The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Rebooting the Empire? Not so fast! March 22, 2017

We were discussing this only the other day, and good overview here in the Observer at the weekend by David Olusoga on some realities that face those who think the Commonwealth will offer a substitute for the EU. As Olusoga notes:

This newfound focus on the Commonwealth feels uncomfortably akin to recent divorcees looking up their former partners on Facebook; and being shocked to discover that they have got married, had kids and moved on. They might have fond memories, they might even want to be on good terms, but don’t really miss us. Former colonies, like old flames, build new relationships, based on their own needs and ambitions. Some may well be up for a better trade deal or more freedom of movement, but they don’t want to be part of Empire 2.0, any more than most of them wanted to be part of Empire 1.0.

And added to this are delusions in relation to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As Olusoga points out these have been evident for decades but there are some pretty basic obstacles to a reboot of the past in the present or near future.

Ultimately, what makes Empire 2.0 a fantasy are the forces of geography and history. While Canada, for example, has undoubted cultural links to the UK, she also has a 5,500-mile border with the US. This, and her membership of Nafta, means that her key trading partner is, inevitably, the US, not the UK. Australia and New Zealand have perhaps even stronger emotional and cultural links to Britain, but as the economies of Asia have risen, the antipodean nations have found themselves on the doorstep of the greatest manufacturing region on earth. Australia has just been through a mining boom akin to the gold rushes of the 19th century, and it is to Beijing, not London, that their importers and exporters look.

He notes that Africa is already ‘lost’ to the UK. China and others are already major economic players. The idea the UK will catch up is simply absurd.

But his most telling point, I think, is one which notes that:

…the most jagged rock upon which the Empire 2.0 fantasy flounders is history itself. Britain in the 19th century was two things simultaneously; the hub of the largest empire on earth and the greatest manufacturing and trading nation the world had ever seen. Yet the formal empire and the trading empire were not the same thing. While the empire, especially India, undoubtedly helped make Britain rich, even at the height of our imperial power we traded more with Europe and the United States than with the colonies. It was to the booming cities of America, and to the slave-driven cotton economy of the deep south, that British capital surged in the 19th century. And while much of Africa was painted imperial red on the maps that famously hung on every classroom wall, Britain did more trade with tiny Denmark than with Nigeria, one of her biggest west African colonies.

Like so much in relation to Brexit all is based on rhetoric rather than reality. That the history is so far from the perception is, I would hazard, an artefact of just how askew the perception is. Britain regards itself as having a cultural, political and economic centrality that is somewhat overstated. To put it kindly. A good point BTL is that so many making the case for ‘new relationships’ with the former colonies (and let’s note that is what is essentially the argument being made) is most often made by politicians, not economists. One need have no great faith in the latter to recognise that basing existential projects simply on what is effectively political musings isn’t the most objective way forward.

What you want to say – 22nd March, Week 12, 2017 March 22, 2017

As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.

The new season at the Progressive Film Club March 21, 2017

Venue: The Pearse Centre, 27 Pearse Centre, Dublin 2
Date: Saturday 25th March 2017

Hopefully you have all recovered from St. Patrick’s Day excesses and are ready to start the new film season at;- The Ireland Institute (also known as The Pearse Centre). We have three films this time. So come prepared for a stimulating afternoon.

Admission Free (as usual)

**
3pm Je Suis Russia (2016)
Director: Regis Tremblay – (40mins)
The director makes a voyage of discovery around present-day Russia to listen to what ordinary people think about subjects such as the possibility of war, their president and other topics. He discovers that Russians, like most people want peace and harmony in the world. They do not want to dominate. They want respect and a place at the table. They are resisting US attempts to dominate and create a unipolar world.

————————————————————
3.45pm The Asylum Market (2016)
Brass Moustache Films (25mins)

The Asylum Market, exposes the dire conditions that asylum seekers in Britain suffer in accommodation provided by security firm G4S. The film is so damning that its producer, Mark Donne, said the BBC refused to broadcast it following G4S lobbying.

4.15pm Money Puzzles (2016)
Director: Michael Chanan – (58mins)

Money Puzzles addresses the misunderstandings about money and debt to be found in both the media and everyday life. It questions the falsehoods and distortions of the econ

An Post…and Bus Éireann: Bus Stop… redux March 21, 2017

Stephen Kinsella wrote in the SBP a few weeks back that Bus Éireann should be let ‘go to the wall’. The weekend before last he wrote:

Sixteen years of data convinced me the organisation did not deserve the taxpayers largesse. Bus Éireann did not pass a simple test: should the state intervene to save it?

Actually, that’s not a simple test, it’s a question. And if there’s a test in there it may be a a little more complex than the answer to that question, or rather there may be many answers to that question because it is contingent on many other things. And tellingly he continues:

Competition, not austerity, had sunk its fortunes. Its highly-paid management should be fired, and its staff reassigned or made redundant.

