Just pretending

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An old joke from the Soviet era was that “the bosses pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”.  It had a decent element of truth in it – the economic system worked, after a fashion, as long as everyone continued to pretend that everything was just fine.  But like any structure based on pretence and make-believe (and at the danger of wholly oversimplifying a complex series of processes) it all fell down when enough people stopped pretending.  Perhaps if the workers had truly believed, rather than just pretended to believe, that they were being paid they’d have truly worked, rather than merely pretended to do so.  And the system might not then have collapsed.  It’s conjecture, of course, but I tend to the view that ‘true belief’ can sustain the unsustainable for longer than would otherwise be the case.  Pretence by the few can be sustained if the many believe.

It was brought to mind by yesterday’s news reports which included comments by both Ruth Davidson of the Scottish Tories and Stephen Crabb of the Tories-in-Wales.  Both said that they had directly asked the Prime Minister whether he was serious about seeking a deal rather than a no-deal Brexit, both said that he had given them clear, or even ‘categorical’ assurances that he was, and both claimed to have believed him.  It was a case of the PM pretending to give assurances, and those to whom he gave them pretending to believe him.  (I could be unfairly impugning Davidson and Crabb here – perhaps they really did believe a proven serial liar who scatters categorical assurances around him like confetti before doing the opposite.  But suggesting that they’re stupid enough to believe the PM would be a greater insult to them than suggesting that they’re only pretending to believe him.)

It goes wider than that, though.  Currently, the PM is pretending that he is negotiating with the EU and that, if only he threatens to do enough damage to the UK, they will cave in – and large swathes of the media pretend to believe him, as they solemnly report on the subtleties of the different ways in which the EU are managing to phrase the word ‘no’.  (The same caveat applies – accusing the media of only pretending to believe him is the lesser of the accusations which could be laid at their door.)

Ultimately, however, the problem in all this lies not with those who are only pretending to believe, but with those who really do believe.  Pretence can and usually does collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, but true belief can withstand even the strongest application of fact.  To achieve the aim of getting people to support Brexit, the Brexiteers pretended that the UK had fallen under the control of a foreign power, pretended that that foreign power was in some way holding us back, pretended that immigration was responsible for problems in the fields of housing, education, and health, and pretended that immigration was the fault of the EU.  They knew all along that it was untrue, just a ruse to persuade enough people that their own future depended on them agreeing to voluntarily surrender their rights – or more accurately, the rights of other people.

Pretence by the few is being sustained by belief by the many, and it’s no accident that one of the key elements of the Brexit planning is a major propaganda onslaught designed to sustain that belief in those who already have it, and build it in those who don’t.  It might even work, for a while at least; the economy of the USSR bumped along for quite some time with everyone just pretending that it was working.  But the USSR also had the benefits of a totalitarian system controlling what people could read or say and spying on their every movement.  Whether a project so blatantly based on pretence can survive for long in today’s world of open and rapid communication is doubtful – the availability of alternative news sources and the inability of those driving the process to control them is at least part of the reason for the past three years of lack of progress.  Pretence eventually collapses; the question is about how long that will take.

The arcane and the bizarre

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Responding to the move to prorogue parliament yesterday, the Speaker denounced it as a “constitutional outrage”.  The Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg responded on BBC Breakfast this morning by saying that, “It is not constitutional for the speaker to express his opinion without direction of the house”.  It’s like a game of constitutional trumps.  They’re both right – and they’re both wrong.  Both are highlighting instances of actions which are, in one way or another, outside the norms of UK parliamentary process, but in a country whose constitution is unwritten and depends totally on precedent, nothing can ever, in strict terms, be ‘unconstitutional’.

The idea of ‘precedent’ assumes that little can ever change, and that the action to be taken in any given set of circumstances must be exactly the same as taken the last time those circumstances arose.  If the circumstances are unique (as, in reality, they always are), then the action to be taken must mirror as closely as possible the action taken in the most closely similar circumstances in the past.  It’s a recipe for superficial ossification, and in the absence of any real objective basis for deciding which is the closest historical parallel, for making things up as we go along.  And I’m really not sure which is worse – the de jure constitutional position that we always do whatever we did in the past, or the de facto constitutional position that we simply make up the rules as we go.  Neither seems compatible with a modern ‘democracy’, let alone one which its fans consider to be a model for the rest of the world to follow.

