Should we demand the abolition of the USA?

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Annoyed at being fined for failing to comply with EU regulations, Elon Musk has demanded that: “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries”. Perhaps the EU should respond with the counter-demand that: “The US should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual states”. Actually, Musk might even agree with that in principle, if he had any principles – but it looks as though his real beef is about any state, or co-ordinated alliance of states, being big enough and strong enough to stand up to what he regards as the natural order of things: rule by billionaire. The difference, though, is that the US federal government has already been captured by the billionaires, and doesn’t need to be broken up to facilitate their rule.

There are, and always have been, questions over how much sovereignty (and in what fields) the EU’s member states should exercise individually and how much they should share; but acting jointly on some issues and agreeing rules which all members must follow is undoubtedly advantageous in a world where some corporations and individuals wield excessive power. It’s easy to understand why monopolists would prefer to deal with a host of weaker individual states on which they can impose their power. The real issue, though, and it’s not one which the EU seems minded even to consider, let alone tackle, is about how we collectively free ourselves from the increasingly oppressive rule of kleptocrats and billionaires. There is nothing natural or inevitable about the accumulation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands; it happens because the laws and rules under which the economy operates have been written to allow and facilitate it. But those laws and rules are made by humans, and humans acting collectively could change them. If enough of us wanted to do so.

Time to embrace the elephant

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

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

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

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

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

Misreading the signs

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

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

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

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

Sir Billy No-Mates

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping 'them' at arms length is deliberate policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing the wrong role

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In 1938, the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, took himself off to Munich and signed an agreement with the then German Chancellor, a certain Mr Hitler, about the future of Czechoslovakia in an attempt to avoid war on the European mainland. Hitler, of course, never had any intention of abiding by any such agreement. As sometimes happens in history, a leader comes along who really doesn’t care a damn about conventions, laws or honesty, but is just prepared to say whatever is necessary at the time to get what he wants. Amongst those excoriating Chamberlain for appeasing Hitler was a certain Mr Churchill. The said Mr Churchill has long been an idol of one of his successors, the one who is hopefully facing his very own Waterloo this afternoon (to mix up the wars and metaphors), and who has long sought to model himself on the uncompromising approach of his hero.

All this goes some way to explaining the statement by Johnson today that he will vote against the Conservative government tonight over the Northern Ireland Protocol agreement which his successor-but-one has negotiated with Brussels. Indeed, in comments reminiscent of Churchill’s accusations of appeasement, he is demanding that the government tear up the Protocol (negotiated by Johnson) as well as the amendments negotiated by Sunak and unilaterally renege on the agreement it made with the EU, leading to a probable all-out trade war with our continental neighbours. All very Churchillian. Except…

As usual however, his command of the detail is a little deficient. He doesn’t seem to realise that the role he’s acting out is that of Hitler, not Churchill. The man who signed an agreement he had no intention of keeping; the man who could never take yes for an answer, and would always go on to demand more until all-out war became more or less inevitable. His Churchillianism is what it’s always been – superficial, and based on a rhetorical style which he fondly imagines he is emulating, but which others can see for the bluster which it is. It will be on show again this afternoon.

EU red tape?

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When major projects go wrong, there’s rarely a single, simple cause. That is obviously true in the case of HS2. Certainly it’s been hit by inflation (although the mathematical competence of anyone who argues that spreading the expenditure out over a longer period addresses that is open to serious challenge). The way that the UK has approached such projects is another, and mirrors one of the problems which has bedevilled the electrification of the GWR main line: disbanding the team after one project and starting from scratch a few years later on the next loses expertise and experience. Treating such projects as part of a rolling programme where the team moves from one project to the next, as other European countries have done, is a much more efficient and effective way of building and retaining experience and knowledge. An approach to getting approval which relies on individual business cases for each part of the project rather than taking a wider view (which is how we lost the electrification beyond Cardiff) is another peculiarity of Treasury thinking which makes major projects hard to build. And all that is without the complicated procedure for obtaining the various required consents, largely – to hear the Brexiteers talk – imposed by the EU when the UK was a member.

