The ties that bind us

Tweet

The aim of the new future ex-Prime Minister’s quick tour of the UK this week has been billed as being to “strengthen the ties that bind us”.  I’m sure that it looked like a nice rhetorical flourish to whoever came up with it, although it may not have occurred to him or her that it could also be heard as meaning “tighten the knots”.  As with much – most – of what he says, the rhetoric replaces rather than illuminates the detail, and it’s not at all clear that he’s really thought about what the nature of those ties might be, let alone how they might be strengthened.

I’m in no doubt that there are factors which lead many in Wales and Scotland – the majority in the case of the former, but maybe not any more in the case of the latter – to believe that the union is of some value, whether economic or emotional, but I’m not at all convinced that the PM understands what they are, seeing the union, rather, from an Anglo-British nationalist perspective.  When pushed, people will generally refer to the economic factors, or at least, their own understanding of the economic factors, but I’ve long suspected that the emotional factors are actually stronger and more influential.  But the nature of the emotional attachment to the union, in both Wales and Scotland, is not the same as the nature of the emotional attachment to the same union which is common in England.  Many people in Wales are quite relaxed about considering themselves both Welsh and British (and similar feelings apply in Scotland); it’s not so much dual nationality as overlapping and complementary nationality.  In England, the distinction between being English and British is a lot less clear. 

The result is that they can end up taking a very different approach to strengthening those ties.  From an English perspective, emphasising Britishness is much the same thing as emphasising Englishness – they genuinely seem to find it hard to understand why that approach doesn’t work very well in Wales and Scotland.  Taking control of the money being spent in the devolved administrations in order to rebrand it as British spending and increasing the number and prominence of union flags around the place may, to them, look like inculcating a greater sense of Britishness and togetherness, but they look entirely different to many of us.  A leader serious about strengthening the ties would start by trying to understand the differences and then look to see how a successful union might reflect those differences, pay heed to different voices and perspectives, value the views of those with a different viewpoint.

That’s precisely what they are not doing – perhaps “tightening the knots” isn’t such a bad translation of Johnson’s policy after all.

What will it take?

Tweet

During the Tories’ leadership election, most people – including the party’s own members and MPs – assumed that the winning candidate was mostly lying.  Given his history, it’s an entirely reasonable assumption – far more reasonable than assuming that he was telling the truth.  The result was that many of those supporting him were discounting his continued assertions that a no-deal Brexit was a sensible course of action, taking it as a given that he would change course after he won.  But what now looks increasingly likely is that the bit that was the lie was not the bit about a no-deal Brexit being sensible, but the bit about a no deal Brexit not being his first choice as a policy.  I don’t know how else to interpret his refusal to even discuss a way forward with the EU until they first accept that the withdrawal agreement will be renegotiated from scratch.  Telling the other side that any negotiation starts by discussing the terms of their abject surrender doesn’t look like a way of avoiding no deal to me, but as a way of provoking it.

It is, of course, entirely possible that the Prime Minister will simply shrug his shoulders and back down, probably denying that he ever said what he is on the record as having said.  It seems to work for Trump and it’s not as if he doesn’t have form in that regard.  I suspect that a lot of his own party’s MPs are still assuming that that is what will happen, even if they aren’t entirely sure when, or with what excuses.  But it’s also possible that he is completely serious in what he says, in which case things look increasingly ominous.  It may be that Johnson is simply (and not for the first time) over-estimating the strength of his hand, but it seems more likely that he is deliberately seeking a no-deal outcome for which everyone but himself will be blamed.  We have gone from a “million-to-one chance” to "No deal is now a very real prospect" in less than a week.

Conventional wisdom holds that parliament will somehow find a way to obstruct him in that course of action, but I’m not so certain.  I don’t criticise Corbyn (for once!) for not seeking an immediate vote of no confidence in the new PM – the demand from the new Lib Dem leader that he should do so looked like grandstanding to me, and is an ominous sign that the application of common sense in pursuit of some sort of anti-Brexit parliamentary alliance may well founder on the rocks of naked Lib Dem short term party interest.  Why would anyone expect the nature of that party to change just because of a change of leadership?  The reason that Corbyn was right at this point is simply that there is no evidence that any Tories would break ranks to support such a motion, and without that there would have been no chance of success.

