Can't even gerrymander properly

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It ought to be shocking that a man who was a minister when the government introduced voter ID can now stand up and say that it was indeed an attempt to prevent people voting, and the only thing wrong with it was that the people it prevented from voting were the wrong ones. Ought to be, but somehow isn’t. Still, failing even to get gerrymandering right is an admission of incompetence; and shouting it out loud a sign of the complete shamelessness which is the new normal. They’re incompetent and shameless, they know it, they know we know it, and they don’t even attempt to conceal it any more, boasting about it instead. They really do think we're all stupid.

Not traditional Tories at all

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There seems to be an ongoing battle in Sunak’s cabinet between those who think that feeding the population is on the whole a good idea and those who are so ideologically opposed to immigration that they think that it is better to let food rot in the fields than to allow businesses to recruit people to collect it. As has become the norm in the Tory Party, it seems that the ideologues are winning. Since Sunak has the power to override or sack the Home Secretary any time he wishes, it is reasonable to conclude that he is on the side of the ideologues, for the time being at least.

Braverman’s core argument seems to be that we should train up UK workers as HGV drivers, fruit pickers, and butchers rather than rely on attracting people from elsewhere to fill those jobs, and that’s the way to build a “high-skilled, high wage economy that is less dependent on low-skilled foreign labour”. The logic involved in that – that training people to do jobs which she obviously regards as low-skilled helps to increase skills and wages – escapes me, but let’s leave that to one side.

One of the issues raised by her apporoach is this: to what extent should people be free to choose their occupations rather than being ‘encouraged’ or even compelled to do those jobs which are available? Clearly, it cannot be a completely open choice – if 50 million of the UK’s citizens chose to become cobblers, we’d have an excess of shoes and a shortage of just about everything else. But neither do most of us want to see the type of command economy which marks people out as they leave school, allocating them to occupations according to need. In the real world, as a matter of fact, it tends to be the case that the children of the most well-off in society have rather more choice about how to earn their living than do those from poorer homes. There is another ideological component underlying that: for the political right (accepting the limitations and reservations about using such simplistic terms as left and right), the masses (but not themselves or their families, obviously) are there to serve the needs of the economy, whilst for the political left, the economy is there to enable people to achieve fulfilment as individuals. (As an aside, it’s a distinction which obviously places the modern Labour Party as one of a number of competing brands on the political right.)

In practice, things are not quite as black and white as that and, in the economy as currently constituted, we need a mechanism of some sort to decide how to fill those jobs which need filling, whilst avoiding a glut of cobblers. For the Conservative Party and Labour Party alike, the traditional answer is that ‘the markets’ should solve the problem. Shortages in one occupation should lead to increased wages, whilst surpluses in another should see pay falling behind. Looking at the actions of the current government, that begs the question: are they really traditional Tories at all? Deliberately holding wages below the rate of inflation (and thus making those receiving them poorer) in occupations where there is a clear and growing shortage is the reverse of what free market ideology suggests should happen. Their approach increasingly seems to be one of compulsion and direction in which the population does as it is told to serve those who wield economic power; but that only underlines the extent to which they have moved away from a belief in market forces towards authoritarianism. Braverman is just the most egregious example.

Starmer isn't really serious about change

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It’s understandable that a Labour Government led by Keir Starmer, if that’s what we’re going to get after the next election, would have a long list of things it wants to do. Some of them would be new initiatives, others would be repealing some of the worst acts of the current government (although his appetite for the latter seems very limited at present). The problem with acts of parliament passed by one government is that they can be very easily repealed by its successor; ensuring that change ‘sticks’ is far from easy. There is one major change which he could make, however, which would not only be hard to repeal in itself, but would also make it harder for the Tories to reverse other changes at some future date. That change is the one thing which Starmer seems absolutely keen to reject, namely proportional representation. Once a parliament is elected by a fully proportional system, it’s hard to imagine circumstances in which it would decide to revert to the absolutism of first-past-the-post.

