Colonialism doesn't always involve invasion or conquest

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Sir Starmer’s speech on immigration earlier this week had obvious echoes of the words of Enoch Powell more than half a century ago, and repeated attempts to pretend that there is no similarity between the words used by the two men look like simply digging an already big hole a bit deeper. I accept that it was almost certainly unintentional. Starmer would have been about 6 in 1968 when Powell delivered his infamous speech, and the coterie of advisers and speech writers around him probably even younger. Lack of a direct memory of Powell’s speech – or even of the man himself – is understandable, even if it demonstrates a certain lack of knowledge of political history. The bigger problem isn’t about whether he was or was not aping an odious politician of the past, deliberately or otherwise – it’s about the extent to which what looked like extreme views in 1968 have become part of the political mainstream, not just for Reform Ltd but also for the Tories and even Labour. Starmer’s words would have been anathema to Wilson and the Labour Party back then, yet their modern-day counterparts are falling over themselves to justify and amplify them.

There is another unpleasant aspect to the words used by UK parties when referring to migrants, which is that it sees them largely in terms of their value (or cost) to the UK economy. So, low-paid (which isn’t the same as low-skilled, although one would be hard-pressed to glean that from Starmer’s words) bad, high-paid good. Rarely do any of our politicians seem to see migrants or would-be migrants as human beings with aspirations and needs. There’s also an interesting paradox in the fact that the low-paid are doing work for which it is proving difficult to recruit UK labour, whilst at least some of the higher-paid jobs are easier to fill locally. Who is ‘stealing’ whose jobs? Whether the higher-paid jobs can or cannot be filled locally, and whilst bearing in mind the caveat that high-paid isn’t always the same as high-skilled, attracting what are seen as being the ‘brightest and best’ from elsewhere has an inevitable knock-on effect on the society and economy of those countries losing those people to the UK. It’s a modern form of colonialism.

Even amongst those brave souls in the Labour Party who are speaking out against the proposed changes, there is a degree of objectification of the people involved. Take the words of a former adviser to Mark Drakeford, quoted here: “To have a sustainable indigenous population requires a fertility rate 2.1. The UK rate is 1.4. This means our indigenous population is shrinking and aging and we are completely dependent on immigrants to remain a viable country”. What could be more neo-colonialist than outsourcing the responsibility for maintaining population levels (even supposing that to be a good thing anyway, but that’s a subject for another day)? And where is the consideration of the impact on those other countries of losing the people of an age group likely to be child-bearing? Moving a perceived problem elsewhere doesn’t ‘solve’ it.

Migration is a complex issue which involves real people living real lives. Reducing it to a cost-benefit analysis, and treating migrants as units of economic production is dehumanising. But it’s what we get when politicians decide that playing to prejudice is more likely to win them votes than attempting to conduct a serious conversation around the issue. Starmer is part of the problem, and what he has to offer is no solution.

Imposing sanctions in baby steps

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The UK and EU are seriously discussing further packages of sanctions against Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, and trying to pressurise Trump into implementing further US sanctions as well. There does seem to be a feeling that the US Congress might be willing to impose further sanctions, although there is considerable doubt as to whether Trump will support it. Sir Starmer is doing his best to sound tough as he talks about ‘ramping up’ (one of his favourite phrases) economic sanctions against Putin and Russia. But hold on a minute. Over three years into a disastrous war in which hundreds of thousands have died, and there are still more sanctions which haven’t been applied yet? When he says ‘we will apply more sanctions unless you…’, what I hear is ‘we haven’t yet done everything we could’.

How effective sanctions have been – indeed, how effective they can ever be – is a question which people who can’t think of anything else to do don’t really want to discuss. The reasons for that are entirely understandable: if countries are unwilling to move to direct military aid of Ukraine, and if sanctions don’t force Russia to back down, then all that is left is a negotiation which will inevitably make concessions to Russia. It represents neither fairness nor justice, but if all that we can think of are sanctions, then we should seriously have been applying them to the maximum already. Tough talk without tough action simply condemns more Ukrainians to fight and die.

But here is the truth that they can’t or won’t admit: sanctions aren’t forcing Russia into backing down and probably never will. Telling members of the Russian regime that they can’t come to London (one form of sanctions which has been applied) isn’t actually the sort of punishment which makes them quake in their boots, and they are still obtaining most of the goods they require by other routes. There are three main reasons why sanctions are probably doomed to failure.

The first is that Russia is big. It has an abundance of natural resources, and is able to produce much of what it needs; maybe not in the cheapest or most efficient way, maybe not always to the same standards, but a big country will always be more resilient in the face of sanctions than a smaller one.

The second is that they are not being universally applied. There are still plenty of countries (including, of course, China) willing and able to supply Russia with the goods it needs. That actually reflects a deeper problem, which remains unaddressed: not all countries see the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the same simple terms as the EU / UK, namely an unprovoked invasion of one country by another. That’s not to say that they’re right in coming to a different interpretation, but whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant to the ground fact that they are continuing to both buy and supply goods which are subject to sanctions by others. Many of us might regret that the world does not have an effective means of disciplining a rogue state, but regret doesn’t change the facts.

The third reason is that sanctions hurt the economies of those applying them, so companies are finding ways around sanctions. As trade with Russia has dropped, demand from countries aligned with Russia for the same goods has miraculously increased. Some of those countries are landlocked and the goods can only reach them by traversing Russia. The idea that they all get to their planned destination, or even that they all stay there when they arrive, is for the birds. Western companies are supplying sanctioned goods to Russia and pretending not to know, and their governments are pretending not to notice. And the capitalists make their sales and take their profits.

That sanctions will not, and probably cannot, achieve their aim is a dismal conclusion to draw, but if it’s what we are going to depend on, then implementing them in packages over a period of years and turning a blind eye to alternative supply routes doesn’t cut it. Sir Starmer’s projected strength is actually a cover for weakness.

Ends and means

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The letter sent by the Trump administration to the authorities in Stockholm instructing them to drop all schemes related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or else explain themselves to US federal lawyers, was mildly amusing to start with. It appears that the US Embassy has occasionally needed permits from the authority for building activity, there is a fee involved, and the only way of paying such a fee is to set the authority up as a supplier (and thus payee) on US systems. A simple case of someone pressing a computer button to send a letter to all payees without giving the matter any real thought. It’s hardly as though the US can simply ask someone else to give it the relevant building permits (although it’s possible that some members of the US government don’t actually realise that).