The visible result of this is a slow and disjointed approach to developing mass high-speed transport in the UK, whilst France, Spain and others have been building complete and coherent networks. One of the consequences is that France is able to talk about banning short haul domestic flights whilst the UK is busily promoting an increase in internal air services by adjusting the taxation regime. Whatever the reasons, it’s clear that construction and infrastructure projects in France can be progressed more quickly and effectively than they can in the UK.

I can’t help but wonder whether that was a factor in the announcement at the end of last week that the UK will pay France to build a detention centre for migrants. Under the new Migration Bill, the UK is going to need a great deal of additional capacity to hold detainees, a policy made especially difficult when Tory MPs (and even government ministers) oppose any and every such centre in their own constituencies. Given the inability of the UK government to build anything very much, it will be cheaper and quicker to pay France to build camps instead (although, unless they’re turning a tidy profit from doing so, the attraction to the French government is rather less clear). Obviously, France is not bound by the same EU red-tape and bureaucracy which is, apparently, doing so much to hold the UK back.

No way out for Sunak

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Poor Rishi Sunak. All the indications are that he has gone into the negotiations with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol with the honest but completely mistaken view that he was trying to make the agreement signed by his predecessor but one work, and that the way to do that was to be reasonable and reach an agreement which would benefit all the stakeholders involved. He’s now finding out just how wrong he was; the objective of those opposing the agreement – including those who originally negotiated and agreed it – is not to make it work but to destroy it. The man responsible for the original agreement has never concealed, from the outset, the fact that he never had any intention of implementing it. Indeed, he made it so clear that it’s easy to understand his surprise at the idea that the EU ever thought he was being serious. The EU were taken completely unawares, despite all the evidence to help them, to find out that they were dealing with liars all along. 

In fairness to the Brexiteers, they have been fairly consistent in saying that what they want is full access to the EU single market without following any of the rules which member states have to follow, on the basis that this would give UK companies a competitive advantage. They’re right – it would indeed do that. Which is why no-one other than the English exceptionalists behind Brexit (and their DUP allies) ever thought for one moment that the EU would concede such an arrangement. In essence, it’s what those in favour of a ‘pure’ form of free trade have always wanted – trade with no tariffs, no border controls and no rules. And they genuinely seem to be so divorced from reality that they actually believed that they could bludgeon the EU into giving them such a deal.

We don’t yet know the detail of what Sunak has or has not agreed, although it would be surprising if it was far away from what has been widely reported in the press. And from that reporting, it looks like it’s little different from what could have been achieved in the original negotiation had the UK side been willing to take the time to discuss and agree rather than make threats and then sign up in haste (to 'get Brexit done') to something that they were never going to implement. It’s unlikely, though, that anything that is agreed will be acceptable to the DUP or the Tory extremists if it leaves any trace of EU laws or rules in Northern Ireland, or any hint of controls on the movement of goods between Northern Ireland and the UK. It's equally unlikely that the EU will agree to any deal which does not uphold both those things. And that would lead us, inexorably, to the establishment of border controls on the island of Ireland. The Brexiteers would say that isn’t what they want (although the DUP would probably be delighted). They might even be telling the truth on that, but only because they’ve always believed two things:

·        Firstly (even if few of them have said it out loud), that the Republic of Ireland should know its place and follow the UK out of the EU, preferably re-joining the UK and swearing loyalty to the English monarchy at the same time. Their attitude towards Ireland is a bit like that of Putin towards Ukraine – it’s not a proper country and has no real right to a separate existence.

·        Secondly, that the UK’s departure would be the beginning of the end for the EU, which is still the end-game for many of them.

