Keeping 'them' at arms length is deliberate policy

Tweet

 

It turns out that Starmer’s much-vaunted ‘reset’ with the EU amounts to little more than changing the colour of the icing on the imaginary cake. Just like his predecessors, he believes that the UK is so important to everyone that it can have the advantages of membership of the EU without having to abide by the same rules, or make any concessions in return. Little Englander cakeism is alive and well in the English Labour Party; it’s just a little more polite and diplomatic in its language.

One of the issues surrounds the idea of some sort of youth mobility scheme, under which young people from the UK and young people from the EU would be given the right, for a limited period of time, to travel to each other’s countries and experience a little of life there. Getting to know and understand each other better is one of the aims of the whole European project, which began in the aftermath of a war in which a lack of common understanding led to millions of deaths. Youth mobility is one of those things which, taken in isolation, many would consider entirely unobjectionable. Not so the Home Secretary, who sees it as allowing ‘migration’ and is strongly opposing it in cabinet, even if the consequence is a lack of movement on the PM’s stated objective of smoothing trade between the EU and the UK. Given that it’s a mutual scheme – traffic is supposed to be two ways – what is the objection to such a reasonable proposal?

The Home Secretary clearly believes that there would be a large difference between the numbers coming here from the EU and the numbers travelling from the UK to the EU, which would show in the statistics as an increase in net migration. There are two reasons why she might be right.

The first is language. Whilst proficiency in two or more languages is common in most of Europe, with English being the second language of choice in most cases, modern foreign language teaching has largely been gutted in the UK. Other Europeans find it easier to adapt to the UK than young people from the UK do in the rest of Europe. That makes the UK a destination of choice for young Europeans (and, of course, part of the reason that the EU is pushing the idea so hard).

The second is to do with class and affluence. In the UK, the desire to allow young people to broaden their experiences and learn about other peoples and cultures is largely a middle-class obsession. Look at who supports it – the liberal and middle class elites. It just doesn’t have the same resonance and attraction for young working class people in the so-called ‘red wall’ or post-industrial areas. It’s not something that they see as relevant to them. The political opposition comes overwhelmingly from the Little Englanders who very much want those young people not to mingle with foreigners in case they do find a commonality of interest and understanding. And it’s that political opposition which is the real obstacle.

The fact that the Home Secretary might be right about the imbalance in numbers is not, however, a reason for simply dismissing the idea completely. The language problem could be overcome, in time, by investing more in the teaching of European languages, and the problem of relevance only to middle-class children could be overcome by a system of grants, scholarships, and encouragement for those not following a more academic path in life. But both of those things require political will and a consistent policy over many years; and that is the problem. If your political strategy depends on stoking hatred and fear of difference, to say nothing of an inherent belief in your own group’s natural superiority, the last thing you want is to encourage any mingling with ‘them’.

Sadly, such Little Englandism isn’t confined to the ranks of Reform and the Tories; it seems to have found a very comfortable home in the Labour Party as well. Worse, within the UK it isn’t even wholly confined to England either. In Wales, however, we do have a route to escape it if we choose. It wouldn’t take long for an independent Wales to understand that our longer term interests have more in common with those of a number of other small nations and regions on the mainland than with our large neighbour, stuck as it is in a distorted dream of past glory.

Taking one for the team?

Tweet

 

Assuming that Trump succeeds with his desire to annex Canada, would it really be merged into the US as a single new state, number 51? In simple geographic terms, Canada covers a greater area (9.99 square kilometres) than the whole of the US (9.15 square kilometres), and a single state covering a greater area than the other 50 looks unbalanced, to say the least. In population terms, it’s true that the total population of Canada (about 37 million) is less that the population of California (about 39.5 million). But it’s also true that eight of Canada’s ten provinces each have a population greater than the smallest US state, and one of them, Ontario, has a population which would make it the fifth largest US state. The other two, along with the three ‘territories’, have lower populations than even the smallest US state, but the constitution, as far as I’m aware, sets neither a minimum or a maximum.

The difference between joining as one state or as a number of new states is important, electorally. Canada as a single additional state would only add 2 members to the Senate, although even that might make a difference given the closeness of Senate elections in recent years. However, adding between 8 and 13 new states would add 16 to 26 new members; potentially making a huge difference to political outcomes in an enlarged US. We don’t know, of course, how Canadians would vote; politics in Canada is much more complex than the overtly two-party system in the US. However, given the generally more liberal attitudes amongst Canadians, it’s not wholly unreasonable to speculate that they might break decisively in favour of the Democrats rather than the Republicans. It would probably be enough to keep the Republicans out of power for the foreseeable future. I guess that might explain why everything Trump says refers to Canada as a single additional state: even if two extra Democrats made Senate control harder to achieve for the Republicans, it doesn’t look as impossible as adding as many as 26.

If Canadians were given a choice about merging with the US (and we cannot, of course, simply assume that Trump would allow that), it’s hard to see them – and this is especially true of Quebeckers – agreeing to do so as one state rather than as several. For Trump, it looks like a double-edged sword – expand the territory at the cost of a loss of political control. It’s almost tempting to suggest that the rest of the world should ask Canadians to take one for the team in order to prevent any recurrence of the current madness. The only problem is that I’m not entirely convinced that the same thing couldn’t happen under the Democrats. The differences between the two are smaller than many think. Trump, after all, could have decided to stand as a Democrat rather than a Republican: in a political system largely devoid of ideological differences and based almost entirely around individuals, party labels aren’t particularly meaningful. Assuming that the problem is only one for Republicans is a big mistake.

