By-election significance isn't about competing brands of vanilla ice cream

Tweet

 

With the votes counted and the dust settling, Andy Burnham won yesterday’s Makerfield by-election by a large majority. To what extent this was a personal vote for the man rather than the party (‘vote Labour to get the Labour PM out’ is an unusual campaign strategy, to say the least) is not clear. I’ve always tended to the view that personalities don’t have a huge impact on election results at parliamentary level, but all rules have their exceptions and the circumstances and extent of coverage in this case may have enhanced the impact of the individual. If individuals really do make a difference, then it certainly helped that Reform Ltd chose a walking car-crash as their candidate, a man whose past comments made him an easy target. A cynic might even suggest that Farage would prefer Labour to stick with Starmer. Whatever, the fact is that Burnham is now in Westminster, and expectations are high that the starting gun will soon be fired on either a Labour leadership contest or else a coronation for the man from Manchester. Whatever gloss attaches to the Burnham name now may well be tarnished by the forthcoming mayoral by-election, which Reform Ltd have a reasonable chance of winning based on the local council elections, even if the bookies currently narrowly favour Labour; but maybe he’ll have staged his coup before that can happen.

The media are painting the Burnham bandwagon as a virtually unstoppable force, ushering in a new government and a new era. I’m not so sure. Burnham is undoubtedly a better communicator than the incumbent, although that isn’t exactly a high bar. The question is about how different he will be in practice. On that score, the omens are not good. He has already committed to maintaining the arbitrary fiscal rules drawn up by Rachel Reeves, and the appointment of a set of deeply conservative financial advisers to support him augurs badly. It looks as though the neoliberal agenda of continued wealth concentration is likely to continue unabated, and he is tying his own hands to do little more than tinker at the edges. Those sunlit uplands aren’t getting any closer. Burnham vs Starmer is politics as ice cream flavours, except the choice is limited to different brands of vanilla.

To my mind, the more significant, not to say worrying, by-election result yesterday was the one in Aberdeen South, where the SNP lost a seat to the Tories. The significance isn’t in the SNP losing, although that’s unwelcome, or even in the Tories winning, although that goes against the run of play. It is, rather, in the basis of the political upset, which is all about the oil and gas industry. It’s an issue that the SNP have not handled particularly well, but the outcome suggests that voters in Aberdeen have fallen for the snake oil being peddled by the Tories (as well as other parties of the ‘right’), namely the idea that we can both secure the planet’s future for coming generations and at the same time use all available resources with no concern for tomorrow. It isn’t just a problem in Aberdeen. Those who would deny the evidence of anthropogenic climate change have seen an opportunity to persuade voters to support them: after all, what’s not to like about a politician who tells you that you can do what you like today and you don’t need to worry about future consequences? Aided by a dumbed-down and lazy media which reports the debate as a “he said, she said” question rather than seeking out facts and scientific consensus, alongside echo-chamber social media, they are pushing against an open door.

Perhaps our end will come not with a bang or indeed any type of sudden event, but in the fug of a long drawn-out party.

Irrelevance may be infectious

Tweet

 

If there is a single UK politician who should understand what political irrelevance looks and feels like, it is surely ex-PM Tony Blair, and it’s tempting to dismiss his critique of the way the UK is becoming irrelevant under the leadership of his own party on that basis. That would, though, miss the point, because for all the robust rebuttals of that critique by current-day Labour figures, the whole episode serves to emphasise not the difference between the Blair generation and the Starmer generation but the intrinsic similarities.

It is clear, for instance, that both what Blair had to say and what Starmer has been doing are predicated on an idea of the UK as a great global power, with influence way beyond its size and economic importance to the world. It’s a sort of post-imperial delusion on the part of people who can’t quite get their heads around the idea of the UK as a medium-sized offshore European archipelago, and expect the rest of the world to somehow take them at their own evaluation of their relevance.

Some have been surprised at the similarity between the responses of Burnham and Streeting, with their insistence that the idea of inequality is missing from Blair’s response. But both men, like Blair himself, are wedded to the neoliberal economic creed that ‘the markets’ can solve every problem and that governments must do, fiscally, whatever they interpret the bond markets as demanding. Increasing inequality is not only baked into that creed, it is its main driving force. In his failure to pretend that he thinks it important, Blair is simply being more honest than either. There is no great ‘battle of ideas’ going on between the Labour leadership hopefuls, just a beauty contest between two over-ambitious wannabe Messiahs. Irrelevant is quite an apt description.

Principles and virtue-signalling

Tweet

 

Principled stands are all very well, and something for which politicians are generally happy to be credited. Until, that is, the cost of taking such a stand is perceived to outweigh the advantages gained. We saw it in Starmer’s ‘principled stand’ against the US bombing campaign in Iran, which was principled until he decided that allowing the US to use UK bases for ‘purely defensive’ bombing raids (an oxymoron if ever there was one) was a less costly option. And he’s never explained exactly how the purpose and target of each bombing raid was verified to determine whether it met the unspecified criteria for being ‘purely defensive’ – the suspicion remains that the ‘principled stand’ amounted to making a grand statement and then turning a blind eye.

Starmer also took a ‘principled stand’ over Ukraine, backing strong sanctions against unwarranted Russian aggression. Until unwarranted US aggression against Iran caused a potential lack of jet fuel and diesel, at which point the principles got lost. Principles which last only until those espousing them conclude that they are costing themselves too much aren’t really principles at all; they’re more about virtue-signalling.