It isn’t just an amusing little gaffe, however. What it reveals is that the US government is attempting to force any organisation which receives any money, for whatever purposes, from the US government to drop any attempts at building a more balanced and representative workforce, not just in relation to the specific US government related activities, but to all its activities, world wide. There is room for some doubt as to whether the presidential directive is entirely lawful when employed solely to US companies operating solely in the US, but the idea that it can be extended to any activity carried out by any organisation anywhere in the world just because they might be in receipt of a small payment for goods or services supplied to the US government is a dramatic piece of over-reach. It assumes, for example, that US law and Trump’s authority automatically over-rides the laws and mores of whichever country in which an organisation might be based. We’ve already seen some UK companies start to remove all mention of diversity from their websites, and one wonders how many others are quietly complying without making any public statement, as though – heaven forfend! – having a diverse workforce was never really important to them, but was seen as a means to present themselves in a good light and thus make money in a particular marketplace (the UK/EU).

The reaction of some of Trump’s UK acolytes in the UK, praising his actions despite their impact on UK companies, betrays a belief that ends are more important than means to them. The much-vaunted ‘sovereignty’ to ‘make our own laws’ that they sought through Brexit is only important to them if it delivers on their agenda. Who’d have thought it?

Short term wins aren't always victories

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The precise details of the ‘trade deal’ agreed between Trump and Sir Starmer are less than entirely clear at present, but it appears that the UK has conceded rather more than it has gained, in order to get back to a position which is not quite as bad as the current one, but not quite as good as the one which pertained before Trump started his tariff campaign. I was rather taken by this description from Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian:

“This has been less a trade deal between allies – a process of give and take that in the long run hopefully leaves both sides better off – than a hostage negotiation. Pay Trump what he feels he’s due, and you get your economy back in roughly the state it was before, though missing a few fingers and probably traumatised.”

The bigger question is how long it will last. With someone as fickle as Trump in charge, today’s best deal ever can easily be redefined tomorrow as the work of a complete loser, and it will all be the fault of the groundwork that the Biden administration carried out. Sir Starmer is in a bind, even if he doesn’t realise it yet. The more he proclaims it as a good deal for the UK, the more His Orangeness will think that he didn’t demand enough – and reneging on deals that he himself negotiated and signed is always an option, as Canada and Mexico have already discovered. Bullies who think that they can get more will always come back and try for it. Assuming that your negotiating partner is honest and trustworthy simply doesn’t work with someone like Trump – and there are plenty of victims willing to attest to that.

Is it better to have done a deal than not done it? In principle, yes, of course. Being slightly less worse off is obviously an improvement – for an individual participant. Whether allowing and facilitating a strategy of divide and conquer is better than forming alliances with a bloc (the EU), which has rather more clout, to deal with the orange menace collectively is a much harder question to answer. The impact of the deal, when we know the detail (which will have some good things and some bad things in it), will be relatively small in economic terms. The bigger significance is whether it encourages or discourages Trump’s approach of bullying his way around the world. I suspect the former is more likely than the latter.

Greenland might be a useful diversion

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Long-described as the world’s second-oldest profession, spying is something which most states above a certain, albeit undefined, size undertake on a regular basis. Understanding the thinking of other states seen as potential adversaries is something which many rulers over the centuries have found useful. Spying on ‘friends’ is also common – who knows when friends might turn into enemies or what they might be holding back? There’s something more than a little disingenuous in the Danish Foreign Minister’s claim this week that “we don’t spy between friends”, given that the Danish intelligence services actively assisted the US to spy on Germany’s former Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

It's still more than a little strange, however, that Trump should have decided that a major priority for the US intelligence services should be Greenland. It’s not as though the country actually poses any immediate danger to the US – a country of 56,000 inhabitants is hardly likely to invade New York. And a dispassionate observer might well believe that there are one or two rather more significant potential threats to the US.

The focus of espionage activity is apparently to be twofold: intelligence gathering on the independence movement and identifying individuals likely to welcome a US takeover. In theory, it should be an easy task to resource. The three US intelligence agencies (CIA: 21,500; DIA: 16,500; NSA: 30-40,000) employ more than 68,000 people between them (unless Elon Musk has fired most of them by now); allocating a few thousand to monitor 56,000 Greenlanders shouldn’t be too much of an ask. How many of those are Greenland specialists, though, might be more of a problem. Some 70% of the population speak only Greenlandic, and I’d be surprised if as many as 1 of those 68,000 ‘spies’ could understand what they are saying. And when it comes to intelligence ‘on the ground’ (as opposed to remote electronic monitoring), someone unable to communicate in the language might just stand out a little.

A country planning a takeover might well find it useful to identify in advance a sufficiently large cohort of people who would welcome the invasion (and perhaps fill posts in the new government) in order to give it a gloss of respectability, but previous attempts at going door-to-door to find someone who would welcome the Vice-President and his wife were less than entirely successful. They found no-one. On another occasion they had to resort to handing out MAGA hats to homeless people as a reward for eating a Trump(Jr)-provided meal. Even the CIA, with its renowned ability to destabilise and topple governments, will find it a challenge to make a coup look like some sort of popular uprising.

Trump’s obsession with Greenland is an odd one, especially given that he could get most of what he really wants (which is about US corporations getting access to valuable mineral rights – and maybe building a hotel and a few golf courses?) by friendly negotiation, but that, it seems, is not the way that the ‘art of the deal’ works. Still, whilst sympathising with Greenlanders, there’s something mildly reassuring about seeing him give so much of his limited attention span to the question.

Defining the task helps

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The standard advice for anyone finding themselves in a hole is to stop digging, but the ability to follow that advice depends on the ability to recognise a hole when you see one. Not all holes are immediately recognisable, especially if the digger believes he’s engaged on an entirely different task, such as laying the foundations for a really strong and robust wall.

