YouGov Poll Joins Others Showing Brexit on Cards

For as long as I can remember, Peter Kellner, a man I like, respect, admire and consider a friend for more than 30 years has been telling me that my fears over Brexit were unfounded. Peter, like myself, believes that Britain isolating itself from Europe would be a historic error of monumental proportion.
But relying on his intimate knowledge of public opinion as head of the leading polling company, YouGov, Peter Kellner has insisted again and again, on the record at public seminars and in private conversation that there would never be a majority in favour of quitting the EU.
I, on the contrary, have felt ever since David Cameron announced his referendum in January that Brexit was possible, indeed probable. It was why I wrote my book Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe (IB Tauris). The first edition came out in January and discussed the divide between David Cameron and Ed Miliband over holding a referendum. That question was settled in the general election and unless the referendum is called off we must assume we will hold this dangerous plebiscite.
I have since completely re-written the non-historical chapters of the book to include developments since May this year. The book’s cover had been changed to a bright red instead of a pale cream and explains the new reasons since David Cameron returned to Downing Street that reinforce my Brexit arguments.
Now opinion polls are moving as it were from Peter Kellner to my side of the argument, namely that Brexit must be taken seriously. The argument that it will be like the 1975 referendum or that voters always stay with the status quo are evaporating. Simon Heffer writing in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph said the Out or Leave campaigners had already raised nearly £20 million. In 1975, the In or pro-Europe camp outspent the Out campaign 12-1. Forty years it is the anti-EU Out campaign that has all the case while the In groups rely on small groups of volunteers and small amounts of money from private donors.
Under legislation passed recently listed companies, including all major FTSE firms which back staying in the EU, cannot give money to a political campaign unless it is authorised by a special AGM. No CEO is going to risk calling a politically charged special meeting of shareholders which can be packed by UKIP activists and other anti-Europeans who buy a single share in order to secure a vote to give money to keep the UK in Europe. One recent survey said the 67% of leading UK firms wanted to stay in Europe but only 6% would campaign to that end. If big business is staying on the sidelines and not chipping in with financial help, the huge amounts of cash that have flowed and still flow from private City firms owned by Eurosceptics to Ukip or anti-European think-tanks will have more influence on the outcome than under-funded pro-EU campaigns.
The new Labour leadership is not Eurosceptic in the sense of Nigel Farage or top Tories like Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid who argue that Britain will flourish outside the EU. But Jeremy Corbyn and his closest comrades criticise the EU with its focus on austerity and free trade deals. The TUC has said its members could easily campaign for a No vote if the prime minister brings back any deal that contains language implying change in so-called Social Europe provisions.
Yet the CBI, and other employer outfits like the British Chambers of Commerce and Institute of Directors have been banging on for years that Cameron must reform, reduce or remove EU social rules like Working Time or Agency Workers Directives. Labour and the unions are not anti-European but cannot offset the relentless Eurosceptic campaign by most of the mass circulation press.
Finally, as I argued in my book, the constant criticism of the EU from politicians and journalists of right and left and the failure of all government ministers since 2010 to find a good word for Europe is working its way into public consciousness. Today The Times published a poll showing a 40-38 split in favour of voting Out or Leave.
The poll was carried out by YouGov. I expect to bump into Peter Kellner at the Labour conference or soon at one of the many discussion events on Europe at which we see each other. I look forward to his explanation of why his own polling firm now joins Survation and ICM in producing Out majorities and whether perhaps his confidence in recent times that the UK would always vote to stay in Europe was misplaced.