Where that leaves Sunak and his renegotiation is a big question. There is some doubt about whether he actually needs to put his deal to Parliament at all. Under the UK’s arcane system of semi-democracy, it arguably falls under the royal prerogative, meaning that ministers can just sign it and implement it. It would make him look frightened and weak, but he might prefer that to the alternative scenario where he puts it to parliament and it gets passed by opposition votes with a huge number of Tories voting against it. Rocks and hard places both leave him weakened, with the blond-headed shark circling maliciously. And both still leave the Conservative Party unmanageable and drifting as it attempts to reconcile the two irreconcilably opposing views on Europe which have destroyed so many of its leaders over the past three decades. In any functioning democracy, these two views would be represented by two different parties, but an outdated electoral system which polarises elections between two parties means that both try to manage differences within a broad church. Traditionally, that’s been more of a problem for Labour than the Tories, but it increasingly looks as if it might turn out to be terminal for the Tories. The coming implosion is almost too kind a way out.

Looking for the simplest explanation

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For some strange reason, people have been mocking Boris Johnson after he called for Ukraine to join the EU. This could be based on a wholly irrational expectation that he would be consistent in what he says, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s not as if it is particularly difficult to identify the inconsistencies, such as claiming that it was the EU that was provoking war in Ukraine (because we all know from so many of his utterances that the EU is the root of all evil), or that membership of the EU would have somehow prevented the UK from aiding Ukraine.

In fairness, there are a number of possible reasons why Johnson might think that Ukrainian membership of the EU makes sense.

The first is that he might actually see it as a way of undermining the EU. The size and relative poverty of Ukraine – to say nothing of what seems to be endemic corruption – would be a major challenge for the EU to absorb quickly. The logic of Brexit (although rarely expressed openly by Brexiteers) was that it was supposed to be just the start of a stampede for the door, leading to the utter collapse of the whole edifice. There are other ways of achieving the same thing – perhaps he’s being really cunning.

The second is that, as a poorer country, Ukraine would be entitled under EU policies to receive massive amounts from ‘Brussels’, although that policy depends, of course, on the richer countries being willing to pay in in the first place. It’s a bit of a cheek from a man who argued that Brexit was a means of avoiding paying into such solidarity funds, but with fewer rich countries left to pick up the tab, maybe he sees it as a way of damaging the UK’s competitors, such as Germany and France. Although it’s more likely that he simply hasn’t understood the dependency between making payments to the poorer and receiving them from the richer. Financial arithmetic was never his strong point, whether in affairs of state or in managing his own finances.

The third is that, driven as he is by an inflated sense of English exceptionalism, he genuinely believes that the EU is fine for lesser peoples and nations, but not for the great power which his fevered imagination tells him that the UK is.

On the whole, however, and following the dictates of Occam’s razor, I favour a very much simpler explanation – he was just doing what he has always done, and saying what a particular audience wanted to hear. Zelensky wants to join the EU, so Johnson supports him. He doesn’t really mean it, any more than he has ever meant most of the things he’s said. He assumed that, if he’s ever in a position of influence again (and I struggle to see how even the Tories could be that stupid), he will simply deny ever having said any such thing. It's not as if he has never done that before.

Picking fights

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Underpinning much of what the UK government is doing currently, there seems to be an almost desperate and somewhat indiscriminate need to pick fights with people. Perhaps their internal polling, or their focus groups, have been telling them that taking a macho stance against all comers will bring electoral rewards amongst their target groups, but there is little evidence to suggest that such a finding is backed up by information available publicly. Perhaps it’s even more simplistic than that – they are just harking back to the Iron Lady without studying the detail of the way she chose her fights. Whatever the reason, picking fights once positions have been taken, with no attempt to avoid the need for them by advance discussions, seems to have become their default position.

It's possible that they genuinely believed that the public would turn against strikers as the inconvenience caused increases, and maybe – had it been only the railways involved – that might have worked. But taking on the nurses in particular was just foolish. Eventually, they will have to settle; they won’t give the RCN everything it asked for (but being accustomed to the idea of negotiation, the RCN never expected that), but they will have to make some serious concessions, however they attempt to spin them. And having settled one dispute in that fashion, they will have to settle the others in a similar way (the Chancellor’s reported concerns that settling one dispute will lead to a domino effect are valid, but it’s the government which lined up the dominos). Had they only been willing to sit down and negotiate properly before the first strikes, it could probably all have been avoided; turning it into a fight looks to be deliberate.