That may be at the heart of Sir Starmer’s problem over things like the winter fuel allowance. Everyone watching him can see the hole getting deeper and deeper, with his probability of being able to escape it rapidly diminishing, and the likelihood of others being dragged in increasing with equal rapidity. His own loyal troops are increasingly bewildered about his enthusiasm for shifting earth, and even the Labour-supporting Mirror is now telling him that it’s time to stop. To no avail. Every call to lay down his shovel simply results in him expending even more elbow grease – and credibility – on throwing even more soil out of the hole.

It makes little sense unless the task he thinks he’s undertaking has nothing to with fuel or pensioners, it’s all about demonstrating toughness. Sticking to a decision as support for it drains away reinforces his self-image as someone willing to take unpopular decisions (or ‘difficult’ decisions to use his preferred euphemism). From that perspective, the more unpopular the decision, the better; the greater the criticism, the more he feels encouraged. Every siren call to stop, every vote lost as a result of the policy, merely strengthens his perception that he’s showing his strength and determination.

I may have read somewhere that his father was a tool-maker, although I suspect that the tools were a little more sophisticated than mere spades. Maybe he imparted some knowledge about choosing the right tools for the job. But one little life lesson that Sir Starmer appears not to have learnt is about correctly defining the job before selecting the tools. Unless he’s actually a Tory plant whose real task is to destroy the Labour Party from within. Now there’s another possible explanation which makes some sense of his actions.

They're not all that different

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During the last week, who said “I actually think overall the British Empire did much more good for the world than it did bad”, and who thinks that “the British Empire was a force for good in the world”? For those who might not have kept up, the answer, of course, is those two famous peas-in-a-pod, namely Fromage and Sir Starmer. The point that they are both trying to make is that ‘we’ should be proud of ‘our’ history rather than ashamed of it, an aspiration which completely fails to understand the nuance between being proud of one’s country on the one hand and supporting everything it has ever done on the other.

They’re not alone, of course; there are plenty of other politicians, Labour and Tory alike, whose views on the issue are little different from those of Reform Ltd, but there are at least some of us who might be more likely to take pride in a country which recognised its chequered past, was able to admit and face up to the fact that its history hasn’t always been covered in glory, and that much of its wealth is based on theft and expropriation. It’s easy enough to identify the bad things that were done in the Empire like the occasional massacre, and the exploitation of people and territories to seize the wealth for the colonialists. Finding things that are unequivocally 'good' is a lot harder. Claiming that one of the good things was the abolition of slavery rather overlooks the fact that much of the wealth extracted from the empire was extracted on the back of slavery: reversing a policy and compensating the slave owners (but not the slaves) after more than two centuries of benefiting from slavery is rather hard to present as being a ‘net good thing’ for anyone taking an objective view.

The other ‘benefits’ usually claimed by empire apologists are the building of railways (all the better to extract goods and resources), the introduction of English law, Christianity, and the spread of the English language. Implicit in the claim that they are all ‘good’ things is the inherently racist belief that all of those things are better than anything that the mere natives had developed, or might have gone on to develop, for themselves. Whilst there is a clear advantage to being able to speak what has become the world’s lingua franca, claiming that as a benefit of imperial rule ignores the fact that English only achieved that status because it was imposed on so many conquered peoples by the imperial rulers or (in the case of the other great driver of English linguistic dominance) by white settlers driving native Americans from their lands. Presenting that as an unarguable net benefit is problematic, to say the least.

What the convergence of views between Sir Starmer and Fromage (to say nothing of all the others in between) does tell us is that English nationalism is based on a highly ethnocentric view of the world, a view based on an innate sense of superiority and exceptionalism. It’s a world view in which lesser peoples (and that includes the Welsh, Scots and Irish) should know their place and be grateful for that which was forced on them by military conquest. It’s a world view from which they are unable to escape, and in which it is incomprehensible to them why anyone might see things differently. It shouldn’t go unquestioned.

Not the epitaph Starmer would choose

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Sometimes, people talk about aspects of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system used for most elections in the UK as though they were design features. But the system was never really ‘designed’ at all; what we have today has evolved over a period from a system which was used when the number of people voting was strictly limited and elections were more about choosing an individual to carry the banner of the wealthiest in parliament than about choosing a government. Having said that, if it had been designed by what have been for the best part of a century the two main UK parties, they would almost certainly have included the ‘feature’ that the system should work to preserve the dominance of those two parties and freeze out, as far as possible, any challengers.

In that regard it has worked as it would have been intended to work, giving those two parties turns at being in government (with a built-in bias, obviously, in favour of one of them – nothing says that the turns have to be of equal duration). If that is the intention, then the system works really well. Right up to the point at which it doesn’t. Inherent within the system is the possibility of reaching a tipping point. As long as a challenger party’s overall support remains below about 25%, and is evenly spread across constituencies, whichever of the two incumbent parties can achieve a little over 30% with their support irregularly distributed can achieve an overall majority of seats in parliament, and the other can form HM's loyal opposition. Democracy it ain’t, but it serves its intended beneficiaries (Labour and the Tories) well, and explains why they are both so reluctant to change it.

However, if the tipping point is ever reached (and the whole point is that it isn’t supposed to happen), the system facilitates a challenger party sweeping the board, with an even lower percentage of the vote. We’ve seen the consequences of that this week in the English local elections. Labour and Tory alike are behaving as though the way to freeze Reform Ltd out is to adopt their policies and be more like them. More rational souls might wonder what the point of keeping them out is if you’re going to do the same as them anyway – and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that if their views are thus legitimized, many voters might conclude that they should simply vote for the real thing.

A far better approach (which also has the not-exactly-inconsequential advantage of being more democratic as well) would be to adopt a proportional electoral system. The Lib Dems, Plaid, and the SNP would support such a change, and even the head Fromage is on record as saying he supports it (although if he thinks he might stand a better chance of becoming PM under the existing system, that might change – politicians’ principles have been known to become flexible when political advantage is at stake, and Fromage didn’t exactly have a lot of principles to start with). The Labour Party membership have supported the idea in party conferences, and with his current majority, Sir Starmer has a superb one-off opportunity to make a change which would be game-changing (as well as being likely to give Labour a share in power for more of the time). It seems, though, that he’d prefer to alternate between acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights and outright panic. Labour accused the Tories this week of gifting the by-election to Reform Ltd by not campaigning, but the person who is really gifting the next election to them is Sir Starmer himself. ‘The man who facilitated the UK’s slide into authoritarianism’ is probably not the epitaph Sir Starmer would choose. But then I suppose few of us get to choose our own epitaphs.

