More than a loophole

Tweet

Many years ago, when I was a member of the Vale of Glamorgan Council, I remember that the then (Tory) leader of the council rose to his hind legs to lecture the rest of us about something or other and during the course of his oration informed the world that people don’t swim in the water off Barry Island, they merely “go through the motions”. It was a refreshingly honest assessment of the sea condition at the time, although I did wonder how he squared that assessment with his role in promoting the Island as a tourist destination. “Going through the motions” – in both senses of the phrase – strikes me as a good description of the English government’s approach to quarantine for people arriving in the UK.

Johnson senior’s scenic little trip to Greece via Bulgaria highlights one of the major problems with the approach being adopted by the UK. The PM is not, of course, responsible for the actions of his father and, fortunately for him, even the mildest form of embarrassment is not something with which he is in the least bit familiar. It would, in any event, be wholly unfair to blame him for the behaviour of his father (although it’s a good deal less unfair to place a degree of blame on the father for the behaviour of the son). The point is that the system being used by Greece to determine who’s allowed in (and by the UK to decide who should quarantine) are based on the last, rather than the original, point of departure for the individual. So, whilst people are barred from travelling to Greece from the UK, if they stop in some intermediate country like Bulgaria they can enter freely. Similarly, a person travelling from New York to London would be required to self-isolate, but if the same person changes plane in Dublin the requirement disappears. And by the time the government publishes what looks likely to be an extensive list of exceptions in addition to the Republic, what’s left looks like little more than motions. Again, in both senses. ‘Loophole’ is a wholly inadequate word to describe it.

It appears that the English Government has agreed its list of exceptions with no consultation with the devolved administrations, which are expected to immediately fall meekly into line without discussion, or be blamed for delaying the decision. In the circumstances, it is reasonable for the devolved administrations to take, or consider taking, actions to protect their people from the reckless decisions being made in London. The PM’s objection to any idea that some sort of border exists between England and Scotland is a knee-jerk reaction – he seems quite happy to draw a border around Leicester and seek to apply controls over movement there. But then being consistent lives in the same box as embarrassment (see above). He is putting Scotland and Wales in an impossible situation – probably deliberately. Even if the Welsh Government were able to stop flights from an airport which they own (and incredibly, it seems that they are not, although I fail to understand how, under current guidance, anyone can legitimately arrive at the airport to catch the flights) they have no easy way of stopping people who arrive at Bristol or Heathrow from traveling into Wales. Whilst they may have the nominal power to impose their own rules on arriving aircraft, those only apply to airports within Wales. It’s almost as though Johnson wants to turn mild-mannered Mark Drakeford into a raving independentista. But that would require an ability to plan and think ahead (see embarrassment and consistency above).

Rewriting history

Tweet

Those who have complained about attempts to ‘erase’ or ‘rewrite’ history, in relation to the campaign to remove outdated symbols from their locations across the UK, are in effect saying only that they prefer the version of history which is familiar to them. The PM himself yesterday said that we should not attempt to ‘edit’ or ‘censor’ our history – what does that mean, if it isn’t about freezing one (i.e. his) interpretation of what happened in history for all time, and dismissing other interpretations as ‘wrong’? It’s a deliberate attempt to mislead and distract from the underlying question in order to maintain a version of history which suits a particular world view. And although the issue has been brought to the fore as a result of a specific problem it’s a much more general question than one about slavery or race – there are other examples much closer to home of the way in which history has long been interpreted to serve a particular viewpoint.

The PM claims that statues and symbols teach us about ‘our’ history. That is just about the last thing that they do. Without interpretation or nuance, and often carrying only limited information about the individuals represented, they tell us next to nothing about those thus commemorated or those who chose to erect the statue in the first place. His statement that “…those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history and impoverish the education of generations to come” is a classic piece of Johnsonian nonsense. I doubt that anyone has ever learned very much about anything from looking at statues (most of us find  books rather more useful), and simplistic labels of the sort found on monuments (often just a word or two such as ‘philanthropist’) are more misleading than educational. Take the now infamous Colston statue as an example. The inscription read "Erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city." The first part isn’t entirely accurate (the statue was erected at the behest of a tiny group of people, and appeals to the public failed to raise enough money to pay for it leaving the main instigator to pay most of the cost himself) and the second part, for anyone who knows anything about the man’s background, effectively declares that slave-trading was a ‘virtuous and wise’ calling. That isn’t ‘history’, it’s propaganda. I don’t think that anyone is asking people to ‘lie’ about our history – the lie is in presenting only a partial view in the first place.

There is, of course, scope for debate about whether the best form of action is to

·        remove such statues completely,

·        cart them off to a museum where they can be accompanied by a much fuller explanation of who the memorialised individuals were, what they did, and why the statues were erected, in a nuanced way which reflects changing mores,

·        or simply add interpretative material at the sites which provides context and a fuller and more rounded description.

But simply leaving things as they are – which seems to be the PM’s desired course of action – isn’t about respecting history at all, it’s about perpetuating existing myth and half-truth in support of a particular perspective.

In reality, ‘rewriting history’ is precisely what historians do, as one of their number explains here. It’s their job; it’s what they’re for, and if history were something immutable and inarguable, we wouldn’t need any more historians. Whilst the facts of the past don’t change, the importance ascribed to them does, along with the way in which those facts are interpreted and contextualised. Opponents of changing interpretations often argue that we need to accept that ‘values were different then’. It’s true, of course it is – but that’s precisely one of the main reasons why ‘history’ changes; as values and perspectives change, so too does the interpretation of facts and events. It isn’t just what some call historical revisionism, it’s more that the passage of time allows a considered re-evaluation. But the real question is this: if different people – and even different historians – can legitimately interpret the past in different ways, how do we decide between those histories? Even debating that question will help us all to a better understanding of our own history than we’ll ever get from looking at any statue and have much more impact than any insistence on the past remaining unchanging for ever. That’s probably why people like Johnson want to close down any debate. They are attached to their own view of ‘our great history’ and would prefer that the rest of us took the same view. We should be asking ourselves whose interests that might serve.

