Who'd have thought it?

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Apparently, if you want to do a trade deal with the world’s second largest economy, a country which just happens to have the world’s largest standing army, threatening them with military action in two years’ time when your big new boat is finally ready is likely to prove counter-productive.  Who’d have thought it?  Not the Defence Minister for sure.

It seems that if you live on an offshore island which trades heavily with its nearest neighbours, it is highly likely that the shortest and easiest sea crossing route will be vitally important to your economy.  Who’d have thought it?  Not the ex-Brexit Secretary, certainly.

If a large group of countries of which you are part spends several years negotiating a close trading arrangement with another large economy, and you then decide to walk away, then that country is likely to see your now much smaller size and negotiating leverage as an opportunity to claw back some of what they had to give away when negotiating with the larger block.  Who’d have thought it?  Not the International Trade Secretary, who cannot understand why they’re not offering better terms rather than worse ones.

And if you want to find an alternative route to transport goods between the UK and the EU, choosing a port with no facilities and a company with no ships is apparently not the best way of going about it.  Who’d have thought it?  Not the Transport Secretary, who thought it was a jolly good way of helping a start-up company.

It’s easy enough to see all this as being just down to good old-fashioned incompetence, seasoned with a good dose of Anglo-British exceptionalism and a delusional belief that things can go back to the way they were when the Empire ruled the waves and the natives did as they were told.  Alternatively, maybe it’s just the cumulative effect over the last two and a half years of the cabinet having been served Theresa May’s home-made jam tarts, complete with psycho-active mould.

We need to find a trusty dog

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It might be at least partly down to advancing years.  Policemen are definitely getting younger, and that’s supposed to be one of the more reliable signs, isn’t it?  I don’t think it’s down to rose-tinted nostalgia, though – I mean, I’ve always known that politicians will say one thing to get elected and then do the opposite when they’re in power, even if it took a while to realise that no party is exempt from that rule.  The first elections in which I took any interest were those of 1964 and 1966.  I was too young to vote, but had I been old enough, I would have voted for Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.  They were going to bring about radical change, to re-forge Britain in the “white heat of the technological revolution”, and above all, they were going to scrap Polaris.  They didn’t of course, and (apart from a brief period of hope under Michael Foot) I’ve never trusted anything the Labour Party has said since.

But if I can’t explain it in those terms, then perhaps it really is true – there has never been a time when politicians told such outright and easily demonstrable lies on the scale which we are witnessing today.  The Prime Minister lies on an industrial scale, even if MPs are told off for pointing it out.  But the fact that it is contrary to parliamentary rules to call the PM a liar doesn’t mean that she isn’t.  Day after day she opens her mouth and what comes spilling out is in complete contradiction to objective, provable truth.  It isn’t just her, of course; but we’ve reached a stage where mere ‘facts’ are no longer relevant; her nearest thing to a saving grace is that she hasn’t yet reached the level of Trump, who seems to feel himself bound to utter six demonstrable untruths before breakfast.

She told the House of Commons this week that she’s spent two weeks ‘negotiating hard’ with the EU when, in reality, they are still waiting for her to define what she actually wants.  There are no negotiations – as some EU officials put it this week, the UK is only “pretending to negotiate”.  What she asked parliament to agree to yesterday was to give its approval to continuing the pretence for another two weeks; she still hasn’t a clue what it is that she’s trying to achieve or how it is in any way different from that which she herself solemnly declared to be impossible just a few short weeks ago.  It would be a foolish person who was prepared to wager that she won’t go back to parliament in a fortnight, declare that she’s still ‘negotiating hard’ but needs yet more time to define what it is that she wants.

In the worst days of the old Soviet Union, when the economy increasingly resembled a basket case, one factory manager was reported as saying of the workers “they pretend to work and we pretend to pay them”.  The UK seems to have reached a point where the government pretends to govern, the opposition pretends to oppose, and parliament pretends to have some influence.  Where’s Toto when he’s needed?

Never mind Brexit - what about some jam?

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In “War of the Worlds” there comes a point where the narrator is playing cards with the artilleryman whilst the Martians ravage the outside world.  As Wells put it “…with our species upon the edge of extermination or appalling degradation, with no clear prospect before us but the chance of a horrible death, we could sit […] playing the “joker” with vivid delight”.  It’s a surreal reaction to the horrors of the outside world.  There was a strange parallel this week, when it was revealed that, in the midst of the shambles which Brexit has become, the Prime Minister discussed with the Cabinet the edibility of jam with mould on top.