It's not just a game

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Most people are familiar with the game called ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. Thee are variations on it, and whilst it was originally conceived as a two-player game, the theory can be applied to any number of players. In the game, the most rational action for any individual player is to compete with others (because (s)he doesn’t know whether the others are going to compete or co-operate), but the most rational approach for the group of players as a whole is to co-operate, and maximise the total rewards gained. That co-operation implies communication and trust, things which don’t always happen in real life.

Climate change can be represented as a version of the game, in which former PM Tony Blair participated yesterday. He is right, of course, when he says that people "feel they're being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know the impact on global emissions is minimal". For all the talk of taking individual responsibility or ‘think global, act local’, no one individual can make a significant difference to climate change overall. And it isn’t just individuals – no single nation can make enough difference acting alone, even the very biggest nations. We’ve seen people arguing on a Wales level or UK level along the lines of ‘our contribution to carbon emissions is so small that stopping it will make no difference’. It’s true. In a world population of 8 billion, 3 million Welsh people, or even 66 million UK residents can only make a minuscule difference. It follows that the rational thing for any group of 3 million (or 66 million), let alone any individual, to do is to ignore the impacts and carry on as usual. After all, 66 million is only 120th of 8 billion.

What the game also teaches us, though, is that if every player decides to compete rather than co-operate, we all lose out in the end, compared to what would have happened had we all co-operated. The first vicious twist in the game is that if some attempt to play co-operatively, whilst others attempt to play competitively, the co-operators lose out by even more than they would have done had they played competitively. It is, therefore, entirely rational to compete unless and until everyone decides to co-operate. That, it seems to me, is ultimately the argument of those who accept the reality of man-made climate change, but reject taking the necessary action to address it. (Those who reject the overwhelming evidence of man-made climate change are, of course, in a separate category entirely, where rationality at any level no longer necessarily applies.)

The second vicious twist is that, applying it to the question of climate change, we end up collectively taking the wholly irrational decision to make the world uninhabitable for humanity as a direct result of individuals and countries making entirely rational choices about their own actions and behaviours. How we get to a world in which acting for the good of all is seen as a better choice than pursuing individual greed and desires is another question entirely. Climate change isn’t the only issue where that question arises, but it’s not a question which the Blairs of this world seem to be capable of even considering.

Markets and casinos shouldn't be the same thing

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Here’s a statement that some might be surprised at me making: Markets work. As a way of matching buyers and sellers, or capital with investment opportunities, markets are an effective and efficient method, better than anything else humanity has managed to devise thus far. There are, however, two caveats.

The first is that there is no such thing as a completely ‘free’ market. All markets have rules by which they operate. One of the reasons for that is that the assumptions used by theoretical economists when considering markets – that all participants have equal power and that all have perfect knowledge of what is happening – are blatantly inaccurate. Markets can only work effectively if those (and other defects) are corrected, so we have rules which must be followed. There will always be disagreements about what those rules should be, but the key issues are who makes the rules and in whose interests they operate. Those arguing for completely ‘free’ markets are invariably arguing for markets which are slanted in favour of those with the most power and the most knowledge. No surprise there.

The second caveat is that a real market is about those basics mentioned above, such as matching real buyers with real sellers, exchanging real things. Yet, when it comes to the world’s financial markets, most trading is nothing to do with that; it is, instead about gambling and speculation, with people trying to leverage large trades for very small profit margins on a day-by-day or even hour-by-hour basis. And in some cases, what is being ‘traded’ (i.e. being bet on) isn’t even something with any real existence beyond acting as a gambling chip. Crypto currency is a case in point. It has no real ‘value’ and its price fluctuates wildly. As a means of winning (or losing) a fortune in  short time, it’s ideal, but its value as any sort of ‘investment’ is doubtful, to say the least. Yet, lured by the improbable apparent ‘value’ of these ethereal ‘assets’, some governments are trying to pretend that they are real enough to be treated as investments by the man or woman in the street.

It's perhaps obvious why Trump would wish to do this – he has after all issued his own bit of crypto, from which he’s made a lot of money at the expense of his cult followers. It’s less obvious why the UK Chancellor would be considering anything similar. There’s nothing wrong with seeking to regulate crypto currencies as such (although the whole point of some of them is to set them up in such a way that they are very difficult to regulate effectively, not least in order to facilitate tax evasion), just as other types of gambling are regulated, including for the safety and protection of the punters. Seeking to regulate them as though they were ‘investments’, however (which is what she seems to have in mind) is dangerous, and risks creating the impression that an inherently risky proposition has somehow been rendered safe. It’s a bad message to be giving out.

People are more important than land

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If Donald Trump were to content himself with annexing the southern part of Ontario Province rather than the whole of Canada (initially at least, always reserving the option to return for more at some future date), he would probably see that as being a major concession to Canada. From such a perspective, Putin only seizing 20% of Ukrainian territory also looks like a huge concession. It may look like a strange definition of ‘concession’ to most of us, but it’s easy enough to see how it would look different to someone who believes that the strong and powerful should be free to exercise their strength to get whatever they want. A bully who settles for less than he could take will always see himself as being generous.

That doesn’t alter the fact that the reality remains that, unless other states are willing to commit their own armed forces on the side of Ukraine (and I really hope that they’re not), sooner or later the country will either be swallowed up by Russia or else a negotiated peace settlement will involve the de facto, if not the de jure, surrender of lands, leaving the world with another of those long term frozen territorial disputes around borders. It’s neither fair nor just, but in the absence of any means of compelling the surrender of conquered territory, it’s a hard fact. Encouraging Ukraine to fight on merely adds to the terrible death toll which has already occurred – one of the few things on which I agree with what Trump says.