What makes it so easy for one government to reverse the actions of its predecessors is the way in which our current electoral system usually gives absolute power to one party on a minority of the vote. Changing that means that repealing legislation would require a more consensual approach. It’s true that it would also make it harder for a government to get its own proposals through parliament in the first place; but looking at Brexit, the legislation to tear up international law over asylum, and the new act giving sweeping powers to individual police officers, many of us might think that to be rather a good thing. Demographics coupled with opinion polls showing that younger people’s opinions tend, on the whole, to be more socially liberal and progressive than those of older people, meaning that it is far more likely that a Labour leader prepared to be bold (a category which admittedly might exclude Starmer) could find a majority in a proportional parliament than a Tory leader seeking to appeal to the extremes. It seems that Starmer would sooner enjoy absolute power for one term and pass a whole series of reversible measures for the Tories to unpick than enjoy a more diffuse and conditional hold on power for a much longer term and make longer term changes to the UK’s society and economy. On that basis, apparently, many people see him as some sort of ‘progressive’. It’s a strange definition that they are using.

What does a police state look like?

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The more we read about the police handling of protesters associated with the coronation, the worse things get. After arresting people taking part in an anti-monarchy protest the details of which had been agreed in advance with the police force, it then emerged that, the previous night, they had arrested three women’s safety volunteers who were wearing hi-vis jackets with the Metropolitan Police logo on them who were taking part in a scheme run in partnership with the police to hand out rape alarms to vulnerable women. Today, it has emerged that they also managed to arrest a fervent monarchist who was handcuffed and then held for 13 hours, for the inadvertent ‘crime’ of standing too close to Just Stop Oil protesters. There was even a report that one person had been arrested for being in possession of a piece of string, although the length of the piece of string remains, as is ever the case, unknown. One common thread running through it all is the utter failure to talk to or listen to those arrested, with the police preferring to simply incarcerate them for hours before attempting to establish any facts.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might be tempted to believe that this was all entirely deliberate on the part of the Metropolitan Police, in an attempt to undermine the new laws by showing just how stupid and arbitrary they are. Sadly, however, given the Met’s record in recent years, I just don’t believe that they are clever enough to do that, and we have to look for other explanations. Such as incompetence, lack of co-ordination and communication, authoritarianism, and a desire to please their political masters. Somewhat surprisingly, they seem to have achieved the last of those: government ministers seem to be queuing up to declare how wonderful it is that the Met took a firm line in arresting people, and seem to be not in the least embarrassed that some of those arrested – maybe even all of them – had done nothing which justified charging them with any criminal offence, even under the new open-ended anti-protest laws which were rushed in in time for the coronation.

And that underlines where the real blame lies. The Met deserve – and are getting – a lot of criticism for their approach, but the real culprit here is a government which is determined to stamp out the traditional right to protest in the UK. It appears that there is now no form of protest which is permissible if the police decide otherwise, even if the details are agreed with the police in advance. Worse, it isn’t even ‘the police’ as a whole who make that decision, or even individual police forces; power has been given to individual police officers to decide for themselves what behaviour they will or will not allow, and to arrest and detain anyone who does something that they don't like. That looks like a classic definition of a police state to me, yet that’s where we’ve got to. And the official opposition can’t even decide whether it wants to reverse the process. Wales really can do better for itself.

Institutional amnesia can affect any organisation

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It’s clear that the UK Government’s plan to ditch all EU-originated legislation by the end of the current year has run into significant difficulties. Whilst ideologues like Jake are demanding that the government stick to its original plan, those responsible for actually implementing it are slowly realising that most of the rules and regulations are there for good reasons, and that simply abandoning them without thinking through a replacement is a really bad idea. It’s highlighting an instance of what is known as “institutional amnesia”, an organisation's inability to recall and use historical knowledge for present-day purposes. Whilst the rules are still there, the reasons for putting them there have often been forgotten.