The question, though, is this: if not now, when?  What will it take for sufficient Tories to break ranks to bring down the PM (particularly if we factor in the probability that a small number of Labour MPs might also break ranks on the issue in order to see Brexit delivered, even if they go no further than abstaining)?  Their latest excuse (giving Johnson time to see what he will do) is a very poor one; it’s not as if he hasn’t signalled his intentions loudly and clearly, or as if his character and nature were a complete surprise.  If the potential rebels can’t see that now, what is the trigger that will lift the veils from their eyes?  There are now less than 100 days until the date on which no deal Brexit will happen by default, but parliament will only be sitting on 27 of those days, some of which will, doubtless, be used up by trying to play procedural games with Commons rules before resorting to the nuclear option (and if, as seems increasingly likely, an election intervenes, the number of opportunities further reduces).  How many of those days will have to pass before enough Tories are convinced that he needs to be stopped?  At the very least, they’re going to be cutting it a bit fine, and at the worst, they will simply leave it too late.  Depending on Tories has never been the most brilliant of strategies; depending on some of them to turn on their own PM within weeks of electing him looks even less so.

Give him an inch and he'll take a metre

Tweet

Mocking Jacob Rees-Mogg for his style guide to staff in his new office is fun, and very easy to do, but probably only encourages him.  It’s almost as though he is inviting people to continue to refer to him as the member for the eighteenth century; for him, living in the past is a badge of honour rather than a criticism.  His insistence on the use of imperial measures, though, is more than mere eccentricity – it is potentially dangerous.

The UK formally adopted metric measures in 1965 (pre-dating, and nothing to do with, membership of the EEC/EU), which means that those of us educated during the 1950s and 1960s were initially taught in imperial and subsequently in metric.  It also means that any child receiving the majority of his or her education after 1965 – so born after around 1960, and therefore currently sixty years old or younger – would have been largely or even exclusively taught to measure distances, weights and volumes in metric units.  I don’t know what the age profile of the staff is in his new office, but given the demographic in the population and the traditional ability of civil servants to retire before state pension age, I’d bet that there are very few for whom use of imperial measures will be entirely natural.  He is effectively asking anyone writing a report for his eyes to ‘translate’ all measurements to a system which has barely been taught in schools (although perhaps Eton is an exception?) for the best part of half a century.

The potential consequences for the Leader of the House of Commons are probably not as significant as the loss of a Mars probe by NASA, but it’s almost guaranteed that the enforced translation of quantities into an antiquated system of measures with which most people are no longer familiar will lead to a misunderstanding sooner or later.  There are good reasons for standardising on a single system of measurement, and none at all for insisting on a different one.  Unless, that is, you consider that the determination of an individual to live 300 years in the past constitutes good reason for anything.

Meaningless rhetoric can have consequences

Tweet

According to the new Prime Minister, the UK after Brexit and under his leadership will become “the greatest place on earth”.  It’s the sort of rhetoric which so easily trips off his tongue, but it’s ultimately a meaningless turn of phrase.  It’s impossible to define any criteria for judging the truth of otherwise of any claim to be the ‘greatest’, and it inevitably comes down to a subjective view.  What he means by it is that he wants all the people of the UK to believe that the UK is the greatest – and, of course, that he has made it so.  The parallel with Trump is an obvious one, and the two men also share a passion for untruth in pursuit of their goal of making people believe.  And it’s in line with his apparent approach to Brexit – we only need to believe strongly enough, and we can make things work.

Now there’s nothing at all wrong with people taking a certain amount of pride in their country’s achievements, whether on the field of sport or in any other field, although it’s a good deal healthier if such pride is occasionally tempered by regret or even shame at the bad things done in our name.  And that’s the sort of country that I want to live in; one which acknowledges its past both good and bad and recognises its collective failures as well as its collective successes; one which co-operates and works with others rather than trying always to compete with them.  But I neither want nor need to believe that my country (however defined) is the ‘greatest’ or best, let alone set out to compete with anyone else for the title.  The history of people or countries who believe that they are the greatest is not exactly a happy one.