Eureporter 17 September

EU ‘Zombie Zone’ in West Balkans makes refugee solution harder
Denis MacShane
Greece beat Macedonia in a tight basketball championship match this month. The game was played in Croatia but foreigners watching a thrilling contest on Greek television would have been at a loss to know who the Greeks were playing as the name of Greece’s opponents was left blank on TV screens.
This is part of the surreal failure of the West Balkans to come to terms with modernity after the decade long war of the 1990s that broke up the former Yugoslavia into seven small European nation-states. The region is now the EU’s ‘Zombie Zone’ where the dead and the hates of the past seem more alive than the living.
Like the Lilliputians in Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ who went to war over whether to crack an egg at its broad or pointed end, the West Balkan states from Greece northwards are better at finding reasons to oppose each other than to cooperate.
The rest of the world laughs at the Macedonian pretention that the hero of ancient Greece, Alexander the Great, has anything to do with today’s Slav-Albanian state of Macedonia.
But as with the Serbian pretence that Kosovo is just a breakaway province that one day will see the light and return to be ruled by Belgrade these nationalist populist passions have a debilitating effect on normal economic developments.
Greece also refuses to establish diplomatic recognition with Kosovo even if Greek businesses are important investors in the small landlocked and desperately poor state .
This leaves Kosovo in an international limbo unable to join global bodies like the UN, the EU or even the Council of Europe and access international loans and investment. The endless clamour for punishment for the massive displacement of Serbs that followed the end of Belgrade’s rule there also prevents reconciliation, trade and economic development.
Without any encouragement anti-Serb politicians in the region will remind listeners about Srebrenica, Sarajevo and the massacres of Kosovan Albanians by Serb warlords and militias.
It is as if in 1965, France and Germany had no diplomatic relations, only talked about wartime atrocities, and stopped normal economic, student, and cultural intercourse.
At last Kosovo has got its own telephone dialling code instead of going via mobile phone services in Monaco. This modest step was brokered last month by the EU and is to be welcomed.
In June, the biggest single national quota of migrants entering the EU were 57,000 Kosovans. The barbed wire barrier erected by Hungary on its border with Serbia was designed not to keep Syrian refugees at bay but to deny entry to Serb, Macedonian and Kosovan citizens who have given up hope of finding work, a home and having a future in their own nations.
The EU’s foreign service does its best and both the current EU top diplomat, Frederica Mogherini and her predecessor, Cathy Ashton, devoted more time to trying to untangle West Balkan hates and knock heads together than any other issue.
But the fact remains that fifteen years after the end of the fighting the West Balkans from Athens to the Alps is blocked by nationalist identity passions that prevent normal state development.
In this twilight world criminality and corruption flourish and movement of migrants, refugees and prostitutes through a region where states do not recognise each other’s frontiers or cooperate on policing and intelligence is a profitable business.
The EU cannot put back on their feet the destroyed states of Iraq, Libya and Syria but if Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London are so incapable of injecting a little common sense into the states of the West Balkans, including Greece, can an EU foreign policy really be said to exist?
Denis MacShane is a former minister responsible for the Balkans and the EU in the Tony Blair government.

Labour Elects a Leftist Robespierre as Leader as Odds on Brexit Shorten
Denis MacShane