A lot of organisations suffer from the problem. I’ve worked for large organisations, in both the public and the private sector, which have reams and reams of policies and procedures, all carefully developed to respond to some stimulus or other – sometimes external, such as legislation or a problem very publicly hitting another organisation which they don’t want to repeat themselves, and sometimes internal, such as ensuring that something which has happened is never repeated. One potential result, from direct personal experience with one large employer, is that when a situation arises, all those carefully prepared and shelved policies get ignored because no-one remembers what’s in them or is able to find the relevant needle in the haystack of documentation, and those charged with responding to the situation re-invent their own shiny new wheels to address the problem. And then write a new procedure to cover the future. In simple terms, when organisations forget the ‘why’ which lies behind the ‘what’, they tend to ignore the ‘what’ as well.

If that’s a problem for large, well-resourced organisations under full-time professional management, imagine how much bigger that problem might be for an under-resourced organisation run at least partly by part-time volunteers with frequent changes in both its officers and its committees and groups. Particularly where competing egos and ambitions are in play. Like a political party for instance. And that brings me to Plaid’s recent travails and the report of the working party into the allegations of a toxic culture of misogyny, harassment and bullying. When I read some of the report’s recommendations, I couldn’t help but feel that the party was suffering from a bout of that institutional amnesia which eventually afflicts most organisations. Some of the proposed ‘new’ wheels looked extremely familiar to me. I’m well aware that, during my period as Chair, the party’s rule book got ever longer and more complicated – far too long, according to many – as rules were tweaked and new committees and groups established, invariably in response to an actual or perceived problem. One thing that I learned from that experience is that whilst rules, procedures and processes are very good at documenting what should happen, they are a very poor way of documenting the learning and reasoning which led to those rules and processes in the first place, and over time (to the extent that they are followed at all) the rules are followed with no real understanding of the rationale behind them. And then fall into disuse or get thrown into the nearest convenient bonfire of red tape.

It's not a problem to which I had (or have) a solution, and I don’t immediately see a solution to it in the working party’s report either. Plaid isn’t unique in facing the problem, although other parties making hay is only to be expected. As the report hints, the long-term solution lies somewhere in the area of the collective culture of the organisation, but changing and then maintaining a single cohesive culture is easier said than done. Particularly bearing in mind those egos and ambitions.

To squirm or not to squirm

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One should always be careful about believing the detail of what people plugging a book – or a podcast – about politics have to say. They do, after all, have a vested interest in selling something, and brash headlines are not exactly unhelpful. Guto Harri, Boris Johnson’s former Communications Chief has been at it today, claiming that Johnson squared up to the soon-to-be-king and gave him a dressing down over his description of the Rwanda policy as 'appalling' leaving Charles ‘squirming’; that Johnson thought that Sue Gray was a ‘psycho’ (takes one to know one, maybe?); and that Johnson was all set to sack Rishi Sunak as Chancellor when Sunak beat him to it by resigning, the dastardly Chancellor that he was.

There is a question over the discretion of both men in talking about what did or did not happen in what was supposed to be a private conversation with Charles but, notwithstanding the golden rule about being careful about taking the word of someone who has something to sell, it is entirely credible that Johnson would have said all these things to Harri. What is a lot less credible, though, is that Harri, as someone who knew Johnson better than most, and would have been extremely familiar with his tendency to dissimulate, exaggerate, and say different things to different people, could apparently have so readily believed that what Johnson was saying to him might bear some relationship to truth.

Johnson has denied the bit about Charles, of course, with a ‘source close to him’ claiming that he “does not recognise this account and it is inaccurate”. Well, he would, wouldn’t he, to coin a phrase. Johnson’s great hero, Churchill, once said that he knew that history was going to be kind to him because he intended to write that history. In Johnson’s case, we have two versions of history in one day, and in all probability neither of them actually reflects what happened. Still, it might all help to sell a podcast or two.