Whether sanctions actually achieve very much is another question entirely. The theory is that by denying a country access to goods from outside the country and denying that country access to markets for its own goods, then pressure is placed on the economy to such an extent that the government can no longer sustain itself and must collapse/ surrender/ stop a war (delete as applicable). The truth of the proposition depends on three assumptions. The first is that the country being sanctioned cannot sustain itself entirely on the basis of its own resources and productive capacity, the second is the neoliberal economic dogma that the limiting factor on any government’s actions is the amount of money available to it, and the third is that all other countries buy into the sanctions regime.

In the case of Russia, none of those three assumptions are valid. Russia may not have the climate to grow certain crops, which might limit the population’s dietary choices (although after decades of Soviet rule, that might not be as novel as one might think), but the country’s resources are vast and varied, and they have the people and skills to exploit them. As long as they don’t need foreign currency, the idea that the money supply is somehow limited is a myth anyway: the constraint on government action is the availability of real resources, not the means of exchange to buy them. And in any event, there are significant other powers prepared to ignore the sanctions regime. Sanctions have the ring of the old adage, which runs ‘something must be done, this is something, we must do this’.

The conclusion – that sanctions are largely symbolic statements by those applying them, and little more than irritations to those to whom they are applied – is depressing. Failure to recognise that fact is even more so – it simply encourages people to continue to pursue a failed path. There is no quick or easy solution. Universal adherence to agreed international law is our only hope in the long term, but achieving it is another matter entirely. Perhaps we never will, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. In the meantime, pretend principles achieve little except to divert attention from the real issue.

Who's checking what the US are doing from UK bases?

Tweet

 

A few hours before Trump’s deadline for Iran to surrender, it was reported that heavily-laden B52 bombers were taking off (or at least attempting to) from RAF Fairford, presumably en route to Iran. Whether they were armed with conventional weapons or nuclear weapons we may never know, but we can only assume that the jets were turned back in flight after Trump agreed, instead, to negotiate the terms of his own surrender, based on an Iranian document which Trump described as “a workable basis on which to negotiate”, and which would require, amongst other things, the payment of reparations to Iran and the removal of US bases from the region. Trump clearly blinked first, although under what pressures from within his own administration remains uncertain.

Whether it’s really a sound basis for a lasting peace is another unknown at this stage, but the use of a UK base for launching those B52s is an issue which shouldn’t be allowed to go away. Starmer has taken what appears to be a very principled and legalistic stance in demanding that UK bases only be used for ‘defensive’ actions to protect British and allied lives in the Persian Gulf, and he has banned their use for offensive bombing campaigns against Iran. But here’s the question: does anyone really believe that those B52’s, whose take-off was timed so that they would arrive over Iran at about the time that Trump said he wanted to destroy an entire civilisation, were in any way involved in a ‘defensive’ mission rather than part of his planned attacks on civilian infrastructure?

When a bomb falls on an Iranian hospital, school, bridge, or power plant, who in the UK government knows whether it came from a plane flying from a UK base or not? Is anyone checking the mission details and flight logs of all US military aircraft departing from the UK to see whether the US is abiding by Starmer’s rules or not? Starmer has banked a certain, albeit limited, quantity of kudos for setting strict rules, but if adherence is not being monitored (even Starmer, surely, couldn’t be stupid enough to take Trump’s word about what he is doing), then those rules are meaningless. Accepting the word of the US president and then turning a blind eye to what happens in practice would not be the principled stance as which it is being presented.

Laser-focused complacency might not help

Tweet

 

In Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little’s Sheriff holds a gun to his own head and gets out of a sticky situation by telling the townsfolk that “The next man makes a move, the n***** gets it”. In the real world, Trump’s approach to Iran seems to involve telling them that he’s going to bomb them for another two to three weeks, and if they then agree to his terms, he’ll walk away and reserve the right to bomb them again whenever he feels like it, but if they don’t agree to his terms, he’ll walk away anyway and reserve the right to bomb them again whenever he feels like it. He doesn’t quite seem to realise that he isn’t creating as much fear as he thinks, merely telling them that they just have to hold on for another two or three weeks. When Boris Johnson kept threatening to walk away from EU talks unless they gave the UK everything he wanted, the EU’s response was along the lines of “bye!”. That sheriff had no real power to compel anyone to do anything, but it was a comedy, and in fiction, characters will do whatever the scriptwriter tells them to do. While there are undeniable comic aspects to both Trump and Johnson, their lack of control of the script meant that neither could compel their interlocutors to do what they wanted – and those interlocutors weren’t playing it for laughs either. Trump, in business as in politics, has always over-stated the strength of his own hand and depended on bullying, violence and threats to obtain compliance; Johnson was just a typical English exceptionalist.

Talk of English exceptionalists brings us to the current PM, Keir Starmer, who tried to tell us yesterday that the UK is somehow uniquely well-placed to weather the current economic storms resulting from an ill-thought-out war. He has a plan, he told us, although detail on the content of said plan was remarkably short. From what little he did say, it seems to consist mostly of being laser-focused on waiting to see what happens and then being resolutely determined to do as little as he can get away with. The picture of the UK being painted by some others, i.e. as being perhaps more vulnerable than others to some shortages, seems not to have penetrated his laser-focused complacency. Maybe things won’t turn out as bad as some of the doom and gloom merchants are prophesying; maybe Trump's expressed admiration for Charlie Windsor will lead him to moderate his behaviour rather than add a king to the list of those publicly humiliated by him, but neither seem to be the soundest of foundations on which to build any sort of strategy. As a work colleague of mine once observed, ‘if you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs, you probably don’t know what’s going on’. A message intended to reassure, from someone who seems not to know what’s going on, doesn’t exactly hit the target. Even if the target is laser-focused.