In one of the most dramatic movements in European politics so far this century, Britain’s Labour Party, one of the world’s oldest, and most successful left parties of government, has chosen as its leader a 66 year old man of the hard, unflinching left.
After 13 years of leadership by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, two classic rightwing social democrats, pro-business, pro-EU, pro-American and against emotional leftism Labour has massively endorsed a man who is their opposite in every imaginable way.
The women who hoped to become either leader or deputy leader were swept to one side as Corbyn’s Number 2 is a middle-aged, middle-rank Labour MP, Tom Watson.
Most of Corbyn’s key aides, including the young leftist journalist and writer, Owen Jones, his economic advisors, and other close associates from leftwing campaigns dating back to the 1970s are all men.
Many leading women Labour MPs announced they would not serve under Corbyn and the Labour Party is now firmly controlled by middle-aged and older men thus defying the insistence that women should have leadership roles in modern centre-left politics.
Corbyn won 60 per cent of all the votes cast, a bigger share than Tony Blair obtained 21 years ago when he was elected leader. He went straight to address a rally in favour of allowing refugees into Britain, in contrast to the more cautious approach of the British and French and many other European governments.
Europe will now have to digest as leader of the Labour Party a man who in Greece would be in Syriza, in Spain, Podemos, in Germany Die Linke or in France le Front de Gauche.
Corbyn is a moralist not a Marxist, a preacher not a party factionalist, a signer of petitions not an intellectual ideologue, a man who sees injustice everywhere around him.
That leads him to positions where he is sympathetic to Hamas and to Hezbollah, to Hugo Chavez, to IRA terrorists, and to militant trade unions without any real examination of what they stand for and what they might achieve.
Only about ten Labour MPs actively supported him. This is not because he is disliked. On the contrary, Corybn is the most polite of men who will disagree with his political opponents but not seek to make personal points or disparage them.
I have known Jeremy for three decades and cannot remember an angry exchange even if I disagreed with many of his views.
He was anti-European in the 1970s and 1980s. His reflex anti-Americanism is that of the 1968 generation of which he an exemplar marching against the Vietnam War. He would like Britain to leave Nato, dump the Queen to become a republic, and give up its nuclear weapons.
He empathises with Latin America anti-US leftism and his last two marriages have been to a Chilean and then a Mexican political activist he met while campaigning on Latin American solidarity issues in London.
He has not spoken out in favour of quitting the EU but he is strongly critical of the orthodox austerity politics favoured by the dominant centre right EPP politicians in charge of the Commission and the EU Council. He says he wants a Europe that drops austerity and upholds workers’ rights.
In fact, the EU may provide Corbyn with his first big ballot box test as Prime Minister, David Cameron, has to hold a referendum on Britain leaving the EU by 2017.
No one expects Corbyn to campaign strongly for an institution he has always regarded with suspicion as being more in favour of big business and money-making than social solidarity and syndicalist trades unionism.
In addition, there will be many on the left who would like to trip up David Cameron by forcing a humiliating referendum defeat which would almost certainly mean his resignation as the Prime Minister who isolated Britain from Europe.
The temptation to see Cameron defeated will hover in the Corbyn camp to the dismay of pro-European Labour MPs.
Most political observers in Britain see the Corbyn victory as making Brexit more, not less likely.
But none of them have come up with an adequate explanation of how this outsider from the far-left fringe of Labour politics has triumphed so completely.
But they should look at history. Marx once wrote that history repeated itself first as tragedy then as farce. In Britain’s Labour Party history simply repeats itself. The extraordinary hysteria in British political circles over Jeremy Corbyn as if Lenin, Trotsky, and Hugo Chavez had taken over the Labour Party and consign it to oblivion forgets the first lesson of Labour Party history.
This states that when Labour goes into opposition it always turns left, often sharp left to begin with and usually elects as its leaders or leading spokespersons politicians who appeal to the party’s gut instincts not voters’ needs and aspirations.
This summer that phenomenon has been exacerbated by the decision to allow 200,000 people join the Labour Party if they paid £3 (€5) just to vote in the election and nothing else. The defeated Labour leader, Ed Miliband, resigned straight after he lost the general election and initiated a leadership contest which had never been tried before and which allowed no time for serious candidate to emerge.
Scores of thousands joined up to vote against the establishment Labour MPs, former protégés of Tony Blair or Gordon Brown who offered themselves as leadership candidates and who were seen as not true echt Socialists with a capital S.
There is always an anger on the left against an outgoing Labour government which is accused of selling out to the establishment, sucking up to America, or forgetting about the workers and the poor.
And when ex-Labour ministers go into the private sector and become very rich, the charge made against Tony Blair and other ex-Labour cabinet ministers there is a puritan desire to find a pure, incorruptible – a Labour Robespierre to lead Labour and Britain towards socialist purity.
In the 1930s, Labour elected as its leader a long forgotten politician called George Lansbury, a religious pacifist as leader in the hope Hitler, Mussolini and Franco would be converted to democracy.
In the 1980s, when Labour went into opposition after Margaret Thatcher’s election Labour had Michael Foot, another unelectable followed by Neil Kinnock, elected as party leader in 1983 as an anti-war, Eurosceptic, anti-American Labour MP.
To be sure, Kinnock changed but he remained unelectable losing elections in 1987 and 1992. So in opting for Corbyn, also is anti-American, anti-business, anti-military, anti-Israel and soft on Latin American socialism of the Venezuela/Cuba variety Labour is just reverting to type.
But at some stage Labour will self-correct as it has done in the past. How long and what form this self-correction will take is now the important question. Labour today has a new generation of politicians elected in 2010 and 2015 who are modern, smart, reformist. Most Labour MPs are horrified at what has happened as are thousands of municipal councillors, and intelligent union leaders even if they disliked the top-down control exercised by Tony Blair, and his two successors as Labour leaders, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.
In 1992, after a fourth consecutive Tory election victory, it looked as Britain would live under Tory rule forever. It didn’t. Labour will regain electability but as in the 1980s or the 1950s it may have to lose some elections before it starts to be attractive to voters. And with the best will in the world no-one can imagine Jeremy Corbyn becoming Britain’s prime minister, least of all himself