Yesterday, they announced that they will block the Gender Recognition Bill passed by the Scottish parliament, teeing up another entirely avoidable fight. They could have expressed their concerns in advance and tried to discuss potential changes with the Scottish Government, but chose to wait until the Bill had been overwhelmingly passed by the parliament before using the nuclear option of over-riding the democratic voice of Scotland. It will, undoubtedly, end up in the Supreme Court. It’s not entirely clear who will win the legal argument, but there can be little doubt that the Scottish Government will win the political argument.

And there’s also, of course, the long-running (three Prime Ministers and counting) dispute with the EU over the Brexit terms, another area in which concessions will eventually have to come.

There are times when picking fights might be a sensible strategy for a party or a government, which can look ‘strong’ (apparently that’s a good thing among the electorate) as a result, but only if it wins a reasonable proportion of them. Repeatedly picking fights which it is easy to predict it is doomed to lose can only have the opposite effect. The Tory Party has become not so much a government as a suicide cult. As Richard Murphy points out today, looking at the main elements of their legislative programme, one might easily conclude that they are governing for the world as they wish it were rather than the world as it actually exists. Fantasy has become the new normal.

Truth and lies are not of equal value

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A couple of day ago, the BBC reported that the UK and Australia had agreed “the vast majority” of the details of a new free trade agreement between the two states. Whether that was achieved by tying the Australian minister to an uncomfortable chair and having Liz Truss harangue him for nine hours was not reported, but agreeing the vast majority of the text of a trade deal is the easy part. It’s always the details which cause the problems. Time will tell – the possibility floated in the report that the final agreement will be signed in June, something of a record time for a deal, suggests either that one side has given a lot of ground, or else that the deal will turn out to be remarkably similar to an existing deal.

What I noted at the end of the report, however, was the matter-of-fact way in which the BBC report told us that “Trade can also be made simpler if countries have the same rules … The closer the rules are, the less likely that goods need to be checked”. It’s a statement of fact with which it is impossible to disagree, but it marks a major change of position for the BBC. During the EU referendum campaign, and in the interests of a specious form of ‘balance’, they regularly treated this key fact about trade as though it was merely an opinion, and treated the opposite opinion – that having different rules is no barrier to trade – as a position of equal validity. ‘Balance’ is difficult to define, and even harder to achieve, but it should never result in pretending that an obvious untruth has the same degree of validity as a provable fact. There is an old saying in journalism that “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the window and find out which is true”. It’s the least we should expect from a publicly funded broadcaster, but the EU issue is far from being the only one on which the BBC seems to forget this basic tenet of news. Getting it right 5 years after allowing the lie to gain credence simply isn’t good enough.

Independence is about joining the world, not returning to the 19th Century

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The ‘modern’ diplomatic system dates back to the fourteenth century, when the term ambassador first started to be used. Rights, obligations, responsibilities – to say nothing of quaint but arcane processes such as presenting one’s credentials to the Court of St James – have accumulated over the centuries. Amongst those is the concept of diplomatic immunity, one of those things that makes eminent sense in theory (providing safe passage for accredited representatives and guaranteeing that they won’t be persecuted by the host nation), but has been extended in practice to prevent prosecution of even the most heinous of crimes. There is no obvious reason why the range of those covered should be extended as far as it has been, nor why diplomats should be exempt from following the laws of the country in which they serve, both issues raised by the recent case of Anne Sacoolas.

But, for all its imperfections, the system of ambassadors works reasonably effectively most of the time. It allows and facilitates communications (including the confidential variety) between governments, encourages trade, provides representation and support to citizens, and generally ‘oils the wheels’. Given the UK Government’s repeated statements that it wants to have the warmest possible relationship with the EU after Brexit, the decision not to recognise the EU’s representative as an ambassador with all that that implies appears at first sight to be perverse. I can’t imagine the EU’s ambassador to the UK being particularly put out at not having to get dressed up to travel to St James Palace to formally present his credentials to the monarch, and I hope that he and his team would not be exceptionally upset at not having the right to ignore and breach UK law at will. But when 142 other countries across the world have decided to give the EU’s representatives the same ambassadorial status as any ‘nation-state’, it would be understandable if the EU were to be a little miffed at the only state – and its nearest neighbour to boot – which refuses to do likewise. And if we ask ourselves ‘who loses as a result?’, the obvious answer is that the UK is set to lose more than the EU from what most will see as a rather petty decision.