It’s not the only thing which is incompatible with a modern democracy, and if Brexit has served any purpose at all, it has been in exposing the inadequacies (or lunacies, more like) of the current system.  We’ve had two other examples this week alone.

The first was the suggestion that the solution to a situation where the PM of the day disagrees with majority opinion in a parliamentary chamber which is already hopelessly over-populated with unelected appointees, hereditaries and bishops is to simply find a lot more people who agree with him and appoint them as additional parliamentarians so that he can get his way.  Is there any other country in the world, with serious aspirations to call itself a democracy, in which the membership of one of its two chambers of parliament is completely unelected and where the government of the day can ‘adjust’ the membership so as to give itself a majority?

The second was yesterday’s news that the Privy Council had met with the monarch and advised her to prorogue parliament, advice which she then accepted.  It’s true that 3 members of the Privy Council flew up to Balmoral to impart their advice, and that, under the unwritten constitution of the UK, that amounts to a ‘meeting of the Privy Council’.  There are, though, around 700 members of the Privy Council, and we can safely assume that at least 650 of those didn’t even know that there was going to be a meeting yesterday.  And under the rules under which the Council operates, they didn’t need to know.  A ‘meeting’ of the Council need not consist of more than a few members, hand-picked by the PM of the day, sent to convey his views to the monarch.  It’s a complete anachronism, like so much else about the UK’s system of ‘democracy’.

The more Brexit teaches us about the UK’s definition of ‘democracy’, the more I find myself wondering whether the UK has ever really complied with the spirit of the EU’s charter on the rule of law, which is supposedly a fundamental requirement of membership (and which may now be used against the UK).  I’d like to think that current events might provoke more people into recognising that we need a proper written constitution which lays down processes and procedures to be followed, but I’m not going to hold my breath.  Regularising the arcane and bizarre is, though, a clear advantage to Welsh independence.  It is inconceivable that a new Welsh state would be so stupid as to follow the processes of the so-called ‘mother of parliaments’, isn’t it?

Confusing government and country

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When Johnson (Samuel, not Boris) referred to patriotism as being “the last refuge of a scoundrel”, he wasn’t referring to patriotism of all kinds at all times; he was referring, rather, to what he saw as the ‘false patriotism’ of Pitt the Elder.  Defining ‘false patriotism’ isn’t quite so easy, but when Johnson (Boris, not Samuel) demands that everyone ‘gets behind’ the government over Brexit, he is most certainly guilty of it.  Supporting the country isn’t at all the same things as supporting the government, a distinction which Johnson’s government is not unique in failing to draw.  Mark Twain suggested that “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it”, which makes a very clear distinction between the two things.

Of course, what “supporting your country” means isn’t exactly amenable to clear and objective definition either.  Ultimately, it comes down to supporting what you individually believe to be best for your country, and there will inevitably be some very different views about that.  The point is that opposing a government can be every bit as patriotic as supporting it.  Those who feel that the current direction of government policy is wrong for Wales (or the UK) can be every bit as patriotic as those who support it.  Deliberately conflating the two things is indeed the action of a scoundrel.

For many Brexiteers, their version of ‘patriotism’ is at the heart of their rationale for Brexit and seems to be based around notions of absolute sovereignty.  For others of us, what is best for our country considers the wider interests of humanity as a whole, placing the ‘country’ in a global context on the basis that individual survival depends on collective survival.  From that latter perspective, a willingness to share sovereignty through organisations and structures which take decisions collectively through discussion and agreement is an entirely natural outcome; the debate then centres on the nature of those partnerships.  Tying to reduce the issue to one of patriotism is trying to avoid real debate about where our best interests lie, for the long term as well as the short term.  And pleas for ‘unity’ around some idealised notion of ‘Great’ Britain (the “greatest place on earth”) are an attempt to move beyond patriotism into a jingoistic version of nationalism.

