from the short term gains are unable – or, more likely, unwilling – to understand.

It's not true that 'all votes count'

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The new electoral system coming into effect for this year’s Senedd elections is a step forward from first-past-the-post, but is still less than perfect. The main criticism levelled at it by many is that it means that electors cannot choose individuals, only parties. Personally, I’m relaxed about that aspect – decades of door-to-door campaigning taught me that (other than in local council elections, where they may know the individuals) most people vote on party lines anyway, and pay little attention to the candidates. For me, the bigger criticism has always been that there is no opportunity for people to express a second or third choice, so that anyone voting for a party which wins no seats has effectively had no say in the outcome. It was, though, the best outcome that was possible given Labour opposition to STV, and it would be churlish not to recognise that.

As campaigning ramps up, however, the failings of the selected system are becoming more obvious, with Labour and – if anything, even more so – Plaid suggesting repeatedly that a vote for anyone else will split the anti-Reform vote and hand seats to Reform. Leaving aside the essentially negative message of that proposition, encouraging people to vote against one party rather than for another, it isn’t the sort of behaviour a properly proportional system should be encouraging. It’s an admission, in effect, that the chosen system is sub-optimal, giving the lie to the oft-repeated claim that 'all votes count'.

It opens the question, though – will the new Senedd change the decision and opt for a proper STV system? Officially, Plaid support STV (although they haven’t always looked exactly enthusiastic about doing so in the councils they control), as do the Lib Dems and the Greens. The last time he opined on the matter, I’m sure that Farage also supported STV (although all Reform Ltd polices have to carry the caveat that they are subject to sudden and arbitrary change). The only parties dead set against it are Labour and the Tories. The opinion polls could all be wrong, of course, but if the general trend of the polls were to be true, current projections would give supporters of STV a clear super-majority in the Senedd, enough to push through such a change if they wished to do so. If they can summon the courage to act, it might even become the most lasting legacy of a change of government in Cardiff.

Undermining the hereditary principle

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In 1900, there were around 160 monarchies in the world compared to a mere 43 today (and of those 43, 15 are reigned over by a single monarch, namely the King of England). Whilst there are rare instances of a republic reverting to a monarchy (such as Spain, post-Franco), the trend is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. It isn’t so clear cut as a choice between heredity and democracy, though: Putin and Xi may not be hereditary monarchs, but that doesn’t mean that they can be removed through a popular vote.

Despite the UK being firmly in the minority in global terms, there are many who seem unable to conceive of the idea that the head of state should be an elected post rather than a hereditary one. In reality, the UK monarch isn’t fully hereditary either; in some ways, the monarch is more like an indirectly elected president, where heredity is the default rather than the sole basis for selection. There have been times, albeit infrequent, when parliament has changed the order of succession and/or decreed that certain people (Catholics for instance) may not ascend to the throne, no matter how strong the bloodline claim might be.

If parliament can remove the eighth in line from any chance of succession (which seems likely to happen shortly) then it can also remove the seventh, or the sixth – or even the first. Indeed, in 1701, parliament removed around 50 people from the line of succession at a stroke. Maybe parliament does not actually elect the monarch, but it can veto some candidates and/or redefine the candidate pool, and has done so on several occasions. For those who cling to the official notion that the monarch’s family was selected by God to rule over us (because, presumably, God identified something very special about one particular blood line), deleting people from the line is a power which can only be used sparingly if at all, since declaring that one of the family might not be so special after all somewhat underlines the alleged legitimacy of the whole process.

Perhaps, though, it also offers a glimpse of a gradualist approach to introducing a presidential system. After all, if parliament can shrink the pool of possible candidates, it can also expand that pool. Deciding that parliament should choose the next head of state (an approach followed by a number of other countries which indirectly elect their head of state) is a smaller change than outright abolition. And if there’s one certainty about constitutional change in England (and this is, ultimately, an issue for England mostly) it is that they will never make a large change if a smaller fudge is available.

Experience is often over-rated

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‘Experience’ is an odd qualification for anything. It’s often assumed that someone who has a lot of experience at doing a job is somehow better qualified to do it than someone with less. It depends, though, on the nature of that experience and what people have learned from it. I once interviewed someone for a job who claimed to have 20 years’ experience of doing the job, but on more detailed questioning, it turned out that he had one years’ experience, repeated twenty times. Length of experience isn’t the same as depth – and experience of failure isn’t the same as experience of success. Contrary to popular belief, people don’t always learn from the former, and the latter can breed complacency and inflexibility.

This week, Farage announced his shadow team – or four of them anyway – and part of his justification for two of the selections (and indeed, for accepting the continued outflow of failed Tory politicians) is that they have experience of government. However, his faith in the value of their experience apparently didn’t extend to allowing them to answer any press questions, a job which he firmly restricted to himself. Given the roles that Braverman and Jenrick performed in a succession of Conservative governments, they certainly have plenty of experience of what failure looks like, although it’s hard to identify any particular success with which either of them were associated during their ministerial careers. Whether they have learned anything from their failures is a matter of opinion, but insofar as we can believe a word they say, or use their words as evidence, that evidence is more negative than positive.

The wider question, though, is whether, or to what extent, ‘experience’ of government is relevant to the potential success of anyone taking on a ministerial job. There are plenty of examples of people who have such experience going on to fail – and equally of people who have no such experience turning out to be rather successful as ministers. And it is almost a given of the UK system that any party entering government after a long period of opposition is likely to be short on people with ministerial experience. I think it’s true to say that, if the polls turn out to be right and the next Welsh government turns out to be either a Plaid minority government or a Plaid-Green coalition, it is probable that there will be only one MS in the governing party/coalition with any experience of government at all. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing can only be a matter of opinion at this stage; a judgement based on actual performance will have to wait. I tend to the view that what’s more important than experience of being a minister is experience of doing other things outside politics, and being able to apply that experience in the new context. Time will tell, but returning to Farage’s experience fetish, it’s not clear that his so-called ‘experienced’ hires have a huge amount of useful experience built up in any non-political roles either.

