Experience is often over-rated

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

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

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

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

What are we proposing to defend?

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

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

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

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

We need to retake control of the economy

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

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

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

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

Will Farage let me drive on the right if I want to?

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Whether the 20mph default speed limit in built-up areas is a good thing or a bad thing is obviously a matter of opinion, depending on whether we prioritise reducing casualties or convenience and speed. The statistics show that it has reduced the number and severity of casualties on the roads, although a thorough evaluation might need a few more years to assess whether it is really working as well as it appears to be. On the downside, experience suggests that it has led to an increase in aggressive driving and risky overtaking manoeuvres, especially by those vehicles whose drivers are exempt from the law. I can’t find a definitive definition of exempt categories in the legislation itself, but simple observation over the past year leads me to conclude that it includes taxis, white vans, and BMWs.

Farage told us last week that it is a ‘looney’ policy, and went on in a Q&A session to describe it as being an example of government telling people what is right for them, adding "It is typical of control, control, control". In essence, his view seems to be that it has nothing to do with safety, and that the Welsh Government have introduced it solely with the aim of controlling what people may or may not do. It’s a particularly silly argument – if it applies to the 20mph limit, then it also applies to the 30mph limit, or to any limit set at 40, 50, 60 or 70. All of them control what citizens can and can’t do. Come to that, why should the government control on which side of the road I should drive? All laws set limits on what we can and can’t do, they all ‘control’ us to a greater or lesser extent. The question is – or ought to be – about where we draw the line, and how we balance safety against speed of travel – or, more generally, personal advantage against collective advantage. ‘Not liking something’ is not enough to distinguish between an arbitrary control of behaviour and a sensible safety measure.

Reasoned debate is not, though, what Farage and his ilk want. Their aim is to appeal to people whose minds are already made up, and to strengthen those existing prejudices. Not that reasoned debate would ever help anyway. No-one who has not arrived at a particular view in the first place through a careful and rational study of the evidence is going to be persuaded to a different view by a careful and rational study of that same evidence. And that doesn’t only apply to the question of speed limits. Believing that evidence can and will shift an opinion which was never evidence-based to start with is a mistake which many of us make. Overcoming prejudice and a willingness to disregard mere facts is more of a long term project, which involves teaching critical thinking as a key element of education. There is a reason why Farageists and their fellow travellers are hostile to the idea of an educated populace.

Who's going to check? And when?

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Whether the newly appointed leader of Reform Ltd in Wales actually lives in Wales or not appears to be an open question at present. It’s a question which Martin Shipton, at Nation.Cymru, is doggedly pursuing. If it’s really true that he doesn’t, then both he and Farage have been more than a little foolish in putting forward a story which falls apart after one day of scrutiny. Maybe they really are that stupid, but it’s more likely that they believe that they can game the system.

The requirement that candidates for May’s Senedd election should live in Wales, and be registered to vote in Wales, is entirely reasonable, especially after the experience of a predecessor party to Reform having had a resident of Wiltshire as its leader in the Senedd. It’s something of a departure for UK electoral politics, though: there is no requirement, for instance, for any candidate for Westminster to reside in the UK. They merely have to state that “they are at least 18 years old and be either: a British citizen, or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, or a citizen of a commonwealth country who does not require leave to enter or remain in the UK, or has indefinite leave to remain in the UK”. They also need to provide an address where they can be contacted. But as far as I’m aware, there is no requirement for the returning officer to verify the information provided. Verifying the veracity of the information provided by candidates has never been part of their role; they merely verify that the relevant boxes on the form have been completed properly. It seems probable that the same approach will apply in the case of Senedd elections: if the candidate provides a valid Welsh electoral roll number, and gives an address where (s)he claims to live, is it any part of the responsibility of the Returning Officer to check that those details are true?

It is perfectly legal to be registered to vote at two different addresses (it’s not usually legal to vote at both, although there is no check on that), and the definition of ‘main residence’ is not as straightforward as it might sound. Reform Ltd may be about to ‘test the system’ by putting forward as a candidate an individual who may not meet the legal requirements. It’s not at all clear that there is any process in place to challenge the information provided by candidates, let alone pro-actively verify its veracity, other than by a court process after the election. Relying on ‘the law says’ amounts to assuming that all candidates are honest people of good faith. It’s just possible that some might not be.

Is poverty really the right way to save pubs?

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Not so long ago, I wondered whether capitalists and supporters of capitalism really understood the way it worked, a theme picked up again in relation to pubs in this post. Pubs, in particular, have been back in the news again over the last week, with Farage’s proposal that impoverishing 450,000 children and redirecting the money saved into pubs could knock 5p off the price of a pint and save thousands of pubs, and the suggestion from the First Minister, Eluned Morgan, that people should stop drinking wine and watching Netflix at home and get down to the pub instead. The opposition’s response to the First Minister was, sadly, more Farage than Morgan, claiming that the problem was for the government rather than citizens to solve, and lies in the system of rates and taxation. Both Farage and the opposition in the Senedd seem to be starting from the wholly unrealistic proposition – albeit a basic tenet of classical economics – that all consumer decisions boil down to cost comparisons. Under that tenet, people choose wine and Netflix over beer and pubs purely on the basis of relative cost.

Like much of theoretical economics, it’s utter nonsense. It is an established fact that young people, overall, are drinking less and that traditional pubs are considered increasingly unattractive to many of them. Cutting the price of a pub visit so that more people go, or encouraging people to drink more when they get there – which is what subsidies, whether direct or in the form of tax concessions, actually set out to do – might delay the inevitable, but if supply outstrips demand by an increasing margin, and if that falling demand is the result of demographic change rather than price considerations, then capitalism decrees that the supply should fall. Put another way, closing pubs is the natural and rational outcome of a change in consumer choices.