Moreover:

Take the public service obligation routes and school bus businesses into the state proper, or put them out to more than 8,000 privately contracted buses, and let the workers find alternative employment. A harsh call, to be sure but neither blithe, nor driven by ideology.

But that is driven precisely by ideology – just as the fact that competition ate into BÉ routes was driven by ideology. A ‘market’ was allowed to develop where BÉ had to compete against private operators. None of this is an argument for BÉ not providing the best possible service to passengers – but that is a different issue.

Anyhow, Kinsella continues:

Another semi-state faces exactly the same problem this week. The public policy disaster du jour is An Post. The question – should the state intervene – is the same as it was two weeks ago. And here the facts are entirely different.

Not only should An Post see the government reaffirm its commitment to a public mail and financial services network, that commitment should be expanded and regulations holding An Post back should be removed.

And he argues that it is because he has ‘looked at the facts’ that he has two different views on An Post and BÉ.

Despite it being in the red ‘An Post receives no direct subsidy form the state. Recall that BÉ gets at least two. An post has been self-financing since 1986’. Except it hasn’t. ‘It received a bail-out once, of €12.7m in 2003’. He argues though that that is dwarfed by the €500m BÉ received by the state since 2000. And while post is down by a quarter since 2004 he still argues for the retention of An Post.

Why so?

Because in part it was created as a semi-state in 1984 (or rather rebranded as such) and ‘like all semi-states AP’s challenge is to prosper commercially while simultaneously achieving politically determined ends. AP is mandated… to perform a universal serve obligation – everyone gets their letters delivered five times a week with next-day delivery as standard’.

But he also notes that:

A series of market liberalisation directive from the EU in 1999 and 2006 allowed much more competition for the postal service. Since 2011 the market has been fully liberalised. APs competitors are not mandated to deliver with the same frequency, nor are they forced to maintain loss-making businesses for political purposes. Remember that companies like BÉ get subsidies from the state for precisely this reason.

What’s staggering is that AP has survived given all this, and he notes that it accounts for just 30-40% of volume in its product space.

Anyhow, looking at productivity and new products and services he sees nothing but good despite few of these taking fully. Turnover too is healthy. Capital employed and return on sales likewise. So he figures that on three grounds it ‘meets the test for intervention by the government’. Firstly because it ‘is a genuine anchor of rural development… 1,100 strong network is efficient and productive’, secondly because ‘it has historically priced itself lower than average for its services’, thirdly because it has demonstrated a willingness to diversify.

He argues further that next-day delivery should become a premium service, that other aspects of its should be deregulated and it should further ‘transform’. This he suggests ‘are just the facts, not ideology, not spin’.

But I think he falls into error in two very distinct ways. Firstly he reifies the semi-state aspect of AP in contrast to BÉ – the latter has very distinct functions, AP by contrast can diversify much more widely – though to relatively little effect. Moreover AP despite having competition does provide the only national letter delivery service door to door five days a week. Others might bite into some of that, but they can’t match it. Whereas BÉ has been forced to exist in a situation where competitor after competitor can enter its core market and cherry pick point to point routes.

I’m deeply sceptical of the vagueness of his proscriptions in relation to BÉ. Is he seriously suggesting that the school bus service should just be handed over to the private sector? And what of non-profitable routes BÉ still runs? Who precisely will run them? Why should the state divest itself of an entity that can run those to ones that probably won’t? Indeed why should the state have to sit back and accept competitive approaches that are eating into bus services in the first place? And if one looks at it in that light suddenly some of the very functions he lauds AP for are clearly also part of BÉ. But that can’t be right, because he’s being entirely unideological. Isn’t he?

He thinks judgements such as these exist above and beyond ideology, that in other words ideology only suffuses them if one approaches them with a pre-prepared ‘ideology’. He believes that because he’ll allow one company to continue and recommend another should go to the wall this confers upon him a sort of neutrality. But ideology suffuses everything. It shapes the perceptions and pre-conceptions he approaches these questions with. Even in attempting to shed himself of same he underlines precisely how immersed in them he is. And worse the yardsticks he applies are utterly enmeshed in ideological concepts – the weight placed on societal needs as distinct from purely financial ones, etc, etc. Above and beyond all else he seems unaware that societies will put money into areas which are of little apparent or immediate economic value. That sometimes other factors transcend the immediate or the not apparent.

These two threads here from previous months on the CLR engage with the nitty gritty of this issue from a variety of perspectives.

CLR Book Club – Week 12 March 21, 2017

Anyone joined in the read of It Can’t Happen Here? Some have already finished, I’m ploughing through it at a rapid rate of knots and enjoying it, well, it’s funny, but not necessarily enjoyable.

