Terminology

This Guardian piece is headlined "Corbyn backs a soft Brexit." He is quoted as saying,

I would go back to the EU, explain that we had fought an election campaign in order to make sure there was a good relationship with Europe in the future, that we weren’t afraid of public opinion on this, and ask them to seriously consider what we are suggesting, which is a customs union with a British say and trade relationship with Europe, and a dynamic relationship on rights would not be undermining Europe on workers rights, on consumer rights, on environmental protections.

Obviously, this ignores that the EU considers negotiations closed, that there cannot be a customs union with a say (whatever that is), and that a vague trade relationship with Europe is inadequate to resolve the issue of the Irish border. So far, so unrealistic - to the point of wishful thinking or fantasy politics. But this isn't my real point.

This is not a 'soft Brexit.' This is a hard Brexit. This is a harder Brexit than the one put forward by most of the Leave campaign during the referendum. It means leaving the single market with all that implies. It prioritises restricting immigration from the EU. It takes away our rights to free movement and says nothing about the existing rights of those who have exercised it. It would be economically destructive.

Let's get this clear. The vague modifier about workers' rights aside, this is a policy of the hard right. This is a Tory Brexit. Corbyn, along with his posh Stalinist apparatchiks, is opposing the bulk of Labour's MPs, Labour members, and the overwhelming majority of Labour's voters, in order to impose a Conservative Party fantasy on the party.

The vast majority of Labour members and voters want to remain in the EU. Poll after poll shows that to be the case. Nationally, there has not been a single poll for over a year without a strong Remain lead. And in case you think opinion polls are unreliable, look at a real election. Look at the elections to the European Parliament. Fourteen percent. Fourteen bloody percent. More than forty percent of members voting for another party. This is what it comes to, a betrayal of the opinions and interests of those the party is supposed to represent.

This is a left-wing leadership? Are you sure? Well whatever it is, it is a dismal failure.

Happiness

Yesterday was good. It started with the news that a Polish friend had been given her British citizenship. She is incredibly proud to be British as well as Polish. And I was proud for her too. She came over with little English, worked hard, learnt the language, took courses, and ended up doing a degree in her second language. She got a first and now works in animal care.

My day was routine. I'm in Greece. I spent the morning digging up the bamboo that invades from the plot next to the garden. Then I treated myself to fresh fish for lunch with a tsipouro, overlooking a beautiful calm sea. After I fed the cats, I settled down to watch the Rugby League Magic Weekend, which I can here because of new EU regulations.

Two instances of simple happiness. Both the product of our right, as European citizens, of freedom of movement.

Yet people are now insisting that they will take that right away from us. Without it, my Polish friend would not have become a proud British citizen. She wouldn't have been able to follow her dreams. And for me, I have two citizenships too. I am British and a citizen of the European Union. I value my European citizenship. Three years ago, people voted to strip me of it against my will. I am upset about that, but nothing like as distressed as I am about the possible loss of my freedom of movement. It will stop me coming and going to Greece as I please, and I will lose the automatic right to live here. I will have legal limits on the time I can spend in my own house. I will face many extra costs, bureaucratic obstacles and restrictions. Also, depending on agreements, it may even be illegal for me to bring back my homemade marmalade. And for what? There are no benefits for anybody. If Brexit happens, I will be distraught.

In the great sum of things, these are small issues, just a couple of individuals, pretty lucky ones at that. And I know that when people voted leave, they didn't think that they were voting against brilliant people becoming new British citizens or to spoil the last years of my life, but that's what they were doing. It's part of the problem with the debate. We heard the word 'immigration' in the abstract, not the phrase, 'people we know.'

The really big confusion between abstraction and reality comes from the rhetorical use of the term 'sovereignty.' That the UK is a sovereign nation state is a simple fact. It is beyond debate. What Brexiters are doing is conflating sovereignty with power. We are sovereign but our power is necessarily constrained. It is limited by our voluntary decisions taken as a sovereign state to enter into agreements, treaties, and international organisations. It is restricted by the power of others to enforce their interests. Power is always constrained. Sovereignty gives us the ability to choose how. We have chosen to limit our power in some areas by becoming members of the EU. We did it because it was in our interest to join. One of the reasons that we haven't left, despite moving Article 50, is because we can't handle the consequences of doing so. That is why Leavers insist that there are none, when there are plenty, and they are profoundly damaging.