Whether that’s a good thing or not is another question. I’m certainly not a fan of leaving all decisions to the dictates of capitalist markets. There are some pubs – particularly, but not exclusively, in rural areas – which also provide a sort of community hub, and act as a centre for other (not necessarily alcohol-related) activities. There is a case, in terms of social cohesion rather than dry cost-benefit analysis, for government action to keep such places open. That, though, requires rather more effort in identifying criteria and assessing locations against those criteria than some sort of blanket aid to the sector (which is what changes to the taxation regime provide). Setting out to save all pubs may be popular with those who use them, but it’s not good policy, and nor is it a good use of resources. And proposing to impoverish children to achieve it is about the best illustration one can think of as to why it’s wrong.

It shouldn't be down to the wrongdoer to take action

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It’s unclear whether Mandelson has committed any crimes or not in relation to his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, although – to date, at least – I’ve seen no serious suggestion that he has. Folly, yes, plenty of that. Failing to declare income to parliament, maybe: he says that he can’t remember receiving money from Epstein, and it’s just about possible that there’s some other explanation for the relevant lines on bank statements. Lobbying other ministers to reduce the tax bill for a friend, yes, that seems pretty clear cut. Leaking sensitive government documents to his friend, again, yes that also seems pretty clear cut. None of it, however, appears to be criminal. It’s enough, though, for people to be demanding that he should be stripped of his peerage as well as standing down immediately from the House of Lords.

It is a ‘feature’ of the English system of governance that people appointed to the Lords cannot easily be stripped of either their membership or their title. Apparently, it requires a specific act of parliament in each and every case, and Sir Starmer appears to have concluded that that is just too much trouble and is instead simply appealing to Mandelson to voluntarily relinquish his seat, and voluntarily stop using his title, while formally retaining it. It’s the sort of compromise and cop-out which bedevils a constitution which assumes that all parliamentarians, in whichever House, are inherently honourable people.

It’s a silly assumption to make – and it’s not as if there haven’t been previous cases to underline the point. The one which immediately leaps to mind is, of course, Jeffrey Archer. Unlike (so far) Mandelson, Archer really did commit criminal acts and was sentenced to four years as a guest of Her Majesty as a result. On his release in 2003, and although not a very active member, he remained a member of the House of Lords until he voluntarily stepped down in 2024. He remains a peer today.

It’s true that the law was subsequently changed – but it took more than ten years, until 2014 – to make it easier to sack a member of the House of Lords for serious crimes (although being sentenced to prison for less than twelve months, which one might think is still rather more serious than anything Mandelson has so far been found to have done, is still considered insufficient grounds for expulsion). The point here is not to defend Mandelson – on the contrary, he deserves to be kicked out. It is, rather, to highlight the arbitrary and inconsistent way in which things work, and the laziness and incompetence which means that successive governments would prefer to leave things alone than address an obvious failing. Demanding that the man accused of poor behaviour takes action himself rather than ensuring that he could be dealt with swiftly and effectively is a less than honest political response.

When is a benefit not a benefit?

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‘Cutting the benefits bill’ is an answer often trotted out by politicians when asked how they are going to pay for something. They don’t often spell out precisely how they will do that – identifying who will go without food or shelter isn’t exactly the most certain way of winning electoral support. Far better just to leave people with the impression that it will affect someone else, not them, and that it’s a painless way of saving money. There is a question, though, of how we define what a benefit payment is. It’s obvious which side of the benefit/ not-benefit line some payments fall, but rather less obvious in other cases. Pensions are a case in point – whilst some see them as a benefit payment, others see them more as a contractual obligation in return for the NI contributions made over many years.

Yesterday, the Tories in the Senedd proposed a new payment for grandparents to look after their grandchildren. Superficially, it’s presented almost as though it’s a payment for work done. Whether it would be taxable or not is unclear, but added to the full state pension (and non-working grandparents able to do child care are quite likely to be pensioners), it would push most of the eligible pensioners into paying income tax unless it were to be exempted. If it is, in effect, a non-taxable payment for care provided, then that would surely make it a benefit payment (not dissimilar, perhaps, to Attendance Allowance) in the views of many – and a universal (paid regardless of other income or ‘need’) one at that. And even if it is not regarded as a ‘benefit payment’ to the grandparents concerned, if the objective is, as the Tories claim, to improve childcare provision for working parents, isn’t that simply a backdoor form of benefit payment to those parents?

I raise these points not because the idea is inherently a bad one. On the contrary, good affordable childcare is a problem and this is an interesting proposal for a fairly cheap extension, although there is a lot of detail not yet spelled out. And I’m not opposed to benefit payments either. The point is, though, that it is more than a little hypocritical for a party which has spent years bemoaning the fact that a millionaire can theoretically get a 35p packet of paracetamol for nothing to propose to give any millionaire who happens to be a grandparent a couple of grand a year for doing what they may well be doing for free currently. It’s difficult to avoid concluding that the benefit payments they’re against are those which go to people unlikely to vote for them (usually the poorest), whilst they support a new benefit which is likely to go to those more likely to vote for them.

How did we get to here?

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Thatcher once said that she thought that her greatest success was Tony Blair’s Labour Party. Subsequent history shows that her success wasn’t so much an event as a process; a process which continues to reverberate today. Underlying the creation of Blairism was the way in which she, and those around her, succeeded in moving the parameters of acceptable political debate, often referred to as the ‘Overton Window’, sharply in one direction, and it’s a process which has been continued by her successors. Osborne’s creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility was another event during the process, an event which locked into ‘acceptable’ political discourse the utterly false notion that governments must seek to balance their income and expenditure over the long term, and pay down any accumulated debt. It’s a shibboleth which the Reeves's and Starmers of this world have adopted with enthusiasm.