‘Experience’ in any role, without assessing how good it is, or what’s been learned from it, is over-rated as a qualification, but Farage isn’t the only one to make the mistake of assuming that it is a key attribute.

What are we proposing to defend?

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Labour’s warmongers are at it again. On the basis of absolutely no evidence that they are willing to share, they have declared that “the threat of a Russian attack on the UK grows”, and that the UK therefore needs to spend vastly more on new weapons in order to repulse such an attack. I don’t know whether Putin is really planning to launch an attack on the UK, but – despite his obvious desire to reinstate what he regards as being the right of Russia to control certain territories – he isn’t obviously a stupid man. He is, for instance, perfectly capable of extrapolating from his difficulties in conquering Ukraine to the likely consequences of attacking any of the major NATO states, and concluding that it is probably not a battle Russia would be likely to win. He also understands at least a little about geography: Ukraine is close to Russia and shares a long and eminently invadable land border, whilst the UK is further away and any attack beyond an aerial assault would require the use of air and sea transport for a large number of forces.

The military clearly want more weapons, but then the military always do, regardless of the assessed scale of any threat. The real beneficiaries of the proposed increase in military expenditure are the arms companies (and their shareholders), companies which are already profitable and seem to have a knack of ending up invariably charging much more than the price initially quoted. The losers – in a situation where Labour are hemmed in by their own blind commitment to neoliberal economics and wholly arbitrary fiscal rules – will be the population of the UK, and especially those most dependent on the state finances and services which will be cut to pay for weaponry.

The first question we need to be asking is what exactly is it we are proposing to defend? And that raises the question of what sort of society we want to be. If the only way to ‘defend’ citizens is to impoverish and marginalise ever more of them, and prepare them to give their lives in order to do so, there is a danger that the ‘cure’ is worse than the disease. Defending the interests and wealth of the wealthy isn’t serving the population as a whole. The interests of most of us have more in common with those of the ordinary citizens of the 'enemy' state than with the interests of the elites who run the states on either side.

The second – and even more important – question is about how we prevent war in the first place, rather than merely setting out to ‘win’ it. War only becomes inevitable when government on both sides becomes captured by people who think it to be so, and much of what looks to be defence preparation to one side will look to be threat of an attack to the other. The most likely cause of any further attack by Russia is a belief that ‘we’ are preparing to attack them. Building up military forces, with more weapons and more powerful weapons, especially when more of them are stationed close to their borders, isn’t exactly the best way of dispelling that belief.

We need to retake control of the economy

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Figures announced this week show a rise in the level of unemployment, with young people being particularly hard hit. The government has responded in the way that all governments do, by talking about ‘helping more people into work’ (often a euphemism for cutting benefit payments) and inventing more, sometimes dubious, apprenticeships as a back door way of subsidising employers. The opposition has responded in the way that all oppositions do, by blaming government policies, especially those relating to wages, tax and regulation. The assumption underlying both of those positions – even if it drives them to propose different solutions – is that rising unemployment is a cyclical problem, which will be resolved if only we can get that magical growth they keep talking about.

It’s possible that they’re right; but it’s also possible that they’re wrong. What if, rather than growth and innovation solving the issue, that same growth and innovation, powered perhaps by AI, compounds it? There is a certain complacency surrounding that question. In a sense, it’s entirely natural – history shows us that the initial response to innovation and increased productivity is a loss of some jobs, which is usually followed by the appearance of new jobs, sometimes of a type and nature which nobody had foreseen. Maybe the same will be true of AI, and it’s overly pessimistic to believe that the job losses will be more permanent and generalised than we’ve seen in the past. It’s clear that the workers likely to be displaced by AI will include those in more technical and high-paid jobs than previous rounds of innovation, but the fact that the nature of any resultant replacement jobs is not currently clear doesn’t mean that there won’t be any. But the statement that ‘there always have been’ in the past can’t be taken as a certainty for the future either.

One junior minister in the UK government has already suggested that part of the response to the growth of AI might be the introduction of some sort of Universal Basic Income (UBI), although even he seems to be talking abut it as a temporary response, allowing people to retrain for the jobs of the future, whatever they may be. And there’s no doubt that any sort of UBI would be enormously expensive: even an income set at the less than adequate level of Universal Credit would be likely to carry a price tag of some £200 billion per annum. But what is the alternative that those objecting to the cost would propose in a situation where most work is done by automatons or AI? Are those people who have been displaced to be treated as disposable, and left without food or shelter as a result, whilst those lucky enough to still have work continue to live as normal (and those who own the machines and the software continue to accumulate wealth well beyond their capacity to spend it)?

It’s a scenario which raises questions about what an economy is for. Forget ‘invisible hands’ and market spirits – an economy is a social construct, and it’s up to the society in which it operates to determine how it works, who benefits from economic activity, and by how much. If an economy cannot supply at least the basic needs of all the people in that society, than it’s not performing its social function. From that perspective, tax is not some burden placed unfairly on those who own the capital or provide the labour, it is merely the mechanism by which the outputs of economic activity are used for the benefit of all. It is, in its very essence, a mechanism for redistribution. For the last four or five decades, we’ve increasingly lost sight of that and allowed the economy to be captured by a few, and corrupted to serve only their interests. If the resulting gross inequality hasn’t been enough to force a rethink, perhaps the impact of AI will be.