Will Anyone Speak for Europe in Britain?
By Denis MacShane

It is more than four months since the election and so far the only senior British leader to speak out for the unity of Europe was Her Majesty the Queen at a banquet in Berlin in June.
As we have seen the prime minister suffered a defeat in the House of Commons after a maladroit attempt to rewrite traditional rules about what ministers can say during the run-up to a national poll.
But the purdah of the weeks before the Remain-Leave referendum is less important than the purdah Mr Cameron has imposed upon himself and his ministers about finding any words that might encourage the nation to believe that membership of the EU is a good thing.
Instead, No 10 tells business leaders to shut up and not say anything positive or to campaign against the bottomless purses of Eurosceptic advocates in the parts of the City or entrepeneurs like Sir James Dyson and Sir Anthony Bamford of JCB who call for a Leave vote.
This runs with the preference of most business leaders who tell opinion polls they shudder at the thought of isolating Britain from Europe but simultaneously say they won’t spend money campaigning for an In or Remain vote.
In the rest of the world referendums demand a simple Yes or No answer. Now a body of unelected officials in the Electoral Commission has unilaterally abolished that norm and proposed a question aound the verbs ‘remain’ or ‘leave’.
This helps those who are arguing that a ‘leave’ vote would not be permanent but simply opening the door to further tougher negotiations which will force 27 other member states of the EU to buckle to Eurosceptic demands.
In the first poll on the Electoral Commission’s wording, the result was a predictable vote to leave the EU. Summer events like the refugee crisis especially its local variant at Calais or the insistence of the ruling centre-right rulers in the EU that the Greeks have to accept decades of poverty in order to stay in the Eurozone have done little to make Europe popular.
It has led Owen Jones, the Lochinvar of left opining and an intimate part of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to write that he will vote No in the referendum in solidarity with the Greeks and to punish the wicked Eurocrats.
The incoming Labour leader has steered clear of Ukip-style Euroscepticism. In instead Mr Corbyn has said he would support the EU on the basis that it increased rights for workers and abolished austerity.
At best Labour might offer free votes and as in the Commons this week will not hesitate to trip up a prime minister who has spent his leadership years criticising the EU and even pulling his party out of the main centre-right European Peoples Party federation.
So who will now campaign for Europe? Who will pay for this campaign? Soon answers will have to be found.

Denis MacShane is a former Minister for Europe in the Tony Blair government and author of Brexit : How Britain Will Leave Europe to be published by IB Tauris