That Johnson is a practised and habitual liar is established fact; but on his namesake’s definition, he’s also a scoundrel.

Boris' brilliant idea

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It might, of course, just have been some sort of strange Old Etonian dare that the PM was set by his old school chums.  Getting someone to tell porkie pies about real, actual pork pies sounds like the sort of jolly prank that I can imagine them playing on each other for their own amusement.  Whether much else of what he said in his criticism of US rules which keep UK products out of the American market was true or false is unclear, but given the source, it’s probably safer to assume that it was mostly invented.

He did make one interesting point though, when referring to the ‘fact’ (in quotes because I simply don’t know whether it is true or not, but let’s run with it for the moment) that a UK company wanting to sell insurance into the US has to deal with 50 different regulators rather than just one or two.  In essence, he may have hit on a brilliant idea here – rather than a group of states each having their own sets of rules and regulations, they could band together and agree a common set of rules which would make trade between groups of states potentially much easier.  Perhaps the countries of Europe could take up the idea as well.  We could call it, oh, I don’t know, how about something along the lines of a single European market?  Then, with a large and homogeneous ‘home’ market, it would become easier to sell our wares into other large homogeneous markets with fewer regulatory bodies needing to be involved.  I can’t imagine why no-one has thought of this before.

Motes and beams

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When I first saw the story that Trump wanted to buy Greenland, my immediate reaction was to check the date of the story.  There are far too many ‘old’ stories reshared on the internet – this one surely was from April 1^st, wasn’t it?  But no, it was genuine.  The fact that the detail went on to say this wasn’t a priority for his administration, just some sort of vague suggestion was a little reassuring – until he cancelled his visit to Denmark and it became clear that he thought the whole purpose of his visit was to agree the details.  He also, it seems, took umbrage at the description of the Danish Prime Minister of the idea as ‘absurd’, claiming it was a ‘nasty’ comment.  It struck me as a rather restrained comment; countries buying and selling other countries over the heads of the inhabitants may have been done in the colonial past, but it isn’t acceptable now.

Closer to home, it seems that one of the proposals put forward by the PM to overcome the problem of the Irish border is that Ireland should leave the EU’s single market and follow the rules laid down by the UK instead.  The word used was ‘temporarily’, until such time as some other fix enables two countries in different regulatory regimes to maintain the integrity of their respective markets with no border controls, but since no such fix exists and there is no prospect of one  being developed, this would inevitably become a permanent arrangement.  And rather than try and agree this directly with the Republic of Ireland, the suggestion is that it should be negotiated with the EU who would then tell the Republic what they need to do.  What was that about buying and selling countries over the heads of their inhabitants?

How we all laughed at Trump’s ‘absurd’ suggestion!  But what, in essence, is the difference?  Playground bullies seeking to dispose of smaller countries over the heads of their inhabitants, not even beginning to understand what is wrong with their proposals – Trump and Johnson are increasingly two of a kind.  We often look at the US and wonder how anyone – let alone a significant section of the media – can treat Trump with any degree of seriousness, but looking at the way Johnson is treated here, it becomes a lot easier to see how it can happen.  The world, including the UK but excluding a large chunk of America laughs at Trump; the world excluding a large chunk of the UK is laughing at Johnson.  It’s just harder to see from the inside.

Finland 'taking back control'

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One of the reasons given for the UK’s decision to stop attending many EU meetings is that it will save time for those involved who would otherwise have to read the papers in advance.  Only those meetings where a subject will be of ‘significant national interest’ to the UK will be attended.  The first and most obvious question is how they will know whether there’s anything fitting that definition if they don’t read the papers?  But the second, and perhaps more important question is about timescale.  Clearly, for a government planning to leave on 31^st October with no transition period, decisions taken now by the EU are going to be largely irrelevant.  However, for a government which was planning a lengthy transition period as part of an agreed withdrawal deal, decisions taken now will continue to affect the UK for some two years or more.  The conclusion about the government’s intentions is clear – no deal is now their sole aim.