Apparently, she simply scrapes the mould off and eats the jam underneath, which is, she claims, perfectly edible.  There is some division of opinion amongst the experts as to whether this is or is not advisable; it seems to depend on the type and colour of the mould and whether you also scrape out the underlying few centimetres where the spores can be lingering, but I wonder if the PM hasn’t inadvertently let us know why the government is in such a mess.  Some moulds produce psychoactive toxins which can cause all manner of problems in the brain, including attentional problems.  Someone who has consumed such toxins might well forget what was said to her yesterday and see nothing wrong with repeating the same words and activities day after day, Groundhog-style.

It’s a better explanation than many that I’ve seen.

Madness seems to be infectious

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The idea that the government thinks that increasing the country’s ‘lethality’ and willingness to use military force to impose its will on others isn’t exactly something to be welcomed.  And quite what it has to do with Brexit escapes me completely; there is nothing in our treaty commitments to the EU which in any way prevents us sending an aircraft carrier wherever we want (as long as it isn’t to threaten action against other EU member states, of course).  There is a negative Brexit effect in that the inevitable short term hit to Treasury revenues makes it harder to afford post-Brexit, but Theresa can always shake that tree in the garden at Downing Street.

There can be few things that quite underline the delusions of grandeur which have driven the Anglo-British not-nationalist-at-all project called Brexit than the idea that freed of the non-existent EU constraints on the UK we can return to the days of Empire and send our gunboats around the world threatening the unruly natives - like those upstart Chinese for instance.  I mean, who do they think they are with their mere 1.2 billion people to think that they could ever resist the demands of the UK?  And there can be few things which do more to reveal it as the fantasy which it is than the fact that the boat that is being sent isn’t planned to be fully operational until 2021, with only what’s called an “initial operational capacity” due to be available from some time in 2020.  That’ll put the wind up them, no?  When they stop laughing, maybe.  And predicting where the new boat might be needed two years hence is an amazing feat from a government who can’t tell us what’s going to happen next month.

In fairness, though, they really shouldn’t laugh.  Writing in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins says that the defence secretary’s brain has gone absent without leave.  I think he’s being unusually kind; a man who thinks the UK can simply tell Russia to “go away and shut up”, and that a half-operational boat with a few borrowed airplanes can threaten the largest full-time military forces in the world might just be as crazy as his leader, who is busily doing nothing whilst jobs and economic activity leach irreversibly out of the UK in an attempt to convince the world that she really would cause a major recession lasting for several years by leaving the UK without a deal if she can’t get her own way.

The whole concept of “Mutually Assured Destruction” might have had the apparently descriptive acronym MAD, but in reality it was always based on the assumption that those in charge would behave rationally when push came to shove.  What happens when a government really can’t be depended on to do that is an untested proposition to date.  I’m wondering, though, for how long that will remain true.

Peas in a pod

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Taking the long view of human history, one feature that stands out as a constant factor is migration.  Wave after wave of migrating humans have swept across the surface of the globe and it is a truism to state that every country, every nation, every border owes something to migration in determining what they are and where they are.  The two most widespread languages in use (English and Spanish) both started out in small corners of Europe and were spread around the world by a combination of conquest and the ensuing migration.  There is something peculiar to me that, in a world largely shaped by migration, prevention of migration should have become such a significant political theme; it’s almost as though large sections of humanity have decided to forget how we became what we are and freeze history in aspic at its current point.

I saw an article a while ago in which Farage seemed to be arguing that it was wrong that citizens of EU states should have more right to come to the UK than citizens of Commonwealth countries.  It’s one of the few things on which I almost agree with him.  The problem arises, though, in the response to that inequality.

When two different groups of people have different levels of rights, there are always two obvious ways of resolving that inequality – you can either take rights away from one group or grant them to the other.  And the general problem with people who highlight this particular difference is that they always seem to want to diminish rights rather than enhance them.  It’s yet another case of the privileged few wanting to restrict freedom to themselves.  It also highlights the key difference in ideological perspective between two different world views.  It isn’t the simplistic one as which they present it, which is that anyone who doesn’t agree with them about controlling immigration is automatically in favour of mass immigration, it’s about where ‘rights’ start and end.  And there are two fundamentally different starting points.

The first is that, in principle, every member of the human race should have the right to travel, live and work wherever he or she wishes, and that it up to anyone who wants to restrict those rights to justify doing so.  The alternative starting point is that moving around is a privilege, not a right, and that governments should decide who can benefit from that privilege.  It shouldn’t need to be said (but probably does) that ‘privileges’ always somehow end up being disproportionately available to those who are already privileged, whilst it is the poorest who find the 'privilege' denied them. 