Labour needs more than a better story-teller

Tweet

 

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

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

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

When is an agreement not an agreement?

Tweet

 

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

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

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

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

Pragmatism, Law, and Justice aren't the same thing

Tweet

 

Some managers are good at running things, but hopeless in a crisis; others are good in a crisis, but hopeless at running things when there is no crisis. However, for life’s ‘firefighters’ to be seen to be doing well, there need to be fires, and if there aren’t any, then they will generally find ways to start some. There are other managers who are good at neither, but somehow manage to convince others (or at least themselves) of their efficacy. Trump is clearly in that third category, but fondly imagines that he is actually one of the world's greatest firefighters.

When you run out of wars to resolve (even if some of them were never wars in the first place, and others have not really been resolved at all), the only thing a man determined to win the Nobel Peace Prize can reasonably do is to start a few himself. Give it a week or two and he’ll be adding Venezuela to the list of wars that he has personally ended. Shortly to be followed by his ending of the wars in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Greenland. He probably thinks that will actually impress the committee awarding the prize.

Here in the UK, meanwhile, the PM is still waiting to be advised as to whether one country bombing another country, sending troops in, capturing the leader and taking him abroad, and reallocating that country’s natural resources to foreign companies, might possibly constitute some sort of crime or not. In fairness, it’s hardly as if he’s a highly trained and experienced lawyer with specific expertise in human rights issues who might be expected to be able to come to an opinion of his own on the matter, is it?

There are, of course, times and circumstances when adopting a pragmatic approach to events which are out of the UK’s control and about which we can do nothing (we’re hardly going to support either a retaliatory strike or even a few limited sanctions) makes sense, but it increasingly appears that the ‘expert legal mind’ currently running the UK actually doesn’t understand the differences between pragmatism, law, and justice. It’s not a first offence, either – we’ve seen much the same thing with his repeated description of a possible pragmatic end to the war in Ukraine involving the ceding of territory as a ‘just’ settlement.

Maduro has hardly been an angel in his approach to governing Venezuela (although his regime has achieved more in terms of reducing poverty and extending education than it is usually given credit for) – and the fact that there are worse leaders around the globe is not much of an excuse for supporting him. His last re-election may well have been rigged (although hard evidence, rather than anecdotal evidence from a sore loser, to justify that assertion is not exactly easy to come by).

But failing to call out a blatant breach of established international law purely in order to placate His Orangeness in the White House does us no favours in the long term, and merely helps to cement a new international order in which the powerful are allowed to do whatever they wish, and the rest are there to be exploited. Those not sitting at the table are likely to be on the menu, as the saying goes. Starmer’s assertion that he has “been a lifelong advocate of international law and the importance of compliance with international law” is just a joke. And not a very good one.

War is a choice, not an inevitability

Tweet

 

One of the policies which seems to be increasingly common ground between the Tories and Reform Ltd is opposition to the target of becoming carbon neutral, or reaching net zero in terms of carbon emissions. It’s a policy platform which seems to be implicitly underpinned by two very curious beliefs.

The first is that expenditure on achieving neutrality is in some way consuming wealth whilst continued exploitation of fossil fuels is generating wealth. It is, of course, complete and utter piffle. If we measure wealth in terms of GDP (or GVA), what money is spent on is irrelevant. It is the act of spending it which adds to GDP; money spent in insulating properties adds as much to GDP as the same amount of money spent on drilling for oil – and that’s true whether the spending is in the public sector or the private sector. There might be an argument that multiplier effects mean that spending on X rather than Y ultimately generates more GDP per £ spent. I actually don’t know the answer in this specific case, but it’s interesting to note that it’s not an argument they are trying to make. I rather suspect that they are conflating two different kinds of wealth – national wealth as represented by GDP and private wealth as reflected in the bank balances of individuals and companies. I’m sure, though, that this conflation has nothing to do with the fact that both parties rely heavily on donations from established players in established sectors, such as oil and gas. Not.

The second curious belief is that if nothing gets spent on achieving net zero, the whole amount of any projected expenditure becomes a net saving, and makes money available for other things. Their favourite other things are tax cuts for the wealthy and/or channelling expenditure into donor companies, such as those in the armaments industry. Badenoch’s statement today is a classic of the genre. I suppose that, if they really believe that climate change is not happening at all, then it would be a reasonable belief, although that would be flying in the face of overwhelming scientific opinion. I’m not sure that they really do believe that, though; reading some of what they say, it seems more likely that they believe that we can and will somehow adapt to climate change. The costs of that, they simply ignore – a problem for another day.

Badenoch would clearly prefer war to addressing climate change, which I suppose puts her on the same page as Farage and Starmer. There is, though, more to the cost of war than diverting the finite resources of planet Earth into weapons of destruction. There is the obvious cost of loss of human lives (although they would probably all prefer to see that as a loss of a productive labour force). There’s also the lost opportunities which such diversion of resources would entail – the opportunity to provide a decent standard of living for all, for instance. Badenoch is making it clear that she thinks that austerity (obviously not for her section of society) is a price worth paying in order to prepare for all out war with Russia. And then there’s probably the biggest cost of all: in the event of surviving such a war, the cost of reconstruction would be enormous.