Will Anyone Speak for Europe in Britain?
By Denis MacShane

It is more than four months since the election and so far the only senior British leader to speak out for the unity of Europe was Her Majesty the Queen at a banquet in Berlin in June.
As we have seen the prime minister suffered a defeat in the House of Commons after a maladroit attempt to rewrite traditional rules about what ministers can say during the run-up to a national poll.
But the purdah of the weeks before the Remain-Leave referendum is less important than the purdah Mr Cameron has imposed upon himself and his ministers about finding any words that might encourage the nation to believe that membership of the EU is a good thing.
Instead, No 10 tells business leaders to shut up and not say anything positive or to campaign against the bottomless purses of Eurosceptic advocates in the parts of the City or entrepeneurs like Sir James Dyson and Sir Anthony Bamford of JCB who call for a Leave vote.
This runs with the preference of most business leaders who tell opinion polls they shudder at the thought of isolating Britain from Europe but simultaneously say they won’t spend money campaigning for an In or Remain vote.
In the rest of the world referendums demand a simple Yes or No answer. Now a body of unelected officials in the Electoral Commission has unilaterally abolished that norm and proposed a question aound the verbs ‘remain’ or ‘leave’.
This helps those who are arguing that a ‘leave’ vote would not be permanent but simply opening the door to further tougher negotiations which will force 27 other member states of the EU to buckle to Eurosceptic demands.
In the first poll on the Electoral Commission’s wording, the result was a predictable vote to leave the EU. Summer events like the refugee crisis especially its local variant at Calais or the insistence of the ruling centre-right rulers in the EU that the Greeks have to accept decades of poverty in order to stay in the Eurozone have done little to make Europe popular.
It has led Owen Jones, the Lochinvar of left opining and an intimate part of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to write that he will vote No in the referendum in solidarity with the Greeks and to punish the wicked Eurocrats.
The incoming Labour leader has steered clear of Ukip-style Euroscepticism. In instead Mr Corbyn has said he would support the EU on the basis that it increased rights for workers and abolished austerity.
At best Labour might offer free votes and as in the Commons this week will not hesitate to trip up a prime minister who has spent his leadership years criticising the EU and even pulling his party out of the main centre-right European Peoples Party federation.
So who will now campaign for Europe? Who will pay for this campaign? Soon answers will have to be found.

Denis MacShane is a former Minister for Europe in the Tony Blair government and author of Brexit : How Britain Will Leave Europe to be published by IB Tauris

Note on Chilcott

Britain’s intervention in Iraq was not decided by Tony Blair, still less George W Bush. It was decided by 417 MPs after 2 days of debate in which all the accusations about dodgy dossiers, being outside international law, fears about lack of post-invasion planning and wider consequences for the Muslim world were argued back and forth.
This was a culmination of endless debates on Iraq ever since the UK authorized overflights and bombing of Iraqi military installations in order to protect Kurds in the north of Iraq and some anti-Saddam groups in the south.
No other issue was given so much attention by the Commons and the 417 MPs who voted, including many in the present government, did so in full awareness of the questions and accusations about the case for war.
But the Chilcott inquiry cannot put 417 MPs in the dock. Instead diplomats, generals, intelligence officials have to have this cloud permanently over their heads because elected politicians took the final decision.
Voters had the chance to remove MPs who voted for the war in 2005, 2010 and 2015. Chilcott’s team seems to dodged the fact that in a democracy a Prime Minister proposes but MPs decide. The report is going to be like twenty Ph D theses rolled into one and will bring no closure and little comfort to those who lost loved ones in Iraq.
At the least a page should be reserved to list the 417 MPs as they ultimately took the decision and bear the responsibility.