How are the benefits of trade to be shared?

Tweet

 

After a few days of chaos, it’s still unclear exactly what Trump wants from Canada in exchange for not imposing tariffs in a month’s time. He claims it’s about three things: drugs, migrants, and trade imbalances but, as is ever the case, any numbers he quotes are at variance with any objective analysis. There have been some suggestions that, on both drugs and migrants, the flow from the US to Canada is greater than the flow from Canada to the US. The nature of illegal flows is that we can never be certain of their true extent, but such a conclusion meets the ‘common sense’ test; it certainly sounds credible.

That leaves us with a trade imbalance. There certainly is one, even if not as large as Trump claims, but the logic (insofar as that word can be used) of Trump’s position, with his threat to impose tariffs on any country or bloc which has a trade surplus with the US, is that all bilateral trade should be at or near a point of balance between imports and exports - or else favourable to the US. It’s an impossible target, and even if it were desirable, unilateral tariffs followed by retaliatory tariffs will not achieve it. They will merely increase prices for consumers in all the countries involved.

Maybe his real agenda is the one he’s now stated often enough – the annexation of Canada, and its incorporation into the US. That would certainly make the trade imbalance disappear – or rather give a good impression of disappearing. It wouldn’t really disappear at all, of course – it would merely be internalised. The ‘51^st state’ would still be selling more to the other 50 states than it was buying from them, but no-one would notice any more. It’s equally true today that, within the current 50 states, some ‘export’ more to other states than they ‘import’ from them, but no-one cares very much because it’s all internal to the US.

Well, I say that no-one cares very much, but that’s not exactly true; it’s more that those who do care don’t realise what it is that they care about. To the extent that importing more than they export impacts the prosperity of the state concerned, that imbalance makes some US states poorer than others. Job opportunities are elsewhere, and young people often migrate out in pursuit of them. More economic migrants. In this respect, the economic relationship between some states and their fellow states within the US is not entirely unlike that between Wales and England (or more precisely, Wales and the south-east of England). But as long as all the international trade statistics treat the US (or the UK) as a single entity, those economic disparities disappear into the overall average. Annexing Canada would, in itself, make no difference whatsoever to the economic relationship between Canada and the 50 states – or to the people within those 50 states. It would merely make the discrepancy dissolve into the US average.

Taking the world as a whole, trade is always in balance. Total exports match total imports. It cannot mathematically be otherwise, because at a global level, it’s a closed system. Drawing arbitrary lines on a map and trying to balance trade across them is then a pointless exercise. The issue is, or should be, about how the economic benefits within that global closed system are distributed. It’s a question that the Trumps of this world can’t even understand, let alone answer.

Does Trump have a cunning plan to reduce the number of people flying?

Tweet

 

Trump’s comments in the wake of the air disaster last week were appalling by any civilised standard. Declaring, without evidence, that it was the result of diversity policies, along with his suggestion that the job of Air Traffic Controller can only be done by geniuses and that those geniuses are exclusively to be found in one particular demographic, managed to showcase his racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia and homophobia almost in fewer words than it takes to list them. Like other opponents of diversity programmes, he seeks to deliberately mislead people about the nature of such programs, suggesting that they imply employing people who can’t do the job but match an under-represented demographic, rather than seeking to ensure that, in identifying and appointing people who can do the job, there is no direct or indirect discrimination against certain demographics and that employers attempt to reflect the diverse nature of the society in which they operate within their workforce.

His comment that people need to be geniuses to become Air Traffic Controllers rather begs the question about who decides what a genius is, and on what basis. We already know, of course, that Trump is himself a genius and a very stable one at that. We know that because he has told us so. Is his definition good enough? To put the question another way, if you were about to take a flight into US airspace, and you knew that the Air Traffic Controller handling the landing at your destination airport was only in post because he was an able-bodied white heterosexual male in possession of an official certificate stating that he is a Trump-level genius, would you still want to board the plane? It might help to reduce aviation-derived emissions in the US, I suppose.

Identifying the right target

Tweet

 

Former Welsh Secretary, David Davies, was busy earlier this week blaming AI for his failure to land a lot of jobs for which he applied. Some unkind souls might think that rejecting Davies for a job was actually a feather in the cap of AI, showing it to be a good judge of his suitability for employment. I suspect that the truth is more mundane: there is a valid point in what he has to say about his repeated rejections, but he’s aiming at the wrong target. Then again, grabbing hold of the wrong end of the stick is hardly out of character.

Part of his complaint is that he was applying for degree-level jobs without being in possession of a degree, and AI was rejecting him automatically as a result. In breaking news, and speaking as someone who has done a great deal of recruiting in my time, I can reveal that before AI was even a twinkle in the eye of its inventors, it was customary for employers, using only human perusal processes, to reject such applications. Even if only on the basis that the applicant, by applying for a job for which (s)he didn’t meet the basic criteria was displaying an inability either to read or else to understand the job ad. Recruiters, increasingly faced with a large number of applicants, will usually take a very simple approach to eliminating many of them without further consideration, and that doesn’t require the use of any fancy computer systems.

The bigger question, which he seems to be grasping for but can’t quite articulate effectively, is whether a degree is really necessary for many of those jobs. On that, he has a point. I would agree with him that there are people whose experience gained in the various roles which they’ve performed probably makes their skill set as good as, or even better than, someone who has a piece of paper but little real experience of anything (although I make no judgement here as to whether Davies falls into that category or not). But many employers take the easy way out. Rather than attempt to assess what alternative routes might make someone suitable for a particular job, they simply demand a degree (or some other qualification) and use that as a filter to reduce the number of applications which they receive and then have to peruse. Perhaps his real complaint is that the employers to which he has applied are just too lazy to consider him properly. It might even be fair comment.