It’s perfectly possible, in principle at least, to end up with the same policies at a practical level when starting from either perspective, but the justifications will look very different.  From the latter perspective, it is the individual humans who have to justify why they should be allowed to move; from the former, it is for governments to justify why movement should be prevented.  It should be no surprise to anyone that a party like the Conservative Party, which believes in essence that ‘rights’ should be few and far between starts from the perspective that movement is a privilege not a right.  They do, after all, seem to think that the same rule applies to health, education, and housing. 

Superficially, it’s rather more of a surprise that Labour starts from the same perspective.  Yet their rhetoric tells us exactly that; it’s almost identical to the Tories.  There might be some difference of emphasis or in the rules governing exactly who and how many people should be allowed to migrate, but essentially, the party of self-styled “socialists” and “internationalists” is as strong in wanting to restrict movement as the Tories.  It’s a factor which Theresa May was quite right to pick up on in her response to Corbyn’s letter, when she pointed out that Labour was as wedded to the abolition of freedom of movement as she is. 

It’s only at a superficial level that Labour’s position should surprise us though.  As with so much which that party says and does, principle long ago stopped being the driving force.  They have adopted their current stance on migration not from principle, or because they think it’s right, or even because of any evidence relating to the economic costs and benefits; no, none of those drive Labour, only a cynical pursuit of votes.  They think, in short, that it’s what the people who vote for them want.  A party which set out to persuade, educate and lead people to a different and better form of society has become a political vehicle aimed at winning power by saying what they think people want to hear – a party which follows rather than leads.

It has been said that, in relation to Brexit, there are two things which both May and Corbyn want.  They both want Brexit and they both want it to be delivered by the Tories.  The reason we are in such a mess over Brexit isn’t just May’s red lines and utter incompetence (important though those factors are); it is also down to Labour’s cynicism and willingness to follow rather than lead.  The ‘game’ has become, for them, more important than the outcome.

Shaping our past

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There has been a lot of fuss this week about the fact that a piece of graffiti on a wall near Aberystwyth was vandalised by someone painting a different piece of graffiti over it and has subsequently been restored by a group of young people who have attempted to replicate the original graffiti.  No doubt some will be offended by my referring to the original as graffiti at all: it is, as they see it, a commemoration of a significant event in modern Welsh history.  And actually, I agree with them and am pleased that those local young people have restored the message - but I’m being deliberately provocative because there is an important point here.

It isn’t just the superficially obvious one about who decides what is or is not graffiti and/or vandalism.  Not that that point isn’t important in itself, of course; like it or not (and for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t), Elvis really is more significant in the lives of some Welsh people than Tryweryn.  I might, like many others, see Tryweryn as a hugely significant event in our modern history as a nation; but I also recognise the work which the possessive pronoun is doing there.  ‘Our’, just in the use of the word, presupposes a great deal, and I’m not sure that that is being widely-enough recognised.  There's rather more to making something truly part of the history of all of us than painting a message on a wall.

And that’s the underlying point that I want to come to.  The disrespect shown to what many of us regard as a memorial, albeit a completely unofficial one, has led to calls for people to be taught more about ‘our’ history.  The problem is that history isn’t just a series of events – any ‘history’ requires events to be selected or discarded; given a significance on a scale in relation to other events, and above all, interpreted.  And who makes all those decisions, none of which is entirely objective or impartial?  I am always concerned about politicians – of any hue – demanding that pupils be taught ‘our’ history; they invariably mean that they want their own take on history to be taught.  Like most people, I suppose, I don’t have a problem if politicians with whom I agree are selecting a version of history which I like; but when politicians with whom I disagree choose a rather different version, we can end up with situations like this one.  I remember the old story about the Soviet historian who allegedly said that “In our country, only the future is certain – the past is always changing”.  There’s something very Orwellian about politicians redefining history to suit the needs of the present, but continuing redefinition and reinterpretation is a normal part of developing history.

That there is a need for a better awareness of history, I don’t doubt.  But it isn’t just in Wales – one of the things which Brexit has revealed to be rampant in certain sections of society (even among elected politicians) is an over-simplistic understanding of the complex relationships between these islands and our continental neighbours (which for many apparently is all about the inherent German desire to dominate and the plucky English single-handedly defeating them).  It’s true that we all need to know more about our past, and that knowing the past is a key element of understanding who we are and how we got here, but it’s as naïve to believe that there is only one way of understanding that past as it is to believe that there’s only one way of being Welsh.  I’m no more a fan of Elvis than I am of Edward I – but they both fit somewhere in what we are today.  Deciding what to teach as ‘history’ is far from being as simple as some might suggest - and teaching dates and events without context and interpretation is unlikely to make much difference to anything.