Now let's look at realities. Do you really want the British state to have unconstrained power? Do you want it to 'take back control' without restriction? The people who don't want their power to be restricted are dictators, imperialists, fascists, and the like. Human progress has been based on restraining the powerful. The EU was conceived as an institutional framework for constraining German power, democracy puts a check on the power of ruling groups, and rights protect individuals and minority groups from oppression. Brexiters have sold the idea that taking rights away from us, thereby increasing the power of our rulers, is to our benefit. This is a bizarre confidence trick that any snake oil salesman would be proud of.

The other paradox is that if we leave the EU, the only power that would increase is the power of the government over the people. The government's external power will diminish as much of it – both strategically and economically – is dependent on the greater strength EU membership brings. We will be weaker as well as poorer.

I have another suggestion, self-serving though it is. How about not doing it? Maybe we should keep our rights, rights that make people happy, rights that I rely on. Because once we start giving rights away, it turns the clock of progress backwards. Let's stay in the EU. Revoke Article 50. Let's choose to be happy.

A fable

‘He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount’

The Brexit tiger has a broad back. Let's look at some of those who have decided to hitch a ride. The first passengers are those ambitious opportunists who think that it will lead to their heart's desire. Travelling with them are libertarian ideologues who mistake the beast as a harbinger of pure economic freedom. 'Disaster capitalists' have jumped on too, hoping to profit from the disruption Brexit will bring. Then there are the unhinged nationalists, English exceptionalists, and enthusiastic believers whose ideological preferences trump evidence. They are joined by cowards who think that as long as the tiger is given some of what it wants it will leave them alone. Sitting astride the haunches are those leftists who think that their chance will come once the tiger is exhausted after satiating itself, forgetting that they are the beast's favourite appetiser. Given the strength and the cunning of the tiger, the riders are completely out of their depth. They are Brexit's 'useful idiots' and are trapped.

The tiger is a dangerous beast. It's cunning and has no wish to give up its prey. Brexit is not a happenstance, but a purposeful policy. The people driving it are sinister. The tiger is not just Brexit, it's more than that. The tiger is fascism. I'm using the term loosely, in a way that makes me uncomfortable. I am not talking of the precise definition coined in the mid twentieth century – dressed in uniforms, complete with militarism and totalitarian dreams – but a more recent version for our era. Twentieth century fascism was only one form of a persistent authoritarian polity that morphs to suit its times. Today we have a squalid, authoritarian, nationalist populism that loathes democracy even as it steals its language. It's aim is an intolerant state devoted to enriching a kleptocratic elite while preaching anti-elitism. Its language is hatred of the other, contempt for the dissident, deep, deep misogyny, and racism. Its logic is conspiracy theory.

Sometimes the fascist tiger appears as the deceptively friendly face in the pub talking 'common sense' and dishing out simplistic solutions to non-existent problems. But lately it has let us glimpse its claws and teeth. A UKIP candidate talks sneeringly about whether he would rape a Labour MP. The Brexit party fields a candidate who supported the IRA bombing of a shopping street in Warrington that murdered two children – standing in a constituency that includes Warrington. Then, listen closely and some familiar names emerge – Rothschild, Soros – and you realise that this tiger carries one of the oldest and most infectious diseases of all.

Brexit is a tasty morsel for the tiger. Its origins lie in the weird ideological fantasies of a group of plutocrats. But once the dream had been sold, the tiger licked its lips. Brexit obviously meant leaving the EU, but how or why was undefined or clouded in untruths. So, it became whatever the Brexiteers wanted it to be at any moment in time. And, of course, what they wanted it to be was always impossible. That meant that their Brexit, whatever it is, cannot be delivered – by anyone. And this is where a trick comes into play, it is not the tiger who has to make it happen. That's the job of the riders. They will fail, obviously, and so the tiger can roar 'you have been betrayed' at all who will listen.

How do you dismount the tiger? The riders convince themselves that they don't want to. This isn't surprising. The tiger is fierce and immortal. Its back feels safe, though it is exceedingly dangerous. It can never be killed or tamed. Getting off can only be done by wounding the tiger, giving time for escape. Abandoning Brexit would make it step back and lick its wounds. The riders could descend, run, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Yet that is only temporary. The tiger has to be caged and starved. We once had a magnificent cage with formidable bars – representative democracy, the European Union, human rights, social democracy, secularism, and the welfare state. It's a little rusty now. Bits have worn away, some parts have been neglected, and others have been vandalised. The tiger has pushed at the weakest points. It needs repairs, and some sections need replacing with something better.