Kosovo Phone Number Not Enough

Denis MacShane

The modest steps brokered by the EU between Serbia and Kosovo are to be welcomed but the fact remains that more than 15 years since the fighting stopped in Kosovo and 20 years since the Katyn style massacres in Srebrenica took place, the Western Balkans is unable to move forward.
Calling Kosovo no longer means using a Monaco prefix but it is hardly the massive step towards Belgrade recognising Kosovo as a full international state. Indeed, for those not expert in the workings of international telephony it must be a puzzle how a foreign power can dictate what phone numbers a neighbouring state can use.
It is also a modest step forward that the great heap of rubble placed by Serb bull-dozers across the bridge at Mitrovica that divides the town will now be dismantled. But a ‘landmark’ breakthrough it isn’t.
The plain fact is that Belgrade still cannot come to terms with the fact that the glory days of a unified state under largely Serb control have gone and will never come back.
It is as if twenty years after 1945, France still refused diplomatic recognition to Germany or endless courts were still sitting to go over the crimes committed by Germans and the French resistance in the brutality of the war.
Instead leaders like Robert Schumann and General de Gaulle turned the page and within a very short period created a new Franco-German comity that allowed economic and social growth to take off.
For inexplicable reasons Serbia, a decade and half after losing its suzerainty over Kosovo, is incapable of producing a political leadership capable of a Balkans resolution similar to the settlement after other such conflicts.
Ireland was wrested from British control after a short bloody war in 1920-21 with its attendant murders, revenge atrocities. Many in Britain thought that Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom but accepted the Irish would have their own identity.
Kosovans lived unhappily under control of the former Yugoslavia but when Slobodan Milosevic made his famous speech near Pristina in 1989 raising the banner of ultra Serb nationalism, he opened the gates of hell of the 10 year-long Balkan conflict. Slovenia was the first country to say Adieu to Belgrade rule and Kosovo was the last.
115 nations now have diplomatic relations with Kosovo but Belgrade insists that the country is just a break-away province that one day will see the light and gratefully accept re-integration into Serbia.
It isn’t going to happen but the longer Belgrade refuses a final settlement the longer Kosovo also has its politics dominated by the liberation fighter politicians who emerged from the short, sharp war at the end of the last century.
The lack of full international status – membership of the UN, Council of Europe, and international financial institutions – makes it very hard for Kosovo to access external investment, the key to economic success.
The EU reported that in July 47,000 Kosovans were the single largest national group joining the migrant trafficking exodus from poverty. The Serbs may say “Told you so!” just as the British looked down their noses at the Irish who emigrated in their millions even after their country become independent.
But it is the Western Balkans as a whole from Greece to the Alps that suffers as membership of the EU remains a distant dream as along as Belgrade cannot deal with Pristina as an equal nation-state.
Frederica Mogherini, the chief EU diplomat, is to be congratulated on continuing the arduous step-by-step work of her predecessor, Cathy Ashton, in getting the Serbs and Kosovans around the same table.
But an international phone prefix while welcome is not where Belgrade needs to be if it really wants to move from the 20th to 21st century.

Denis MacShane was the UK’s Minister of the Balkans 2001-2005

A Letter to My German Friends
From the Vietnam War to the eurozone crisis: What today’s Germany must learn from LBJ.
By Denis MacShane*