That is, though, to ignore the Brexit mind-set, to say nothing of English exceptionalism. Brexiteers have argued throughout that the EU should not become, and therefore should not be treated as, a state. They tried (and failed) to negotiate directly with the bigger member states, particularly France and Germany. From their perspective, it is the member states which have legitimacy, not the EU as a bloc. Brexit could only ever be the beginning – being on the doorstep of a bloc like the EU without being part of it makes sense only if it’s a prelude to cracking that bloc apart. Part of that is conducting diplomacy directly with the member states, not with the EU. Post-truth politics demands that the EU not exist if we treat it as though it isn’t there. Brexit has always been a long-term project, just ask Rees-Mogg, and Brexiteers have always been clear in their own minds (although not so much in their public statements) that there would be economic losses for most of us in the short term – just the first half century or so. And we can always eat sovereignty in the meantime.

The underlying principle by which the English nationalist government works is that there is one, and only one, legitimate source of power in the world, and that is the nation-state. By that they mean not that the state is defined by the nation (which is perhaps the traditional definition), but that the nation is defined by the state. Treating the EU as some sort of lesser body with no real legitimacy is the same way that they regard the governments of Scotland and Wales, as we’ve seen in their actions to date. Over-ruling and ignoring Wales and Scotland isn’t oversight or carelessness, it’s the direct result of a world view in which only Westminster has legitimacy. They are simply applying the same rule both internally and externally. The choice we face in Wales is between joining their project, accepting their nineteenth century definitions of nation, state, and legitimacy, or joining the rest of the world in adopting twenty-first century definitions. Independence isn’t about opting out of an outdated English exceptionalist view of the world so much as opting into a modern internationalist world. The choice is ours – unless we allow it to become theirs by default.

Labour to embrace Tory alternative reality

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According to Labour’s leader Keir Starmer, voting for Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal will bring closure to the whole EU debate in the UK, marking the end of divisions both within the Labour Party and in the population at large. It’s straight out of the Johnson / Trump playbook, but stating as fact something that is plainly not true doesn’t make it fact for them, and it won’t work for Starmer either. As noted yesterday, there isn’t an easily identified and objectively ‘right’ way to vote on the deal being presented to parliament today (although there are plenty of wrong, or at least misleading, ways of justifying the decision taken), but even if there were, the issue would be far from closed.

It is entirely understandable that Starmer would seek to avoid the question of the UK’s relationship with the EU being a major issue in the 2024 election, but equally impossible that he can control that. In the first place, the deal that has been agreed is, at best, half-baked – there are many loose ends around which negotiations will continue for the rest of this decade. Then there is the five-and-a-half-year deal on fisheries which will require substantial renegotiation in the coming years, and where failure to agree could undermine the whole deal. Then there are the inevitable and pre-announced attempts by the current UK government to backtrack on regulatory alignment which are likely to lead to running battles over the terms of trade. Johnson needs a villain, and the idea that the EU will cease filling that role for his government in order to allow Labour to move away from the issue is fantasy. There is also the impact of Brexit on the future cohesion of the UK – that isn’t going away any time soon. And finally, for any party which claims that its aim is to improve the lives of the people of the UK (and I think Labour still makes that claim, although it’s sometimes hard to be certain), there are a whole host of ways in which the future relationship with the EU could and should be improved – is Labour really planning to offer no view on any of that?

Above all, there is the obvious and looming reality that an isolated UK on the fringes of the world’s largest and most successful trading block will perform less well in the decades to come than it could as a member. Going back to the 1960s, this was, ultimately, the reason for the UK’s accession to the Common Market in the first place. The biggest differences between now and then are that the EU now is bigger, more successful, and more integrated as a market than it was then, and that the alternative model (strengthening EFTA) which many of us supported at that time is no longer available. The idea that the ongoing relationship with that market can be set in stone today, for a decade or more, by a thin and inadequate deal which closes off future debate is a fantasy – and a dangerous one at that.