It might only be for two months if they get their way, but there’s also something rather ironic about a government which claims to be determined to ‘take back control’ from the EU delegating its voting rights at meetings to Finland.

Just another stunt

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As I understand Boris Johnson’s somewhat belated missive to the EU27, he is arguing that a mechanism to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland be replaced by a mechanism to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.  The key difference is that the mechanism in the Withdrawal Agreement is defined, whereas his is not.  Why replacing a defined arrangement with an undefined ‘alternative’ one would be acceptable to anyone is one of the many unanswered questions, but ‘because UK’ is not much of an answer.

In his letter, he commits the UK to accepting a “legally binding commitment” to “not put in place infrastructure, checks or controls at the border” and vaguely hopes that the EU will make a similar commitment.  That makes it sound like a major and generous concession which it would be churlish not to reciprocate, but for a regulatory regime which seeks to abolish tariffs on imports and reduce the standards to which goods and services must be provided it’s very easy to remove controls with an area with higher standards and tariffs.  It’s considerably more difficult for the regime with higher standards to simply lower the gates and let anything and everything through, and the PM knows that.  It will always be those states which wish to maintain the highest standards which have the incentive – nay the requirement – to control the external borders of their market.

It’s probable, of course, that his letter wasn’t really aimed at the EU27 at all; making such a letter an open one and releasing it to the media at the same time as sending it to the EU looks more like a stunt aimed at the UK public than a serious attempt to negotiate anything, and I’m sure that that is at least a part of the truth.  At another level, though, it underlines yet again the real aim of the Brexiteers, which is to destroy the EU as an entity.  Keeping an entirely open border between a carefully constructed single market and a regulatory regime which seeks to reduce or abolish standards and controls can only end up one way – the integrity of the market would be destroyed, not least because the infamous WTO rules would require the EU27 to apply the same rules to the rest of the world as to the UK. 

Brexit, in isolation, has never made much sense, and it’s never been the sole objective of the Brexiteers.  As the first step towards destroying the EU and reducing the extent of regulation on employee rights, environmental standards etc it is a great deal more coherent as an objective.  They have always claimed that it was never the economic aspects of the EU which they didn’t like, only the political ones, such as the reference to ‘ever closer union’.  In truth, what they don’t like is that the EU has been a force for controlling capitalism (even if not to the extent that some of us would like) rather than allowing it to operate entirely unfettered, and that’s more about the rules of the single market than about political union.  It’s a curious irony for those of us who originally opposed membership of the EEC because it looked like a capitalist club that it has actually done more to control the worst excesses of capitalism than the UK would ever have done alone, and that the real promoters of unfettered capitalism have proven to be the domestic variety.

I don’t think Johnson’s letter has anything to do with negotiation; it has everything to do with justifying his position, blaming other people, and getting on with the job of dismantling the regulatory structure that the EU has jointly developed.  Those who accuse the EU of using the situation in Ireland as a means of keeping the UK under the EU’s regime are themselves trying to use the situation in Ireland to undermine the EU itself.

A strange form of 'social justice'

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Iain Duncan Smith and Social Justice aren’t words which naturally trip off the tongue in a single sentence (unless there’s also a negative to be found somewhere) so calling a think tank founded by him the ‘Centre for Social Justice’ has always looked like an attempt to give a warm-sounding name to an organisation likely to be aiming to do the precise opposite of what it says on the tin.  The latest report from this so-called ‘think tank’ is a case in point, recommending as it does that the state pension age be gradually increased to 75 by 2035.