Being the best

Tweet

One of the problems for a certain type of nationalist is that they have a deep and abiding need to believe that their country is in every way ‘better’ than any other country. English nationalists are one of the most extreme in this respect. Indeed, they believe themselves so much better than anyone else that their form of superiority must not even be referred to as nationalism at all. They’re so nationalistic that they believe themselves to be uniquely not nationalist at all.

Such nationalism is often displayed by claims that the country is in some way ‘world-leading’. It’s a phrase trotted out regularly and is so self-evident that it never needs to be justified by mere facts or evidence. The phrase ‘mother of parliaments’ is one example, even if it doesn’t actually mean what most of them seem to believe that it means. Westminster is neither the oldest parliament nor the model for most other parliaments in the world, excepting only those that had some sort of version of Westminster imposed on them by Westminster itself. And most of those have reformed significantly since then, jettisoning the most arcane rituals such as the approach to voting.

Last month, Boris Johnson claimed that the UK’s approach to testing and tracking would be ‘world-beating’ and in place from the beginning of June. It isn’t and it wasn’t. Despite both of those negative statements being patently true they haven’t stopped him repeating the claim. It is an essential part of the nationalists’ approach to Brexit that the UK will become a ‘global leader’. It won’t and it can’t. I often wonder whether they really believe – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that the UK really is the best at everything; can they be that blind to the facts?  I’d almost like to believe that they know it’s just empty rhetoric – that would demonstrate that they have at least some connection to reality – but I can’t be certain. The intriguing question is why they have such a great need to believe that ‘we’ are in some way ‘better’ than everyone else. Perhaps the apparent arrogance and superiority masks a feeling of inadequacy. That’s a question for the psychologists – but for the rest of us, what’s wrong with being a normal state rather than demanding that everything ‘we’ do is labelled as being the ‘best’ merely by dint of being British?

Whatever the underlying reason, it leads the nationalists into saying and doing things which are increasingly farcical. Yesterday, the PM insisted that he is ‘very proud’ of the UK government’s response to the pandemic. That would be the response which has taken the UK to the number one position in the league table of deaths per million of the population, most of them avoidable, and managed to combine chaos and incompetence on an almost world-leading scale, beaten to the top slot only by Trump. I suppose, though, that coming top of any table is ‘world-leading’ in a sense, it’s just not the sense that a rational person would seek.

Tory MPs are just grandstanding

Tweet

There are those who struggle to understand why someone who has spent his whole life aiming to take on the top job should be so willing to risk his hold on it for the sake of retaining one member of his team. But I think that misreads the nature of Boris Johnson’s ambition and the nature of the job that he thinks he’s doing. He never really wanted to be PM at all – the job he wanted was world king. And the sort of monarch he wanted and still wants to be is the absolute variety – none of this ‘constitutional monarchy’ nonsense for him. Being merely the Prime Minister of a small part of the world is a long way short of achieving his lifetime ambition, but in settling for something which isn’t even second-best, he’s trying to do the job as though it were the one he wanted. In his world, if the king says something is so, then it is so – anyone who says otherwise is a traitor.

We know from his time in school that he has always believed that normal rules and constraints don’t apply to him, and he has lived his life accordingly – brushing off and brazening out any and every situation or problem which would have brought down lesser mortals. To highlight just one incident from many years ago, the way he treated his participation in a conversation about having a journalist beaten up as though it was a huge joke should have ended any hopes he had of ever achieving high office. Being sacked for lying – twice – ought to have exposed the nature of the man as well but he has simply carried on regardless. The one thing that he has learned from all this is that the technique works; nothing embarrasses him, nothing makes him feel any shame or regret, nothing dents or damages his enormous ego and self-esteem.

So, faced with an apparent crisis with his chief advisor having been caught out cheating and lying, with his own daily lies being exposed every more clearly, why wouldn’t he believe that he can simply bluster his way through the bad patch until people’s attention turns to something else? What if he is losing support amongst his own MPs – this is a man who turned a majority government into a minority government just a few short months ago by expelling anyone who disagreed with him. He then proceeded to win a huge majority of seats in the general election which followed. Why wouldn’t he believe that he can do it again? “With one bound he was free” was the leitmotif of Dick Barton, but it could equally be the phrase which encapsulates the charmed life of the chancer who currently holds the position of Prime Minister of the UK.

Whilst observers speculate on how long he can hang on to his right-hand man, seen from his position the problem is merely one of riding out the storm until people find something else to talk about. As king, he has the sovereign right to appoint who he wants when he wants; he and his immediate courtiers have the absolute right to do as they please when they please; having to answer questions from subjects is all a bit of a bore and a waste of his valuable time. Mere disagreement from those he regards as lesser people doesn’t and won’t phase him, just as it never has in the past. Some Tory MPs are breaking ranks to express a contrary view but experience has taught him that he can safely ignore them. The Tory party has traditionally been ruthless in removing its leaders but he’s purged the party to such an extent that I wonder whether it is any longer capable of such action. Unless the rebels are prepared to commit regicide, verbal criticism in response to constituent pressure is just grandstanding.

Watching the collapse in slow motion

Tweet

The debate about when schools should re-open highlights yet again that the key to leadership during a crisis is honesty and transparency. Parents and teachers want to be as certain as they can be that both they and the children will be safe, and they are naturally seeking that reassurance from government. The way in which not only Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but also an increasing number of local authorities in England itself, are declining to accept assurances from a government which seems to have alighted on an entirely arbitrary date of 1^st June and turned it into some sort of macho test of its own strength and determination indicates the extent to which people feel that they cannot trust the word of ministers. What started out as an aspiration to re-open schools starting on 1^st June has turned – in the way in which arbitrary goals are regularly treated by this government – into a target which must be met, even if that involves taking on and traducing teachers, unions, parents and local authorities.