The Brexit myth was and still is that a small offshore country can deregulate business and individuals and still be allowed to compete on equal terms, with trade determined solely on price in accordance with a simplistic textbook view of economics. It’s almost understandable why a bunch of people who know more about financial manipulation and speculation than real industry and business might think that can work, but it’s a lot harder to see why the Labour Party are so keen to embrace the same alternative reality. Starmer is about to set the terms of his own failure.

Both over-centralised and powerless?

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One of the side-effects of the coronavirus pandemic is that it has highlighted some of the difficulties afflicting the EU.  The inability of the EU to respond clearly and centrally to the crisis because of differences of opinion between member states is leading some Brexiteers to say “I told you so” or something similar and rub their hands with glee at what they see as an impending collapse.  But hold on a minute – what this means is that those who told us that the problem with the EU is that it is an undemocratic over-centralised body imposing its will on member states are now telling us that the problem with the EU is that independent member states have too much power and are preventing the central authorities from taking firm action.  Consistency and respect for reality were never exactly their strengths.

Drawing lines in the right places

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One of the greatest achievements of the European project over the last 70 years has been the removal of visible borders over much of the continent.  The Schengen area doesn’t exactly match the EU (some EU countries are outside it, and some Schengen countries are outside the EU), but it would have undoubtedly been impossible without the existence of the EU and the single market.  It has shown that the absence of borders and border control does not, of itself, threaten the national identity of anyone.

There are others, though, who like borders and, for them, the stronger and more visible those borders are the better.  ‘Controlling our borders’ was one of the core Brexit messages – and that in a state which wasn’t part of Schengen and had never abolished border controls anyway. The reason that Brexiteers bang on about ‘controlling our own borders’ is that those borders define a demarcation line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with an often unstated but nevertheless ever-present fear and distrust of ‘them’; and the more visible the border, the greater the degree of demarcation.  Part of my opposition to Brexit is precisely about rejecting that demarcation, that ‘othering’ of foreigners; in European terms, I consider myself to be at least as much a part of the ‘them’ as of the ‘us’, particularly given the narrow and exclusive way in which ‘us’ is often implicitly defined.

I’m uncomfortable with the way in which so many countries have responded to the pandemic by reinstituting border controls.  Movement controls I understand, but are state borders the right place to impose and police them?  In France, the virus seems to be spreading from east to west, and in Italy from north to south; closing the eastern and northern borders respectively look like drawing lines in the wrong places.  Choosing national or state boundaries is an easy option, but it may also be a lazy and sub-optimal option - the determinant of where any lines need to be drawn is the progress of the virus, not nationality.

Here in Wales, I have no argument with the restrictions on movement which have been imposed to respond to the covid-19 outbreak, and accept that there is a need for enforcement of those restrictions, even if I have some doubts about the details of that enforcement.  It follows that I entirely accept the need to stop people travelling to second homes, potentially bringing the virus from urban hotspots into rural areas lacking the resources to respond to any major outbreak.  I can understand why local people in the areas most affected are concerned about people travelling to them under current circumstances. They are right to be concerned. 

There is, though, something that makes me feel uncomfortable about some of the language and rhetoric involved, particularly when it translates into fear and distrust of the ‘other’.  Calls for the effective closure of the Wales-England border when the virus is already circulating both sides of that line look like another example of trying to draw a line in the wrong place. There are holiday home owners in Wales as well, who would be unaffected by any border closure – unless we move to close county (or even community?) borders as well. 

Logically and rationally, restricting movement makes sense and enforcing those restrictions is a natural concomitant.  Those are things which can be undone easily and quickly if and when the situation allows.  But dark human emotions such as fear and distrust of others, once expressed and experienced, are much harder to reverse. Control of movement doesn’t have to be the same thing as managing flows across a line on a map and the association between ‘control of movement’ and ‘enforcement of borders’ is a potentially dangerous one.  Effectively encouraging the idea that people on the other side of an arbitrary line are in some way ‘others’, even if done entirely unintentionally and with the very best of motives, may have undesirable longer-term implications. 