They’re still at it today. Views within Labour which might have been regarded as being rather to the right of the party’s centre just a few decades ago are now routinely described as ‘soft left’ or even ‘hard left’. And Kemi Badenoch announced yesterday that there is no room in her Conservative Party for views which would have been seen as entirely mainstream until very recently. It isn’t only a success for the likes of Thatcher and Badenoch, of course; it’s also a success for a media which is owned by, and seemingly exists mostly to promote the interest of, those who own the wealth and in whose pockets and bank balances money continues to accumulate under neoliberal economics.

It didn’t have to be this way. In the immediate post-war years, a Labour government, which was rather more radical than it is often given credit for, actually shifted the Overton Window in the other direction. Whilst there was some pushback from the ‘right’ over some issues (such as nationalisation), it became generally recognised over two or three decades that the state had a role to play in industrial policy, that more homes – including council houses – should be built, that the NHS should be funded, that there should be a decent system of benefits. Albeit in a mild form, what one might call ‘social democracy’ became established as the accepted norm. Thatcher may have been the instigator-in-chief of the rupture, but Labour then played along, facilitating the conversion of an event into a process. That has brought us to a position where someone like Macmillan, Eden, Douglas-Home – and maybe even Heath – would be unwelcome in the party they once led, and where the Labour leadership seems to draw more on the thinking of Enoch Powell than of Bevan or Beveridge.

At the bottom of this lies a major question – should politicians lead or merely follow public opinion? Clearly the leaders of the UK’s three right wing parties all believe that public opinion is further to the right than they are. If they’re correct (and I’m not at all sure that they are – the most vocally-expressed opinions aren’t always the most popularly-held), then how do they think that we got from there to here? Blaming the media is a soft option, although that doesn’t make it entirely inaccurate. Ultimately, weak politicians, prepared to sacrifice any beliefs or principles in the pursuit of power, and anxious to secure the endorsement of the worst elements of the media, must take at least as much blame. It’s a tradition in which Starmer firmly sits.

Where is the challenge to conventional thinking?

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Although we don’t yet have the full details, the police reorganisation announced this week by the Home Secretary is already looking like a bit of a mish-mash – and a major missed opportunity for a more thorough debate around the best way of organising policing. Leaving aside the obvious own goal of not taking the opportunity to devolve policing to Wales, and the way that ends up undermining the First Minister and Labour’s Senedd election campaign, there are other ideas which seem not to have even been considered by what has shown itself to be a centralist and centralising government.

At the heart of the issue are two demands which appear to be in direct conflict, but that conflict is more to do with being wedded to the idea of single police forces than any practical necessity in terms of policing. Those two demands are: firstly, for a more local and accountable approach to policing; and secondly for the rationalisation of more specialist areas of policing. Even if policing were to be devolved to Wales, we would still face the same issues when debating whether to have a single Welsh force or multiple forces. However, there are plenty of international examples of an approach which does not put all ‘policing’ under a single organisation, but there seems to be a lack of willingness to learn from them. The Home Secretary’s intention to set up a national force to deal with certain crimes makes sense (although whether it should be a single EnglandandWales body or two separate bodies is an area for disagreement). But taking out those activities where a rationalisation of specialist resources is beneficial should reduce rather than increase the need for a reduction in the number of forces. An area like Dyfed Powys, for instance, is already too large for any serious degree of local control and accountability – an all-Wales force would be even less so.

Why could we not, instead, split policing between: smaller, more local forces – at county/ county borough level perhaps? – responsible for bobbies on the beat and the sort of low level activity which is most people’s experience of crime; regional forces responsible for investigating more serious crime; and a national (Welsh) force responsible for more specialist activities? And why does traffic policing have to fit into the same structure? The UK seems to be hung up on the idea that ‘policing’ is a single activity which has to fall under the remit of a single body, but abandoning that view opens up the possibility of reconciling the demand for more local accountability for community policing whilst still having resources and expertise in depth to respond to other needs. It’s what happens in many other countries, and it generally seems to work, but the centralising mindset seems unable to consider it. It’s the sort of different approach which a Senedd with control over policing could follow, although it would still require politicians willing to challenge convention.

What is to be defended - and how?

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It was reported a couple of weeks ago that there is a £28 billion ‘funding shortfall’ for the UK’s military forces. It underlines the way in which a careful choice of words can frame any discussion. The substance of the story is that the military needs a lot more money to do all the things that it wants to do, and is presenting the lack of that money as a ‘shortfall’. It’s not the only word that could be used. The same gap could equally be framed as a deliberately planned overspend: the expenditure plan has been drawn up in a way which requires more money than the budget has allocated. A ‘shortfall’ is the responsibility of government, but an ‘overspend’ is the responsibility of the defence chiefs. It’s all about blame avoidance.

The more substantive underlying question is about what the UK’s military needs are; establishing that is a prerequisite to talking about how the expenditure is funded. It’s not a question on which either the government or the military really wants any sort of debate, because an open discussion on the question must inevitably put the question of the Trident upgrade on the table. This enormously expensive project is a major element of the UK’s planned military spend, yet it is, in essence, a weapons system which could only ever be used as a posthumous act of revenge following a nuclear attack on the UK. Even then, there’s considerable doubt as to whether the UK could really decide to fire any of the missiles without US authorisation. The UK government always claim that it can be so used, but the phrase attributed to Mandy Rice-Davies applies. Scrapping Trident completely would free up enough funding to overcome the alleged shortfall, even if we collectively decided that we still wanted to do everything else on the military shopping list.

Meanwhile the Lib Dems have come up with an alternative funding mechanism – the issue of what they are calling ‘war bonds’, based on what the government did during the two world wars. According to Ed Davey, this could raise an additional £20 billion for military purposes, and it’s clear that he thinks that the target market is individuals across the UK, so it would be giving the public a chance to "support patriotically our defence". I suspect that he’s right in saying that the government could raise that sort of money, although it’s more likely to come from the wealthiest in society rather than the man in the street, and they’re more likely to buy such bonds for the security of the capital and the interest they would attract than out of any great patriotic fervour. Given that the government (and there is no indication that a Lib Dem government would take a different view on this) regards all bond sales as ‘borrowing’, it would blow a massive hole in any fiscal rules. But they are correct in identifying that there is a market for more government bonds, which gives the lie to the idea that bond-holders are demanding that the government redeem existing bonds, aka ‘pay off debt’.