If they were using a really good AI system, then AI might well be able to analyse CVs and compare them against job descriptions in great detail, faster than any human could, and identify candidates who might be suitable regardless of their formal qualifications. That would mean that his real complaint ought to be that the AI systems being used aren’t intelligent enough to spot what he clearly believes to be his exceptional talents. It surely couldn’t be that they are indeed using such systems and there just aren’t enough exceptional talents to spot.

Economic migration is neither new nor unique

Tweet

 

For generation after generation, Wales has lost people, particularly young people, who have left to seek a better future elsewhere. The immediate cause is well-understood: a lack of opportunity here, coupled with greater opportunity elsewhere. Within the UK, it’s not a phenomenon unique to Wales of course; Scotland and much of England outside the south-east corner have suffered the same fate. The wider reasons for that economic imbalance are well-understood as well: a centralised state which concentrates power, wealth and talent in the centre by sucking it in from the peripheries. The extractive and exploitative nature of the Welsh economy is easily seen by looking at transport links – the best ones overwhelmingly run from west to east rather than north to south, historically facilitating the extraction of mineral and other wealth.

The fact that Wales has not been an independent country during that time, and the consequent lack of a recognised international border obscures the basic fact: most of those who left Wales were (and are) what are today called, usually pejoratively, economic migrants. People who live in an area denuded of much of its wealth by far-away rulers migrate in search of a share of what was originally theirs anyway. We’re not good at recognising it, but it is the same imperative which drives many of the migrants reaching these shores currently. Coming from countries which were systematically exploited and robbed by their colonialists, they travel to where the wealth now resides in search of opportunity. And it should be no surprise that the country of choice for many of them will be the one which colonised them, and whose language was imposed upon them. So, for example, Algerians tend to favour France and those from the former British Empire tend to favour the UK.

If anyone should be able to understand and empathise with economic migrants, it is us here in Wales. But by and large, many amongst us don’t. Perhaps it’s due to a lack of understanding of our own history, coupled with an acceptance of the version of history with which we are fed. But the bottom line is that, whilst many in Wales blame the exploiters for the loss of those who leave, they blame the individuals for the new arrivals. In truth, our interests have more in common. If it’s an unfair distribution of wealth which drives economic migration, it is a fairer distribution which will reduce it. It’s no accident that, in the UK as in the US, anti-immigrant sentiment is being driven and funded by some of the richest political donors. We only have to ask ourselves who might feel most threatened by any suggestion of a fairer distribution of wealth, whether within a state or more globally, to understand why.

Rock, paper, scissors

Tweet

 

The Chancellor and Prime Minister seem to be increasingly fond of telling us that nothing will stand in the way of their ambition for growth. According to Reeves, “Growth trumps other things”, including the commitment to a net-zero economy. Leaving aside any questions about whether a commitment to net zero actually hinders growth in any event (there are reasonable arguments to be made that it can change the nature of economic growth rather than inhibit it, but that’s a subject for another time), the government’s own actions make it clear that there are some things which growth does not trump. The most obvious example concerns the UK’s relationship with the EU. One of the easiest things that a UK keen on economic growth could do would be to re-enter the customs union and single market. It's something which could be done without ‘betraying’ Brexit, given that prominent Brexiteers argued at the time that Brexit didn’t mean that we had to leave them in the first place. However, growth might trump net zero, but Brexit trumps growth. If only net zero could trump Brexit, we could play a sort of rock, paper, scissors game. A neat closed circle into which Starmer and Reeves could quietly disappear. But Starmer's much-vaunted 'reset' of relationships with the EU appears to be little more than a Labour version of cakeism, under which the EU gives the UK a better deal without the UK conceding anything.

It is being widely reported that Reeves will announce tomorrow that, in pursuit of that magical growth, the government will give the go-ahead to building a third runway at Heathrow. Or rather, they will give the go-ahead to starting a process which means that the third runway might be in place in about 10 years from now, assuming that the project goes rather more smoothly than any large UK infrastructure project in recent decades. In terms of her self-imposed and arbitrary fiscal rules, the operational ‘benefits’ from Heathrow expansion will start to flow only a decade hence, well outside the 5 year timescale of those rules, and only after at least two general elections have taken place. Since the planning phase is going to take a minimum of 2-3 years, there’s unlikely to be any sort of boost to the economy, even in terms of the relatively short-term construction phase, until after the current government has faced the electorate.

The argument for expansion is usually presented in terms of showing that the UK is open for business. It conjures up images of businessmen jetting off to far-flung places to sell their wares to grateful foreigners, or of rich foreigners jetting in to invest their fortunes in UK businesses (preferably without anyone enquiring too deeply about the source of those fortunes), and encourages us to believe that, if only there were an extra runway, more of both of those things would happen. It isn’t quite the reality though. Estimates of the proportion of business traffic passing through Heathrow vary. This one suggests it’s around a third of all passengers; other estimates put the figure as low as a fifth. Despite its carefully cultivated image, Heathrow is, first and foremost, an airport used for leisure travel. And many of the travellers come from elsewhere in the UK, not exclusively from the London area, even if that’s where the majority come from. There’s another aspect to that last part as well. Whilst it’s obviously true that an airport contributes to GDP in a variety of ways, including shops and restaurants as well as the jobs involved in processing passengers and planes, an airport which sucks in passengers from further afield than the local catchment area also concentrates GDP geographically around itself.