In terms of building the necessary trust, Gove’s performance yesterday, in which he managed both to ‘guarantee’ the safety of all concerned and also state that no-one could be certain of absolute safety didn’t help. He was right the second time, of course – there can never be any guarantee, the decision necessarily involves weighing up the risks. But the ease with which the initial lie tripped off his tongue goes to the heart of the growing lack of faith in the government – it seems that lying is invariably the first option, and that honesty has to be prised out slowly and laboriously afterwards.

Last week, we also discovered that the UK’s most senior civil servant, the Cabinet Secretary, had been ill with coronavirus, and that a deliberate decision had been taken not to tell the public because, apparently, it was regarded as being news too sensitive for the public to handle. Why they thought that we could handle the illness of the PM and several others around him but not that of the Cabinet Secretary remains a mystery. But what I really don’t understand is why no-one realised that it was bound to come out at some point, and that keeping it secret wouldn’t exactly build confidence. And also why no-one seems even to have considered the possibility that the public at large might start to wonder ‘if they are keeping something as minor as that back so as not to panic us, what else aren’t they telling us?’ The question is such an obvious one – only people with some sort of bunker mentality could seriously have failed to understand, even for a moment, that keeping this secret might just turn out to be a really bad idea. But no, they went on to compound the error by denying that he was ill and claiming that he was working normally.

I’m glad that I’m not a parent of a school age child in England, having to make the decision as to whether to keep my child home from school on the basis of information the accuracy of which is unclear and which is being delivered by proven liars, and I feel sorry for those who are in that situation. And I’m glad that the Welsh government is taking a more cautious approach. It’s no surprise that the level of confidence in the English PM and his government has plummeted since his car crash speech last weekend – we seem to be watching a government implode in slow motion under the weight of its own dissembling. The surprise is that they don’t even seem to understand what is happening or why and simply respond by doubling down on the lies. There will be, of course, a solid base of Tory supporters who will stick with their man come what may, although even some of those must surely be struggling to defend the lies with a straight face. But parents of school age children, relatives of residents of care homes, friends and family of front-line carers and health workers – these aren’t negligible sections of the electorate to be carelessly gambling with their support. I even find myself wondering whether he’s deliberately testing the validity of the Trump doctrine about shooting someone not being enough for him to lose support. The danger is that Trump might actually have been right about that.

Is Boris an organizing genius?

Tweet

If there’s one thing for which the English Prime Minister cannot be blamed it is the fact that there has been an outbreak of coronavirus in the UK. It is becoming increasingly clear that the virus was already circulating well outside China much earlier than people thought, and the UK isn’t the only country where community transmission was already happening before the need to take any measures was identified. However, turning a drama into a crisis (as an insurance company once said) only happened as a direct result of government action (or rather inaction). With the advantage of having seen what was happening in places like Italy, and the luxury of having a week or two to avoid a repetition, it took a special kind of skill to ensure that not only could the UK repeat the experience of Italy, it could go one better and show that the UK doesn’t have to be bound to any mortality limits set by a member of the EU. And having the highest mortality rate (on a population basis) of any country in the world just goes to show how brilliant the UK can be under the right leadership, and once freed of the shackles of the Brussels bureaucracy.

Avoiding the economic impact of a minor outbreak would have been hard to avoid as well. Obviously, allowing the outbreak to get out of control before taking any action made that impact worse, but it took further government action to make it as bad as it has become, and only a world-leading government could have responded to the economic impact in such a way as to make it even worse than it needed to be.

Having presided over a health crisis, and then compounding that with an economic crisis, it took real effort to add a constitutional crisis into the mix by conflating England and the UK and ignoring the devolved administrations in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast. There was nothing inevitable about things like accidentally outlawing driving from England to Wales, and whilst the health crisis might have mandated an economic crisis of sorts, there was nothing about either the health crisis or the economic crisis which mandated a constitutional crisis as well. That is entirely down to the actions of government.

Now some might feel that all this just highlights the incompetence and cluelessness of Johnson and his team, but I am reminded of the words of Aneurin Bevan. He once said that “This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.” Could the apparent bumbling and stumbling of Johnson all be a cunning way of disguising the man’s secret genius for organization?

Fairies and the Conservative Party

Tweet

Sometime in the 1950s, I remember going to see Peter Pan.  It was a Christmas treat organised by the Cadoxton Conservative Club for the children and grandchildren of members (my grandfather was a staunch member).  We were taken to the theatre in a fleet of double-decker buses, and each child was given a bag of fruit – an apple, an orange, and an over-ripe banana come to mind.  (As an aside, given that Barry Docks was the port of entry for most of the UK’s bananas in those days, I never really understood why they were over-ripe, but that’s not really relevant here.  It must be a parable for something, though.)

One of the dramatic moments was when Tinkerbell’s light started to fade, and we all had to shout very loudly that we believed in fairies in order to save her life.  The shouting wasn’t loud enough at first, so we had to do it again and again until Tinkerbell recovered to full health and the show could continue.  In later years, of course, I came to realise that it didn’t matter how loudly we shouted - full recovery was pre-scripted into the show.

This week, the Prime Minister has told us how much she believes in Brexit, but to date she hasn’t shouted loudly enough to convince the members of her own party.  Somehow, however loudly she shouts it, I doubt that it will be believed by many of them.  It’s not only her own belief that matters, naturally; for Tinkerbell Brexit to recover requires all of us to proclaim our true belief from the rooftops.  Indeed, if we fail to shout loudly enough then, according to the Brexiteers, the failure of Brexit will be our fault.  Success or failure depends solely on the strength of our belief.  In Neverland, where children never grow up, it’s the way things work; only adults realise that the outcome of the story actually depends on the author, not the audience.