As a former Europe Minister in the UK, I count myself among those Englisgh who are true friends of Germany. Indeed, there is much to admire about the achievements of what must be considered the most successful social democratic country (certainly among Europe’s large countries) – and notwithstanding the fact that Germany has a Christian Democrat as Chancellor.
At the same time, I am pained by the fact that the Germans currently give off too much of an impression of being like Frank Sinatra: “I did it my way” (read “It’s my way or the highway.”)
Germans would be much better advised if they followed the example of another American – less of a global icon, but no less than an American President.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, knew a lot about being vilified worldwide. After all, he personally had to confront most of the charges leveled against the United States for its pursuit of the American War on Vietnam.
In particular, Johnson was not just criticized, but patronized endlessly, by his French counterpart, Charles de Gaulle. He relished in attacking the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.
Despite all this haranguing, which caused great irritation in private, LBJ gave strict orders to his entire administration not to counter-attack. France was still a vital U.S. ally and friend argued President Johnson — and disagreements with de Gaulle could not be permitted to reach a rupture.
Publicly, Johnson only said, “I would like to see de Gaulle more in agreement on matters with us than he is but it is a matter for him to determine.”
Unfortunately, there is no German LBJ right now. And there has not been one since the days of Helmut Kohl, who knew how to reach out.
In making this suggestion – not just for a “thicker skin,” but more strategic-minded magnanimity – I am well aware of the fact that some charges leveled at Germany, by people who definitely are in a position to know better are wildly misleading.
For example, Germany’s Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has never said that every nation must be an exporting nation – even though such a statement is often attributed to him (and other German policymakers).
As things stand, there is a clear sense outside Germany that a long-lasting CDU-led government really thinks it can decide who should govern other EU nations and will tolerate any alternative.
The underlying assumption is that 85 million Germans feel entitled to kicking out 10 million Greeks. Forget the Ugly American, it is now the Ugly German.
The criticism is unfair. After all, Germany will accept as many as 400,000 asylum seekers this year, while right-wing populists in Britain and France are getting worked up about just 1,500 people at Calais.
And it is not Germany, but the the errors of the first six months of the Tsipras government that caused Greece’s economy shrink by as much as 4% this year.
But tone, finger-wagging and self-righteousness from Germany is grating across the rest of Europe, atlas all the countries located outside of what must by now be considered the Greater German Economic Zone.
The point is not whether this or that particular charge raised against Germany is on target – or justified. What matters is that it is being leveled.
U.S. Democrats, at the time of their pursuit of the American war against Vietnam, had some reason to feel unjustifiably targeted. After all, it took some chutzpah on the part of France’s De Gaulle to advance all those charges directed at Washington.
It was an act of astounding arrogance on the part of the president in Paris! Vietnam had landed like a hot potato in the lap of the Americans who – if anything – had stumbled into this French post-colonial minefield way too naïvely.
Still, LBJ held the line. He resisted the temptation to give back in kind. Lyndon Johnson could serve as an example that Wolfgang Schäuble should take to heart.
An LBJ would not have patronized or sneered at Yanis Varoufakis, his former Greek counterpart. That Schäuble did so just shows that the German finance minister, despite his long experience in politics, still has vital lessons to learn. True leaders just don’t retort in kind.
For all the obsessing about Greece, larger issues need to be properly considered by the Germans as well. That may still be somewhat unfamiliar territory in Berlin, given that their leadership role is still a newish thing to them.
The German diktates to Greece has provoked a backlash in Britain which will influence at the forthcoming referendum. British politicians and writers who say the EU destroys democracy point to Berlin’s behavior towards Greece.
For the first time since 1950, it is quite fashionable again in British political discourse to be anti-German.
This is not all poor Wolfgang Schäuble’s fault, far from it. All I can say as a friend of Germany (and of the Greek people), as well as someone who does not want the UK to quit Europe, is that I am very worried.
I find no language emanating from Berlin that is reassuring.
And yet, reassuring others at moments of crisis, and showing at least a modicum of magnanimity toward those in serious trouble is precisely what a leading nation must do.

* Denis MacShane, Contributing Editor at The Globalist, was the United Kingdom’s Minister for Europe from 2002 to 2005 — and is the author of “Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe.”

Explaining Jeremy Corbyn to Friends Outside Britain

By Denis MacShane

If I get one more call from political friends outside the UK asking ‘C’est qui ce Jeremy Corbyn?’ or ‘Was ist los mit dem Labour Partei?’ I shall have to start charging for my replies.

The answer is simple. Jeremy Corbyn is all the ghosts of Labour’s past periods of working through the eternal question of the democratic left – power or faith? The tragedy of the European left is that it does opposition well and office badly. Why not then stay in the comfort zone of opposition and denunciation of all the many ills in the world?

That has been the story of Jeremy Corbyn’s adult life. He a socialist Candide, always seeing beyond the official wisdom to ask the question why things cannot be different.

He is not a political organiser like a Tsipras, or a Gysi, or Mélanchon. He is a man for all causes that the left hold dear. He is against capitalism and thinks the state can run the economy. He is against militarism and war, against austerity and balanced budgets. He started life protesting the Vietnam War, then Reaganism, then globalisation and free trade, then George W Bush and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. So he does not like America.

No appeal to Jeremy to support an individual badly treated by an odious government, or groups like the Kurds or the Polisario front, or those expelled from Diego Garcia to turn it into a US military base in the 1960s (Ah, those Americans again) goes unanswered.