The right time is now

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For monarchists, there is, apparently, never a ‘right’ time to talk about the question of monarchy vs republic. Whilst one monarch reigns for 70 years, it is an issue which can be deferred until she dies; when she dies, such a debate would be disrespectful; and when a new monarch is crowned, it is disloyal and unpatriotic to raise the issue. That takes us back to the start point where there is an unchallengeable reigning incumbent albeit without the 70 years of reigning, even if he has been busy cutting ribbons and opening things. And so the issue goes largely undebated and life carries on. Few boats are rocked.

Those who support the idea that the head of state should be a hereditary position argue that it gives us a degree of stability under the late queen and the current king that we would not have with an elected president. They often posit the choice between the late queen and a recent political villain of choice – Trump, say, or Blair. Reducing the choice to named individuals might make it easier to opt for the monarch of the day, but it’s a verbal sleight of hand. There are other potential presidents. Presidency can be executive or ceremonial; assuming them to be the same thing is a deliberate attempt at deception. It is more realistic to suggest that the choice could be between a hereditary monarch and a president such as Michael Higgins of Ireland. And there are also other royals. It is by accident of birth that we now have King Charles rather than King Andrew. Whilst a choice between two billionaires such as Charles and Trump might lead many to prefer Charles, I strongly suspect that were the choice to be between Andrew and Michael Higgins, supporters of hereditary appointments might rapidly find themselves in a minority. But choosing between the two options on the basis of which individuals might end up in the job is, in any event, a poor argument for one system over the other. Even if it’s the best argument that the monarchists have. Especially if it’s the best argument that the monarchists have.

It's true, of course, that in a republic we could end up with the ‘wrong’ person in the job. It’s also true that in a monarchy we could end up with the ‘wrong’ person in the job. But in the first case, there is a mechanism for removal at a subsequent election whilst in the second, there is not. We potentially have to wait 70 years (although not for the current incumbent, obviously, despite the call as part of the crowning ceremony that he should live forever). Elections can get it ‘wrong’ - democracy allows us to make bad choices as well as good ones. But whether a choice is good or bad is in the eye or mind of the beholder; it’s not an absolute. Surprisingly, not everyone agrees that Johnson was a disaster, for example. And it is, at least, our choice in a way that hereditary succession is not.

“Not my King” has become a popular slogan of late, and in the sense that none of us chose him, it’s true. We are, though, his subjects, whether we like it or not. As the Archbishop of the established church in England made clear in the ceremony on Saturday, he consecrated Charles as “King over the peoples, whom the Lord your God has given you to rule and govern”. And whilst the Church holds sway only in England, the people given to Charles by god, according to the archbish, include those in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as sundry other remnants of conquest. The idea that we are ‘given’ to a monarch as subjects to be ruled over is a fiction, of course. But it’s a fiction which goes to the very heart of the English constitution. The authority of parliament and the government stems from the crown not from the people; it stems from the fiction that they rule in the name of and on behalf of the Protestant Christian god; and it's a fiction of which last Saturday’s events rather forcefully reminded us.

It’s often argued that, for practical purposes on a day to day basis, ditching the monarch for an elected and purely ceremonial president would make little difference to most of us. If it were possible to make such a simple single change, that would be true. But from an establishment perspective – and there is little difference between the Tories and Labour on this issue – a debate on converting the UK to a republic is a very large can of worms. Challenging the fiction at the centre of the constitution challenges a great deal more which is taken for granted. It isn’t just about who fills the role of head of state and how he or she is chosen – it’s about the relationship between the people and power, and about on whose behalf actions are taken. It’s actually a very big deal – and a long overdue change.