It's still somewhat depressing that, even recognising that harsh reality, the debate and negotiation all seems to revolve around what land and territory should be ceded to whom, with little consideration for the people living, whether currently or formerly, in those areas. One of Putin’s demands is for Ukraine to respect the rights of Russian-speakers living in Ukraine. (Being a native Russian speaker in Ukraine doesn’t make someone a Russian of course, any more than being a native English speaker in Wales makes someone English, although it's a distinction lost on Putin.) But what about the equivalent rights of Ukrainian speakers in the occupied territories? Or even those living in those territories whose native tongue is Russian but who nevertheless consider themselves Ukrainian? What about the citizens of those territories who have been forcibly removed to remote regions of Russia – to say nothing of the children who have been abducted, adopted, and who Russia has attempted to indoctrinate into hating their own families and nation?

Land and territory are tangible; people can swap maps with different proposals as to where lines should be drawn. But land and territory have always been moved between states, usually by the exercise of force. They are ultimately less important, however, than the lives and wellbeing of people, and the right of those people to choose their own nationality and identity. I’m far from convinced that that relative importance is receiving due attention in any negotiation process, but then neither Trump nor Putin are individuals who particularly care about people.

Understanding what winnng means

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What ‘winning an election means is not as straightforward a question as it might appear. It’s easier to answer in an individual constituency or ward than it is overall: under first-past-the-post, (FPTP) it’s whoever gets the most votes, whether that amounts to an overall majority or not, and under any of the various alternative systems used in different places, the winner(s) is/are the candidate(s) who come out on top after the various rounds of counting. Looking at the situation overall, however, it’s too easy and simplistic, especially for those whose understanding is based primarily on FPTP, to conclude that the party with the highest number of seats or votes is ‘the winner’. It is on that flimsy basis that some polls are suggesting that Reform plc could ‘win’ the next Senedd election.

There is, though, no serious suggestion that Reform plc will win a majority of the seats – and nor will any other party on the basis of any polls taken to date. Though neither party will particularly thank anyone for pointing it out, the likeliest outcome of the next Senedd election is some sort of arrangement between Labour and Plaid, even if they are the second and third placed parties (whichever way round) in terms of seats. Surely, the real ‘winners’ of the election will be the party or parties that form the next government rather than the one with the numerically largest number of seats? The only way that Reform plc can be part of any government in the Senedd is by coming to some arrangement with one or more other parties. And there is only one other party likely to countenance that. It’s not entirely impossible, based on current polling, that Reform plc and the Tories between them might garner enough seats for a majority, but it stll appears vanishingly unlikely. Talk of Reform plc ‘winning’ the election is somewhat overblown in that context.

Whether it’s right that the largest party should be excluded from participating in government purely because they cannot – either alone or by working with others – conjure up a working majority will be perceived (and presented) by some as some sort of affront to democracy, but it really is not. It is an inevitable possible consequence of a more proportional system of voting under which more parties are enabled to have representation for their viewpoints. And the simple fact is that Farage and his crew are unable to command a majority for their views in Wales. The fact that a party representing only a minority viewpoint cannot end up with a majority of the seats is a positive feature of PR, not a flaw or bug. It’s just a pity that England insists on keeping a system which does allow that to happen and imposing it on us when it comes to government at the UK level. It’s a mistake – albeit one made by plenty of political commentators – to allow our thinking to be constrained by English norms into believing that the party with the largest number of seats is always the ’winner’, and talking in such terms only emboldens those who would wish to cry foul.

Waving the people's flag

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Some people have expressed surprise at the support coming from Farage and Reform for the nationalisation of the British Steel plant in Scunthorpe. Based on the premise that nationalisation is a ‘left-wing’ concept, it would indeed be surprising for the most ‘right-wing’ party to be supporting it. The flaw, however, lies in the premise.

It's true that Labour historically (before Blair got his hands on the party’s constitution) called for “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”, and that ‘common ownership’ has generally been interpreted as meaning the same as ‘state ownership’ (the two are not necessarily the same thing, but that is an issue for another time). It’s also true that, in pursuit of that goal, the immediate post-war Labour government nationalised the coal and steel industries in the UK. They also nationalised the railways, although the background to that is a bit more complex: in the aftermath of the second world war, the railway system was in a bad way and needed the sort of massive investment which a patchwork of private companies was never likely to be able to provide. By and large, the utilities - gas, water, electricity, communications – were never really nationalised in the sense of being taken out of private ownership and into public ownership. Most of them had grown out of municipal undertakings, and the re-organisation was more to do with a transfer between one part of the public sector and another. Beyond those few examples, where is the evidence for an ideology-based attempt to bring the means of production under public control?

In practice, nationalisation is a tool used by both Labour and the Tories (think Rolls-Royce under Ted Heath, or the banks under Gordon Brown) to bail out failing capitalist enterprises. And it has been largely a temporary measure at that, with the companies sold back into the private sector when they became profitable again. Once we recognise it as a tool to assist capitalists rather than to dispossess them, it becomes entirely natural that the political ‘right’ should espouse it too – if not even more natural. The real question is not why the ‘right’ should be such passionate supporters of nationalising failing businesses, but why the ‘left’ should be so passionate about doing the same thing, rather than, say, taking control of enterprises more likely to have a long term profitable future. Again, though, the flaw is in the premise. Labour has long-since lost any claim to be ‘of the left’.

Trickle-up economics always wins

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There was a story in the i paper yesterday about how some of the UK’s billionaires ‘lost’ huge amounts of money in a single day as a result of the Trump-induced stock market crash. My heart bleeds for them, of course, although I’ve been unable to find a small enough violin to mark the occasion with sad music. The question, though, is ‘where did the money go?’. After all, basic book-keeping tells us that a loss in one place must be balanced by a gain somewhere else: if the money has ‘gone’ it must have ‘gone’ somewhere.

The truth, of course, is that the money hasn’t gone anywhere; it was never there in the first place. At the time of writing the story, those billionaires still own all the assets they owned the previous day – all that changed was the theoretical cash value of those assets if they decided to sell them at a particular point in time. Even if they did suddenly decide to sell them, they won’t have ‘lost’ the difference between one day’s valuation and the next day’s valuation. The amount that they will have ‘lost’ will be the difference between what they paid for the assets and what they receive from them at the point of sale, adjusted for inflation. In most cases, that ‘loss’ will be negative, i.e. they will have made a profit not a loss. It’s just that the profit will be less than the profit that they would have made had they sold them a day earlier. An asset whose price is inherently volatile and bears little relationship to the underlying value of the property concerned is a remarkably poor way of measuring wealth, and the idea that company owners and long-term investors make a profit or loss on a day-by-day basis as the price of shares varies is nonsense.