Like so much else of what the current government is doing, a decision to expand Heathrow looks largely performative. Taking – or, rather, being seen to take – tough decisions (a phrase which seems to be a euphemism for decisions which will upset as many potential Labour supporters as possible) has become an end in itself. The belief that doing so will somehow magically lead rich foreigners to pour their zillions into the UK is more an act of blind faith than anything else. But it’s not the sort of faith likely to survive contact with economic reality.

How to get a Peace Prize

Tweet

 

Apparently, the thing that Trump covets more than anything else (other than more money, of course) is a Nobel Peace Prize. Whether he really cares whether he gets one or not, or is just miffed that Obama got one and the USA’s ‘favourite ever’ (according to him) president didn’t, is not exactly an irrelevant question. And there are plenty of sycophants willing to nominate him – some of them having already nominated him at least once previously.

It’s true, of course, that he didn’t actually start any wars during his first term, which is probably a good starting point. I can’t help wondering, however, what sort of committee deliberating whether to give him one or not wouldn’t hesitate before giving the prize to someone who has threatened the use of force to take Greenland and the Panama canal, is openly threatening to use economic power to force Canada into joining the US, is bullying neighbouring countries into “…[agreeing] to all of President Trump’s terms” by the use of tariffs, and wants to organise a thorough ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by transporting them to Egypt, Jordan, or, bizarrely, Indonesia. Committee members would surely be more than a little hesitant out of a fear that it just might come to look like a mistake with the benefit of hindsight. It may be, as many of those who support Trump argue, that this is all bluster and we should wait and judge him by his actions, rather than by his words. Maybe, maybe not: but wait and see might be a sound piece of advice for the Nobel Prize Committee as well.

Trump’s best chance of getting an early Peace Prize would be to sack the members of the committee and demand that the Norwegian Parliament replace them with his own nominees. Some might argue that he doesn’t have the power to do that – but he doesn’t have the power to sack all the US Government’s Inspectors General either, and that hasn’t stopped him from doing so. There’s no obvious reason why a man prepared to bully Denmark, Colombia and Canada wouldn’t be prepared to do the same to Norway.

A new influx of refugees?

Tweet

 

There was a story yesterday suggesting that some Americans are so unhappy or even fearful following the election of Trump that they’re planning to emigrate to the UK. It’s a bit like the one about rich people talking about leaving the UK because Starmer is going to make them pay taxes – overblown, based on a small number of anecdotal instances. No doubt there will be a few, but the extent to which people root up their lives and move elsewhere as a result of a particular election result, or tax change, is greatly exaggerated. The objective of such stories is to try and pressurise governments into giving them special treatment. I can’t see it working in the case of Trump; a few discontented individuals leaving the US won’t make him change course. Sadly, however, it seems that Starmer and Reeves are much more susceptible to such pressures and will bow down to the over-privileged wanting to protect their privileges, as we also saw yesterday.

Leaving aside the fact that such migratory responses are actually much rarer than reports-with-an-agenda might suggest, it’s interesting to consider what treatment such refugees (which is surely what they should be called) from the US will receive. The probability that they will be detained on arrival, or at the expiry of their visitors’ visas, awaiting deportation is close to zero. It’s tempting to suggest that being white and English-speaking might be behind the difference in attitude, but I suspect that it’s more to do with money. They have some, whereas other refugees don’t. There is nothing in any of the relevant international laws which suggests that granting refugee status to someone should depend on how wealthy they are; indeed, the expectation is, rather, that it should be about assessing how much danger they are in. That isn’t, though, the way the UK government operates. And it doesn’t matter which party forms that government.

And then what?

Tweet

 

Many of Trump’s early Executive Orders have been to do with the rounding up and deportation of undocumented immigrants. He and his supporters claim that it will be the biggest round up and deportation in history. If they actually succeed in deporting people in the numbers being suggested, it will indeed be the biggest deportation in history. Whether it’s the biggest round up is more questionable: it may well be the biggest in terms of absolute numbers, but maybe not in terms of the ratio of those rounded up to the total population. My recollection of history tells me that there was a very big round up of people carried out on the European mainland towards the end of the first half of the last century, and, although I haven’t done a detailed calculation of the numbers, I suspect that it was proportionately larger in relation to the total population within the parts of Europe concerned.

That same recollection of history also tells me that forcing people to register (another of Trump’s proposals) and then detaining them were the comparatively straightforward part of the exercise; the difficulty came in knowing what to do with them once detained. It’s a matter of historical fact that Hitler’s proposal to rid the European mainland of Jews was initially about ‘encouraging’ people to leave, and was then followed up by proposals for mass deportation, including a scheme to transport 4 million Jews to Madagascar. It was a tall order, even in the days when imperial powers could and did simply transfer territories and their population between each other (although, as Trump reminded us recently, those days have not entirely been relegated to history, in the minds of some at least), and the scheme was eventually abandoned as being too difficult to implement. Short term, the only option was the building of detention camps where those arrested could be isolated from the rest of society, and in a not-at-all-strange parallel, Trump has already ordered the military to start building detention camps.

Actually deporting people is not as easy as it sounds, let alone as easy as Trump’s rhetoric suggests. There has to be some sort of agreement with the governments of the countries designated to receive the deportees; they can’t simply be dumped on the tarmac of an airport, or driven over the border at gunpoint, especially if the border patrols on the other side are telling them to stay put at gunpoint. And ‘undocumented’ covers a wide range of possibilities – being of obvious Hispanic origin, for instance, isn’t the same as being provably Mexican, and even if Mexico agreed to take its own citizens back, that leaves an awful lot of other people whose nationality remains unestablished. And then there are the legal processes to be gone through; American justice grinds extremely slowly at the best of times, and even attempts to remove all legal protection will themselves be subject to legal challenges.

