Learning to live with it

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The media reported two fatal stabbings in London last week, an occurrence which seems to be becoming all too frequent. Each and every one is a tragedy for those involved, of course, but to put it in perspective, very, very few people die each year as a result of knife crime. According to the House of Commons Library, there were 244 homicides as a result of the use of a sharp instrument in the year to March 2021. Yet no-one seriously suggests that we should ‘just learn to live with’ knife crime, and invest resources in dealing with the consequences rather than in attempting to reduce the incidence. It would be a very silly argument to make. And yet…

Contrast that with preventable deaths due to Covid. There have been 174,000 premature deaths so far which mentioned Covid on the death certificate, according to the ONS, and currently around another 1,000 are being added to that total every week. There are things which the UK government could do to reduce the incidence of infection, or even to make resources available to allow the more civilised governments in Wales and Scotland to take more steps to protect the population, but they have instead decided to allow the virus to rip through the population in England, with inevitable knock-on effects elsewhere in the UK. Instead of acting to prevent deaths and hospitalisations, they are investing scarce resources in building extra temporary wards in hospital car parks (with no clue as to how they will be staffed, given that Covid-related staff absences are increasing daily). It’s good business for what the Telegraph referred to as “purveyors of soft-shell body storage solutions”. Yes, that’s right – their normal business is supplying temporary morgues, but they are handily diversifying to house the living in glorified tents. Although we may yet be calling on them for their core business skills as well. This is what ‘learning to live with Covid’ looks like for at least the next few months in the UK, and there is no certainty that it won’t be so for a great deal longer.

One of the fundamental arguments for restricting people’s freedom has always been to protect others from the consequences of that freedom. That is why we do, quite properly, restrict the ‘freedom’ of people to walk around the streets carrying knives, and we act against transgressors. In the case of Covid, the argument has been turned upside down. The ‘freedom’ of people not to have ‘restrictions’ placed on their daily lives in order to control the spread amounts to the freedom to infect others as they wish. Not intentionally, of course – that’s where the comparison with carrying knives breaks down – but those resisting restrictions have enough knowledge to know that the ‘freedom’ they demand has inevitable consequences for others, including the premature death of thousands of them.

The UK finds itself at a time of crisis with a government in thrall to people who present an effective cull (perhaps unintentional, although in the case of some of them, I cannot be certain) of the oldest, frailest and most vulnerable of the population (for it is those categories most likely to die early) as some sort of libertarianism, a protection of the ‘freedom’ of the many. And, rather than having a reasoned debate on what collectively enforced measures might be sensible to reduce the impact of the disease, the public is encouraged by the UK government, from the PM down, to see any measures as individually restrictive rather than collectively preventative, and a compliant media goes along with this. It’s difficult to overstate how dangerous the crazies who have infiltrated and taken control of the Tory party are, but the one thing Brexit has taught us about them is that ‘winning’ one argument is never enough for them. Their pursuit of ideological purity can and will never be satisfied, and the costs of making the attempt will be high. Wales and Scotland need out.

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.

Defining freedom

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The actor, Michael Caine, came in for some criticism yesterday for saying, in relation to the EU, that he would prefer to be poor and free than rich and enslaved.  As plenty of others were quick to point out, it’s fairly easy for a multimillionaire to say that when the real pain of impoverishment will be borne by someone else.  That is, though, a bit of an ad hominem attack; it seems to me that his basic point, namely that there is sometimes a trade-off between freedom and wealth is a valid one.  The point might be better made by someone with a few more financial worries, but the idea is a sound one.

Not everyone will draw the line in the same place; our individual personal circumstances inevitably affect our choices.  A well-fed slave might look at a free but hungry beggar and decide that he’s better off where he is, for instance, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that he supports slavery as a sound basis for an economy.  ‘Enslavement’ is also relative; a Marxist might argue that the relationship between capital and labour is such that all workers are, in effect, slaves, even if they haven’t yet realised the fact.

And it’s that question of defining what ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ mean that is my real issue with what Caine said.  For any state in the modern world, what does ‘freedom’ actually mean?  Clearly, when one country or state uses military power to over-run another and govern that second country in the interests of the first, that second country has lost its freedom in a very real sense.  But if those same two countries negotiate as equals to take certain decisions jointly, they remain independent sovereign countries.  Part of the problem with Brexit from the outset has been that some have been unable to distinguish between those two scenarios, whilst others have been deliberately unwilling to do so.

The result of that inability or unwillingness is that ‘taking back control’ has become a slogan of those who believe that the state in which they happen to reside should have the absolute right to make all its own laws in all fields; and such unthinking absolutism has taken hold in a substantial part of public opinion.  One of the aspects of this is the assumption that a particular state which exists today is the natural, God-given, order of things.  The fact that that state only exists as a direct result of historic military conquest which did indeed directly extinguish the freedom of other countries or states (even the unification of England is down to this process, let alone the addition of Wales, Scotland and part of Ireland) is conveniently ignored.  It’s as though the passage of an unspecified and undefinable period of time validates conquest, and only joint decision-making through agreement is inimical to ‘national freedom’. 

I can agree in principle that freedom is something for which it is worth paying a price (although each of us will draw our own lines about how much freedom and how big a price), but for me there is more ‘freedom’ to be had by Wales having the right to join as an equal with other European nations in taking some decisions jointly than there will ever be in being subsumed in a larger state which insists on the absolute right to take all decisions in the centre and share sovereignty with no-one.

Liberation?