It is hard to see what, exactly, that policy has to do with ‘social justice’, given that its greatest impact will be on the lowest-paid (i.e. those most dependent on the state pension in later life), whilst the higher-paid will continue to be in a position to retire a great deal earlier if they wish, since they generally have other, more generous, pension provision.  And whilst generalisation is not without its dangers, we know from other data that lower income is associated with poorer health and shorter life span, meaning that the number of years for which the pension is received by people in this group is significantly less in any event.  It’s an odd kind of ‘social justice’ indeed which suggests that the least well-off should have to work the longest, receive the lowest pensions, and enjoy them for the shortest time.  Clearly it isn’t the pensioners concerned who benefit from such a policy – the beneficiaries are the higher earners who are unaffected directly by the proposal, but who will be looking to gain from any tax reductions (or by avoiding what might otherwise be required tax increases) as a result of reducing the cost of providing pensions.

The report does actually recognise that issue, stating: “Low income households, therefore, have the greatest need to remain in work, but also face the highest barriers to working” (because, for instance, they “… have less opportunity to amass sufficient financial resources”).  Anyone serious about ‘social justice’ would be looking at why they have ‘the greatest need to remain in work’, instead of which they decided to concentrate on overcoming the barriers to them doing so.

It’s clear that the underlying basis for the proposal has little to do with social justice and everything to do with a particular ideological perspective, which for me is summed up in this sentence from the report’s summary, which reads: “Ensuring that this growing proportion of older people continue to make an essential contribution to our economy as workers, carers, taxpayers and volunteers is an important question for public policy”.  Had it been worded just a little differently, talking about how those older people who wanted to go on making a contribution in any of those ways could be enabled to do so, I wouldn’t raise any issue.  Not everybody wants to ‘retire’ and facilitating continued activity is an entirely valid objective of public policy.  (Although I don’t see how they get from a contribution as ‘carers’ or ‘volunteers’ to the conclusion that they don’t need a pension; it’s a strange juxtaposition.)  But the ideological underpinning here is the idea that people’s whole purpose in life is – or should be – to contribute as workers (either paid or voluntary) and taxpayers, and that the government should ‘ensure’ that they do so.  That is an attack on the whole concept of ‘retirement’ as it has been previously understood.  From this perspective, ‘retirement’, or rather the payment of the state pension, becomes increasingly limited to those who are physically unable to work any longer, and the objective is to pay it for as short a time as possible.

None of that is to deny that better health and an increasingly aging population don’t cause challenges for a pensions system which has always been run like a giant Ponzi scheme because the ability to pay pensions out of current revenue effectively assumes continuing population growth.  But that problem wasn’t caused by those who are about to find their working life extended significantly – it was caused by the politicians who designed and have presided over the scheme from the outset, and who have given themselves a different and better pension scheme meaning that they are unaffected by proposals such as this one.  There is a long-term challenge involved in putting the state pension onto a sound basis; deferring pension rights for the lowest-paid is avoiding the issue, not solving it.

Brexit is not their real priority

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If Corbyn’s proposal that he should head a temporary government with an agreed short-term remit to deal only with avoiding a no deal Brexit was, as some have suggested, intended as a trap for the new leader of the Lib Dems, then she certainly walked straight into it.  Having said that stopping Brexit was her absolute top priority, rejecting a firm proposal to achieve that end reveals that it isn’t actually her top priority at all – preventing Corbyn from becoming PM, and/or trying to establish the Lib Dems as the ‘purist’ anti-Brexit party are both more important to her.  The Lib Dems prove to be as keen on putting their own narrow party interests first as ever – if they were serious about stopping Brexit, they’d have immediately accepted the idea of negotiating and raised their concerns or put forward alternatives in those discussions.

Having said that, for Labour to gloat over having so badly wrong-footed her isn’t so clever either.  After also claiming that their top priority is stopping no deal, their move – coupled with an apparent refusal to consider alternative possibilities – reveals that they have higher priorities as well, namely getting Corbyn into Number 10 and smashing the Lib Dem revival.  If they were serious about stopping Johnson’s no deal, they’d have put their proposal on the table and indicated that they saw it as a starting point for an adult discussion, rather than as a trap for the Lib Dems.