In the meantime, many people – perhaps millions, in Trump’s wildest dreams – will find themselves in a sort of limbo in detention camps, and the US Government will find itself paying for food, clothing, security, and what passes for ‘housing’ for an indefinite period, whilst the absence of people who were making a contribution to the economy causes problems of its own outside the camps. What would the government do with them? In the historical parallel which I mentioned earlier, those responsible for detaining people alighted on alternative ‘solutions’ involving either forced labour or physical annihilation. I can’t bring myself to believe that even Trump would opt for the second of those, but I wouldn’t be so quick to rule out some sort of system of forced labour, even if only to fill some of the gaps in the economy which the detentions create. He’s more likely to follow the Putin model than the Hitler one, and if he manages to grab Canada and/or Greenland, he would even find it easier to mimic Siberian conditions. And cheap, non-unionised labour isn’t something that many of his billionaire friends are likely to refuse in a hurry.

No doubt many of his MAGA supporters will cheer him on whatever he does – and the crueller the better. For those detained, it’s a nightmare. Optimistically, it would end in four years’ time with a new president. But if Trump succeeds in extending his reign – or ensuring that there is an anointed successor (maybe even turning the presidency, effectively, into a hereditary position), there is no obvious way out for them. I somehow doubt that Trump has thought this through at all; most of what he does seems to be based on very short timescales. As always, it will be the most vulnerable who suffer.

Only four years?

Tweet

 

Whilst much of what Trump said and did yesterday was alarming to some of us, no-one can say that it was really unexpected. But in a strange way, the bit that probably alarmed me most was his talk of putting Americans, complete with their flag, on the surface of Mars. It’s not that I’m opposed to manned space exploration: I’m reasonably confident that humans will travel to Mars in the future (although I’m even more confident that Mars will prove to be the furthest that humans will ever venture, what with the laws of physics being as they are and the dangers inherent in the endeavour). It’s more about timescales.

Everything we know about Trump says that he’s focussed on the short term, and even more so on himself, his role in that short term, and his ability to monetize that for his own benefit. Most of what he had to say yesterday fits that picture – his programme is one which is likely to make billionaires richer at the expense of everyone else, and to achieve that within his term of office. He clearly doesn’t understand some things very well, but he has a keen eye for the monetary benefits. Tariffs is one obvious example – he seems to think that they are paid by the companies and citizens of the country exporting to the US, rather than inflating the prices of the goods imported. They do, however, by switching taxation from individuals’ income to their expenditure, disproportionately benefit the richest. Many of the executive orders he signed yesterday are fairly easily reversible. At a cost, obviously, not just in terms of money but also in terms of the disruption caused. It might mean waiting four years, and whilst opinions vary on how much damage will be caused during that four years, it is only four years, and that’s a short time in the scale of human history. For some people, of course, that damage will be enormous, life-shortening, or maybe even terminal in the case of, for example, those denied medical aid by budget cuts or those deported back to the places from which they took so many risks to escape.

But will it really be only four years before he’s gone? And that’s the bit about his Mars spiel that concerns me. There is no way that anyone is going to get to Mars within the next four years. Even the eternal over-promiser Musk has said that it won’t be until at least 2029. Most people would regard that as being hopelessly optimistic, and NASA has talked vaguely about sometime in the 1930s. That in turn is almost certainly an over-optimistic assessment in order to get their hands on federal funding. Literally no-one who knows anything about space exploration seriously expects that it will happen during Trump’s current term in the White House, and it’s highly unlikely during the term of his immediate successor either. However, that assumes that his term will end on January 20, 2029 as it is supposed to. There are people – and there have been presidents of the USA – who would be quite happy to be seen as having laid the groundwork for a triumph celebrated by one or other of their successors. Trump isn’t one of them. If he can’t claim 100% of the credit, and isn’t personally making money from it, then there’s nothing in it for him.

To say that he was ‘reluctant’ to leave office last time around would be something of an understatement. He’s already dropped hints that a compliant congress should change the rule about a two-term limit, and he famously told Christians during last year’s campaign that they needed to vote, and if they did so, then they would never need to do so again. Is his Mars proposal another early indication that he is already thinking about ways of carrying on after 2029?

Is pointing now the point?

Tweet

 

Maybe it’s just a result of getting older and (even) more cynical, but it struck me recently that it has become impossible for politicians to make an outdoor visit to anywhere without finding something to point at for the cameraperson. The picture heading up this story (taken when the two actors politicians concerned visited our local windfarm a month or two ago) is a case in point. It doesn’t take a lot of searching to find a host of similar examples where one politician or another is looking very earnest and serious whilst pointing at something out of shot. That ‘out of shot’ is important as well – in not one example of the many I’ve seen is the object being pointed at either shown or explained in the accompanying text, but the earnest face, and obviously serious conversation whenever more than one individual is involved, are essential prerequisites.

Even assuming that they’re pointing at the same thing (and it isn’t always clear to me from the photos that they are), why would two people find it necessary to draw each other’s attention to the same thing at the same time, each explaining earnestly to the other exactly what it is that both of them can plainly see? My suspicious mind wonders whether there’s actually anything there at all, or whether the cameraperson has simply concluded that two people standing by a road, or a fence, or a building, or a wind turbine is too boring for words and what (s)he actually needs is an ‘action’ shot. Maybe, “Just point at something over that way and talk to each other with serious faces” is the best that they can come up with. Or maybe the main point of some politicians these days really is simply to travel around pointing at things.