Birmingham this week has been like a pale copy of Neverland.  Boris Johnson did a better job of pretending to be Peter Pan than did Theresa May; he had more of the audience shouting out in support of their conviction than she is likely to get this afternoon.  She still doesn’t look like a true believer in anything much except that she should be in charge – something else which makes her pale in comparison to Boris, who is more convincing on that score as well.  But what neither of them – to say nothing of their audience – seem to understand is that the outcome will be shaped by the script, not by the devoutness of the audience.  And the script is largely being written elsewhere.

It must be comforting for them to be able to escape from the real world to a place where they can fly and where none of this is a problem at all, just as long as they can persuade us all to believe in fairies.  However, the script (over which they have absolutely no control) requires them to reconnect with reality eventually, and Michel Barnier doesn’t need to ape the crocodile by swallowing his clock for the rest of us to hear it ticking away loudly in the background.

Trains, boats and planes

Tweet

Many years ago, I had a boss who regularly used to say that “if we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs if we had some eggs”.  His point, albeit repeated ad nauseam, was a valid one: people always come up with new obstacles and dependencies which prevent them getting on with the task in hand, and as soon as one dependency is resolved, there’s always another one.  And sometimes, they’re even circular.

It was the Foreign Secretary who brought this to mind this week, with his expression of a wish to have a new aeroplane to fly himself and other Brexiters around the world doing new trade deals.  Suitably painted, (presumably in union flags – but definitely not grey, apparently) this would project this undefinable thing called ‘soft power’ in ways which would make people fall over themselves to do new trade deals.  He’s got form on this as well; it’s not so long ago that he was calling for a new royal yacht with the same objective in mind. 

They told us that Brexit would be easy; that the rest of the world would be falling over themselves to do new deals with us if only we supported Brexit.  But now it seems that we need a bit more than that.  If only we had a royal yacht we’d be able to do lots of deals if only we had a shiny new aeroplane as well.  I don’t doubt that if we gave him both, he’d come up with a host of other essentials which are prerequisites for doing the deals of the century; failure will never be his fault, it will always be everyone else’s for not giving him the proper tools for the job.

Meanwhile, in a faraway universe whose existence Brexiters continually deny, those countries which were supposed to be lining up to do deals with the UK are actually lining up to do deals with the EU.  Apparently, from their clearly misguided perspectives, a market of 600 million is more attractive than a market of 60 million.  Who in their right mind would ever have thought that?  Even worse, those antipodeans don’t even realise that they are supposed to get new yachts and aeroplanes first, so that they can project their ‘soft power’.  If we would only buy Boris a plane and a boat, he’d be down under like a shot projecting a bit of this ‘soft power’ stuff, and then they’d fall into line and understand that they need to talk to their former colonialists and masters first, not those beastly European types.

Alternatively, the UK could make a positive effort to try and engage with the rest of the world on terms that everyone else understands, rather than demanding that they all fall into line with the UK.  Just a thought.

Mirror, mirror...

Tweet

…on the wall, who’s the stupidest of them all?

The Foreign Secretary seems to be spending much of his time and effort criticising the leader of the Labour Party for not immediately condemning unequivocally those whom Johnson holds responsible for both the Salisbury poisoning and the use of chemical weapons in Syria.  Johnson claims that Corbyn is the ‘Kremlin’s useful idiot’ in response to which Labour have in turn called Johnson an idiot for undermining the UK Government’s position by lying about what the man from Porton Down did or did not tell him.  If Johnson is right, than at least being useful to someone puts Corbyn a step ahead of Johnson, who has never been demonstrably useful to anyone.

We can all swap insults, but it isn’t the most helpful or enlightening approach to grown-up politics, and given Johnson’s reputation for lying, time and again (having been sacked from jobs twice for doing so, without even starting on the £350 million a week for the NHS), he’s not in a good position in the credibility stakes.  Bluster and diversion are his standard recourse when challenged, but surely people are seeing through that by now.

As I’ve posted before, it may well be that he and the government are party to some secret intelligence not shared with the leader of the opposition, let alone with the rest of us, which enables him to be as certain as he is.  But given his record, his demand that people fall into line and agree with him is unrealistic and unreasonable.  It’s true that there is something very British about supporting ‘my country, right or wrong’, but it’s an approach which hasn’t always exactly worked out well.   Not for nothing is patriotism regarded as the last refuge of a scoundrel, although scoundrel seems a bit mild as an epithet to apply to Johnson. 

There’s something very un-British, however, about demanding that people be found guilty and punished without due process and proper examination of all the evidence.  I always thought that the adage that ‘justice must not only be done, it must also be seen to be done’ was one of the core values that we’re all supposed to share.  It isn’t the first time, though, that I’ve discovered that my understanding of ‘British’ values is different from that of those demanding that we all sign up to them.

Responding to the threat of redundancy?

Tweet

At long last, I understand why the Foreign Secretary is so angry with the Russians.  When he said, “Russia has had one goal in mind since the attempted murders on UK soil through the use of a military-grade chemical weapon – to obscure the truth and confuse the public”, all became clear to me – he’s really worried about his own future.  After all, if the Russians should succeed in obscuring the truth and confusing the public, what role is left for Boris?

The race to the bottom

Tweet

It is right that the government and opposition parties should be competing with each other to offer alternative views of the future.  But that doesn’t make it sensible for them to compete to see who can come up with the most inane ideas about borders and customs union.  In a tight race this week to see who could say the silliest thing on the issue, Corbyn’s claim that we could be part of a customs union in which the UK could set its own external tariffs was narrowly pipped by Johnson’s claim that the whole border issue is as simple as recording the registration numbers of vehicles crossing it.  Neither show much understanding of the question.