Taking the rap

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There have been many moments during the continuing Brexit debacle when I have wondered quite what the UK has come to.  This piece by Robert Peston was another of those.  In it he says that ministers in the UK Government are left trying to guess what government policy is on Brexit – they don’t know, and the PM is refusing to tell them.  She’s off to Brussels today to put her government’s latest request to the EU leaders – but it seems that she’s the only member of her government who knows what she’s going to say.  And I’m not entirely convinced that she knows either.

A cynic might suggest that that’s the only reason she’s not telling them - she doesn’t know herself – but I suspect that’s only part of the story.  The balance in the Cabinet is such that, if she actually comes down in favour of anything, a number of them are likely to respond by resigning; in Schrodinger’s cabinet, the uneasy truce can hold only until someone opens the box.  Dysfunctional as a description doesn’t do justice to the position in which we find ourselves; this is on a different scale completely.

How cabinet members square their consciences with the idea that they are bound by collective responsibility but haven’t a clue for what is an interesting if rather academic question.  I suppose that the spoils and trappings of power help, but at least a few of them must surely be starting to wonder whether it isn’t time for a change.  I’d be surprised if some of them at least weren’t starting to wish that the UK had a written constitution containing a properly thought-through 25^th Amendment with a handy Section 4.  Still, even without that, custom and practice shows that the Cabinet can remove a PM when they are left with no choice.  That day is surely approaching.

Stopping the scammers

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There was a story yesterday about a man in Flintshire who was scammed out of £15,000 by a caller claiming to be helping him to deal with an internet problem.  This is a growing nuisance.  As someone who has worked largely from home for some years, I get a lot of these scam calls, and on this one in particular, people claiming to be from ‘BT Technical Department’ seem to phone on a more or less weekly basis.

If I have nothing better to do, I’m afraid that I’m rather naughty with them, and play them along for a while with the objective of keeping them on the phone as long as possible (the record to date is 28 minutes) by asking them to provide ever more detailed explanations of what they’re saying, or even to repeat themselves because I can’t understand their (usually Asian) accents.  Calling them out for what they are just when they get to the point that they think I’m going to download their software and let them look at or control my computer isn’t generally popular with them, although it doesn’t seem to stop them trying again a few days later.  Perhaps they’re using me as a training resource, but the more time they spend talking to me the less time they have to spend scamming someone else.

Anyway, I had an almost ‘honest’ one on the phone a week or two ago.  When he got to the relevant point in his script, I said to him something along the lines of “You must think I’m stupid”.  His response was that yes, he did think I was stupid, but not just me – all the people in the UK.  In not quite so many words he told me “I phone people in the UK every day and take their money” before launching into an expletive-ridden dialogue about me having wasted his time and calling me a rude name before hanging up.

Obviously, not everyone is as tech-savvy as me when it comes to their ‘explanations’ of how they know my computer has been compromised; and this isn’t the only type of scam around.  Others are more vulnerable and other types of scam can hook them in.  There are things people can do to protect themselves, but not all of them help a great deal.  Some of these scams come from legitimate-looking telephone numbers, but they’re actually spoofed.  And the problem with that is that it’s impossible to block a caller who spoofs a different number every time they call.  But, given the prevalence of these scams, given the significant amounts of money which they are taking from people – why are they getting away with spoofing telephone numbers?  I can honestly think of no valid reason why anyone should be allowed to make a call and provide an incorrect identity as to the source of the call.  Removing that facility won’t stop the scammers, but it would provide just a little more protection for vulnerable consumers – or even those, like me, who are just fed up of the repetitive nature of these calls.

Defining the 'best person for the job'

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Following the announcement that the Chief Executive of Carmarthenshire County Council is to retire shortly, there has been some discussion about the way the council has been run in the past.  Personally, it seems to me that if an authority is – or gives the impression of being – led by its officers rather than its political leadership, the fault for that lies squarely at the door of the political leadership.  Blaming the officers for filling a vacuum, or for having dominant personalities, is a cop-out; the responsibility always lies with the elected members to assert their authority if and when necessary.

Of more interest to me is the question of the future replacement.  Last week, Cymdeithas yr Iaith called for the council to ensure that the next appointee is a fluent Welsh-speaker, something with which I would whole-heartedly agree.  I remember speaking with some of the councillors about this issue before the current chief executive was appointed.  Whilst some very much wanted a knowledge of Welsh to be a requirement, they were strongly advised that they couldn’t do that at the time.  I thought that advice was wrong then, and I think it would be wrong now.  The compromise arrived at was, as I recall, a requirement for the new appointee to learn Welsh.  Whilst I know that lessons were provided, hindsight shows clearly that that was a meaningless stipulation.