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Boris Johnson was taken to task recently by a Swedish MP for using the word ‘liberation’ in the context of the UK leaving the EU.  I’m not particularly interested in the precise definition of the words here as much as the underlying attitudes which the uses of the word display.  It is clear to me that many Brexiteers really do see it in terms of regaining liberty and sovereignty (even though the government’s own white paper on Brexit makes it clear that sovereignty was never in doubt).  It convinces me that they really don't understand what 'domination' by another country actually means, but if they truly believe that exiting the EU is about regaining lost liberty it’s easy to understand why they are so surprised that most independentistas don’t support Brexit.  And conversely, it’s a perspective which helps to explain why some independentistas are so fond of Brexit.

It’s a question of more than merely academic interest, and is particularly pertinent to the debate in Scotland on a second independence referendum.  It’s a major part of the explanation as to why it isn’t possible to draw a simple line from the 62% pro-EU vote to a majority for independence.  The problem, for the SNP, is that a significant minority of those supporting independence also support leaving the EU, seeing both as a question of ‘freedom’.

At a superficial level, it’s easy to see how the misunderstanding arises.  Why, after all, would people opposed to decisions being taken in one capital outside their country support them being taken in another capital outside their country?  Why distinguish between one ‘union’ and another ‘union’?  Part of the answer, of course, is that the comparison is over-simplistic – the fact that the word ‘union’ is used in both cases is too easily interpreted to mean that they’re the same thing.  Explaining why the two are different is challenging in a political milieu which reduces everything to simple slogans.

From a historical perspective, there is a huge difference between a union brought about by military conquest, where one particular nationality is dominant, and where sovereignty is deemed to reside in the centre on the one hand, and a union which is joined voluntarily on the basis of a mutually agreed set of terms, which recognises that sovereignty lies with the people of the member states, and which is, in its very essence, a multi-language and multi-culture organisation dominated by no one country on the other.  Although it might look like decisions are being taken in faraway capitals in both cases, there are some key differences there as well.  In the case of one union, they are taken by a government which is dominated by one ‘member’ of the union, and in the other, there is of necessity a more collective approach to decision-taking with lengthy negotiations between the partners and a qualified majority system of voting at the end.  In other words, in the one union, we get to do what we are told, whilst in the other we get the same level of input as other members before a collective decision is taken.  We will still be outvoted on occasions, of course.  But to claim that that is somehow less democratic than simply being told what to do is to traduce the meaning of the word democracy.

Even the most committed Brexiteers display through their words that they understand the difference between the two, even if that understanding is not always a conscious one.  If the two were truly equivalent, than an EU which included England, Scotland and Wales as independent individual members would be, in effect, maintaining the “union” between the countries of the UK, simply on a looser, more equal basis.  The fact that they don’t see it that way demonstrates clearly that, at some level, they understand the different nature of the two unions.  And it underlines the essential nationalism of their position; one set of borders, one set of political and governance arrangements, is axiomatically “better” than another.

Some of the strongest arguments that I’ve seen against membership of the EU are based on opposition to the capitalist ideology underlying the EU.  They are arguments with which I have a great deal of sympathy, and they mirror the arguments used by many (including myself) in the 1975 referendum.  But the option of an alternative arrangement with a significant number of other countries outside the EU no longer exists, and the idea that Wales can build ‘socialism in one country’, to borrow a not-entirely-happy slogan from the past, strikes me as wishful thinking in the twenty-first century.  I’m simply not convinced that we can build our future in isolation from the rest of Europe; the world has become too integrated for that.  The problem, in a nutshell, is that however good some of those points are as arguments against membership of the EU, they do not stand up as arguments for the only alternative on the table, which is being part of an isolationist UK (with or without Scotland) in which the ideology so criticised in relation to the EU holds even stronger sway.

I understand why some independentistas want to have no part of either union (or presumably any alternative union) – and why they therefore celebrate rather than oppose Brexit.  I understand why that looks more like ‘proper’ independence than membership of either the EU or the UK.  But how realistic is it to argue that Wales could or should be ‘totally independent’ in the modern globalised world?  Joining any international body (including the UN) necessarily requires a pooling of sovereignty with other countries; it necessarily requires that not all decisions taken will be taken unanimously, and that sometimes we will disagree.  In addition, all the other members of the EU consider themselves ‘proper’ independent states, and would laugh at the idea that they are not.  Why does Welsh independence require us to be ‘more independent’ than them?  It seems to be taking a particularly ‘British’ or ‘Brexiteer’ view of what independence is, rather than looking at it from a Welsh or European perspective.  It’s as though parts of the Welsh national movement are forgetting our long history of taking that more European outlook and are instead being sucked along in the flow of defining things in very British terms.  To me, that’s a curious position for any independentista to take.

The question is how much sovereignty we should share and with whom.  Not all unions are equivalent, and probably none will be perfect.  I’m convinced that being in an organisation which includes a number of other similar sized countries with whom we can work offers a better future to Wales than being in an off-shore island totally dominated by the neighbour to our east.  Yet the latter is, today, the default future awaiting us.  And looking to the longer term, persuading people in Wales that our best future lies in opting out of that and becoming an independent state outside both unions looks to me to be a much harder task than persuading them to opt in to membership of a European union on equal terms with other European nations.  The latter is also more compatible with the general flow of European history in the twenty-first century.  Brexit takes that second option off the table, and independentistas supporting, or even facilitating, Brexit are, in my view, pushing Wales’ entry into the world into the far-distant future as a result.