What they are all doing, though, is talking about the issue as though the constraint is a lack of money, when it really isn’t. The constraints on government spending on the military are firstly whether the spare physical resources (labour, materials, etc.) exist, and secondly, if they don’t, to what extent do we wish to prioritise weaponry over wellbeing by redirecting those resources. Treating money as the constraint serves only the few in society, and makes it more or less inevitable that the cost of increasing military expenditure falls, ultimately, on the wellbeing of the many. Destroying that which we wish to defend is no defence at all. It’s easy to see why the purveyors of war all want to avoid that question.

Labour needs more than a better story-teller

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Nobody really knows how much impact an individual has on the outcome of an election. I can say from experience as a candidate that a number of electors will tell candidates something along the lines of ‘I don’t usually vote for your party, but I’m going to vote for you’. I can also say from experience as a canvasser on behalf of other candidates that a similar number of electors will tell canvassers something along the lines of ‘I usually vote for your party, but I won’t vote for X’. Whether they net down to zero is an unanswered – and unanswerable – question, but the overall effect is that most candidates (guilty as charged!) end up believing that their own personality and ability is having a greater effect than it actually is. What we simply can’t do is run the same election twice and see what the impact of different candidates might be. Martin Shipton, on Nation.Cymru, wrote a timely reminder last week about the dangers of believing in political Messiahs.

It’s clear that Andy Burnham, to say nothing of his friends and supporters, believes that he is uniquely placed to win the pending by-election in Manchester – or would be, if he were allowed to stand. Those same friends and allies are now warning of the dire consequences of blocking his candidature, claiming that the seat will be lost to Labour as a result. There is a danger, for Labour, of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, which will leave Burnham and pals on the sidelines declaring that it all could have been so different if only he’d been allowed to stand. He might well have lost anyway, of course; which outcome we choose to believe depends on the extent to which we believe that the personality and profile of candidates makes a net difference in one direction or the other. In blocking the candidature of one individual, Sir Starmer and his allies might well have blocked one potential source of challenge at the expense of making a challenge from another direction even more probable. It was a gamble either way.

For those of us not party to the drama, intrigue, and machinations of the Labour Party at its worst, the bigger question is about policy rather than personality. Clearly, Burnham is a more effective communicator than Starmer, although most would probably agree that that is not a particularly high bar. But how different is he really in terms of a policy agenda? Not as much as the spin suggests, would be my assessment. That is the real problem for Labour – they’re so committed to their self-imposed fiscal rules that a minor tweak to those rules would make little real difference; they need to do more than tell the story a bit better. Those who are arguing that the answer is a change of leader are asking the wrong question.

Maybe we'll never know what Rutte said to Trump...

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Over the years, I’ve attended many meetings in which one attendee or another has set out his or her (usually his) views on whatever the issue is and then simply assumed the agreement of everyone else, sometimes even leaving immediately after speaking. ‘The boss (even if he wasn’t the boss in any formal sense) has spoken’ as an approach to ‘consensus’. Perhaps we’ll never know exactly what happened at the meeting between Trump and Rutte yesterday, but it sounds a lot like the same sort of thing: Trump has expounded his views and assumed agreement – in his mind, ‘sorting out the detail’ is all about agreeing the precise terms of his takeover. Certainly, Rutte cannot have agreed to any handover, or even a framework, or even the concept of an idea for a framework (to use the convoluted language which Trump seems to favour), for any handover; he simply doesn’t have the authority. All the indications are that Rutte has done little more than spell out to Trump the terms and detail of existing treaties, all of which His Orangeness will have forgotten by tomorrow.

The threat of using force and imposing extra tariffs has been removed, a statement greeted by a huge sigh of relief all round, but whether that threat has really been removed remains to be seen. After all, until a few days ago, Trump supported the handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. In Trumpland, any statement or agreement is valid only until it isn’t. Maybe it’s true, as some have suggested, that Trump has backed down because of the impact of his actions and statements on the stock market. Stock markets are an extremely poor indicator of the success of any economy, and are generally thought to be over-valued anyway, but to Trump, stock markets seem to be his main, or even only, indicator of success. To billionaires whose wealth is measured by the ‘value’ of their stock holdings, there’s a certain logic in that. Maybe one of the wilder stories I’ve seen – that he had ordered the military to prepare plans for a Greenland takeover only for the order to be refused as illegal – is true, although it seems unlikely to me that he could not find at least one general prepared to act on his instructions.

Or perhaps another basic truth has been demonstrated empirically – bullies back down when faced with strong united push-back. Certainly, one of the few tariff battles on which Trump has caved was that with China, which stood up to him resolutely. It would be nice to believe this version of events, with its corollary that Starmer and others have learned that resistance is better than appeasement. The problem with unpredictability is that it’s unpredictable; even if something ‘worked’ once, that doesn’t mean it will ‘work’ again. The biggest takeaway from Davos was surely the speech by Mark Carney of Canada and its message that countries need to stand together rather than be dominated individually. Whether the sort of international agreement and co-ordination which that requires can be achieved in a suitably rapid timescale is an open question, but signs that Starmer and others recognise the need and are working in that direction are sadly lacking at the moment. Carney was talking primarily about ‘middle-sized’ countries, but for those of us living in smaller countries which may not all yet be independent, the Carney approach offers us more hope for the future than any alternative currently on the table.