As to the substance, well the Lib Dem leader does actually have a point.  There must be serious doubts as to how many of the rebel Tories and newly independent MPs who want to stop no-deal would support a vote of no confidence if the result was a Corbyn-led government.  That does, in turn, though reveal that those Tories and independents who say stopping a no-deal is the most important thing are fibbing as much as Labour and Lib Dems are, because they, too, have a higher priority, namely not being seen to aid Corbyn into Downing Street.  Having spent years demonising him for being something which he is not, they are now unable to exercise the necessary flexibility.  And Swinson’s point is of only limited validity anyway – for every Tory MP who won’t countenance even a single purpose short-term government led by Corbyn, there’s going to be a Labour MP who won’t countenance a single purpose short-term government led by someone other than the leader of their party.  Their opposition to putting a veteran Tory like Ken Clarke at the head of such a government is only what one might expect; but, in typical Labour style, their opposition to putting a different Labour MP at the head is even stronger for many of them.

So, there we have it – three disparate groups, all claiming that their highest priority is stopping no-deal Brexit, all in reality placing more importance on two entirely different questions, namely who is PM and where does the best advantage for their party lie.  Unless at least one of those groups starts to behave like a group of adults and recognises that the important thing here is the remit of any temporary government, not its figurehead nor their respective positioning once the dust has settled, then the Brextremists will win by default.  They have no need to behave like adults or win any arguments; their only requirement for success is that the clear parliamentary majority against their policy remains divided over the peripheral issue of personality.  At the moment, sadly, my head tells me that the Brexiteers are more likely to win if stopping them demands adult behaviour from their opponents.

Opening boxes

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Perhaps Boris Johnson really believes that the only reason that the EU27 are not willing to move yet is that they are waiting to see whether parliament will block a no-deal Brexit, although given his past record it seems unlikely.  I tend to suspect that the only thing that he really believes is that if he says the same thing often enough, then enough people will believe him to vote for a government led by him in the forthcoming election.  Whether what he says is true or not, or whether he himself believes it to be true is, ultimately, irrelevant.  Sadly, there is evidence enough that that one true belief of his might actually be valid – there are indeed large numbers of people who do believe what he says to be true.  For all his talk about ‘uniting the country’, all he really wants to do is to ‘unite’ enough voters to give him a clear parliamentary majority and, with the vote being split in more directions than in the past in a seriously unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system, the number of votes he needs to do that is lower than has traditionally been the case.  Getting around 30-35% of the country to believe that what he says is true (or else to knowingly vote for a liar on the basis of him being less bad than the alternatives) is all he needs or wants.

Whether it’s a necessary or inevitable concomitant of such a narrow tribalistic view is open to debate, but part of the result of this divisive approach is to split people into two main camps – the ‘true believers’ and the rest, who he is increasingly labelling as ‘collaborators’.  He did it this week in his ‘uncensored’ session answering questions from the public which had been vetted and selected in advance, referring to “a terrible collaboration […] between people who think they can block Brexit in parliament and our European friends”.  I can’t have been the only one who read the word ‘friends’ in that context in the Orwellian sense of meaning ‘enemies’.  The same turn of phrase was used more bluntly by the Tory grass roots campaign, StandUp4Brexit, in referring to the brave statement by Guto Bebb that he would be willing to countenance a limited term Corbyn premiership as an alternative to the long term damage of no deal, when they accused him of “collaborating with the EU”. 

This use of language is no accident.  Accusations of ‘collaboration’ are an unpleasant echo of the past, especially from the 1940s in Europe; I can’t imagine how they must sound to French ears in particular.  Harking back to ‘the war’ is a standard part of the Brexiteer play book, even if what they’re harking back to isn’t even real memories but second or third-hand folk memories distorted through the lens of a bowdlerised version of history.  But that same period in history should make us very wary of any politician seeking to gain power on around 30-35% of the popular vote in a rigged system by branding anyone who doesn’t agree with him as a collaborator.  The distance between branding supporters of membership of the EU as ‘collaborators’ and demanding that such people be tried for treason isn’t as great as many of us might hope.  In his pursuit of power ‘by any means necessary’, Johnson is opening some very unpleasant boxes.