What does freedom look like?

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According to the Brexiteers, there’s just one week left under the oppressive yoke of Brussels rule, after which the UK will, at last, be free to set its own course in the world.  We will be free to set our own standards and rules in a whole host of areas, constrained only by the minor inconvenience of trying to sell our wares into markets which insist on imposing different standards and refuse to accept anything which does not comply.  That will be their problem, though, not ours – if they don’t accept our new standards, we can refuse to sell them our goods and services.  Let’s see how they like that!

We’ll also be free to set our own external tariffs, which means we can abolish all tariffs on incoming goods if we wish.  That will give us the advantage of buying whatever we like, from wherever we like, at the cheapest prices available on the world market.  If the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit and abolish their tariffs on our goods, that too will be their problem.  We can stop making the things that they want and force them to look elsewhere.  Let’s see how they like that!

We’ll be free to control immigration, and stop foreigners coming here to take advantage of our economic strength.  We won’t even need to pay the cost of introducing a points-based system: the economic result of using our freedom to set our own standards and abolish tariffs means that they won’t even want to come here in future.  How’s that for killing two birds with one stone!

Above all, we’ll be free of the evil and iniquitous requirement of EU membership that the state must abide by the rule of law.  Our government will at last be free to trample on democracy and human rights and treat people however they want.  Brexit means Brexit; the people have spoken; the government must give them what they voted for.  That’ll show the EU that we mean business!

As Fintan O'Toole suggests, the big problem with imaginary oppression is that getting rid of it leads only to imaginary freedom.

Chancellor achieves new heights

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Last week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer did his best to sabotage any hope of retaining good access to EU markets by insisting that the UK will deliberately diverge from EU standards and regulations; this week he went to Davos and came close to starting a tariff war with the USA.  It certainly honours the government’s commitment to run talks with the EU and the USA in parallel rather than in series, but I hadn’t realised that the objective of doing that was to wreck both.  But, wait a moment – what was the Chancellor even doing in Davos?  It’s only a month since the PM banned all cabinet ministers from attending the gathering saying that they were going to be far too busy at home.  It was, of course, a ‘Boris Johnson pledge’, and therefore not meant to be taken seriously, but it’s a pretty blatant U-turn even by his standards.  Perhaps the PM thought that, after attempting to sabotage the EU talks last week, the Chancellor could do less damage in Davos than he could if he stayed in London.  If he did, the PM may have, to use a Bushism, seriously misunderestimated Javid’s capacity for following his own example.

Small truths can hide big lies

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In a speech last week which was widely described as ‘rambling’ and ‘incoherent’, the PM managed to give the impression that he either doesn’t know what’s in his own deal, or else that he’s simply lying to mislead people.  Rambling and incoherent seem fair enough descriptions to anyone who’s seen him perform recently.  It turns out that the man whose erudition and great oratorical skills were going to turn around the fortunes of his party either doesn’t possess those skills or else is, for some reason, unable to deploy them when they’re needed.  He simply doesn’t do what those party members who voted for him thought that it said on the tin.  Who’d have thought it (other than, of course, those people who were actually paying attention to what’s happening, which by definition excludes the membership of his party)?

Not understanding his own deal or lying about it are also highly credible accusations against a man known for his lack of attention to detail and his propensity to dissemble, but I wonder if the accusations are missing the point.  It could be simply that the small truth obscures the bigger lie – he knows that his deal requires checks, and he’s telling the truth about not implementing such checks, and the bigger lie is what he told the EU.  He simply has no intention whatsoever of honouring the obligations to which he has agreed in his discussions with the EU (which is not to say that he won’t expect them to honour theirs – this is the essence of cakeism).  The EU’s problem is that they thought – silly them – that the PM of the UK could be relied upon to be honourable, not realising that the habit of referring to all MPs in the House of Commons as ‘Honourable’ members was just for show in his case.