Martin McGuinness: 1950 – 2017 March 21, 2017

Sad, unexpected and unwelcome news.

Mr McGuinness, 66, died early this morning at Derry’s Altnagelvin Hospital with his family by his bedside.

He had been diagnosed with a rare heart disease in December.

A former member of the IRA’s Army Council, he became Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator in the peace process.

He led the party into power-sharing with the DUP in 2007 and served as deputy first minister alongside Ian Paisley, Peter Robinson and Arlene Foster.

SDs and the North March 21, 2017

A short piece in the most recent Phoenix asks whether the SD TDs ‘along with IT ideologue Fintan O’Toole trying to recreate the WP?’. Given the WP is still in existence that seems a stretch. But then the piece itself seems a bit of a stretch too. The SDs have, on foot of the DUP funding during the Brexit campaign, large adverts in favour of Exit in the London press, suggested that this ‘raised serious questions about the financing of political parties who operate on the whole island of Ireland’. The Phoenix argues that this must mean SF, suggesting that is the only party operating on the whole of the island apart from PbP (though this too will presumably be news to the WP and others). On the other hand the comparison doesn’t really hold between the DUP and SF given that the DUP had no MPs or other elected reps in London or in Britain, whereas SF has lorry loads of them in the South.

Anyhow, another curiosity is that it suggests that Fintan O’Toole is one of those influencing the SDs on the North. While it correctly notes that O’Toole managed to ignore SF’s anti-Brexit stance in a recent piece or two while drawing attention to a supposed ‘moderate’ centre ground of UUP and SDLP and beyond that Alliance, it also argues that ‘Fintan is a soul brother of Catherine Murphy and shares her political background as a WP activist in the past’. Is that true? I hadn’t heard that O’Toole was active in the WP or even a member. Anyone able to shed some light on it.

Anyhow, the piece also suggests that within the SDs opinions are mixed on the North – ‘the SD leadership is at odds with many of its working class members and have been unable to formulate a policy on the north’. Has anyone heard about this?

Our very own international folk hero March 21, 2017

Well this is bizarre. I missed the Kenny speech at the White House, was away for the weekend and didn’t even read a transcript but it’s certainly going down well.

Optimists… March 20, 2017

Caught this on tv the other day. Feel the excitement:

Every day in every country around the world, there are business opportunities for UK companies’ products and services. The demand is out there, you should be too.

To find out more, visit http://www.great.gov.uk

Exporting is GREAT is the Government’s most ambitious export campaign ever. It aims to inspire and support 100,000 new UK exporters to sell their goods and services overseas by 2020. Our mission is to become the world’s greatest exporting nation, capturing the imagination of the UK public, boosting business confidence and national pride and empowering more UK companies to go out and succeed in global markets.

Even if there is no UI in the medium term… what of an UK without Scotland but with NI? March 20, 2017

Where does that leave Northern Ireland should an Independence referendum in Scotland succeed? Peter Geoghegan in the IT argues that:

Independence would represent a seismic tear in the fabric of the United Kingdom.
Overnight, Northern Ireland would become a rump state, psychologically and politically unmoored from its closest relatives.

And that:

Would the UK survive without Scotland? Almost certainly, at least for a while.
But as English nationalism becomes ever more the centripetal force of British politics, Irish interests are likely to become even more marginal.

What sort of life would this United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland have? It’s worth keeping in mind that on the most basic logistical level the connections, other than flight, are most directly through Scotland. That wouldn’t end in the context of Scottish independence but one has to imagine that they would change. Perhaps, and this is a big perhaps, if the UK is able to strike a deal with the EU/ROI in relation to this island and the border it is possible that a fairly permeable frontier will exist. Indeed it may be that this island serves as the dry run for future Scottish independence and the technical and logistical aspects of same.

What a strange patchwork quilt the islands would be too. With the south of Ireland the north of the island of Britain most likely both in the EU. The psychological effect of all this cannot be understated. And there would be other implications. Much has been made of the centrifugal dynamics of Brexit to the EU. But what of the same dynamics in relation to the Union. If a member can leave in the 21st century suddenly that union looks shaky, fragile. The irony of Northern Ireland still being in the Union after a Scottish exit is fascinating. But perhaps that is to misread the dynamics there. For Irish independence, even the truncated version currently in play, has obviously had a long term effect on attitudes in Scotland.

And more than passing strange that the EU should provide a sort of glue which would cement the UK together into the modern era. I’ve always been dubious about those who talk about single nationalisms or national identities (my own direct experience suggests that it is a lot more complex than that), but in an odd way despite there being no real European identity I wonder if on some level the linkages to a Europe (not, by the way, necessarily an EU Europe) has had interesting effects too in terms of smoothing away some of the harder edges of more local national identities on these islands – at least for some.