Education is about more than employability skills

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The research showing a link between education level, attitudes towards immigration, and right wing politics makes for interesting reading. It seems that non-graduates are far more likely than graduates to be both hostile to immigration and vote for the Tories or Reform Ltd. Could that, I wonder, be why those parties are so keen to reduce the number of young people going to university? For those of us who see a better educated population as a valid and worthwhile end in itself, rather than treating universities as simply a means of matching ‘resources’ to the requirements of multi-national capital, having a more tolerant population which is better able to analyse facts rather than follow prejudices is just one of the many benefits. I can see why those who seek to build a politics based on prejudice might not agree.

Dictatorship is not the answer

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It seems as though Trump’s proposed ‘Peace Board’, initially mooted as part of the ‘peace plan’ for Gaza, is being given a much wider remit by its sole owner and proprietor, one Donald Trump. It looks more like an attempt to replace the UN with a handpicked core membership (to include a chair for life appointed because he’s called Donald Trump, as well as that well-known purveyor of peace, former UK PM Tony Blair, and Trump’s son-in-law, Secretary of State, and special envoy), and a wider membership to be invited to participate by the chair. This wider group includes one Vladimir Putin, a man particularly well-known for his love of peace, and that staunch defender of democracy, Lukashenko of Belarus. Those accepting membership can opt to upgrade to a premium membership in exchange for handing the chair a mere $1 billion (to be spent as decided unilaterally by the chair), whilst anybody who turns down an invitation can expect to be hit with further tariffs (such as the proposed 200% tariff on French wines and champagne which Macron has earned by politely declining. Like any good mafia don, Trump is making people offers that he thinks they can’t refuse.

That there are problems with the UN is undeniable. Reaching a consensus is a difficult and time-consuming task, especially when five permanent members of the Security Council have a veto. It’s not entirely clear exactly how Trump’s proposal overcomes that weakness, although he presumably expects all members to simply accept his ultimate authority on all decisions. Theoretically, that works, but practically it’s problematic even when he’s president of the US; if he remains as chair when (or if) he ceases to be president, by what power exactly does he impose compliance? That problem of seeking and achieving consensus, leading to painfully slow decision-making, isn’t confined to the UN, of course: the EU suffers from the same issue. The question we are faced with is whether we accept that as a cost of seeking consensus and agreement through negotiation, or whether we simply vest all power in an individual – or rather, in Trump’s case, allow an individual to vest all power in himself. For all the frustrations of dealing with a multitude of different parties with different interests and agendas, I’m sure that I’m not alone in rejecting the dictatorship which is what the alternative amounts to.

Here in the UK, another former UK PM has weighed in with his own take on the solution. It’s full of fine words, as in this paragraph: “The democracies of the world should draft a short values statement, echoing the UN charter’s starting point – “We the peoples …” – and this time showing we mean it. Its first section would assert our full support for self-determination and the mutual recognition of nation states*; for the outlawing of war and coercion; and for the primacy of law, civil rights and democratic accountability as the essential means by which human dignity is advanced. A second section would outline the rules that govern the cooperation essential to guarantee food, water and security, economic opportunity and social justice, and climate resilience and health for all, including pandemic prevention”. But it, too, is short on telling us how this can be enforced.

Both Trump and Brown have identified a real problem when it comes to taking international decisions, but only Trump has come up with a ‘solution’ – personal dictatorship by one D. Trump. The reality is that, if we reject the ‘might is right’ approach of Trump, there is no simple solution. Not electing people who are clearly deranged would help a little, but there’s no obvious way of preventing that either.

^* Obviously, Gordon Brown does not intend this to be taken as being in any way support for nations not currently regarded as states – Wales, Scotland, Catalunya etc. – having any right to self-determination. That would never do.

For Trump, there is no such thing as an 'ally'

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As part of his justification for gaining total control over Greenland, the Guardian reports that Trump “has insisted that Denmark cannot be relied upon to protect Greenland in the case of a confrontation with China or Russia”. He’s right, of course: there is no way that Denmark acting alone can mobilise sufficient resources to defend Greenland against an all-out assault by Russia or China (although the idea of an all-out assault by China seems even more far-fetched than an assault by Russia). I’d go further: there is no way that Denmark could mobilise sufficient resources to defend the territory of Denmark itself from an all-out assault by Russia or China – or even the US. And Denmark is far from being the only country in that position. The Danes might foolishly have thought that that was precisely why they joined the NATO alliance – so that they would not be left alone to face such a threat, never really expecting that it would come from their supposed ally rather than their supposed enemy.

Some of Trump’s acolytes have taken the analogy even further by arguing, in effect, that any country unable to defend itself, acting alone, from an assault by one of the big powers has no right to exist – and that any power which is able to overcome another country by dint of superior force has the right to do exactly that. But when the mightiest military power the world has ever seen is run by people who believe that they have the right to take whatever they can take, it is time for the rest of the world to recognise that the US can no longer be regarded as any sort of ally, let alone a reliable one. No agreement can be taken as being worth anything from the day it is signed; the bully is always likely to come back for more. Trump himself seems to see the world as divided into three great powers each with its own sphere of influence, with all other countries being either supplicants or enemies. There is no other status in between supplicant and enemy. Pretending that the UK somehow has some special influence or relationship with this version of the US is turning a blind eye to reality. Yet that is where Starmer has placed the UK.

Options are limited, and not instant. If we assume that we want to avoid getting into a shooting war with the US – a reasonable, not to say wise, assumption – then any defence against the fascist state into which the US is descending has to be primarily economic, and it has to involve collective action. Part of Starmer’s reluctance to go down that route is probably that agreeing collective action takes time, and economic action is in any event slow-acting: sanctions against Iran, North Korea, Russia etc. aren’t exactly notable for their success. Needing the agreement of no-one, and protected from any restraining action from Congress or the courts, Trumpism is, on the other hand, fast-acting, as well as arbitrary, capricious, and unpredictable. I rather suspect that part of the calculus of Starmer and others is that Trump will be gone in three years, and the US will return to ‘normal’: still the world’s bully, but a little less blunt and obvious about it. That, though, depends on some key assumptions: that Trump will not carry on past the end of his term; that any successor won’t be as bad or even worse; and that elections will actually take place at all. None of these seem to be worth betting the farm on, yet that’s where Europe, and especially the UK, seem to be.