What the Government has failed to explain to the satisfaction of just about anyone so far is why it is so important that the UK should be able to negotiate its own trade deals rather than relying on the 60 or so trade deals which the EU already has in place and the new deals which it is already pursuing.  Why duplicate or compete with that, just to put a different flag on the agreement?  In fairness to Corbyn and Labour, as I understood what Corbyn and his supporters to be saying this week, the reason that they want to be able to do that is because they feel that the EU has been discriminatory against poorer countries in its current tariff structures.  If true, that’s a fair point, and a reasonable basis for seeking change.  The problem with Labour’s position is that they seem to believe that they can both stay within a single tariff regime with the rest of the EU and at the same time adjust the UK’s tariffs with the countries concerned.

If we use a few simple figures to illustrate the point, what they are arguing in essence is that their (new, improved, bespoke) customs union can impose a common external tariff of, say 20%, and that the UK can then negotiate separate deals to reduce that tariff to say 10% (or even 0%) for those poorer countries to help them to improve their economies.  In principle, that’s simple enough – provided that those imported goods then stay inside the UK and are not transported elsewhere with the customs union.  But the point of the customs union is that goods from one member state can flow freely to all the others.  How would one prevent goods from being imported to, say, Belfast with no tariff and then transported by lorry to Dublin where the common external tariff of 20% applies, without introducing the sort of hard border which Labour say their proposal is designed to obviate? 

The whole point of a customs union is that it allows goods to flow across the ‘internal’ borders of that union without requiring any tariffs; Labour’s proposal would seem to undermine that completely.  Their fraternal support for the poor whose goods are being shut out of the EU is well-intentioned but, assuming the truth of the claim, what is the best way of seeking change?  Is it by changing the EU’s trade policies to allow those poorer countries better trade access to the whole EU market of 500 million, or is it by negotiating UK specific deals which only allow access to the UK market of 60 million? 

Noting the registration details of vehicles crossing the border with no clue as to who or what is inside them was the even sillier response from the Foreign Secretary who seems not to comprehend the difference between a county border and an international one.  His proposal would certainly provide an electronic list of which vehicles are in the UK at any time and which are not.  But it would tell us nothing at all about who or what was in the vehicles.  Obviously ‘taking control of our borders’ is rather less important to him than he said it was.

The final fling

Tweet

I remember that when I was a child growing up in the 1950s, it was common talk among those of my parents’ generation, and older, that ‘the only good German is a dead German’.  In the immediate aftermath of a horrific war during which there can have been few families which did not suffer a direct loss, the attitude was understandable.  In order to keep people onside, there had been positive encouragement by government and war time leaders to see things in simple terms of goodies and baddies, and to learn to hate the ‘enemy’.  There were also in the 1950s and 1960s a whole host of war comics in circulation.  These invariably portrayed the ‘Jerries’ and the ‘Japs’ as fanatical and ruthless (as well as often cowardly and bunglingly incompetent) whilst soldiers of the UK and US were portrayed as brave, heroic men (invariably men) of principle standing up for righteousness and justice against the foe.  It is fairly easy to see how a generation or two could have become imbued with a hopelessly over-simplistic understanding of what has always been a complex relationship between European powers.

It was a strong current, and it didn’t stop at one or two generations – the England soccer fans who chanted ‘two world wars and a world cup’ whenever their team played against Germany were of a much younger generation, but were expressing a variant on the same raw emotion, albeit at least third hand by that point.  The understanding of European history which many in the UK possess, particularly those in older generations, is largely based on that oversimplification which sees ‘the Germans’ as hell-bent on world domination by whatever means possible, whilst the UK is that plucky little island state which stood up to them and defeated them.  Twice.  It’s a poor version of history, but as a mechanism for transmitting nationalistic sentiment from one generation to another, it has been remarkably effective, even if that effectiveness has declined over time, with the majority of younger people – a generation which has had the time and the money to travel and meet people from other countries – tending to judge the situation as it is today, not as their forefathers were led to believe that it was in the past.

That difference is reflected, of course, in the generational variance in attitudes towards the EU and Brexit.  The prism through which we view ‘Europe’ is either that of a place full of shifty and untrustworthy foreigners, out to dominate us at any chance they get, or that of a continent which has tried (and largely succeeded) to put the past behind it and come together in a peaceful and co-operative fashion from which all benefit, albeit in structures which are far from perfect.  I still see, in comments on this blog and elsewhere, references to the EU as the Fourth Reich, the latest means by which those dastardly Germans are attempting to dominate us.  And even if some more educated politicians (such as the Foreign Secretary) don’t put it in such crude terms, when they talk about rules being ‘imposed’ upon us by foreign powers they are essentially trying to tap into the same sentiment.

There should be no surprise when people like Johnson say that there can be no turning back from Brexit.  They know that this is probably the final fling for a particular view of Europe and the world; demographic changes are against them.  They need to cement their ‘victory’ as solidly as possible, and inculcate a new sense of jingoism and nationalism in the younger generation before their generation loses all its influence as a result of the inevitable process of natural attrition.  Their appeal for a return to the ‘greatness’ of the past, and their demand that we should all ‘get behind’ Brexit is, in its very essence, an appeal for the sort of blind loyalty to king and country which their generation took for granted, yet which they see crumbling all around them.  In a sense, I almost feel sorry for those whose world view is so strong and immutable that they cannot understand why others don’t share it as instinctively as they do, believing instead that it’s simply a matter of repeating the same message over and over again.