One of the main drivers for Brexit from the outset has been an Anglo-British sense of exceptionalism and superiority, so much so that what would be regarded as dangerous nationalism in the case of anyone else who believed they were special is regarded as not-nationalism-at-all by people who simply ‘know’ that they are exceptional, and that anyone else who thinks they are is just plain wrong.  Insofar as Johnson believes in anything at all other than his pre-ordained right to rule, I suspect that he really does believe that the UK – or more specifically Greater England: it’s a very English perception of what the UK is – is unique and special, and deserves to be treated as such.  He certainly seems to suffer from a certain nostalgia for Empire (he once wrote, referring to Africa, that "the problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore"), like many of his background.  At one level, that is nothing to worry too much about – contact with the reality of the modern world will soon enough demonstrate the fallacy of such a belief.  At another level, however, it is much more worrying.  He is deliberately encouraging a belief in a unique greatness, and in the idea that the UK is in some way entitled to special treatment from the EU27.  There aren’t clear dividing lines between national pride, blind patriotism, and a belief in superiority; these are just labels we give to points on a spectrum.  What probably looks to him like simply another piece of political rhetoric carries the danger of being interpreted as, or even inciting, something much worse.

Emulating his hero

Tweet

It’s well-known that Churchill is a hero to Boris Johnson, and that he tries to model himself on his hero.  He even wrote a book about him.  But given his notorious lack of attention to detail, I wonder what exactly he learnt from studying his hero.  There are certainly some similarities – casual racism and an instinctive feeling of a natural superiority are two of the obvious ones, along with a certain facility with language.  Churchill painted landscapes; Johnson paints model buses (allegedly - I'm still not sure about that one).  But all those things are largely superficial qualities.  It’s true that both came to power without an election and at a time of crisis; but the differences thereafter strike me as being more significant than the similarities.

Churchill took up the post at a time when the House of Commons was united in the face of what was agreed to be a common enemy and reached out to political opponents to form a coalition government which enjoyed a majority of 604 seats in a House of Commons of 615 in pursuit of an objective which enjoyed overwhelming public and parliamentary support.  Johnson, faced with a divided parliament and a bare majority of 2 has instead chosen to select a government drawn almost entirely from a minority faction within a minority party in pursuit of an objective which is probably no longer supported (in the form promised, let alone the form likely to be delivered) by even the narrow majority which voted for it in 2016.  Churchill’s rhetoric was designed to appeal to the widest possible audience in order to stiffen resolve and unity; Johnson’s seems designed to appeal only to those already committed to a cause.  The majority for that cause in his own party might be growing, but the minority supporting it outside is diminishing, and for those who are not Brexit zealots it does more to stiffen opposition to him than support.  It’s as though he believes that Churchill’s rhetoric, determination, and strength of character were what won the war rather than the sacrifice of the millions who suffered – oh, and the little matter of US and Soviet military power.

There’s another interesting comparison though, stemming from the fact that Churchill also took power without first winning an election.  It didn’t end so well – for all his fine words and efforts, rhetoric wasn't enough.  As soon as the electorate were given an opportunity to vote they threw him out in a landslide victory for Clem Attlee’s Labour Party.  Because of the slight issue of an ongoing world war, he was able to postpone that election for five years, a luxury not available to Johnson, whose actions to date seem to make an early election more, rather than less, likely.  However, getting thrown out by the electors at the earliest opportunity is one Churchill ‘achievement’ which I would welcome Johnson emulating.

Failure wasn't always inevitable

Tweet

When a project – of whatever type – fails, there is usually a ‘post-mortem’ of some sort to establish why and learn the lessons for the future.  That’s the theory, anyway, but the continued failure of projects suggests that learning the lessons isn’t as easy as it sounds.  Part of the explanation for that is the casual assumption that a ‘project’ is simply a series of tasks which merely require proper management and planning in order to get from initiation to completion.  There are indeed some projects which broadly fit that description; the danger arises in believing that it’s true of all projects.