Will the nuclear decommissioning model actually work?

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The story this week about funding the reclamation work at Ffos y Fran has wider implications than are immediately obvious. Whether the company actually has the money available to carry out the promised reclamation work is still to be determined, although some thorough forensic financial investigation suggests that it has. Whether that money has been deliberately moved around in an attempt to shelter it for the company’s shareholders is unclear, but goes to the heart of the dispute. Court proceedings will answer those questions in due course.

The underlying question, though, is how realistic it is for any company to be expected to set aside large amounts of profit during the operational years of a facility in order to pay for restoration work on completion. Clearly, the suggestion that it is a reasonable expectation was key to the consent for the site in the first place; it is the enforceability of that which is now in doubt. It doesn’t really fit the capitalist model of enterprise which involves initial capital expenditure to get a project operational and then maximum extraction of profit during the operational phase. Committing to several years of heavy expenditure requiring the time and attention of the company’s owners and managers for no return at all really doesn’t fit the model. It should be no surprise at all if any company in that position attempted to avoid – or reduce – its liabilities.

It’s a model, though, in which government seems to be placing blind faith when it effectively allows private companies to build and run major projects. In yesterday’s post, I referred to the long-term implications for an independent Welsh government of allowing Wylfa Newydd to go ahead. The assumptions around the Hinkley Point C project include that EDF will be picking up the full costs of decommissioning through a Funded Decommissioning Programme, and the agreed strike price for electricity provided by the plant includes an allowance for those costs. The problem, though, is that no-one really knows what those costs will be – and the decommissioning work will continue for decades, not just years, during which the company will no longer be receiving any income for the electricity produced. The probability of that actually happening seems to me to be vanishingly small, with the likelihood being that some or all of the cost will ultimately fall back on public funds. The same will be true for Wylfa Newydd, meaning a large potential liability for a future Welsh government. Ffos y Fran is an interesting case study, but nuclear decommissioning is on an enormously larger scale – billions rather than tens of millions. Is that being understood?

There's more to coalitions than mathematics

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For those of us who favour independence for Wales, yesterday’s opinion poll showing increased support for both Plaid and the Green Party is clearly good news. The fact that the larger of those parties has declared that independence is not on the agenda for the next Senedd term, even if there is a majority in favour amongst Senedd members, takes a little of the sheen off; although, in practical terms, getting to that point as a result of the sheer difficulties of persuading London to allow a referendum is little different from getting to that point by not trying. Nevertheless the apparent willingness of a full 50% of the population to vote for independence-supporting parties is a dramatic turnaround in Welsh politics. It’s a huge step forward, which would have been hard to believe just a few years ago.

It is, of course, just one poll, and things could change between now and May. I’ll admit that, after having spent the 40 years from 1971 heavily involved in Welsh politics, the idea that the Labour Party could really be relegated to equal fourth place on 10% of the vote is still a little hard to believe, no matter how many polls suggest it, and no matter how attractive it might be as an outcome. Previous polls had suggested that a Plaid-led government was the likeliest result in the new Senedd, as long as Labour either participated in some way or at least acquiesced, but this latest poll suggests the possibility of a Plaid/Green coalition without Labour’s involvement – a much more significant break with the past.

Certainly, there is a strong policy crossover between those two parties, probably stronger than that between Labour and Plaid, if policy statements can be taken at face value. That crossover is not total, however, and there is a danger in performing simplistic mathematics to predict a government without considering the differences as well as the similarities. One of the most obvious areas of potential difficulty, it seems to me, is over energy policy. A pragmatic approach to politics has sometimes led Plaid politicians to oppose new nuclear power stations only in the places that no-one wants to build them, whilst supporting wind and solar projects only in the places that no-one wants to build them.

The stand-out question in this context is whether a Plaid/Green government would be for or against Wylfa Newydd? Energy policy itself is not a devolved matter; to the probable relief of both parties, the next Welsh Government won’t have to take the yes/no decision on the project, so perhaps the parties would be able to come up with some sort of fudge. That might be more difficult if the First Minister himself takes a clear view in favour, and there are a host of other ancillary decisions which could either facilitate or frustrate the project where Welsh ministers might well need to take a position. The implications of new nuclear power for a future independent government are significant either way. I’m sure that I’m not the only voter who will be wondering, when it comes to putting the cross on that paper in May, whether I’m voting for or against expansion of nuclear power in Wales – and at the moment, we don’t have that certainty.

Which is the best way of dealing with Trump - bombs or tariffs?

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Two of the big stories in August 1968 were the Russian invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia, and the ongoing ‘troubles’ in the north of Ireland. It may be apocryphal – I’ve failed to trace the report directly – but there has long been a story about a newspaper publishing a picture of a youth throwing stones at a tank, which attracted a response from one reader asking whether the youth was a Czech patriot or an Irish hooligan. Fact or fiction, the story underlines that what we observe sometimes owes as much to our own prejudices as to objective fact.

Two stories from Trumpland yesterday underline the same phenomenon. Firstly, there was this one, with Trump officials in the wake of the apparent murder of Renee Good warning potential protesters that they will deal severely with anyone protesting against the repressive actions of the masked snatch squads which Trump has despatched to roam the streets of US cities. Then there was this one, in which Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting against the repressive actions of the Iranian authorities, threatening violence against the regime if they continue to kill protesters. Whether protest is good or bad depends on who’s doing the protesting and against what – nothing new there, it’s exactly the approach he adopted to the assault on Congress in January 2021.