Re-interpreting the facts

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From the outset, a major part of the case put by the Brexiteers has revolved around the idea that the institutions of the EU wield power that rightfully belongs to sovereign states and weaken those states in the process.  As Ian Dunt put it in an article in the Irish Times, “Their entire working assumption about world politics was that international cooperation sucked power from the nation state”.  In isolation, and from a theoretical rather than empirical view, it’s not wholly unreasonable.  It is, after all, a formulation of the fear which led some independentistas, including myself, to oppose membership of the EU back in the 1970s.  There is a problem, though, when people cling to a theoretical view which is not grounded in empiricism, and which events prove to be unfounded.

One of the things that the whole Brexit process has demonstrated is the way in which a group of nations acting collectively can actually strengthen rather than weaken the individual parts.  Specifically, the Republic of Ireland has ended up with a stronger hand in the process than its very much bigger neighbour, because the EU institutions have sought to protect member states against the demands and exceptionalism of a would-be non-member.  It is almost the exact opposite of a world view in which, as Dunt puts it again, “…international relations [is] a zero-sum game in which big countries are winners and small ones losers to be gobbled up”. 

It’s a reality which logic dictates ought to lead to a change in outlook, but the cognitive dissonance involved has all been too much for them.  The EU’s support for Ireland’s position has led to some Brexiteers complaining that the EU is not being tough enough in bringing that small country into line for the benefit of the larger ones – in the same way as they themselves have simply over-ridden any and all objections from Scotland or Wales to their approach.  For them, that is the natural order of things.  If their complaint sounds like the complete reverse of what they were previously saying about ‘Europe’ dominating its member states, it’s not because they were previously wrong; it can only be because ‘Europe’ is using Ireland to pursue its own devious and nefarious objectives.  Every fact or event which undermines their own world view can be and is simply re-interpreted in ways which confirm and strengthen it.  It makes rational debate close to impossible.

Let's not repeat the mistake

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There’s no doubt that the increase in support for independence highlighted by a poll last week is stunning.  Neither can there be any doubt that this is good news for independentistas – it shows that opinions can and do change, and that they can change rapidly in the right circumstances.  There are, though a couple of concerns which should be noted.

The first is that a change which happens rapidly can also be reversed rapidly, and there has to be at least a question over the depth of the commitment to independence revealed by this poll.  A change driven by potentially transient factors may not be sustained long term.  Whilst it’s a good basis on which to build, and shows a growing willingness in principle to consider the concept, there is a need to do more than simply widen the support – it also needs to be deepened and strengthened.

But my second concern is bigger, and it revolves around the finding that 41% would support independence it if meant that Wales could remain in the EU.  As an expression of the number preferring membership of the EU to continued participation in the UK, it’s a useful headline figure, and very encouraging news.  I can’t help wondering, though, if it doesn’t also highlight the dangers of offering over-simplified options as binary choices – in the same way as happened with the EU referendum itself. 

If the question had included the wording “even if that meant customs posts along Offa’s Dyke”, would the response have been the same?  Yet, unless there is some as yet unstated solution to the Irish border problem, that is the likely outcome of a scenario where Wales is in the EU and England outside it, because the problem isn’t, and never has been, specifically about Ireland.  The problem arises where two countries or groups of countries want to both have entirely open borders for the movement of goods and services and at the same time operate different regulatory regimes.  There is no known way of achieving both those outcomes without compromising the integrity of one or both market regimes.  So, if England were to choose to be outside the EU whilst Wales, Scotland and (a united?) Ireland chose to be inside, there could be free movement of goods between Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but not between those countries and England.  The border problem doesn’t go away, it merely moves.

None of this invalidates the extremely interesting and encouraging result that as many as 41% currently would prefer to remain in the EU, but those taking it as a mandate to pursue such an objective need to spell out the probable consequences and what they would do about them.  Otherwise, there is a danger that a strong campaign could create a clear majority for an outcome expressed in over simplistic terms which is undeliverable in practice.  And we’ve had quite enough experience of that sort of outcome over the last three years.