What they don’t get – and probably never will – is that the world has changed irrevocably under their feet.  People, and especially younger people, are no longer willing to be told what to think, and have mechanisms for disseminating alternative views which don’t depend on the media controlled by our ‘leaders’.  Brexit is a critical juncture in the movement from one view of the world to another.  The timing of the referendum was crucial to the outcome, and the ‘winners’ know that they can’t afford to concede another chance.  Every day that passes reduces the number of Leavers and increases the number of Remainers.  The only real question is whether demographic changes will be able to redirect the political processes before too much damage is done.  The future belongs to trust and co-operation, not the division and competition of the past.

Boris and the Giant Damp Squib

Tweet

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Foreign Secretary sincerely believes that it is possible to combine his obvious pitch for the leadership of his party with a genuine attempt to appeal to those who still think Brexit a terrible mistake, I wonder if he even begins to understand why his attempt at the latter yesterday was such a dismal failure.  The belief that doubling down on the misleading, inaccurate and incomplete picture presented during the referendum, coupled with an appeal for blind faith based largely on some nineteenth century sense of British (for which read English) nationalism served only to underline the gulf between two very different world views.

He majored on things which he clearly thinks that ‘everyone’ believes deep down, and tried to tie them into Brexit, but it seemed to me like a student drawing a conclusion from premises without showing the workings in between – largely because there is no logical process involved.  Two examples in particular struck me.

The first was his assertion that the UK should be global and outward-looking.  He may be right in saying that we all want that (although it needs a bit more definition, rather than rhetoric, before I’d sign up to it).  But what he does not explain is why that is incompatible with membership of the EU.  Are the other member states not outward-looking?  Does the EU not seek to play a part in the wider global community?  To reply that being outward-looking and global means that we need to negotiate our own separate trade terms is to answer an entirely different question.  Indeed, I’d go so far  as to argue that any country which wants to negotiate its own unique bespoke trade deals with the rest of the world rather than work in concert with partners in the interests of all is being inherently selfish rather than outward-looking.

The second was his statement about “for the people, of the people, and by the people”.  It’s a noble sentiment, almost the textbook definition of democracy, and as a Welsh independentista, I’m hardly going to disagree.  But what is so special about the UK that this rule should apply only to the UK, and cannot be applied to, say, Wales or Scotland, let alone to the EU as a whole?  There’s nothing about the phrase that mandates a particular size or set of borders, yet Johnson speaks as though it does and as though that set of borders is self-evident.  And how can anyone, in all seriousness, square that definition of democracy with having a hereditary head of state, or an unelected legislature which contains people who are there by right of inheritance, by dint of being senior clergy in one particular religious denomination, or as appointees?  And finally on this point, what is there about that definition of democracy which explicitly precludes us from deciding voluntarily to share part of our sovereignty with others for the greater good of all?

For people like Johnson, these are questions that do not even need to be asked, because the unique and special nature of the UK is a given.  The speech was revealing, not for its clarity, logic, or reasoning, but for its insight, once again, into a mind-set which places the UK at the centre of the universe, as an inevitable part of the natural order of things.  There are those who argue that Johnson’s equivocation at the time of the referendum – he famously wrote two articles, one in favour and the other against, before making his own mind up – shows that he is not a natural Leaver, and therefore well-placed to woo over Remainers.  I disagree; I don’t think that he was ever torn between two world views, only between two different approaches to implementing his own (to say nothing of pursuing his own career ambitions).  I believe that he really doesn’t understand how an alternative world view can even exist, which is why, even if yesterday's speech was a genuine attempt to do more than stake his claim on the leadership, it was always doomed to fail.

Boris knows all about the tree

Tweet

According to media reports, the Foreign Secretary is today demanding that the Cabinet allocate an extra £100 million a week to the NHS.  It’s the sort of thing that Foreign Secretaries do, of course, whenever they’re keen to become popular enough to get elevated to the role of Prime Minister (and when they’re not busy insulting the countries with whom they’re supposed to be building strong relationships).

He does seem to be having a bit of trouble with his arithmetic, though.  Last week, he told us that the £350 million weekly Brexit bonus which could be diverted to the NHS was an underestimate; this week he suggests that the bonus available to the NHS is less than a third of the original number.  But then, since the true number is almost certainly negative – in the early years at least – it doesn’t really matter whether the numbers add up or not.  It also doesn’t matter whether the amount of money corresponds to any identified need or demand; if you’re going to pluck figures from the air, nice round ones are as good as any. 

I don’t know – and neither does Johnson – whether the amount needed by the NHS to provide a decent service is an extra £100 million a week, an extra £200 million a week, or some other figure.  That it needs more to do what it is currently trying to do (and I’ll accept, in deference to one commenter yesterday, that that is based on an assumption that there is an understood definition of what the NHS should or should not be trying to do), seems to be generally accepted, but pulling a figure out of the air is not exactly a scientific approach to government expenditure.  And the idea that an extra weekly sum in about three years’ time after EU payments cease has anything to do with this year’s winter crisis is, shall we say, a ‘creative’ bit of presentation by someone who needs the popularity now, before the government collapses.

In another ‘interesting’ intervention last week, Johnson called for the building of a bridge between the UK and France.  Given his colourful history, there aren’t many people who would use the phrases ‘building bridges’ and ‘Boris Johnson’ in the same sentence, but I’m more interested here in the financial aspects.  No-one can really put a figure on the cost of building a 22 mile bridge across a deep and busy shipping channel with often difficult weather conditions, but it would almost certainly be many billions more than whatever the initial estimate said.