The cage isn't a place of confinement. It isn't a zoo where we go to look at the tiger. It's a method of building a better world that pushes the tiger away so that we forget that it exists. Its importance isn't what it protects us from, it's what it gives to us. It's the cage that sets us free. It's built from democracy, internationalism, equality, liberty, and security. All can be improved, some can be bettered, negligence and vandalism can be put right. But we need to celebrate it, campaign for it, and speak out against the miserable resentment that the tiger's friends want us to embrace.

Rebuild and the riders can dismount and join the rest of us who are no longer wary about our status as vulnerable prey. And, out of the corner of one eye, we might catch a glimpse of the emaciated tiger, slinking back into the shadows, hoping in vain for escape.

Healing

This is a fine piece by Lyra McKee from 2016. It is a reminder of the importance of the voice we have lost. She wrote about suicides amongst …

… the generation nicknamed the Ceasefire Babies—those of us too young to remember the worst of the terror. We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, spared from the horrors of war. But still, the after effects of those horrors seemed to follow us.

It’s a theme picked up by SinĂ©ad O’Shea in her tribute to McKee and in writing on her own film about dissident paramilitaries.

A post-conflict society is messy. There are no winners. Everyone has lost. It’s nuanced and precarious and doesn’t work well for news headlines or political soundbites. However, this is exactly where Northern Ireland has found itself in recent times, in a row between politicians, the stumbling block to Theresa May’s Brexit deal, and the UK’s departure from the EU. As local councillor and another of the film’s participants, Darren O’Reilly, told me: “Nobody is paying attention until it suits them.”

It seems also as if the increased scrutiny over the backstop has energised the dissident Republican community and served as a recruitment tool. Since the start of February, dissident Republicans have shot four men “by appointment”. They claimed responsibility last month for three “suspicious” devices sent to UK addresses. Now the tragedy of McKee’s killing.

Wars don’t just end. There are long and lingering effects. The utter complacency of Brexiters on the few occasions that they thought about Northern Ireland was based on an assumption that peace was a permanent fixed state, brought about by the Belfast Agreement, not that it was a fragile settlement, the beginning of a long process of de-escalation and reconciliation.

***

It was my generation that voted for Brexit. And Leave voters keep harping on about the Second World War. They are mocked. They never knew war, so they must have got their information from the movies. This is unfair and untrue. The effects of war were all around us when we grew up. We were surrounded by those who had fought, who had lost people they loved, who had seen things that people shouldn’t have done. The war was there in the stories and the silences. It was in the bravado, the hatreds, and the memories. It was there in the moments of distress, when something triggered a loss of control. And we, the post-war baby boomers, saw it all.

It was worse still for Germans, who had to come to terms with the Nazi past of their country. Their revulsion turned a small section of West Germans to terrorism, their own generation’s attempt to resist Nazism in the way their parents hadn’t. But then, their violence was based on as an absurd misreading of their own society as the Brexiters’ misunderstanding of the European Union.

Think too of the countries emerging from the collapse of Communism. Our war ended in 1945, their nightmare only ended in 1989. We shouldn’t be surprised by the revival of authoritarianism in the East. Thirty years is no time at all for a society to recover.

***

I’m in Greece now. On the bus from Thessaloniki airport through the city centre, I sat and listened to an excited young Greek woman speaking in English to her Spanish boyfriend, pointing out all the landmarks of her home city. A young Dutch family got on, and then as we passed the University, students of many different nationalities piled on. This is Europe. Europe as it should be. Diverse and shared.

Yet Greeks too have only recently emerged from their own national catastrophe – Nazi occupation, a bloody fratricidal civil war, and a military dictatorship that only ended in 1974. It still echoes through Greek society and politics, especially in the wake of the Euro crisis. Still, this is a pro-European country. Most think that we are mad to leave.

***

It takes time. I am one of those of my generation who responded by becoming ardently pro-European and never ever questioned our place in the European Union. Others did not. Nationalism and isolationism offered an escape from the recent past into a fantasy world of nostalgic heroism. After all, it was the world that surrounded us when we were children.

Young people don’t think like this. They are two generations removed from the war. They are overwhelmingly in favour of keeping our EU membership – some 70-80% wanting to remain if the polls are right. They are comfortable travelling on a multi-national bus. Europe is their natural environment, their hope, their birthright, and their future. They feel that my generation has stolen it from them. They hate us for it.