There is an alternative

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Sunakland is a strange, other-worldly sort of place, which adheres to a system of logic which is unique and impenetrable to outsiders. It is a world where an overwhelming rejection of the governing party in a series of elections is heard by the PM as a huge vote of confidence and a demand that he continue with a relentless pursuit of the same policies. Some of his acolytes think the result shows that people are giving Rishi Sunak a chance. I’d love to see what the results looked like if they weren’t. Not all of his followers agree with him, however. Some manage to see the voters’ reaction to the last three years of chaos as being a demand to return the chaos-creator in chief to the top job, apparently in the belief that the chaos was caused by, rather than the cause of, removing Johnson from office. Yet others see people turning away from the party of low taxes and poor services and turning instead to parties who want to provide better services by (according to incessant propaganda from the Tories) increasing taxes as a sign that voters are demanding more tax cuts and austerity.

In other news from that strange place, it seems that the governing party (it seems reasonable to assume that a deputy party chair appointed by the PM is promoting party policy) believes that a quarter of the entire UK population should be encouraged to emigrate. I suppose that might help to solve the housing shortage without upsetting Tory MPs by building houses in their constituencies, although I’m not sure that he’s thought through the implications for the NHS nor the widespread labour shortages which would result from such a dramatic population cut, let alone the impact on the government’s oft-stated ambition to be a world leader in research and innovation. It would also help to achieve his goal if they weren’t still congratulating themselves on removing the freedom of movement of those they now want to freely move. Still, I understand that the border control authorities have acquired a tidy stock of small boats – they could march all republicans down to Dover and launch them towards France. That’ll teach the French a lesson as well. Like the message on the wall in Animal Farm, the slogan will slowly morph from ‘Stop the boats’ to ‘Launch the boats’.

Fortunately, for Wales and Scotland at least, there is a way to leave Sunakland without going anywhere. It really is time to take it.

Splashing the cash

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From a republican perspective, the results of a poll showing that 54% of people in Wales would vote to keep the monarchy whilst 23% would vote for a republic is not at all a bad starting point on an issue which is barely discussed publicly and in relation to which the media and the main political parties relentlessly promote the status quo. And, interestingly, it’s far from clear that even all those who support the continuation of the monarchy are over-impressed by the cost to the public purse, with just over half saying that the monarchy should pay for the coronation out of their own resources. That said, it’s probably the case that attitudes to Saturday’s events probably reflect attitudes to the institution, and that the overall level of enthusiasm is rather less than the BBC and media would have us believe.

There have been some wild claims as to just how much of a boost the UK economy will get as a result of the jamboree, with the palace repeating claims that the benefit could be up to £1.25 billion. That looks a bit like a politician’s statistic to me (92.8% of which, like the figure of 92.8% itself, are made up on the spot to support whatever argument is being advanced at the time). It’s certainly true that a lot of tourists like to visit royal sites and palaces – whether that number would rise or fall if the occupants were cleared out and the whole of the building made available for public view is an open question. Royal history without the royals might turn out to be a surprisingly lucrative proposition.

One rather more specific claim has been that pubs will gain from a £120 million spending splurge over the weekend. The basis of that claim is uncertain to say the least – the workings haven’t been reported – but, for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that it’s true. The question, then, is ‘is that a boost to the economy overall?’, and the answer to that depends on where the money is coming from. If people are smashing open their piggy banks, or pulling the money from under the mattress or wherever else they’ve been hiding it, then the expenditure will indeed boost the economy overall. If, on the other hand, they’re merely spending money which might otherwise have been spent in the supermarket or on other leisure activities, then the ‘boost’ to one sector of the economy is matched by a hit to one or another different sector. In a time when people are struggling with the cost of living, the second scenario seems rather more likely than the first.

It has been reported that the cost of staging the event to the public purse will be around £100 million. Again, I haven’t seen the workings, but am prepared to accept the figure for the sake of argument. The same question arises – where does this money come from? Given that the government keep telling us that the cupboard is bare, it won’t be coming from Rishi Sunak’s piggy bank, or from under his mattress (although the tax authorities might usefully take a peek anyway to see what might be there and where it came from). And in the absence of any announcement of cuts elsewhere, it isn’t obviously going to impact other spending. In terms of the government’s overall spending, it’s a tiny drop in the ocean, but the likelihood is that it is effectively going to increase, marginally, the current year’s deficit. And that highlights one of the key differences between government spending and household spending – the government can, and almost invariably does, spend money which it hasn’t actually got. The result is that spending £100 million of extra government money on a coronation provides a real boost to the overall economy in a way which transferring £120 million of private money from supermarkets to pubs does not.