Leaving aside the possibility that the Foreign Secretary has already written off all hope of a Tory victory at the next election and therefore feels free to make outrageous promises which he and his party will never be called upon to honour, I can only conclude that he is admitting that there is, after all, a magic money tree.  The fact that his party came to power in 2010 on the premise that the current account deficit needed to be eliminated by 2015 or else the sky would fall in, and is now saying that it doesn’t really matter if the deficit lasts until 2031, is a pretty strong clue that they’ve known the truth all along.  A government which controls its own fiat currency, such as the UK, can create as much money as it needs to, as and when it needs to.  The only real caveat is that there also needs to be a willingness to raise taxes if the resulting increase in cash leads to excessive inflation.  The point at which that is likely to happen is a matter of belief based on an ideological perspective; it isn’t a number which can be derived by any formula.

If Johnson was really concerned about the NHS rather than positioning himself to succeed May, he’d be demanding the release of extra money now, not artificially linking it to the date of Brexit.  But the NHS, just like leaving the EU, is, for Johnson, more to do with calculating how to serve his own best interests than ours.  The odd thing is how many people fall for it based on the bumbling persona which he has created for himself.

Doubling down on the lies

Tweet

Apparently, Goebbels never actually said that "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”, although he’s frequently quoted as having done so.  It seems that he believed that truth made for better propaganda.  He did, though, write this: "The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous." 

It is, of course, unfair to smear a whole nation in such a way, but that doesn’t mean that one can’t find individuals who fit the bill.  Boris Johnson, for example.  The infamous slogan on the side of that big bus has been debunked time and time again, but Boris is like the arsonist who cannot help returning to the scene of his crime.  Last week, he told us that the figure was indeed wrong – it should have been higher.  But then, looking ridiculous is nothing new to Boris, especially if he has some union flags to wave at the same time.

There are, at least, some Tories who seem to have enough honesty to be at least a little embarrassed by such misleading claims.  The Maldwyn MP, Glyn Davies, repeated at the weekend his previous suggestion “Let’s agree to invest £350 million per week more into health and social care” as a means of lancing the damaging sore which the inflated claim has caused.

I don’t know whether that would work or not; it might, but it would also undermine the claim that we can’t find the money for the NHS if we want to, a claim which is central to the government’s policy.  Glyn Davies claims that it would ‘shoot the fox’; but it seems to me it would also be shooting both his government (and himself) in the foot by exposing the other great lie, which is about government finances and what is possible within them – which is why the government is unlikely to follow his advice, preferring to twist in the wind as the bus promise continues to haunt them all.

He starts his piece by saying “The stark reality is that it will never be possible for the NHS to meet the demands of a growing population, an aging population, and the irresistible costly advance of clinical science.” which is a wholly unevidenced assertion based on his, and his party’s, own priors about levels of spending and taxation.  The claim that the government can and should simply add £350 million a week to the NHS budget with no attempt to identify the source of such funds is enough to fatally undermine the assertion.

We can have the health service we want, with or without Brexit (although it’s probably easier without Brexit given the likely damage to overall government finances in the first few years after leaving the EU).  It is ideology, not economics, which prevents that.  Repeated often enough, the big lie that it can’t be done will also end up making the liars look ridiculous.

Understanding plain English

Tweet

After open hostilities broke out between the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister just over a week ago, peace was duly restored.  And that peace remains in place.  The two of them are in complete agreement over the length of any transition period and the rules that will apply during that transition period.  The fact that the Foreign Secretary also believes that the transition period should be shorter and that some of the rules won’t apply does not, apparently, signal any disagreement between him and the Prime Minister.  They are in complete agreement about everything, the Prime Minister has been her usual ‘very clear’ about that. 

If the EU27 perceive in any of this a certain lack of clarity in the UK’s approach, it’s obviously because they haven’t been listening properly.  These foreigners, eh – what are they like?

Brexit Masterchef

Tweet

Yesterday, the former chief of the Vote Leave campaign told us that triggering Article 50 to leave the EU was an “historic, unforgivable blunder”.  Strong words, but they don’t necessarily mean that he’s completely changed his mind about leaving the EU at all (although some of his comments suggest that he’s never been entirely convinced about Brexit).  It’s more a criticism of the approach adopted, and particularly of the way that the government has plunged into the process without having a plan or knowing what it wants the end result to be.  He’s not the only one in the leave camp who has expressed such doubts.

The problem with that analysis is that the Prime Minister really does seem to believe that the government is working to an agreed plan.  In response to the latest statements by Boris Johnson, she told us yesterday that “We are all agreed as a Government about the importance of ensuring that we get the right deal for Brexit”.  It’s a statement that I can believe, but it’s wholly inadequate if they don’t have any sense of agreement about what that ‘right deal’ might look like.  It’s as though they’ve decided to bake that famous cake which everyone is always talking about, but without deciding whether it’s for eating or merely having.  Even worse, they haven’t decided what sort of cake to bake – some want a good old patriotic Victoria sponge, others want a nice sticky chocolate cake, and yet others – I blame their education – will be happy to accept a good dollop of Eton Mess.  Worse still, they’ve started to bake the cake without having agreed on the ingredients.

Still, as the Prime Minister keeps telling us in lieu of answering any question put to her, she’s perfectly clear that the people simply want her to get on with the baking, and not to get distracted by such irrelevant detail.

Brexit dividends

Tweet

In his latest pitch for the Conservative leadership, Boris Johnson has returned to the ‘promise’ to spend an extra £18 billion a year (£350 million a week) on the NHS following departure from the EU.  The figure has been widely discredited many times and even most of those responsible for promoting it during the EU referendum have long since admitted that the ‘Brexit dividend’ – i.e. the amount of money available for other things because it’s no longer being sent to ‘Brussels’ would be a lot less than that.