The moon landings is one which did.  Those involved knew what they had to do and set out to engineer their way to success.  They certainly hit problems and challenges, but these were, by and large, engineering problems – the sort of ‘problem’ to which there is always a ‘solution’, even if it takes time, energy, and money to find that solution.  And the moon landings have become an idiomatic point of reference for anything large and complex – “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can ….” (fill in the gap with whatever takes your fancy).  It is an easy way to dismiss challenges, and portray something as (comparatively) easy, and it was behind what the new future ex-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was talking about when he compared Brexit to the Apollo project.

It’s an easy and lazy comparison to make, but it’s also fundamentally wrong-headed.  The fact that ‘problems’ in the world of engineering or mathematics have ‘solutions’ doesn’t mean that the same is true in other fields, and the assumption that it is lies behind the failure of many projects.  In the case of Brexit alone, there are many examples to be found, all of which form part of the reason why Brexit hasn’t been the simple and straightforward process which its proponents claimed it would be.

The Irish border question is one of the obvious ones.  Listening to Johnson and the other Brexiteers talking, once could be forgiven for believing that this is ‘just a question of engineering’; we simply need to find and apply the right technology to manage the border, and the problem is solved.  What this overlooks is the human aspects of the problem; a border isn’t just a physical construct, it’s also an emotional and political one.  Managing the border isn’t simply about physical flows to and fro, it’s about the attitudes engendered by the existence or non-existence of that border.  Those attitudes are, in reality, rather more significant than lorry transits, and in concentrating on trying to find fancy ways of managing those lorry transits the Brexiteers completely fail to understand, let alone address, that issue.

One of Johnson’s three priorities as outlined in his words yesterday was about ‘uniting the country’.  Whilst he’s right to identify Brexit as having been a divisive issue, his apparent assumption that bringing the process of leaving the EU to a conclusion by forcing through an approach which not only ignores the almost 50% of the population who voted against Brexit, but also the significant proportion who supported Brexit-but-only-with-a-deal will achieve that makes the same mistake; it assumes that ‘engineering’ a way through is enough.

At the outset, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, it was not inevitable that the Brexit project would fail; adopting an approach which took account of the subtleties of emotions and perceptions and which recognised that both the objective and the process needed a lot more discussion and definition might well have succeeded.  What made failure inevitable was treating it as an ‘engineering’ issue which simply required the application of ‘solutions’ by people who aren’t even engineers in order to achieve an objective which was never defined.  Replacing one non-engineer by another with an even more cavalier approach (albeit in possession of a better joke book) doesn’t immediately strike me as being likely to change very much.

It all depends on where you are standing...

Tweet

I’m not a big fan of using words like ‘left’ ‘right’, ‘centre’ or ‘extreme’ to describe political positions; they’re far too often used as a term of abuse rather than a serious contribution to debate.  But setting aside my reluctance to use such terms for a moment, there can be few better examples of the way in which what is generally called the ‘centre’ has shifted than the statement last Friday by Sajid Javid praising Nigel Farage for not being an extremist, because he walked away from UKIP and called his former party a bunch of ‘thugs and extremists’.

Farage has never said anything to make one believe that he’s changed his mind about his previous use of anti-immigrant rhetoric, such as his statement that he’d feel uncomfortable if Romanians moved in next door, or that he feels awkward hearing people on a train speaking anything other than English, "because I don't understand them" (although why he feels it necessary to understand a conversation between strangers on a train was left unexplained).  It’s the sort of casual anti-foreigner sentiment which seems to come naturally to the Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all behind the Brexit project, and Javid has effectively declared that he considers it normal and acceptable.

‘Extremist’ is not an easy term to define, because it’s a relative rather than an absolute term.  Whether someone is an extremist or not depends largely on where you are standing in relation to him or her.  In effect, the closer you are standing to someone, the less extreme that person will appear to be.  Javid’s claim that Farage is not an extremist tells us more about the position in which he and the Conservative Party find themselves than it does about Farage himself.