There is one point about which she is right. Governments face choices. Whether the constraint on what governments can do is the availability of money (as she, Starmer and Farage all insist that they believe) or the availability of physical resources (as economic reality dictates), governments still have to choose between options for using that money or those resources. Badenoch is making her choice clear – war. And she’s being aided and abetted by politicians and military types urging the same choice on an almost daily basis. There is an alternative, though: we really don’t have to allow them to make that choice.

There's nothing just about Trump's plan - or even Europe's

Tweet

 

In response to the ‘Trump’ plan for peace in Ukraine (which according to some was actually drawn up by Russia rather than Trump, although its precise provenance remains in some doubt), Keir Starmer has said it needs more work in order to turn it into a “just and lasting peace”. Fine words, but whether they’re any more meaningful than a standard Trump word salad is open to question. To be ‘lasting’, it has to provide cast iron guarantees of no future aggression against Ukraine, and the version published to date offers no more than wishy-washy words.

But the bigger issue is defining a “just” peace. If we’re seriously talking about ‘justice’, then any agreement has to include a return to the internationally-recognised boundaries prior to the seizure of parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, an agreement on reparations for damage caused by an illegal invasion, a system of trials for war crimes committed, and agreement that any future changes to boundaries will be negotiated, not imposed by force. Such a ‘just’ outcome, realistically, isn’t going to be on the table – it could only ever be an option if other countries were willing to use their own military forces to impose such an outcome. What Starmer is talking about is not whether the outcome is ‘just’ or not, but whether the degree of injustice is acceptable to Ukraine and to those countries providing Kyiv with armaments and other support. He's just not honest enough to say so.

The question for the UK becomes one of deciding just how much injustice it should ask Ukraine to accept in the cause of peace. A ceasefire along the current lines of control whilst negotiations on the longer term continue (but without formally recognising the occupied territories as Russian) is a big ask for Ukraine (and utterly unjust), but without external military support it’s probably as good as it gets. But given how much ground Trump has already conceded to Putin, he may already have made even that an impossible outcome. Since Putin knows (not least because Trump appears to have told him so) that Trump will support him in asking for much more than that, it’s hard to see why Putin would back down significantly on what he thinks Trump has already agreed, namely the handover of even more of Ukraine, the formal recognition of Russian sovereignty over the occupied territory, the forgiveness of all Russian war crimes and the reintegration of Russia into a US-led global kleptocracy.

Starmer is doing his best to look like some sort of global statesman from an age where the UK’s opinion counted for something, but it really doesn’t. The truth is that, if they jointly so decide, the two dictators, Trump and Putin, have the power to impose their will. I don’t like that, but me not liking something doesn’t make it untrue. The biggest obstacle to a Trump-Putin accord is not a gang of European middle-ranking powers pleading with Trump, it is that Trump doesn’t actually know what he wants from one day to the next. He certainly loves being flattered, and it’s easy to see why so many have concluded that flattery might be the best way to influence him, but how long that influence lasts after they’ve left his presence is a different matter.

Assuming that the world order will return to what was previously regarded as ‘normal’ once Trump goes is a dangerous starting point, not least because we don’t know when he will go or what will follow him. It’s an unstated assumption, though, which seems to underpin Starmer’s stance – which means that there is no planning going on for the new world in which we may be living for some time to come.

Starmer and Reeves are feeding Farageism

Tweet

 

Imagine for a moment a different world in which the UK managed to solve its endemic problems. It’s vanishingly unlikely, of course. As long as governments of whatever hue insist that the constraints on what they can do are a lack of money and the need to abide by a set of fiscal rules which they themselves have devised, rather than the availability of physical resources and the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, there is no real prospect of meaningful change.

But, for the sake of argument, bear with me for a moment. Suppose we could get to a situation where the NHS could provide the help that people need, when they need it, with negligible waiting lists; suppose that we had an educational system which produced consistently good results and was the envy of much of the world; suppose that everyone had adequate housing suitable to meet their needs. Suppose also that we had ‘full’ employment: in realistic terms, everyone of working age who was able to work could get a decently-paid job that they wanted to do; suppose that that included not just UK citizens, but also those who had come here from elsewhere; and suppose that all those who arrived from elsewhere spoke impeccable English (or Welsh, of course). In such an ideal world, do we believe that Farage, Badenoch, Starmer, Mahmoud etc. would stop banging on about the need to block migration and remove some or all of those already here?

Sadly, I don’t think it would change their position one iota. There are those who argue that they simply hate migrants per se – I don’t believe that they do. I suspect, rather more cynically, that they believe that a sufficient proportion of the electorate hate migrants so much that there are large numbers of votes to be had by being seen to be tough on migration. It’s not that the politicians themselves are racists or xenophobes, they’re simply willing to appeal to voters who are in order to win elections.

Whether their faith in the innate prejudices of a significant part of the electorate is justified or not is an unknown. For the reasons outlined at the beginning, it’s not a theory which is ever likely to be tested. And for as long as UK governments refuse to fix the problems which they can then blame on migrants, they will get away with pretending that anti-migrant feelings are based on what they choose to call ‘legitimate concerns’ rather than on prejudice and racism, and claim that expelling people rather then improving conditions is the way to solve those problems. Actually, it’s worse than that. By refusing to address the underlying problems and concentrating instead on deporting people, they reinforce the idea that migration is the source of the problems; in other words, the Reeves/Starmer fiscal rules reinforce the narrative about migration. Their ideological blinkers are directly aiding the Farages of this world.