Enjoying the excuses

Tweet

 

Losing your anti-corruption minister in a corruption scandal is quite an achievement for any PM, let alone one who’s only just assumed office. In fairness, the scandal was some time ago and in another country, but nevertheless, there was enough rumour and innuendo doing the rounds to make someone at least question the wisdom. It needs to be said, of course, that it’s not at all clear whether the deal between Russia and Bangladesh actually involved corruption or not, let alone whether, or to what extent, Tulip Siddique was involved in it. The legal process in Bangladesh may or may not reach a conclusion about that in due course.

In the meantime, we can just sit back and enjoy the comical value of the excuses being put forward. Apparently, Siddique was only part of the group which travelled to Moscow to conclude the deal with Putin because she wasn’t seeing enough of her aunt. And only ended up in the picture with Putin because he invited her aunt to ask her family to step into the frame. I mean, who amongst us hasn’t found him or herself in the Kremlin on a jolly family outing, only to be invited at random by Putin himself to join a photograph marking the signing of a multi-billion contract? And then there’s the house she was gifted, which she claimed was from her parents, but was actually from a member of Bangladesh’s ruling clique. Again, who amongst us hasn’t been gifted a house without really knowing who the donor was, let alone where the money came from?

These are just everyday events of a completely innocent nature. For anyone who just happens to be related to the despotic head of a corrupt regime, at any rate. If the case ever comes to trial – something which is by no means certain – I’m doubtful that she will be convicted of any crime. Whether that means she’s a suitable candidate to return to ministerial duties is another question. Stupidity may not be an actual crime, but if there isn’t a test to avoid appointing those who are too stupid or naïve to be ministers, there certainly ought to be.

Is Reeves doomed?

Tweet

 

Starmer’s initial response yesterday to the question about whether Rachel Reeves will remain Chancellor for the whole term of his government was to say that she enjoyed his full confidence, a line which he repeated several times before, eventually, one of his spokespersons gave the requested confirmation. As promises go, it’s about as trustworthy as his manifesto for the last election, and the Chancellor could be forgiven for feeling a bit like a football manager who knows that the club’s owner only has to declare his complete confidence twice more before the inevitable sacking.

She may be able to defy the laws of political gravity for a while longer, but four years is a long time, and in any event defying the laws of basic arithmetic will inevitably prove to be beyond her capability. Her claim that she could repair and sustain public services, not increase taxes or borrowing, and at the same time reduce the government deficit (which is what her entirely arbitrary but ‘non-negotiable’ fiscal rules say must happen) always depended on the assumption that the UK economy would grow such that tax revenue increased without changing tax rates. And not just grow, but grow in a way which is unprecedented in recent history and for which there is no basis in policy to justify. Reality and wishful thinking aren’t the same thing, no matter how hard the spin doctors might try to convince us otherwise. Something will have to give, and the easiest thing to change, politically, is those fiscal rules. There’s nothing strange in that – they invariably change when the Chancellor changes; and even Starmer will eventually work out that that is the cost he will have to pay.

The question is about how much damage is done in the meantime, since it is becoming increasingly clear that her response will be to stick by the rules and cut spending instead. She will claim – indeed, the government is already claiming with its target of a 5% spending reduction – that this will be achieved by cutting out ‘waste’. But defining ‘waste’ isn’t as obvious as it sounds: for most politicians, ‘waste’ is any spending with which they disagree. Whether school breakfast clubs, keeping libraries and theatres open, or even implementing reduced speed limits are wasteful or not depends on your political perspective. About the only thing we can say with certainty is that an imposed budget cut – whether of 5% or any higher figure which Reeves will announce in the next month or two – is rarely effective at reducing what the average layman would call waste, and invariably ends up with cuts to services. Calling it ‘fiscal prudence’ rather than austerity is a bit like calling a hungry tiger a big cat. Big cat sounds more friendly, but it will still be happy to eat you.

The brightest and the best

Tweet

 

One of the developing fault lines in the Trump world is over the question of selective issue of visas for certain individuals regarded as being exceptional – the usual term used is ‘the brightest and the best’. The billionaires funding Trump, including the official First Buddy, Elon Musk, want to continue issuing such visas, whilst the MAGA purists want a complete halt to immigration and see every such visa as denying a job to an existing US citizen. At the moment, Trump seems to be siding with the billionaires (‘billionaire supports billionaires’ would hardly be a surprising headline), although history shows that he eventually falls out with everyone, and sooner rather than later in the case of anyone who might distract attention from himself.

There’s a similar, albeit not exactly parallel, debate here in the UK. By and large, businesses want more visas whilst politicians believe that the public wants fewer. Talk about attracting ‘the brightest and the best’ is the compromise adopted by those politicians who want to try and appeal to both sides of that debate, although they generally end up satisfying neither. But whether in the US or the UK that term, ‘brightest and best’, could do with more detailed scrutiny than it’s getting. Why are some people considered ‘brighter and better’ than others?

In the case of Musk and Trump, their position is clear and public – they genuinely believe that ability is first and foremost genetically determined. It’s a core belief which underpins what they believe is their inherent right to rule over the rest of us. Trump even seems to believe that his uncle’s career as a professor somehow shows that Trump himself is a genius. A stable one, of course. That belief in genetic pre-determination is less obvious in the UK, but it still underpins the argument. It’s a convenient – and ultimately lazy – belief, which saves its adherents from having to explain why one of the richest countries in the world, with one of the historically most well-regarded systems of higher education, is incapable of producing the same people, and needs, in effect, to outsource their production to others. Reluctant as I am to agree with the MAGA purists on anything, they may have a point here.