The problem has been, historically, that organisations considering whether to make a post ‘Welsh essential’ or not have been considering, primarily, the external aspect of the role – how, and to what extent, the appointee needs to be able to interact directly with the public outside the council and whether translation facilities can be sufficient to render a requirement to be able to use Welsh superfluous.  The question that needs to be asked in a bilingual county like Carmarthenshire, however, is about the internal language of the authority as well.  Carmarthenshire is an authority whose political leadership have committed to extending the use of Welsh not just for external purposes but for internal ones as well, and that needs to be taken into account.

The argument that the council must get ‘the best person for the job’ regardless of language works only if, and to the extent that, the Welsh language is some sort of optional ‘add-on’ to the council’s activity, rather than something absolutely central to everything it does.  I doubt that anyone would seriously argue that a monoglot French speaker could ever be the ‘best person for the job’, no matter what other attributes or qualifications she or he might possess, so in what sense can the ‘best person for the job’ be a person who cannot understand what half the staff are saying to her or him unless either they switch to their second language or else a translator is present?

And what about communicating with the political leadership of the authority?  Of the 10 members of the executive board, I make it only 2 who don’t speak Welsh, yet in all discussion with an English-speaking chief executive, they must either switch to English or else have a translator present.  The latter works, up to a point, for formal meetings, but how about all the informal and casual discussions which must be taking place on a more or less daily basis?

But even for formal meetings, there is an impact.  As a translator, I have sat through many council, committee and working group meetings in the county as a translator.  What I have observed is that, no matter how well-intentioned senior officers may be (and many are extremely well-intentioned towards Welsh), the language in which meetings are largely conducted varies greatly according to the language of the officers (and, of course, the Chair).  That is not a criticism, merely a statement of observed fact.  If an authority like Carmarthenshire is serious about shifting the internal administration to make greater use of Welsh, then ensuring that the language is used from the top down is a key step that they can, and need to, take.

Cymdeithas are right to see the impending vacancy as a major opportunity for the council; but the way in which the council responds will also tell us how seriously they really take the policy which they espouse.

Shaking the tree again

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When the Prime Minister first announced, in the light of the heavy parliamentary defeat for her Brexit plan, that she would be talking to other parties across parliament to hear their views, it was apparent that the only views in which she was interested were about what it would take to persuade those MPs to back her deal.  Alternative proposals were not welcome, although if they came from within her own party, they might get a grudging hearing.  The idea of persuading MPs from other parties – particularly Labour MPs from leave voting areas – has reached new heights with the plan to make extra funds available to those areas in return for the votes of their MPs.

It's pork barrel stuff, of course; and many will condemn both it and the MPs concerned for being taken in by it.  At one level, however, I can understand why an MP representing an area badly hit by austerity and government cuts might think that obtaining extra investment in exchange for a single vote in parliament might be doing the right thing by his or her constituents.  There are some wider issues arising, however.

Firstly, the way in which the government can find money for such bribes and sweeteners underlines the fact that austerity is, and always has been, a deliberate political choice made by the Conservative Party.  It was to all intents and purposes supported by Labour in the 2010 election, when the main argument of Labour candidates and MPs was, as I recall, effectively that Labour austerity would be better than Tory austerity.  The government could have done things differently had it so chosen, and the way in which money is being found for anything and everything to get Brexit sorted underlines the fact.

Secondly, had it not been for that deliberate political choice, it is probable that the level of desperation which drove some to vote for Brexit would have been lower, and the result of the 2016 referendum different.  There is something very ironic about the government now spending money to ensure that it delivers on a referendum vote which resulted from not spending the same money 8 years ago.

And thirdly, MPs who are prepared to vote for something which will be damaging not only to their own constituents but also to those in other constituencies in exchange for a short-term amelioration of part of the problems which led to the original vote are taking a very short-term and parochial view of their responsibilities.  They are also placing their faith in a government which has shown itself to be utterly untrustworthy and able to reverse its position in a trice.

Talking about the proposal, a Downing Street spokesperson said “we are determined to lead a programme of national renewal, post-Brexit”.  Of course, it doesn’t and never did require Brexit to do that.  In fact, without Brexit and the inevitable short term hit to Treasury revenues which will result from it, they would have been in an even better position to do it, were it really what they thought the right thing to do.  They didn’t – and still don’t.  That magic tree isn’t being given another good shake because they think it’s the right thing to do, but because it suits the interest of the PM and her party.