That’s not to say that there are no winners or losers, however. People who own shares more indirectly – for example in pension funds – and reach a point where they have little option but to sell will certainly find that, even if they’ve still made a net profit over the whole term of their investment, their retirement plans may have to change dramatically as a result of the actions of the madman in the White House, because they will receive less than they were expecting. It is they, rather than the billionaires, who are the real losers. There are people who have profited as well. People who have, or can access, sufficient funds to buy and sell shares on a daily or even hourly basis can take advantage of all those forced to cash in their savings at a low price by buying low and selling when the stock bounces up again. It’s even easier if they have advance warning of Trump’s actions, a hint of which he was kind enough to give them just a few hours before reversing his tariff decision.

The White House itself has released a video apparently showing Trump congratulating some of his billionaire buddies for making a killing on the back of his actions. “He made $2.5 billion today, and he made $900 million. That’s not bad,” said His Orangeness. There were some real winners and some real losers as a result of Trump’s actions, but they weren’t the billionaires highlighted in the story referred to at the outset. The winners were the people in a position to speculate and gamble on the stock markets, and the losers were those who depended on stability and certainty for their retirement. Surprise, surprise, the net result was that money and wealth flowed from the many into the hands of the few. Trickle-up economics always wins through in the end.

Reaching for the Golden Oldies

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If there’s one sure sign that a Prime Minister thinks he or she is sailing in troubled waters, it’s when he or she reaches out for the Golden Oldies. And there are few Oldies quite as Golden as the mantra about ‘more bobbies on the beat’ which is, apparently, Starmer’s topic of the day. It’s a well-played tune, previously deployed by Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, and John Major. I’m pretty sure that I remember it from Thatcher and Callaghan as well, although the online fossil record is harder to follow from such primitive times.

There are another two certainties which follow on from any promise to increase the numbers of police on patrol. The first is that it won’t happen. And the second is that it would make little difference, even if it did. Crime is a complex phenomenon, which has no one simple cause, and whilst seeing more police walking around, preferably armed at least with tasers and big batons, appeals to a certain electoral demographic (a demographic which obviously suffers from a combination of short memory and gullibility), there is no real evidence that it makes a huge difference to the volume of crime – and it may not even be the best way of using any additional resources which can be dedicated to policing. As one anonymous police source put it, “We’d rather take the money with no strings attached and invest in other things”.

One report on Sir Starmer’s anticipated pearls says that the measures are being introduced amid “fears there is a lack of visible police presence which is driving street crime and in turn more serious and violent offences”. It’s utter nonsense, of course. Lack of visible policing doesn’t ‘drive’ crime, it merely makes it marginally easier to commit. The ‘drivers’ of crime are many and varied, but include drug abuse, greed, poverty and desperation, to say nothing of crimes of passion. There was once a politician who promised to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, but when he got into office, he discovered that the second was too difficult and would require too much effort, and the first was more easily addressed by empty rhetoric than actual action. Still, empty rhetoric makes for a good chorus line in a golden oldie.

Time to embrace the elephant

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There was a time in the 1960s, when Harold Wilson was PM, when the big monthly financial news regularly headlined by the BBC was all about this strange thing called the ‘balance of payments’. It was a crude and simplistic measure of the difference between imports and exports, and the news was invariably bad – the UK was importing more than it was exporting. These days, the numbers are worse – much, much worse – as this chart shows, but no-one is worried about it. The story about how a small imbalance was an existential problem but a huge imbalance is not an issue is a tale for another day. The point, here, is that government at the time, prompted as I remember by tabloids, launched the ‘I’m backing Britrain’ campaign, encouraging consumers to seek out and purchase UK-made goods rather than imports.

The campaign generated a lot of light, in terms of publicity and faux patriotism, but not a lot of heat, in terms of its effectiveness. It’s a precedent worth bearing in mind when considering the calls for a ‘Buy British’ campaign in response to the Trump tariffs. There are, of course, plenty of good reasons for buying goods as locally as possible, keeping the money in the local economy and reducing food miles amongst them. But for a variety of reasons, not all of which are immediately obvious, buying local can sometimes be an expensive option, not one open to everyone. Even assuming that everyone had the choice, and the financial ability to make that choice, of selecting British produce over all others, past history does not suggest that success is guaranteed. Worse still, if we did all choose to buy British, it doesn’t follow that the chief sufferers would be the desired target (i.e. the US); it’s just as likely that producers in other countries, including some of the poorest, would be the main losers.

The desire to strike back at Trump and by extension the US is entirely natural and understandable, but finding the best method of doing so is far from straightforward. If, as most of the experts say (and I believe them on this), the main immediate losers from tariffs are the consumers in the country imposing them, then retaliatory tariffs would do more harm to UK consumers than to anyone else. The second-line losers are the companies and their employees in the country targeted by tariffs, but the relative size of the UK and US economies means that the US economy can tolerate higher tariffs more easily than could the UK economy. Protection of those impacted looks to be a better mitigation than retaliatory tariffs, even if the UK government has been more than a little timid on that front to date.

Possibly the worst possible response is to plead with Trump for a deal which gives the UK some advantage over all the others seeking similar relief. Not only would it involve making unwanted concessions (and not just over things like food regulation – it’s clear that the US also wants to use its economic power to affect social and taxation policy in supplicant countries), the probability is that he’d just bank any concessions made and start again a short while later demanding more concessions. Giving in too easily to a bully merely convinces the bully that he didn’t demand enough in the first place.

That leaves us with the elephant. There is one, and only one, economic entity in the world which is big enough and has a diverse enough economy to be able to stand up to the US on the one hand, whilst developing its own economy internally to reduce or eliminate the need for the US on the other. It is, of course, the EU. Joining forces with the EU, and co-ordinating a joint response, doesn’t even require rejoining, or even the partial rejoining which the single market and the customs union represent. It merely requires a willingness to accept that joint action is better than allowing Trump to divide and rule (making that difficult is precisely why he hates the EU so much). It says a lot about what the Labour Party, founded on the idea of solidarity, has become that the idea of collective action has become such an anathema, and that competition and stealing a march on others is the only option of which they can conceive.