He seems to have only two solutions to any problem, both of which are under consideration in relation to Iran. The first is violence: there must be somebody he can bomb. And the second is tariffs – in Trumpland, increasing the cost of goods or services for Americal consumers is axiomatically a way of seeking compliance from foreign governments. If those are the only things he understands, it gives the rest of the world a question about how we should respond to the growing lawlessness of the US authorities: should we bomb Washington, or impose tariffs on all US products? It's not a serious question, of course - but it's hard to think of anything else that he might even begin to understand.

Who is really being subsidised?

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The hospitality sector is up in arms about changes to business rates which, they say, will make their businesses unsustainable, and are asking for changes which will reduce the amount of tax that they need to pay. They are saying, in effect, that they are unable to charge a price for their products which is sufficient to cover all their costs plus returning a reasonable profit. Looked at in hard market capitalism terms, as discussed here, that means that many of those businesses are simply not viable. Left to its own devices (which is what many capitalists claim to want), a capitalist market would force a reduction in capacity (some businesses would fail) such as to achieve a new balance between supply and demand at a (higher) price which makes the remaining businesses viable.

Now I’m not a huge fan of unfettered capitalism, and whilst markets are, in general, an efficient way of allocating resources, the idea that they are or should be completely unregulated is not a sensible way of determining social priorities. Governments have always interfered, in various ways, to moderate the impact of markets in pursuit of wider goals. And the government may well be right in thinking – for reasons of employment retention, or for reasons of social cohesion, that maintaining a higher level of provision of restaurants, pubs and hotels than the market can profitably sustain is a good thing, and thus decide to offer some sort of assistance. Those in the sector want to see that assistance in the form of reduced taxation, but it isn’t the only way of achieving the aim. Tax breaks are a form of subsidy. They don’t always look like that, because it involves taking less from the business rather than giving them a handout, but a tax regime which adjusts rates for some categories of businesses in order to keep otherwise unviable businesses in existence cannot be other than a selective subsidy.

It isn’t the only way of providing a subsidy. The government could, instead, decide to take the same amount of money and issue vouchers to each household, enabling them to enjoy a discount off the bill for food and drink – subsidising the pints not the pub. It looks very different, of course, but the effect is the same: people would be able to go out and enjoy a meal or a drink which they couldn’t otherwise afford, and the businesses would be receiving an income sufficient to make them viable. Better yet – for those who are greater fans of markets than I – it would enable the consumers to choose which pubs and restaurants received the extra custom and therefore money, rather than being a blanket subsidy for all.

For a number of reasons, I wouldn’t actually propose that, but it’s interesting to note that many of those demanding tax breaks would be furious at the idea of ‘giving’ people money to eat out. It’s a universal benefit which they are getting without working for it, they would argue. Yet, in economic terms, it’s exactly the same thing: the same amount of money produces the same effect in terms of people being able to afford food and drink and businesses remaining viable. It raises an interesting and more general economic question: when the government gives a subsidy, who is it actually subsidising? Is it the business, the owners of the capital involved, the consumers, the suppliers, or the employees? In practice, all of those people benefit in some way or another, regardless of the form in which the subsidy is paid or to whom it is paid. So why is a ‘tax break’ deemed an entirely valid approach, whilst a handout to customers is some sort of undeserved freebie? The answer, of course, lies in who sets the agenda and boundaries of debate. And it isn’t the customers.

Divide and conquer is working as well as ever

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During his 2016 election campaign, Trump famously claimed that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue in New York and shoot someone and it would not affect his poll numbers. Whether it was true or not at the time is open to debate, but he certainly seemed to believe it, and all the indications are that he still does. At times, it even seems as though he is trying to test the claim empirically, even if it isn’t himself who actually pulls the trigger. The insouciance and lies with which he dismisses any criticism of the armed gangs of masked men which he has sent out to seize people off the street, or at their place of work, or even in schools and colleges, isn’t really surprising. It is entirely consistent with his character.

What is rather more depressing is the ease with which armed government employees have fallen into a culture where they regularly exceed any lawful authority and are willing to shoot first and ask questions later. And that applies as much to the individual soldiers and airmen involved in sinking boats as it does to the ICE teams roaming the streets of major cities. We know that ‘following orders’ is no defence, and that individual officers have a legal duty to question patently illegal orders rather than follow them, but some of what has been happening goes beyond mere obedience to superiors and into the realm of ‘using their own initiative’, secure in the knowledge that, even if they weren’t specifically ordered to do something, it’s what the head honcho wanted them to do. And if you can be persuaded that the Reich, or the Trumpate, will last a thousand years, the possibility of being held accountable will always look low.

We shouldn’t really be surprised: history tells us that it has happened before and contains plenty of examples of people who do what they think their bosses want them to do. It goes back at least as far as Henry II and his turbulent priest. With the greater availability of alternative (rather than solely official) news sources, it might have been hoped that a more aware population would be more resistant, but some reports suggest that the US is, probably deliberately, recruiting people who are barely literate to carry out their programme of detention and deportation. For any tyrant or despot, a poorly-educated populace always has advantages (and lest we think that we in the UK might be immune from such attitudes, think about those politicians railing against the number of people educated to degree level who they consider to be ‘over-qualified’ for their allotted station in life).

Looked at rationally, in an economy run by and for billionaires it ought to be strange that so many people who have little or nothing to gain by facilitating a kleptocracy in which wealth trickles ever more quickly upwards are so willing to act as agents of the kleptocrats. But sowing hatred and division and blaming ‘others’ for all the problems has shown itself to have extraordinary staying power as a means of cementing authority and wealth in the hands of the few. There's no sign of its power waning.

When is an agreement not an agreement?

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It was revealed today that Trump is unilaterally withdrawing the US from 66 international organisations and agencies on the basis that they are “contrary to the interests of the United States”. Whether that is actually true or not is an interesting question to which there is no absolute answer: it really depends on how one defines the ‘interests of the United States’ and over what timescale. The point, though, is that US membership of every one of those bodies will have been underpinned by a formal international agreement signed by the President of the day, and in some cases ratified by Congress. Other participating countries will have made assumptions about US sincerity and intentions in deciding the shape and nature of their own participation. Trump would probably argue that they were all signed by previous presidents, all of whom (in his eyes) were losers, incompetents, traitors or worse, but the bottom line is that he is simply reneging on agreements, often long-standing, to which others have assumed that the US would adhere.

