Finding PISD sufferers an appropriate home

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Parliament suffered an outburst of outrage yesterday as the dinosaurs who still don’t recognize that the UK no longer rules the waves fulminated against the audacity of the Chinese for daring to engage in illicit hacking activities. They’ve even dared to hack their way into the publicly available electoral registers. In the olden days, the response would have been to send a gunboat or two up the Yangtze river to teach the natives a lesson, but an aircraft carrier which struggles to get out of port without breaking down somehow doesn’t really cut it. Post Imperial Stress Disorder is, apparently, a thing. And it seems to be quite widespread, even amongst those who never knew Empire. It’s easy to understand how PISD sufferers might feel frustrated when the serious and dramatic UK response is a few meaningless sanctions against two named individuals and a small and obscure company.

The demands to be told exactly what the Chinese have been up to are reasonable, up to a point – but it raises a question about reciprocity. Does anyone seriously believe, for instance, that the UK’s security services are not hacking their way into Chinese computer systems with malicious intent? (If they’re not, that is probably an even bigger scandal.) Should the demand for openness and honesty be applied to the UK’s nefarious cyber activities as well? It’s a silly question, of course. We all know that the UK is special and unique, and therefore entitled to use whatever means are appropriate to protect its interests, including breaking international law whenever the fancy takes it. And not just in a ‘specific and limited way’ either.

The demand that others be held to a higher standard than ‘us’ is one of the main visible symptoms of PISD, but the disorder itself is incurable, sadly. The best we can do is try to isolate sufferers from the rest of society, and let them see out their days in comparative solitude. Somewhere they can rant to their hearts’ content and influence very little. That may, in fact, be the best justification anyone has ever come up with for the existence of the House of Lords. Seen as part of the selection process for membership of that institution, yesterday’s performance in parliament might even start to make sense.

Not doing as we do

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It says a lot about the current state of the Conservative Party that the living, breathing refutation of the concept of nominative determinism is rising through the ranks of those considered possible next leaders, with the party’s internal league table showing only two ministers ahead of him: one who is obviously mad and another who is leaving parliament at the next election. As if being appointed to his current job was not adequate proof, in itself, of the dearth of talent in the party.

He's taken himself off to China this week to ask the country’s leaders very politely if they will please be a little nicer in their relationships with the rest of the world, stop being quite so friendly with Russia, and perhaps think about respecting the human rights of Chinese citizens. The last part of that is something where he feels himself to be under some sort of obligation to say he’s raised the issue, but it may actually be more akin to a study trip, to enable him to make a better contribution to the next cabinet discussion on restricting the rights of UK citizens. Indeed, I wonder how long it will be before leaders of other countries visiting the UK will be obliged to excuse their visits by saying that they’ve raised the issue of human rights abuses with UK ministers. Perhaps they already have; but it isn’t the sort of thing we should expect to be reported here, just as the People’s Daily is unlikely to report that particular part of Cleverly’s discussions with the Chinese government. Whatever he himself might learn from the trip, he’ll probably be hoping that those travelling with him will not be studying the way in which the Chinese government can make Foreign Ministers disappear, whatever hopes some of us might harbour.

In a move which will surely help Cleverly in his attempts to influence China, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons chose today to publish a highly critical report on China, including a statement which implies recognition of the independence of Taiwan, although whether it will influence China in the desired direction is open to debate. The Chair of that committee said it was crucial that Cleverly communicated during his meetings that “we will not stand for transnational repression or drift towards authoritarianism”. As a statement of the UK’s position, it’s only a half-truth – the sub-clause, “unless it’s in or by the UK”, seems to be missing. That omission helps to underline, however, that the whole basis for the visit is the deranged belief that a middling size state actively isolating itself offshore from the most integrated continent on the planet can seriously hope to influence a country rapidly becoming the world’s biggest and strongest economy by appealing to a set of values which it itself is busily abandoning. It’s a classic piece of English exceptionalism in action.

Knowing their place

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Dominic Raab is apparently very unhappy with the Chinese government. They signed a formal treaty with the UK a mere 36 years ago and, now that it no longer suits them, they are unilaterally acting in breach of it. The UK’s response is to seek the support of all of its partners and friends to act jointly to hold China to the terms of the agreement, because it seems that that is what happens when one party to a formal international treaty deliberately acts in contravention thereof.

Some unkind people might be wondering how Raab can say any of this with a straight face given the UK’s decision to unilaterally breach the terms of an agreement which it signed a mere 8 months previously, but that is to miss the point. The situation is obviously entirely different. Firstly, the Chinese are foreigners who live a very long way away. Secondly, they just don’t understand their proper place in the world. The UK, on the other hand, is not only British, but a ‘global sovereign power’ (© Boris Johnson, 2019) to boot, and therefore uniquely entitled to do as it wishes. It is entirely proper that the UK should gather its friends* around it to enforce the terms of one treaty, but equally entirely outrageous that the EU countries should act in concert to enforce the terms of another.

How lucky we are to have government ministers who can see the distinction so clearly and can explain it in terms that even China should be able to understand. And if they don’t, well the UK can always send a gunboat or two…

*Any suggestion that this is a small and diminishing group is as unworthy as it is accurate.

What happened to all those EU constraints on trade?

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In what will clearly be good news for some businesses in Britain and the people who work in them, around £9 billion worth of trade deals with China were signed off yesterday during the Prime Minister’s visit.  During the same visit, the International Trade Secretary suggested that deals such as this show that we shouldn’t be ‘obsessing’ with Europe, and should be looking wider afield.  Up to a point, I agree with him.

Here’s the point, though: they don’t have to be alternatives.  All the deals signed off yesterday were signed by the UK whilst still a member of the EU and within EU rules.  It’s true that the specific deals signed off yesterday aren’t the same as a generic deal covering terms; but the whole point of a generic deal is surely to enable specific individual deals.  If there is already significant scope for improving trade with China within EU rules, in what way would that wider deal ‘replace’ what is lost in terms of trade with Europe?  Only someone 'obsessed' with leaving the EU would see these as alternative, rather than complementary, approaches.

All power to the markets?

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There’s another aspect to this ‘confidence’ business as well.  We are being told by the UK Government that the ‘markets’ have ‘confidence’ in the UK Government’s approach to fiscal policy, and that is why the UK’s credit rating is not threatened in the same way as that of the US.

I’m not sure that ‘markets’ can have, or not have, confidence in anyone or anything.  In this context, the term ‘markets’ is just a shorthand way of referring to the outcome of a whole series of individual decisions by the people who own and control the capital which flows around those markets. 

And what we’re being told effectively is that those owners and controllers of capital like the way the UK Government is approaching the issue, and don’t like the way that the US is dealing with it.

That doesn’t mean that one way is right or the other is wrong.  It merely means that the ‘markets’ believe that one approach is better than the other – from their viewpoint, and in their interests.  Falling in line with that is simply another way of allowing capital to determine policy, and another example of the way in which elected governments have surrendered control.

(Actually, the best argument that I can think of for a deficit reduction programme would be to put ourselves in a position where the ‘markets’ don’t dictate policy to us, but we’re not going to be in that position any time soon.)

I didn’t know quite what to make of China – one of the most expansionist military powers – telling the US that it can’t afford its current level of military or welfare spending; but I bet it didn’t go down too well in the White House.  It did, though, highlight the extent to which China, nominally the world’s largest ‘communist’ state is now a key player in the ‘markets’ due to the level of control it has over capital. 

However, there’s something very incongruous about a ‘communist’ state lecturing the capitalist world on the need to cut welfare for the poorest in society; it’s an interesting interpretation of the international brotherhood of the working class.