How and why does something become a moral issue?

Tweet

 

The UK’s Prime Minister has described his decision to recognise the state of Palestine as being a ‘moral responsibility’. It’s a nice rhetorical flourish to justify something which should have been done a long time ago, but it doesn’t explain how and why something which was apparently unacceptable to him last year suddenly became a moral imperative. Was it the non-stop killing of Gazans by Israel which tilted the balance? Maybe, but that doesn’t explain why so many had to die before it became a ‘moral’ issue. Perhaps it was the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the driving out of Palestinians from the areas being settled, but that, too, has been going on for a long time. ‘Morality’ isn’t a numbers game; there’s no magic threshold at which deliberately killing civilians, including children, moves from being a practical issue to a moral one, no magic threshold at which the seizure of land becomes a moral issue. Framing it as a moral issue might sound good, but it also avoids serious action to bring about change.

The recognition is, in any event, more limited than it appears. No-one in their right mind would want to see Hamas forming the government of the newly-recognised state, but if the Palestinians have the right to a state (as Starmer argues), by what authority can the UK declare in advance that the people may not choose a government which includes a specified group or party? Although, on reflection, an international order which precludes certain individuals or groups from ever exercising power isn’t such a bad idea – there are a number of regimes across the world which I think we would be better off without. But who decides what is or is not acceptable, and how is it to be enforced? And if it is not a general rule, why should one ‘independent and sovereign state’ be singled out as uniquely having no right to choose whatever government it wishes? There are practical issues as well – banning an organisation is all well and good, but it’s easy enough for any organisation to disband and reform under another name.

There is one simple truth underlying what is happening in Palestine, and it applies to other conflicts as well. The world is not and never has been run on the basis of morality, and there isn’t even a single set of moral standards on which we all agree. It is actually run on the basis of raw power – in effect, ‘might is right’. He who possesses the power and armaments imposes his will on others. It’s a philosophy to which most of the world’s leaders (including Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, and, yes, Starmer himself) subscribe, in their actions if not in their words. As long as that remains true, those leaders talking of ‘moral responsibility’ is just window dressing.

Reinforcing migrant blame only keeps us on the same trajectory

Tweet

 

As something of a parting shot yesterday, Trump told Starmer that immigration “destroys countries from within”, and advised him to deploy the military to stop migration. How that would work isn’t clear, but perhaps he means a few extra-judicial killings of the sort which he is implementing himself. Trumpland tends to see absolute destruction on all sides – his response to an unfavourable court ruling on his imposition of tariffs was to suggest that the court’s decision “would literally destroy the United States of America” as well. The threat of ‘absolute destruction’ is key to his regular invocation of an emergency of one sort or another. It’s hyperbole of course: a good general rule of thumb is that any sentence containing the word ‘literally’ is probably going to be more hyperbole than fact. Even when it isn’t from Trump.

I can’t think of any actual historical example which would lend support to the idea that immigration destroys countries; on the contrary, immigration has made many countries what they are today, with the US being perhaps the most obvious example. What immigration can do, however, is change the culture of a country, sometimes in small ways, and sometimes – especially when the ruling elite are drawn entirely from the immigrant population – much more drastically. Once again, the US stands out as a particular example of cultural replacement as Europeans marginalised, and at times massacred, the former population. The world’s greatest exponents of cultural replacement have been the European colonial powers, foremost amongst them Spain, England and France, but with dishonourable mentions for Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy as well. And here in Wales, we are not exactly unfamiliar with the idea of cultural replacement either, albeit as victim more than perpetrator.

Does the current level of immigration – either into the US or the UK – really threaten that sort of cultural change? There’s no evidence to suggest that it does. Unlike a true invasion where the ruling group is replaced, attracting migrants into the general population really doesn’t have that much impact. Historical evidence says that, after two or three generations, the descendants of immigrants tend to absorb the majority culture more often than challenging or changing it. The economic impact of migration is disputed; most objective studies suggest that it has a net positive effect overall, but for those who are not being well-served by the economy at present, immigration is a convenient scapegoat. Especially when exaggerated by those who seek to use people’s fears and prejudices as a route to power. One of the main elements of those prejudices – we cannot avoid this truth – is a form of racism; not always based on skin colour, although that’s certainly a factor, but often on a fear or dislike of anyone seen to be ‘different’.

I seriously doubt whether the likes of Trump or Farage (or Starmer or Badenoch come to that) really care very much about immigration at all. Playing to perceived prejudices is just a route to power, and dividing those over whom they seek power is a bonus. The result is that, rather than challenging or changing those prejudices, they reinforce them. Those who seek to rebut the arguments generally highlight facts and statistics, but it’s an approach doomed to fail. People will not be swayed by facts and statistics from a view which was never based on facts or statistics in the first place. There is a certain inevitability about the destination if we stay on the current trajectory. A standard piece of advice to writers is ‘show, don’t tell’, and a good starting place for governing politicians would be to create and then demonstrate economic success for all rather than verbally reinforcing blame. I’m not holding my breath.