He opposed Sovietism and will denounce Chinese capitalism and communism in equal measure. He is moralist and a preacher, not a politician who seeks to form a group of supporters or lead a faction. In votes in the House of Commons he has voted against the official Labour line more than 500 times.

But he does so without scorn or contempt in his voice. He quietly and effectively makes his point and moves on to the next cause, the next small meeting, the next demonstration or protest outside an embassy. Unlike the other tribunes of the left he does not denounce his Labour Party colleagues or use the time-honoured tradition of personal denunciation.

In thirty years of knowing Jeremy Corbyn and being firmly on the reformist, modernising wing of Labour social democracy we have never exchanged a cross word. Unlike many on the left (or the right) who resort to personal denunciation or sneers or putdowns, Jeremy Corbyn just gets on with putting into words his socialist dreams.

The last person in Labour who could have imagined Jeremy Corbyn being seen as a possible – now probable – leader of the Party is Jeremy Corbyn.

This reflects how hollow and empty Labour had become after 20 years of domination by first Tony Blair, then Gordon Brown and finally one of their creations, Ed Miliband.

The left always punishes those who lead it to power and office. Look at the treatment of George Papandreou in Greece, the way Lionel Jospin has become an unperson in France, or the disappearance of Zapatero in Spain. The right thanks its former prime ministers. The left throws them into the recycling bin.

To win power 20 years ago Labour became a highly disciplined electoral machine. It shut down all internal party debate. Policy was decided by the elite insiders at the top. The annual conference became void of interest. No new talent emerged based on debating skills. The new generation of politicians shaped by Blair and Brown were all straight from Oxford and had no experience of fighting political battles, shaping opinion, and fighting inside the party to modernise it. They were simply aides to the Blair-Brown machine, put into parliament and then made ministers without any real experience of debate, argument, or party leadership.

Ed Miliband symbolised this post-political generation and when he failed to deliver a return to power in May 2015 the party simply imploded. As with Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain there is desire for some simple verity called ‘socialism’ that all can believe in and which if properly explained to voters will bring the left to power to transform the nation.

Corbyn represents that longing for a better world. The Labour Party in a generous demotic offer to make the selection of its leader more democratic has allowed anyone who pays £3 (€4, $4.50) to vote for the new leader. 600,000 have joined. Once they have cast their votes they cease to be party members and it will fall to 220 MPs, and all the existing party officials in the country to make sense of a Corbyn-led Labour Party.

There will be endless quarrels and disagreements. These are already surfacing over the question of Israel and Europe. There is not an iota of anti-semitism in Corbyn’s make-up but he does appear on platform with the most vicious of eliminationist and anti-Jewish speakers and organisations. For Jeremy the cause of the Palestinian people over-rides any duty to examine the ideology of those who denounce and wish to destroy Israel and the right of Jews to have a small patch of land they can call their own.

On Europe, Jeremey opposes TTIP, of course, and while not calling for Brexit says he support a Europe that is pro-worker and anti-austerity. So in the forthcoming UK In-Out referendum he may well oppose any deal on the EU which David Cameron puts to a vote if it is one-sidedly neoliberal and not fair to workers and social justice.

The European question may help Labour as if there is a No or Out vote then David Cameron will have to resign. The Conservative Party will be in disarray and divided, and there would be an opening for a clever opposition to demand new elections to deal with the constitutional and economic crisis of a Brexit vote.

But Labour also has to work out what to do about Scotland which like Quebec or Catalonia wants a different existence no longer ruled by London. Labour has always depended on its Scottish MPs but they have all been replaced by nationalist MPs. Labour has to work out what to do about the disappearance of the manufacturing working class and their unions who provided a reservoir of votes and common sense political support.

Labour is a party of the 20^th century which does not know how to exist in the 21^st century. Electing Corbyn is a symptom of that disarray.  He will not enjoy the job and will not last long. But as elsewhere in Europe, the old parties of the left have difficulty finding a way to power and purpose in the new economy and new society.

Denis MacShane joined the Labour Party in 1970 and was an MP for 18 years and served as PPS and Minister and Council of Europe delegate 1997-2005.