Misreading the signs

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Government spokespersons have been quick to try and spin the fact that the UK has been hit by Trump with a lower tariff than others as a product of Sir Starmer’s genius approach of doing whatever it takes to please Trump – saying ‘yes sir’ in all the right places, offering the shiny bauble of a visit to the King of England, hinting at reducing taxes on US tech companies etc. It’s a form of self-reassurance for a government which doesn’t really know what to do.

I’m not sure that it’s true, though. Trump didn’t get to a policy of charging exorbitant tariffs on non-existent imports from uninhabited islands by considering how nice the penguins were being to him, even if some of them are indeed king penguins. The approach he took was the entirely arbitrary one of counting the number of apples in Tesco, dividing it by the number of oranges in Aldi and halving the difference, or some other equally irrational mathematical approach. The UK has been subjected to exactly the same calculation, based on exactly the same algorithm, as all the other countries; there’s no special treatment involved at all. The tariff on UK goods is low because the UK does not have a trading surplus with the US, which implies a lesser punishment has been meted out because the UK is not particularly good at selling goods to the US.

It might legitimately be counted as a Brexit dividend, though. Had the UK still been part of the EU, the punishment would have been based on the balance of trade between the US and the EU, and because the rest of the EU appears to be rather good at selling more to the US than it buys from them, the UK would have been hit with the same tariffs. I’m not entirely convinced, though, that enabling the UK to be judged on the basis of its own failures rather than on the success of the EU as a whole is a ‘dividend’ about which we should be boasting.

The worst aspect about assuming that  a lower tariff is some sort of success, however, is that it provides Sir Starmer with a self-justification for a policy of continuing to appease His Orangeness. When what is needed is a collective approach, seeking to obtain and maintain an individual advantage over what used to be called our partners doesn’t look like the approach most likely to bring about any change.

How real is paper wealth?

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‘The markets’ have reacted fairly predictably to Trump’s puerile attempt at a conjuring trick by registering some dramatic drops. The analysts tell us that this reflects their pessimism about inflation, interest rates, and economic growth, all of which are likely to be adversely affected by the trade war which Trump has kicked off. Whilst I don’t doubt that economists (most of them, anyway – there are always some who’ll take a different view) do indeed see Trump’s actions as a threat to economic prosperity, I wonder if that’s what ‘the markets’ are really reacting to. It probably would be the case if markets were doing what classical economics says that they do, which is matching capital with investment opportunities in expectation of future profits. But if those same markets are actually more about gambling and speculation, which is probably the reality behind most trading, then what really drives them is an attempt to second guess what other players will do in response to tariffs in the hope of turning a profit by making a better guess than those other players.

It underlines that share prices an extremely poor indicator of economic value; they often bear little relation to the value of the underlying economic assets which they nominally represent. And their volatility makes them a poor measure of the wealth of their owners. To take just one simple but current example, the share price of Tesla has plummeted since Musk got involved with Trump’s administration. He’s still a very wealthy man, on paper, but his total wealth is apparently a lot less now than it was a few months ago. In his case, the scale of things means that it makes little practical difference, but the question is whether ‘paper wealth’ is a sound basis for assessing anything.

That’s relevant in the context of the increasingly strident calls for a wealth tax here in the UK. Whilst the idea appeals to many of us, assessing the amount of wealth owned by an individual is not a simple or straightforward task, especially if the value of a significant component of that wealth can vary from day to day – or even hour to hour. And non-paper wealth – property, land etc. – is not easily realisable or assessable without being realised. What is easier to assess, albeit still difficult when the tax system is complicated and people can afford to pay expensive advisers (although both of those obstacles could be overcome by a government intent on fairness), is the income generated by that wealth including, of course, any increase in value from the date of acquisition to the date of disposal of any asset. We certainly should do more to tax the wealthy, but taxing the wealthy isn’t necessarily the same thing as taxing their wealth. Their income is a lot easier to get at.

Sir Billy No-Mates

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It’s unclear exactly what Trump is hoping to achieve by imposing tariffs on all good imported to the US. Sometimes he implies that it’s a temporary move to restore what he calls 'fairness', whilst at other times, he implies that it’s intended to be a long term replacement for income tax – a way, in effect, of transferring taxation from the income of the richest to the expenditure of the poorest. He either doesn’t understand, or is pretending not to understand, what tariffs are or how they work. My money’s on the former; partly because it’s the simplest explanation and Occam’s Razor applies, and partly because anyone who thinks that tariffs can be applied to smuggled fentanyl is clearly demonstrating his lack of understanding. Whilst the idea that smugglers would stop at the border to fill in forms and pay the tariff is attractive, its relationship to reality is somewhat distant.

The underlying statistics on which the tariffs are based are also questionable: the idea than an island group only inhabited by penguins and seals is exporting quantities of “machinery and electrical” goods to the US is fanciful at best. Whoever produced the figures for his show yesterday clearly didn’t apply any sort of ‘sense check’ to the numbers before letting His Orangeness loose to announce them. The calculation of the total value of tariff and non-tariff barriers is opaque, to say the least, but then basing decisions on arbitrary figures pulled out of thin air is his normal modus operandi.

However flimsy the factual basis, however arbitrary the decisions taken as a result, the fact is that the tariffs are going to be in force (until he changes his mind, which could be tomorrow - or even later today - based on experience to date), and the question is about how to respond. The main losers, in the immediate short term at least, will be US consumers. Even if the companies importing goods from elsewhere succeed in ‘persuading’ their suppliers to drop prices, or themselves decide to somehow ‘absorb’ part of the increase, the bottom line is that, for US consumers, prices of imported goods will rise. That isn’t a bug, it’s a feature; intended to encourage more domestic production. It might even work, but not on a large scale in the timescale of the current Trump presidency. Investment decisions required to build domestic capacity to replace imports aren’t going to happen overnight. To the extent that US demand for their products reduces or they feel obliged to reduce their pre-tariff prices, companies in all of the countries hit by tariffs, as well as their employees, will also be losers although, again, the timescale of that happening depends on how inelastic the demand for their products is.