Identifying tyranny

Tweet

 

Can I have been the only one watching the news last night when Charlie Windsor started talking about how ‘we’ defeated tyranny in the past and needed to stand up to it today who initially wondered whether he was talking about Trump rather than to Trump about Putin? Maybe it was one of those cleverly-crafted diplomatic criticisms which seem to be about one thing, but are actually about something else. If it was, such subtlety would have completely gone over the head of the target. Maybe one day we’ll find out who wrote Trump’s speech in response – it certainly wasn’t Trump himself – which, somewhat amazingly, he managed to read out without digressing into one of his lengthy rants about stolen elections, losers and morons.

One of the things that has become clear from the visit is that the much-lauded trade agreement allegedly reached back in May hasn’t really been agreed at all. The detail is still under discussion, with the US president free to renege on anything (such as elimination of tariffs on steel) if he feels like he may have given too much away. And from what we have seen of the man so far, even if he had agreed it, there’s no certainty that he wouldn’t change his mind on elements of it at any time – a trade agreement with Trump is an essentially worthless document. That knowledge won’t be enough to stop Starmer giving way even further as and when necessary.

The remaining potential flashpoint is this afternoon’s joint press conference where the probability that Trump will go off at a tangent remains high, particularly if he’s asked a question that he takes a dislike to. In theory, Starmer is the host; in practice, he’s already banned one broadcaster (the Australian broadcaster ABC) whose Americas editor upset Trump earlier this week by asking some difficult questions about conflicts of interest with Trump’s personal enrichment schemes business dealings. The reason given was some mysterious ‘logistical’ problems, an excuse also used for banning Al Jazeera, in whose case the weather was also mentioned as a factor. How the weather only affects outlets not necessarily friendly to Trump is a question which we probably are not supposed to ask. The underlying point is that a press conference, on UK soil, hosted by the UK’s Prime Minister, is excluding legitimate journalists at the behest of a man who thinks a free press is such a bad thing that he’s suing one US newspaper for having dared to support his opponent in last year’s election.

At what point does ‘mere’ elected autocracy become the sort of tyranny about which the king of England probably wasn’t talking after all? When attempts are made to silence a free press? When broadcasters are bullied into axing programmes or sacking presenters? When people are disappeared from the streets by masked government agents? When law enforcement is deployed to pursue and prosecute political opponents? When universities and museums are told what they may or may not teach or display? When law firms are compelled to donate their services for free to causes chosen by the president as a condition of being allowed to continue operating? When companies are compelled to give a share of their profits – or even their share capital – to the government in exchange for export licences? Tyranny doesn’t always arrive in a single giant leap; sometimes it comes in a succession of small steps, making it difficult to draw a line between tyranny and non-tyranny. Are the Starmers of this world looking on with fear as they comply – or with envy? I’m not entirely sure that I want to know the answer to that one.

Starmer, Amazon, and cats

Tweet

 

Fast, efficient and effective delivery isn’t an entirely unworthy objective of an organisation, as Amazon would attest. It’s certainly better than failing to deliver. So Sir Starmer’s promised obsession with delivery isn’t as entirely vacuous as some have suggested. There is, though, another parallel with Amazon: as long as they receive the punter’s cash and deliver the box, they don’t really care a great deal what’s actually in the box. It could be anything, anything at all; they really don’t care. Sir Starmer seems to be on the same path: what is to be delivered is incidental to the fact of delivery. Where Sir Starmer and Amazon part company, though, is that Amazon do care, at least a little bit, about whether what’s in the box matches what the customer thought they’d ordered, whereas Sir Starmer doesn’t seem particularly bothered about that. Just as long as the box gets to the doorstep.

Entirely incidentally, there are two other constituencies which enjoy receiving Amazon deliveries, other than the paying customer. Cats and small children. Few things please them more than a nice empty box. A happy cat or child doesn’t guarantee a happy customer, of course, but it’s a nice bonus. It’s not clear, however, that Sir Starmer’s deliveries will even arrive in boxes. And relying on pleasing non-voting cats and small children with virtual empty boxes which might or might not have once contained something that the voting customer might or might not have wanted doesn’t look like the brightest of political strategies. There’s a bit more to this delivery business than having an efficient courier – and so far, Sir Starmer doesn’t even seem to have found one of those.

A choice of possible legacies for Starmer

Tweet

 

There is a lot not to like about the new voting system which will be used for the Senedd elections next year. Whilst most seem to object to the idea of voting for parties rather than individuals, I tend to see that as little more than validation of what already happens: people tend to vote for parties not individuals, even if individual candidates prefer to believe that their ‘personal’ vote is a bigger factor than it is in practice. I've been there myself. The bigger issue for me is that, effectively, only first votes count – votes cast for any party which does not win enough votes to gain a seat are effectively worthless. It is simply not true, as proponents of the system claim, that it means that ‘every vote counts’. Like many others, I would prefer a system of STV, which overcomes both of those objections.

As systems go, however, it’s still better than the one we use for Westminster elections. At the last election, Labour gained absolute power and almost two-thirds of the seats. This is described as an overwhelming victory, despite Labour receiving only a little over one third of the vote. Latest opinion polls (and there’s a lot which can change in the interim, including a high probability of a Farage-led implosion) suggest that it’s a trick which might be repeated by Reform Ltd at the next election. It would, again, be described as a huge victory. Opinion polls for the Senedd suggest a similar level of performance by Reform Ltd in terms of votes which, translated into seats, might even make them the largest party – but they would be a very long way short of a majority. And given that their only conceivable coalition partner is the Tories, there is a vanishingly small probability that they will get anywhere near forming a government. Some have talked about how excluding the ‘winners’ from government is somehow undemocratic, but the problem is with language not democracy. A party which can only win around one third of the vote and cannot find one or more coalition partners to get it up to 50% of the membership of the Senedd hasn’t ‘won’ the election, even if it has more votes than any other party. The only thing they’ve ‘won’ is a few seats, the same as any other party represented in the Senedd. Generations of dealing with a system based on first past the post has led us to a degree of confusion about what ‘winning’ means, and we need to recalibrate our language. The ‘winners’ of an election held under a system of proportional representation are those who end up with enough partners close enough in outlook to them to be able to form a government.