Vanity headlines

Tweet

If there’s one thing that the Tories in the Assembly really like, it’s grabbing a dramatic headline about an alleged waste of money by the Labour Government.  And if there’s one thing that they avoid like the plague, it’s proposing constructive and helpful alternatives.  Their criticism last week of the expenditure by the Welsh Government on Cardiff Airport was a case in point.  Demanding that it be sold off unless it makes a profit (and if it ever did, I have no doubt that they’d demand that it also be sold off in order for that profit to end up in private rather than state hands) would take us back to where we were before the government bought the airport in the first place – it was failing, not least because it was suffering a serious lack of investment.  What they have not told us is what sort of future they see for the airport, although they leave the clear impression that they’d rather see it return to decline and failure in private hands than stand a chance of success following a reversal of the lack of private investment by the state.

The realities of geography don’t favour some of the wilder dreams of supporters of expanding the airport.  The catchment area for which Cardiff is the best and closest airport isn’t as large as that of its competitors – basically, it’s limited to Glamorgan and most of Dyfed.  Outside that area, Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool are all potential – and in most cases, closer or more accessible – alternatives.  The idea that it can ever truly become an international airport serving the whole of Wales is a fantasy.  Expecting to be able to run a commercially-viable full range of international scheduled flights is unrealistic unless either the total number of passengers can be increased significantly (which would surely be contrary to environmental policy) or else passengers can be diverted from other airports which are currently more easily accessible to them.  If Cardiff airport did not exist, would anyone seriously suggest trying to establish a full international airport at that location as a commercial enterprise?  I doubt it.

At the other extreme, there are those who would argue that air travel is so damaging that we should be deliberately restricting flying, and that far from increasing capacity and competition we should be seeking to reduce capacity.  I find it difficult to imagine such a scenario gaining popular support at present, but under such conditions it would hard to see a future for Cardiff Airport at all. 

In between those options, the likeliest – almost by default – future for the airport is one based on slow organic growth, where the extent of that growth depends more on population changes and increasing affluence and is matched with appropriate investment in increased capacity, than on proactive government measures to promote and expand the airport at the expense of its competitors.  I find it hard to believe that the Tories actually want to see the airport fail and close (they certainly are never going to come out and say that), and maybe they even see its future in much the same way that I do.  What they fail to explain, however, is why private ownership would make that more likely to succeed than state ownership, when actual past experience demonstrates precisely the opposite.  Still, why let mere facts spoil a good headline?

The redness of the herring is irrelevant

Tweet

It’s just a guess, of course – I have no firm evidence to back this up – but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people would be utterly mortified if we made a very public statement which turned out to be as utterly untrue as Boris Johnson’s reference yesterday to a kipper.  It would embarrass most of us to be exposed for having taken something on trust without having bothered to check its accuracy.  Johnson, however, is not (and never has been) part of any known definition of ‘most of us’, and lives by an entirely different set of rules.  He is more likely to be pleased at the coverage his kipper-waving garnered and to feel secure in the knowledge that corrections never achieve the same coverage as the initial outrageous statement.  Not for nothing is it said that a lie will be half-way round the world before the truth has got its boots on.

It’s a technique which the growth of social media has done much to promote: once a story is ‘out there’ it will be copied and shared – and, sadly, believed – much more often than any boring old correction.  Johnson isn’t the first or only politician to employ such a tactic, of course.  Who remembers the correction to the nonsense spouted by the former Home Secretary (and soon to be former Prime Minister) back in 2011 when she claimed that the human rights act prevented the deportation of a man because he owned a cat?  It was telling that she opened her narration of that particular piece of fiction with the words “We all know the stories about the Human Rights Act…”, a phrase which is invariably followed by a story which we only ‘know’ because it’s been repeated so often, despite being complete bunkum.

When apparently intelligent people come out with this stuff, it isn’t because they don’t know better, or because they can’t be bothered to check (checking might only allow the facts to intervene), or even because they believe it themselves; it’s because they know that it will be believed by a substantial number of people.  Playing to and confirming the prejudices of those people isn’t just an unintentional accident – it’s the whole purpose of telling the lie in the first place.  In Johnson’s case his casual bumbling and bluster is simply a poor attempt at disguising a cynical disregard for any truth or facts which might undermine his own ambitions.  And the saddest part is that even such a poor attempt as this one does actually work with the target audience.