For all the same reasons, it follows that the main losers when countries impose retaliatory tariffs will, in the short term, be the consumers in those countries; the process is a reciprocal one. For that reason, and despite all the natural desire to hit back at the person and country responsible, the immediate reaction of Sir Starmer (which is that he should not react immediately) is probably sensible as far as it goes. If and when it becomes clear that Trump’s approach is giving some US companies either individually or by sector an advantage over UK companies, that is the time to respond forcefully. Protectionism can also be reciprocal, another of those unfortunate facts which Trump seems incapable of understanding.

The bigger concern with Sir Starmer’s response is about whether trying to ingratiate himself and the UK with His Orangeness is the best way to deal with a bully. Being best mates with a bully might buy some relief in the short term, but it facilitates the bullying of others and, in the long term, the bully will always come back for more. Sir Starmer’s apparent unwillingness to collaborate with others rather than seek advantage over them is unhelpful, and fails to acknowledge that, however important the UK might have thought itself to be in the past, the future of these islands is inevitably linked to that of the rest of Europe. His reluctance to accept that a choice has to be made is itself making the default choice of sucking up to the bully. Talk of a reset of the relationship between the UK and the EU is just hot air when the government is seeking to negotiate an advantage for itself over the EU partners. Pretending to be everyone’s best friend is the best way to end up friendless.

Following the money

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He might twist and turn a little on the issue, but there’s no real doubt that Farage wants to move from an NHS funded out of taxes to one funded more by insurance. He knows, though, that the NHS ideal of services being free at the point at which they are required is popular, and he’s obviously finding it difficult to find a form of words which means that would still be true as well as meaning that those who can afford to pay for insurance will do so. 

It isn’t just a Farage thing, either. There are plenty of Tories as well as an increasing number of Labour politicians who seem to be thinking along similar lines, with they key phrase always being about ‘those who can afford to…’. A system of health care based on the most well-off paying more than the poorest sounds hard to argue against – but what advocates of such an approach want us to forget is that that’s exactly what we have now. Health care is free for all, funded by tax and National Insurance, and those who earn the most pay the most. In principle, there’s no necessary difference between the two models. In principle, it shouldn’t matter which model we use, so why are they so keen to change?

Ultimately, there are several reasons, none of which they are particularly explicit about.

The first two are purely ideological: they have an almost pathological hatred of taxation, the state, and the whole idea that the state should be doing anything. Handing over the NHS to the management of a network of private providers and private insurance companies is, in their eyes, axiomatically better. That leads us on to the second reason, which is almost a corollary: they believe that all economic activity (and whilst ‘economic activity’ isn’t the first description of the NHS which springs to mind for many of us, the NHS is actually a significant part of the UK economy) should be profit-generating.

There are also two probable consequences of an insurance-based system along the lines that they are suggesting. They are both features rather than bugs. The first is that the target group for paying more is rather larger than the wealthy few who might be more easily targeted by a more progressive tax system. What might be called the ‘middle earners’ are the ones who would end up paying more. They might be ‘able’ to afford it, although it is always and inevitably the case that people paying more for one thing end up with less disposable income to spend on other things. That is the price they would pay for having a more reliable and available health service. The second is that we would end up with a two-tier health system. The UK, allegedly, cannot afford to improve the NHS for all, but a system of private providers available only to those paying for insurance would provide a better service than the residual NHS which would continue to exist to serve those who could not afford, or choose not, to pay for insurance. It is, after all, that belief that they will get a better or faster service that drives many to pay for private insurance currently.

The ‘winners’ from the alternative system would be those owning the shares in the companies guaranteed to make a handsome profit; there is a group in the middle who would lose financially but probably gain in terms of an improved service; the ‘losers’ will be those who are thrown back on an inadequate public NHS, getting a second-class service – typically, the poorest and the lowest earners. It’s obvious why the first of those three groups would see this as being in their personal interest. They will be a reliable source of donations for any party promoting such a policy. Those in the second group would have to weigh up the pros and cons rather more carefully; some would favour it, others less so. But the target electoral group for Farage and his gang is actually the third group. His reluctance to spell things out starts to look entirely rational.

Planning on the basis of blind faith

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The establishment of the Office for Budget Responsibility by George Osborne in 2010 was a cunning plan to embed orthodox neoliberal economic thinking into the UK economy; to guarantee, in effect, that no non-Conservative government (for which, read Labour) could ever try to follow a different path. He never intended that it would trip up a Conservative government but, in fairness, who could honestly have foreseen Liz Truss? When the inevitable happened, and a Tory Party riven by Brexit, broken by lies, and displaying utter incompetence eventually gave way to a Labour government, the plan worked like a dream. Lacking in sufficient imagination to realise that she could just abolish the OBR (other countries manage without one), appoint different people to run it, or simply change its remit, all of which are in the power of the government, Reeves has chosen instead to do exactly what Osborne planned, and treat its conclusions as though they were written on tablets of stone handed down from on high.

She wanted to count her benefit cuts as saving £5 billion, but the OBR calculated that they would only save £3.4 billion, so off she dutifully went to lop another £1.6 billion off future spending plans. Experience tells us one clear truth – both her original estimate and that of the OBR are wrong. We don’t know by how much (or even in which direction), but planning on the basis that either one is correct five years in advance would be stupidity of the highest order (and therefore, apparently, a basic tenet of government financial planning). As JK Galbraith so succinctly put it, “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”.

It’s interesting to note, though, that Reeves’ faith in the power of economic forecasting is selective. When a forecast produced by the OBR ‘forces’ her to do what she wants to do anyway (and anyone who believes that she really doesn’t want to cut benefits needs to get out more), it’s an immutable law of economics; when another forecast by her own government tells her that the result of her actions will be to push 250,000 more people (including 50,000 children) into poverty, she demurs, and claims that they’ve got it wrong because her benefit cuts will miraculously result in more people being in work. The forecast almost certainly is wrong, of course (back to Galbraith), but by how much and in which direction we won’t know for some time to come. What we do know, without having to wait any time at all, is that we have a Labour government which is remarkably relaxed about putting more people into poverty when it’s entirely within their own control not to do so.