It’s not the only example. Having signed an agreement with Keir Starmer just a few months ago, Trump has paused all work on the deal, demanding concessions in other areas first. It seems to be fairly typical of his approach to business as well as politics – if people give him everything he wants, he assumes that he didn’t ask for enough, banks what he’s got and then withdraws from the agreement until he gets more. All agreements are conditional and temporary until he decides he no longer likes them.

It’s a point which the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ needs to bear in mind. In tiptoeing around the easily-bruised Trump ego in order to keep him engaged and signed up to a peace plan for Ukraine, they are making an implicit assumption that he will consider himself bound by whatever document he signs. It’s a foolish assumption to be making – any security guarantees to Ukraine based on commitments made by Trump are likely to be worthless. If Putin could be persuaded to believe that Trump might honour his word, the ‘guarantees’ might have some sort of deterrent effect, but all the signs are that Putin has a much better understanding of Trump than do Starmer or Macron.

Given his past statements, it seems unlikely that Putin will sign up to any peace proposal involving the stationing of troops from NATO countries in Ukraine anyway (even if Trump gives him a nod and a wink to say he’s not serious, a scenario which is far from unlikely) so perhaps it will never be tested in practice. If he does agree, it could well end up meaning that Starmer and Macron are leading their countries into a shooting war with Russia without the essential intelligence and back up from the US. It underlines again how foolish it is, under the current US administration, to regard the US as an ally rather than a hostile power.

Is NATO nailed to the perch?

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Whether NATO is merely slumbering while it waits for the end of Trumpism in the US, or whether it has been nailed to its perch to give a misleading impression of life is an academic question, since in neither case can it be relied on (in the short term at least) to meet its stated objective of providing a collective system of defence. The Prime Minister of Denmark told us this week that it would be dead if the US launched a military attempt to take over Greenland. That sounds logical, although NATO ‘allies’ behaving aggressively towards each other isn’t exactly new. Think of the Cod Wars between NATO members Iceland and the UK in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, or the recurrent near-wars between Greece and Türkiye, occasionally involving the firing of real bullets. Threats by right-wing UK politicians against France or Spain were perhaps never really a practical proposition, but the mere fact that they were expressed shows that not everyone takes the alliance very seriously.

Invading and seizing part of the internationally-recognised territory of a fellow member state is on a different level, though. And when the invading force belongs to the largest and most powerful member of the alliance – the one which has been seen as the ultimate backstop since the founding of the alliance – that puts a more serious perspective on the question. Perhaps Trump will hold back from the military option. There are other approaches to getting what he wants (which seems – just like in Venezuela – to be more about oil and natural resources than about national security) although his love of macho action suggests he’d sooner deploy the military whether he needs to or not. Whether bullying, intimidation, and threats are any less of a danger to the NATO alliance than an actual military intervention is an interesting question; but one rather suspects that most of the members would prefer to keep their mouths shut and put the alliance on some sort of life support than pronounce it dead in such circumstances.

The wider question, though, is whether the alliance is already dead, de facto if not de jure. Trump has already made it clear that he will not come to the aid of any European country which hasn’t spent as much money as he declares necessary on buying US military hardware defence, and it's not at all clear that he would aid even those that do. In fairness to Trump – not a phrase which trips easily off the keyboard – I’ve long held doubts about the reliability of the US as a backstop under previous administrations, as well as about the role of the alliance itself. The difference between Trump and his predecessors is that he can’t help blurting things out where others preferred to maintain a more ambiguous silence. The bottom line is that an alliance dominated by one member and unable to operate effectively without that member ceases to be of any value if that one member goes rogue. Waiting for Trump to invade a fellow NATO member before declaring the organisation dead is pretending that the decaying corpse in front of us still shows signs of life. The question which European leaders should be debating is about building a new international order, starting in Europe, which does not depend on the dubious commitment of the military might of the US, and which is oriented towards avoiding wars rather than fighting them.

Farage is the consequence of limited ambition

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The owner and proprietor of Reform Ltd seems rather pleased that so many people are referring to him as a racist based on the overt racism he allegedly displayed as a schoolboy half a century ago. His argument is that it increases the probability that racist voters (or, to use the term which he seems to prefer, “our core support”) will vote for his company in a future election. It should be no surprise either that overt expressions of racism or non-denial denials thereof would motivate racists to vote for a racist, nor that so many of those most likely to vote for Reform fall into that category. He might choose his words ever so slightly more carefully these days, but no-one who listens to what he says can be in much doubt about his distaste for foreigners, particularly those of a different hue or religion or who dare to speak a language other than English.

The question is about how to respond. If calling him out as a racist solidifies his core support, does that mean we should all cease calling out his racism? Part of the answer to that is that, outside what he calls his ‘core support’, there are many people who are not racist: contrary to what some seem to believe, voting for Farage doesn’t necessarily make someone a racist. There must be at least some in that category who will be deterred by a better understanding of the nature of what it is that they are planning to vote for. But more widely than that, failure to address expressions of racism tends to normalise those views, and that, in turn, shifts the mainstream of political discourse towards, rather than away from, Farageism.

In effect, normalising Farage’s political views is exactly what the leadership of Labour (to say nothing of the Tories) has been doing for some time. Building a tolerant society depends, ultimately, not on what politicians do or say, but on building a wider consensus in society. But building consensus around the type of society which we might wish to see is a project which politicians, and especially Labour ones, have long since abandoned in favour of building a coalition of voters, whatever their views, which is large enough to secure power. Providing politicians with careers who can then exercise the power of the state is a much narrower project, and will change little. That does, though, seem to be the limit of their ambition.