There should be a lesson there for Westminster parties (and most especially Labour) in that first past the post may well gift absolute power to Farage and Reform Ltd, but a system of proportional representation would be likely to lead to a very different outcome. As Polly Toynbee pointed out in Monday’s Guardian, based on current polling Sir Starmer has a choice of legacy: he could be the man who reformed the UK’s electoral system or he could be the man who gifted the UK to Farage. The omens are not good. Not just because this is not a man who never seems particularly enamoured with the idea of changing very much at all, but because he also seems to belong to that strand of thought which has long dominated the Labour Party which would prefer to exercise absolute power occasionally (leaving the Tories or even Reform Ltd to hold similarly absolute power the rest of the time) than share power almost continuously. Choosing between enabling Farage and blocking him ought to be what is jokingly called a no-brainer, but Sir Starmer seems likely to make it literally so, by avoiding the engagement of a single neuron in the process.

Throwing people probably wouldn't help

Tweet

 

Yesterday, in advance of Trump’s meeting with Putin later this week to redraw Ukraine’s boundaries, Sir Starmer warned the world that he wouldn’t trust Vladimir Putin “as far as you can throw him”. It’s another of those rare occasions when Sir Starmer has spoken half sensibly. Only half mind, because there is also a major question about the trustworthiness of Trump. And looking at the two men, if it came to a distance throwing contest, I reckon that most of us might be able to throw Putin a millimetre or two further than Trump. It’s probably something to do with the Big Mac consumption ratio.

And that’s the problem with Sir Starmer’s statement backing Trump’s interventions over the Ukraine war: neither of the two parties can be trusted. Putin’s motivation is to get US recognition of his control over as much of Ukraine as possible; Trump’s appears to be earning himself a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the bloodshed, at least long enough for him to get to Oslo and collect it, regardless of whether any peace is just or lasting. Most of Europe is saying that Ukraine must be part of any agreement – the country must not simply be carved up between Trump and Putin.

Sadly, the truth about the world in which we live (rather then the one in which we might prefer to live) is that two dictators, each heavily armed with the means to wipe us all out, meeting in Alaska can and will carve up Ukraine and, come to that, any other country that they choose (a side-deal on Greenland, maybe, as a quid pro quo?), and no-one can stop them. Without US support, unless the rest of the world – and particularly Europe – is willing to commit resources, including military personnel, to the defence of Ukraine, then the ultimate outcome is certain, with only the timescale in doubt. It’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not just, it’s not the sort of world most of us would want, but Trump is surely right to say the cards are stacked against Ukraine. He should know – he’s the one who stacked them.

For decades, we have lived under the delusion that the world order is rules-based, but the US has always had a shaky commitment, at best, to that concept, and has abandoned it completely under Trump. The truth is that we live in a world where the powerful can and do impose their will on those less strong than themselves – Trump has merely shredded the pretence that things were otherwise. Might is right, in practice if not in theory. With the US having gone rogue, the choice is between telling Zelensky to fight to the last Ukrainian, or advising him to accept that some territorial loss is the price of peace, and concentrating on getting back the stolen children and rebuilding what’s left of Ukraine, with absolutely no guarantee that Putin won’t try and grab more of the country in a few years time. It’s not a pleasant choice, but not choosing the second means that Sir Starmer is effectively choosing the first. Slathered in a good dose of meaningless rhetoric about the evil Putin.

How we get to a position where the world can get back to at least the pretence of having a rules-based international order is a much bigger question, to which none of us have the answer. But we can at least start by asking the question, something which Sir Starmer seems unable to comprehend.

The appearance of action

Tweet

 

There have been suggestions in the past that Scotland could overcome the Labour-Tory Westminster blockage of a new referendum on independence if an election resulted in a majority for independence in the Scottish Parliament and that parliament then declared Scotland to be an independent country. There is no legal requirement for a referendum before independence; many of the UK’s former colonies never bothered with such niceties. Some fought for their independence, others negotiated for it, some (perhaps most notably the USA) simply declared themselves independent. But one of the most important tests of whether a country can become independent without the consent of the state currently in control is the question of international recognition. A declaration of independence which no other state recognised could turn out to be pretty meaningless, leaving the administration unable to trade effectively or make any other sort of international agreements, which is a major reason for the SNP having avoided trying it to date.

Sir Starmer is right to understand the importance of international recognition in the process of establishing a Palestinian state, and were the other essentials of statehood in place, it would be a powerful step to take. The problem is that they are not – and Israel is in the process of making sure that their absence is as irrevocable as possible. Between clearing large parts of Gaza of its population, and encouraging settlers to force Palestinians from their land in the West Bank, there are no longer any clear boundaries for a Palestinian State. There may be internationally agreed lines on a map, but they are largely meaningless. Nor is there much by way of a functioning administration, which could be recognised as the ‘government’ of the new state, in large parts of the territory.