I’m not arguing that the people concerned should not be allowed to migrate to the UK (or the US, for that matter); on the contrary, at the level of principle, I believe that people should be able to choose freely where to pursue their lives and careers. But there’s something dishonest about an advanced country like the UK with its 67 million inhabitants (and even more so the US with its 335 million people) claiming that it is unable to train and educate people to the highest level and needs to attract them from elsewhere instead – unless they truly believe that nature (genetics) plays the key role and that nurture (environment, education etc.) is always secondary. The evidence to support such a categoric belief is noticeable primarily by its absence.

What is a crash anyway?

Tweet

 

Whisper it quietly, but it’s entirely possible that Liz Truss is justified in arguing that she did not ‘crash the economy’ with her ill-fated non-budget. There were, after all, other people involved, and the Bank of England’s decision-taking at the time didn’t help. Above all, there is no clear definition of what ‘crash the economy’ actually means; it isn’t exactly a well-established technical term. The political wisdom of trying to recover her reputation by issuing a ‘cease-and-desist’ letter, with its implicit suggestion of potential legal action for defamation, is another question entirely. Not only does it draw attention, yet again, to the damage she managed to do, it positively invites a response along the lines of that of the defendant in the infamous case of Arkell vs Pressdram – and whilst his words avoid the choice Anglo-Saxon of the original, Starmer’s response duly obliges. I somehow doubt that the case will advance much further. The prospect of being cross-examined in the witness box as to what she did or did not do, and trying to explain why the crisis was technically not in fact a ‘crash’ at all seems likely only to draw even more attention to her perceived failures, as well as being doomed to fail.

In the meantime, ‘the markets’ are playing up again today, with Rachel Reeves on the receiving end of their activity. Or, rather, the speculators and gamblers who always have an eye open for a chance to make a few pennies on marginal price movements are betting that she cannot honour her commitments on tax and borrowing whilst sticking to her fiscal rules. If I had a million or two to spare, I might even be tempted to join them; it looks like a pretty safe bet to me. Her determination to stick to fiscal rules which she herself wrote and which are entirely arbitrary has constrained her ability to do what she has said she will do on tax and borrowing, and she has no-one to blame but herself for not only putting the rock and the hard place into position, but for then rushing to place herself between them. Sooner or later, something will give. The gamblers will walk away with their profits and Starmer may well need to find a new Chancellor.

It’s all so unnecessary. The government could order the BoE to stop its quantitative tightening; it could order the Bank to reduce interest rates; it could change its fiscal rules. It prefers to pander to the prevailing conservative/ neoliberal economic ideology which has done so much to damage prospects for most people in recent decades. And that risks facilitating those who want to double down on that ideology.

What about the inhabitants?

Tweet

 

Failing to rule something out isn’t the same as ruling it in, and it’s perfectly possible that Trump thinks that leaving the threat of military action hanging over Greenland and Panama will ‘encourage’ Denmark and Panama to cave in without any need to resort to actual use of force.

He is probably serious about wanting to take control of Greenland, but that doesn’t make him unique in US history. Other presidents have also had designs on the territory and various land swaps have been envisaged in the past, including his own suggestion of giving Puerto Rico to Denmark as well as the 1940’s suggestion of swapping it for land in Alaska and the 1910 proposal to exchange it for some islands in the Philippines (so that Denmark could, in turn, swap them for a chunk of what is now Germany). The UK doesn’t exactly have clean hands on the issue either, having once sought to be given first refusal should Denmark decide to sell, with a view to it becoming part of Canada in order to keep it out of the hands of the US. He’s also probably at least semi-serious about annexing Canada, and he’s not the first to think that either: the US actually invaded Canada during the 1812-1815 war with the UK, expecting (rather like Putin in Ukraine) to over-run the country in days. Buying territory along with the people who live there is hardly a new concept either, especially for the US, which bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 and a huge chunk of the mid-west from France in 1803. Describing the purchase of Greenland over the heads of its residents as ‘decolonisation’ is perverting the meaning of words somewhat, but the process itself is hardly historically novel.

People tend to forget that most – maybe all – of the world’s political boundaries between states are the result of war, or treaties agreed between nominally equal parties (even though, in reality, many of those treaties were effectively imposed on the weak by the strong). The boundary between Canada and the US, like Danish ownership of Greenland, are both accidents of history. Trump’s mindset in this context isn’t radically different from that of Putin – both think that the boundaries of the states which they govern should be drawn differently to include more territory, and both are willing to consider, at least, the use of force to bring about those changes. It is, unfortunately, far from inconceivable that an early meeting between Trump and Putin – which both want, apparently: Putin because he thinks he can outwit Trump, and Trump because he believes his own hype about his abilities as a dealmaker and his friendship with Putin – will lead to something akin to the Yalta conference after the second world war, in which the so-called great powers (now reduced to two, in the eyes of both of those involved) carve up Europe and the Americas between them.

As for the people of Greenland themselves, such evidence as exists suggests that their preferred status is independence. In a world where invading the territory of the EU is not ruled out, and an invasion of the UK is floated as an option, the chance that the Greenlanders’ voice will be heard seems slim.