That doesn’t mean that I’m advocating spending £100 million on a pointless and archaic ceremony; I can think of plenty of better ways of spending that money. I’m more interested in the general lesson here, which is that government spending which increases the budget deficit boosts the economy; and its corollary, which is that ‘austerity’ (cutting government spending to reduce the deficit/debt) dampens the economy. That doesn’t mean that governments can or should run ever bigger deficits (there are other mechanisms, such as a lack of resources and a consequent increase in inflation which impose constraints on that, although despite all the posturing by politicians about percentages of GDP the simple truth is that no-one knows with any certainty where the limits lie). It simply means that when growth is weak, deficit-funded government expenditure can boost it, and that the time to reduce deficits is when growth is strong. There’s nothing new about that, it's something which has been known and understood for many decades. The tragedy is that we have a government which, for largely ideological reasons (and to protect the interests of the wealthiest, which may well amount to the same thing) tries to pretend that the opposite is true, and a main opposition party which is so keen to prove its fiscal responsibility that it’s even keener on taking action likely to dampen rather than promote growth.

One People...

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There is a tendency amongst the usual suspects in the Conservative Party which is coalescing around a new political philosophy imported from the US called National Conservatism. The name is unfortunate, to say the least – my first reaction was that it sounds like it might be an attempt to place themselves to the right of National Socialism. My second reaction after reading a little more was that my first reaction may not be entirely unfair. The organisation is holding a conference in London shortly, to be graced by the presence of a whole host of prominent Tories, including Lord Frost, Jake Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove and Suella Braverman.

At the heart of their philosophy (outlined here by the Edmund Burke Foundation) is the idea that the nation-state is the best and natural unit of organisation for human societies. In an article penned jointly by Jake and Frosty for the Telegraph, the pair describe the ideology as a “belief in the nation state and the principle of national independence”. It’s hard for an independentista to disagree with that as a principle. Indeed, at first sight, it would seem obvious that anyone holding that view would necessarily be a firm supporter of independence for Wales and Scotland. That isn’t, of course, what they believe; in fact they are both in favour of winding back devolution rather than turning it into independence. It all hinges on the definition of a ‘nation’. Some would see nation-states as being created by nations, but for national conservatives, it's actually the reverse: nations are created by states. From that perspective, the existence of the UK state in itself determines that the people living within it form a single nation. It’s axiomatic and inarguable, by definition. In another reminder of the past, Ein Reich necessarily translates as Ein Volk.

It follows, for them, that a single nation has to be based on a single ideology and set of values, and the Foundation happily spells them out. They include the idea that “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision”, and demand that the norm should be “the traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman”. They also want “the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing”. It is a recipe for enforcing their own view of what a nation, and particularly the ‘British’ nation is, and for rolling back the diversity and freedoms to which we have become accustomed, whether directly through law or indirectly by establishing expected norms. It is about imposing a set of values and behaviours on all of us.

We are currently seeing an outbreak of red, white and blue (to say nothing of the expectation that we will all joyously swear our allegiance to the latest unelected head of state), associated with next weekend’s clowning of the king; but that will be as nothing compared to the agenda of these people. And they are increasingly the mainstream of the governing party of these nations, which holds that position based on the votes of only one of those nations and then reserves to itself the right to determine, or terminate, the rights and wishes of the others. Anyone who doesn’t want to become fully assimilated into the ‘one people’ needs to understand that the only way of preventing it is to opt out of the ‘one realm’ first. And sooner rather than later.