Recognition is symbolic, but of little real effect compared to the other steps that the UK could take in terms of sanctions and cessation of military exports. And delayed recognition is even less effective – merely giving the Israeli government a clear timeline in which it needs to complete the elimination of any viable Palestinian state. But then, symbolism is probably all Sir Starmer really wants: the appearance of action without making any real difference. In fact, that phrase (“the appearance of action without making any real difference”) could well come to be the defining characteristic of Starmer’s Labour. And not just in relation to Palestine.

Blurring the lines isn't firm action

Tweet

 

Terrorism, like some perverse form of beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The term, ‘La terreur’, was first used during the French revolution, when it was very much a state-sponsored method of terrifying a population into submission and acceptance. It underlines the fact that there is no clear, generally-accepted definition of the term – a huge advantage for politicians since it means that they can define it any way they choose. Governments tend to use the word as a catch-all for almost anything of which they disapprove, an approach which leads to Putin using the term to justify his war in Ukraine, and Sir Starmer using it to describe a few people who try and give a new coat of paint to a couple of military aircraft. Whether that latter action actually ‘terrified’ anyone is a moot point, but it doesn’t really matter; once something has been officially defined as terrorism, almost any action is apparently justified in dealing with it.

One of the more alarming aspects of the government’s decision to proscribe a single pro-Palestine organisation is the way in which the police now seem to be extending the definition of terrorism to include anyone who supports the same aims as the proscribed organisation itself. Effectively, they’ve started arresting people (and detaining them under the more stringent conditions relating to terrorism rather than the more usual conditions for other types of crime) for declaring their support for the idea of a Palestinian state, rather than only for outright support for the proscribed organisation. Maybe individual police officers have been inadequately briefed about exactly what the law does or does not permit, but it’s hard to believe that different forces in different parts of the UK would independently have come to such a similar conclusion – which suggests at least implicit encouragement from the government.

There are probably few who would quibble with the principle of proscription as a tool to deal with an organisation taking violent action causing death or injury to citizens in an attempt to force a particular change in policy (although not quibbling with the principle isn’t the same as believing that it’s an effective approach). It ought to be possible, though, in a semi-democracy like the UK to debate when and under what conditions such a sanction should be applied and to question the way in which that sanction is then policed. The government, however, seems determined to close down any such discussion.

War, with all its accompanying death and destruction, invariably ‘radicalises’ people, to use a term generally used pejoratively these days. The horrific war in Gaza is just one example. Whether it’s always the bad thing as which it is presented is another question which they don’t want to debate. The second world war radicalised a generation of people in the UK, and the immediate post-war Labour government under Clem Attlee channelled that into making some of the most significant changes the UK has ever seen. I can’t help but wonder whether the instinctive reaction of the current day Labour Party under Sir Starmer would have been, more likely, to criminalise and imprison those who had been radicalised. Few people in the UK actually support ‘real’ terrorism, but forever extending the definition of the term blurs the lines. It might look like firm action, but it is likely to make enforcement harder rather than easier.

Save the alligators!

Tweet

 

Americans have a saying that when you’re up to your waist (although they generally refer to a similarly-located part of the anatomy) in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp. In less expressive language, sometimes, even if people start a project with a clear objective, the practical difficulties encountered along the way can assume such a significance that the aim becomes more of a distant aspiration: killing alligators becomes an end in itself.

To the surprise of no-one except the current and previous governments, reducing net immigration (assuming one thinks that to be a problem in the first place), turns out to be rather more complex than their rhetoric has ever suggested. ‘Stopping the boats’ is really just one – and not a particularly large one at that, in the scheme of things – element of the problem. Short of starting a war with France by forcibly landing people back on French beaches, deliberately killing the occupants of the boats, or simply ignoring international commitments and regulations such as the law of the seas, there isn’t actually any way of stopping the boats at all. Once they enter UK territorial waters, the UK government has a legal obligation to ensure the safety of the occupants, and prior to that point, the French government has a similar responsibility.

Sir Warmonger’s latest wheeze to address the issue is to make an agreement with France for a ‘one in, one out’ policy, initially capped at a maximum of 50 each way per week. The mathematically competent (a category which obviously excludes government ministers) will immediately note two things about this proposal. The first is that minus one plus one nets out to nil; the proposal would reduce the total net migration into the UK by precisely zero. And the second is that 2600 a year is around 6% of the total number making the crossing; a proposal to swap 6% of those making the journey for a different 6% is supposed to deter the other 94% from even trying, presumably by encouraging them to wait to see if they can get into the select 6% who will be allowed a safe crossing. Clearly, the PM hopes that those members of the electorate salivating over the prospect of deporting people in chains are as mathematically challenged as himself.

Interestingly, one of the main arguments put forward by those who think that the use of force, detention, and deterrence to stop people crossing is the wrong approach has been that a better alternative is to allow safe crossing and perform a proper assessment of asylum claims before deciding whether or not to deport. The proposal looks a lot like doing exactly that, except on such a small scale as to make no difference. It’s all a form of scope creep in reverse. Reduce net migration becomes stop the boats becomes stop some of the boats becomes swap some of those arriving by boat for some others who didn’t get in a boat. Then, it can be declared to be a huge success. Just about the only certainty is that absolutely no alligators get killed in the process. I suppose the animal rights lobby might be pleased about that, even if the alligators were only ever an allusion.