Loopholes and principles are not easy bedfellows

Tweet

 

The ill-starred romance between Farage and Musk didn’t last long, which presumably means that the enormous donation which had been mooted might not arrive after all. It turns out that a mega-rich man actually expects something in return for his patronage. Who’d have thought it? In this case, the expectation was slavish support for his views on issues of the day (including the immediate release of a convicted criminal) however unfounded in mere facts and evidence those views might be. It leaves Farage with a difficult choice – stay in post and beg for money elsewhere, or make way for his Musk-anointed successor. Farage is claiming that he would “never sell out my principles”, but telling us that he won’t sell something he has never possessed doesn’t actually tell us a lot about his next moves.

The real debate about political funding should be examining the mysterious process of transubstantiation, during which profit generated elsewhere and then funnelled through a UK-based company magically becomes British money and therefore a legitimate source of political donations in a state which theoretically only allows such donations from UK sources. Interestingly, it only becomes British money for the purposes of political donations, and apparently doesn’t also become liable for UK taxes. As I say, it is truly a mysterious process. It’s a loophole, of course, and one which a party committed to eliminating sleaze and dubious funding might be seeking to close, particularly if the sums are so large as to completely tip the scales. However, a party which happily accepts a large donation from a company registered in a tax haven will inevitably find itself more than a little compromised on the issue. Dodgy funding is only an issue when other parties benefit from it, it would seem. In the meantime, all is well as long as ‘no rules are broken’, the only basis on which most politicians seem to consider the issue of morality, rather ignoring the fact that it is they who make the rules in the first place. Those who deliberately leave loopholes in rules from which they can benefit themselves can’t really complain if someone else uses the same loopholes.

Counting the members

Tweet

 

The response by the leader of the English Conservative and Unionist Party to the growth of the membership of Farage’s Reform was a masterful demonstration of how to ensure that your enemy’s successes receive maximum media coverage, underlining in the process the true extent of her political acumen. Whether her claims of fakery are true or not has yet to be fully resolved, although such evidence as has been produced suggests that a party led by Farage may have broken his habit of a lifetime by actually bearing at least a passing resemblance to truth, an outcome at which few can have been as surprised as Farage himself. We are told that, if the growth in membership numbers continues at its current pace, then Reform will have double the number of members in the Tory Party by the end of January. That’s mathematically true, but it’s also mathematically true that at the current rate of growth, the entire population of the UK will be Reform members in only 38 years from now. Simplistic mathematical truth isn’t always a useful or meaningful metric.

Given the lack of clarity about what ‘membership’ actually means for a ‘party’ which still appears to be legally owned and controlled by the man himself, and the suggestion that few of those ‘members’ are actually likely to end up pounding the streets, let alone ringing the doorbells of unsuspecting voters, membership numbers in themselves, whether accurate or not, probably don’t tell us a great deal about Reform’s electoral prospects, even if they do help to reinforce the idea that Badenoch could start a fight about nothing in an empty room.

More significant are the opinion polling numbers which have been appearing recently, showing that Reform has a certain momentum at present, to which Badenoch has kindly, if rather incompetently, added. But if a week is a long time in politics, it’s a very long time indeed until the next Senedd election, let alone the next UK election, and parties led by Farage have in the past shown an uncanny ability to self-destruct, so we should be careful about over-reacting to a few opinion polls. But neither should we be overcomplacent in the face of the rise of a political movement dedicated to the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, aided and abetted enthusiastically be those who will pay the price: sometimes, it seems, turkeys really do vote for Christmas. Especially when the media seem so determined to talk up the possibility in order to give themselves something to talk about.

Much of the talking heads reaction seems to be about the policies and philosophies underpinning political debate in the UK, and whether ‘the right’ will somehow transition from Tory to Reform or come together in some sort of takeover of one by the other. That misses the point, almost as much as the comforting suggestion that Wales is somehow a ‘left-wing’ nation which will reject the even-more-extreme Toryism of Reform just as it has traditionally rejected the more mainstream Toryism of the Tory Party itself. None of that stuff about left and right is what drives Reform’s members, voters and supporters. Whilst those at the top of the party might have a clear vision about concentrating power and wealth in the hands of a few by impoverishing the many, it’s not one that they’re going to share – for obvious reasons. The rest are driven more by a ‘plague on all your houses’ mentality, an appeal to outdated English jingoism (yes, even in Wales), and a good dash of racism, albeit increasingly presented in terms of a clash of cultural perspectives. None of this is amenable to pragmatic argument about the detail of policies and promises which no-one believes are going to be enacted anyway.

But if it isn’t easy to counter these attitudes, it really is extremely easy to reinforce them, and it’s something which the Labour government manages to do regularly. Every time they tell us that there is not enough money for things such as winter fuel payments, they tell us implicitly that those things on which they do spend are higher priorities. It’s no surprise that some people see every penny spent on dealing with the desperate people arriving on these shores as being money which could be used for something else, if only it weren’t for these immigrants. Ask yourselves how many times you’ve seen memes suggesting that the homeless, or veterans, or pensioners are more deserving of our support than immigrants, with a strapline along the lines of ‘we should look after our own people first’. It’s a narrative which Labour’s own words and actions reinforce daily, even if not entirely intentionally – and it’s utter nonsense. The UK is one of the world’s richest countries, and it also has one of the largest gaps between the richest and the poorest – those two facts are not unrelated. The question we should be asking is how we use the wealth which exists. It’s a question which the Labour Party used to ask, but stopped asking decades ago in its rush to follow the Tories in their adoption of a wholly false theory of economics which just happens to benefit the few.

We can’t yet know whether the momentum which Reform currently has will continue and carry them into electoral success in future contests. But we can be pretty certain that if it does happen, the current Labour government will have facilitated and enabled it with its blind adherence to self-imposed fiscal rules and an unwillingness to challenge inequality in any meaningful way.