I’d go further – I’d argue that there will be no Brexit dividend for the foreseeable future.  Perhaps there may be in the long term, if the economy really does outperform to the extent that Brexiteers believe want the rest of us to believe, although it’s beyond any reasonable or realistic forecasting window so we’ll never actually know whether we would have been better off staying in or not.  But in the short to medium term, most recognise that there will be a hit to the economy, and coupling that probable reduction in GDP, or at the least reduction in growth of GDP, with the requirement to spend a lot more on replacing all the EU agencies with UK versions, increasing the spend on managing the physical and economic borders, and the other increased costs which will come in the wake of Brexit, I believe that zero is a reasonable estimate of the Brexit dividend within any reasonable forecasting period.

Having said that, I welcome Johnson’s statement that the UK Government can spend an extra £18 billion on the NHS if it wants to.  And I agree with him; they can – it’s just that it has nothing at all to do with Brexit.  Looking at the detail of what has been said by Johnson and his supporters, that’s a truth which they come close to acknowledging themselves.  £8 billion of that total – more than 40% - has already been committed and is in no way contingent on Brexit.  What Johnson has asked for is that an extra £5 billion a year be made available in 2019 and a further £5 billion in 2022.  Given the ease with which more than £1 billion was found to buy a coalition partner, and the total government spend of more than £770 billion per annum, this isn’t much more than small change to HM Exchequer – less than 1.5% of expenditure.

However, for a moment, let’s assume that there is a relationship with Brexit.  Part of Johnson’s argument is that the UK should not honour any perceived commitments to EU budgets after the date of departure, and he wants a maximum transition period of six months.  If he’s right, then why isn’t the whole of the extra money available immediately?  Why do we need to wait until 2022?  And if he’s wrong, then where is the 2019 tranche of money coming from?  The answer to both of those questions is very simple – the initial premise is wrong, and a decision to spend more on the NHS is not contingent on Brexit; it’s a simple matter of policy.  The only reason for linking it to Brexit is to attempt to persuade us that Brexit has a short term benefit, when he knows as well as anyone else that it does not.  But then, Boris and truthfulness have been estranged for a very long time.

It's all about trust

Tweet

The buffoon and his nemesis have both recently returned from their pilgrimages to the great man and his team in New York, although only the nemesis actually got to talk to him, and then only by pretending to be a reporter rather than the full-time politician as which we pay him handsomely.  Both bring similar glad tidings from the mountain, although not only is this particular message not written in tablets of stone, it doesn’t appear to be actually written on anything. 

Still, they’ve heard the message and we just have to trust them to have both understood the mind of the great man and interpreted it correctly.  And we must believe that the great man has a settled opinion, uniquely, on this one particular issue, despite having reversed or revised his opinion on almost everything else. 

He wants to do a deal on free trade with the UK, we’re told, and he wants to do it quickly.  They also want us to believe that there’s no scintilla of inconsistency between his desire to rip up the US’s existing free trade deals and his intention to negotiate a new one specifically with the UK.  In fairness to both the buffoon and his nemesis, I can see that that would make eminent sense to them.  After all, they see no inconsistency between ripping up the UK’s free trade deal with its 27 neighbours and starting again with everyone else; why should the US be any different?

The detail of the proposed new detail is conspicuous by its absence.  But again, for people who can tell us little more than that Brexit means Brexit, why would the mere absence of detail be any sort of problem?  We can trust Trump and the US more than we can trust those pesky Europeans that we’ve been trying to deal with for the last four decades, because the US is special (although not quite as special as ‘us’, obviously), and according to the Prime Minister last week they even share our values (do try and keep up – those are the uniquely British values that she was talking about the previous week).

The future is safe as long as we trust Boris, Gove and Trump.  No problem there, then.

War, peace, hyperbole, and Euro-poker

Tweet

Perhaps it’s something to do with the nature of their education, but it seems in recent days as though Cameron and Johnson have been trying to reduce the debate about the EU referendum to a game of common-room poker in which they try to outbid each other with horrendous consequences if we take the ‘wrong’ decision.

Cameron started it, when he said something along the lines of “I bet World War Three”.

Johnson: “I’ll see your World War Three and raise you a Hitler and a Napoleon”.

Cameron: “I’ll see your Hitler and Napoleon, and raise you an ISIS”.

It might be mildly amusing to watch if they were just playing cards, but they’re not – the real stake here is the future direction of a continent, and it would be reasonable to expect all of those involved to try and keep a sense of perspective in laying out their arguments.

It’s certainly true that part of the vision of those involved in setting up what has become the EU was that the major European powers should never go to war with each other again, and that the best way of preventing that would be to enmesh their economies irrevocably.  It’s also true that, for the last 70 years, the peace has held between countries which spent large parts of the previous few centuries at war with each other.  Whether there was cause and effect here is rather harder to determine.  If countries have reached a point where they recognise that they need to stop invading each other on a regular cycle, perhaps they no longer need the formal institutions to prevent it.  Perhaps; we can never be certain what might otherwise have happened, yet the certainty with which politicians pronounce on this point is alarming.

The comparison with Hitler and Napoleon is a ludicrous one.  A Europe united by conquest by one state or another – such as France or Germany in this case – is not at all the same thing as a Europe united by discussion and agreement between partners, and it’s nonsense to suggest that it is.  The ‘unifying’ intent of Hitler or Napoleon is better compared with the process by which the individual ‘unified’ current states of Europe – such as France, Germany, and, yes, the UK – were themselves created in centuries gone by than with the process by which a united Europe has been built.

As for ISIS welcoming Brexit – well maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t.  The aim of a united caliphate which they are pursuing by bloodshed and fear certainly puts them more in the Hitler and Napoleon camp than the Monnet camp of history; but merely avoiding doing what a perceived enemy might want us to do doesn’t strike me as a particularly brilliant line of argument.  Trying to do the opposite of what someone else wants us to do because he’s not our friend is more kindergarten stuff.

It would be nice to think that the standard of debate might improve as the referendum approaches – but it seems more likely to degenerate further.