Checking the assumptions

Tweet

Yesterday, there was an exchange of views in the media between the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, and the member of parliament for the eighteenth century, Jacob Rees-Mogg about the impact of a no-deal Brexit on the economy.  The former stated a negative impact of £90 billion, whilst the latter claimed a positive impact of £80 billion.  Clearly, both of those things can’t be true, but that doesn’t mean that either of them is ‘right’ either.  The problem with making projections is that they’re always going to be based on mathematical models, and those models are always going to be based on a series of assumptions; the difference between the two positions is based on the differences in the assumptions that they make.  The fact that the consensus of economists is closer to the position of Hammond than Rees-Mogg doesn’t make the consensus right; there could be an element of groupthink at work.  But the obvious reality that the Brexiteer position is an outlier should give some cause for detailed scrutiny to say the least.

At the heart of the difference in positions is the question of the value of new vs existing trade deals.  One thing both sides appear to be agreed on is that ‘free trade’ is a good thing which generates economic prosperity, although there is a question in my mind about whether it is always the good thing that it’s presented as being; that’s a question for another day.  If we start from a position of accepting that free trade can and does boost economies, then the difference between the two positions comes down to an assessment of which route offers the greatest amount of free trade.  Part of the Brexiteer argument has always been that the freedom to strike trade deals with a much wider market than that offered by the EU will lead to more free trade than the restrictions placed on us by membership.  And if some free trade is good, and a lot of free trade is better, then the logical conclusion is that completely free and open trade globally is best of all.  At a superficial level, that is the ‘attraction’ of Brexit.  There are two not insignificant problems with it, though.

The first is about what is the best route to opening up more trading freedom between countries.  Is it by taking the large trading blocs which currently exist and negotiating comprehensive deals between them, such as that recently signed by the EU and Mercosur, or is it by doing away with trading blocs like the EU and Mercosur and starting again at the level of individual states?  Asking the question is almost enough to answer it; a negotiation involving only two parties acting on behalf of 28 and 4 member states respectively is almost invariably going to be easier than having 32 countries each trying to negotiate individual agreements with the other 31.

And the second is about depth rather than breadth; ‘free trade’ is about more than tariffs and quotas; it’s also about standards, rules and regulations.  The ‘depth’ of the free trade arrangement between the 28 EU member states is much greater than that between the EU and, say, Canada (which increasingly seems to be the model put forward by the Brexiteers), but increasing depth necessarily requires increasing alignment in a whole range of areas.  Rules end up being made jointly rather than unilaterally, and it is precisely that to which Brexiteers object.

In the light of those two factors, the claim by Rees-Mogg that no-deal produces more economic benefits than continued membership depends on an assumption that increased breadth with countries further away more than compensates for reduced depth with countries on our doorstep.  One of the things that I learned in Maths many years ago is that any result which fails the ‘reasonableness’ test (never mind what the numbers say, does it look or feel credible?) probably contains an error in the workings somewhere.  The Rees-Mogg claim seriously fails the reasonableness test, making it look like a number generated to try and ‘prove’ a point rather than one which owes anything to the normal rules of mathematics.

For all their talk about the glorious benefits of the trade deals which the UK will be able to negotiate in the future, I’m not convinced that free trade is actually of much importance to the Brexiteers at all.  If it really was the driving force that they claim, they would be pushing for more deals like the EU-Mercosur deal, and for those deals to be deeper, rather than seeking to walk away from them and start again with a clean sheet (which is more or less what WTO terms means).  Prioritising breadth globally over depth regionally is a characteristic more associated with wanting to secure an advantage by working to looser rules than those binding other countries than with wanting to increase trade.  It makes eminent sense to a country which is – or believes that it is – in a position to impose its will and its trading terms on weaker countries.  That is, of course, exactly the trade model on which the British Empire was built (and the one which Trump is attempting to pursue using America’s might).  That’s at the heart of the Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all Brexit fantasy – a yearning for the past ‘glories’ of empire, and an unwillingness to accept the realities of the twenty-first century.  But believing really hard doesn’t create a power and influence which no longer exist and producing numbers which are simply unbelievable doesn’t turn fantasy into reality.