It’s the young who give me hope. They are the ones who will lead us back into the EU if we make the mistake of leaving. And they are the ones on the frontline against the new European authoritarianism.

***

It isn’t all about time and generational change. Peace is not therapy. Instead, we cannot recover unless we build institutions that allow that recovery to take place. This is the underlying importance of the European Union. It established a democratic framework for post-war renewal and development. It is the settlement that allows nations emerging from their Stalinist or fascist pasts to establish their democracies. It is what was built to overcome the trauma of Europe’s terrible twentieth century. It matters and it has worked.

Brexit is a terrible mistake. Revoke article fifty and remain. Do it now.

Project reality

The Irish Taoiseach warned about this before the referendum, only to be routinely dismissed as another exponent of "project fear" - a supposedly hysterical over-reaction to scare the voters. Well this is how it ends, with a young, talented woman shot dead.

The threat to the peace process in Northern Ireland has been scoffed at by Brexiters, called 'artificially manufactured,' while they have suggested a range of fictitious 'solutions' to the border question, using technology that hasn't been invented yet or throwing responsibility back on to the Irish government or the EU. 'Nothing to do with us - if you don't want a border don't have one.' The idiocy of it is beyond belief. Only it isn't.

Farage, Johnson, Galloway, Rees-Mogg, and all the rest of the wankers, are either ignorant of Irish history or treat Ireland with imperial disdain. They wish away all and any realities that have the temerity to get in the way of their stupid obsessions. The single market made leaving the EU economically damaging if not impossible. The Good Friday agreement made it politically imposible. This was ignored, despite the voices shouting as loud as they could.

The peace process was in difficulties anyway, with Stormont deadlocked, but throwing in the decision to allow English voters to pull Northern Ireland out of the EU, despite it voting by a large majority to remain, was hardly going to help. To then turn to the only Northern Irish political party to oppose the Good Friday Agreement to prop up a minority government implementing Brexit was utterly crass.

All the talk has been about a frictionless border, but this is not the only issue. The genius of the EU as a peace project is that it has blurred nationalism. It left national identity untouched, but added a secondary one - EU citizenship - to unite people as European. Brexit will strip that citizenship away and the two countries will revert to separate identities, once again polarising communal divisions.

And now people are dying. I just hope and pray that this isn't the start of another outbreak of a long, cruel civil war. Fuck Brexit and its reckless cheerleaders, fuck the charlatans and liars who have brought us to this, fuck the vandals and vultures waiting to pick the profits from the carcass of our lives. Stop it. Revoke article fifty. End this idiocy. Let's take our place in the European Union in peace and solidarity with the people of Ireland, both North and South, and share the larger European peace that populist nationalists are doing their best to destroy.

Fail

Whatever occurs this week, Brexit has failed. It might still happen, but it will be an exercise in failure. It has failed because it is completely unable to deliver what its supporters claimed it would. Sovereignty will be diminished as we will be weakened and subject to the demands of the three economic superpowers, the most important being the one that we have left. Our global influence will be reduced as most of it sprang from our membership of the EU. Our economy will decline, there is no model of Brexit which will not hurt. And even the fantasy of the disintegration of the EU is shown to be just that as the EU unites to defend one of its smaller members, Ireland, against the threat that Brexit poses to it. The EU has shown itself to be coherent and far more powerful than the UK in protecting the core interests of all its members. The damage that has already been done is considerable.

The worst consequence has been the emergence of an English nationalist movement on the left and right. Lexiters should remember that the attempt to combine nationalism and socialism does not have a happy history. Bob from Brockley gives them a splendid put-down here. The right combine delusional thinking with atavistic hatred and have licensed people to express the sort of views that had been buried for a decade or more.

There are two possible Brexiter responses to this tragedy. They can double down on the fantasies, cry 'democracy' (while seeing it as a single event, never to be repeated), accuse others of treason for disagreeing with them, or develop ever more arcane theories as to why everything will be fine, all the while indulging in their fantasies about the imperial or neo-liberal oppression those pesky Europeans are subjecting us to. The second is to face reality. This is far rarer. One example is the dismal Peter Oborne accepting that one strand of his thirty years of bollocks (including vile and conspiracist Assad apologias) is in fact bollocks. Or like this Twitter lament supporting an EFTA Brexit and denouncing the hard-liners. While from the government, Geoffrey Cox realised something that was obvious from the beginning, but was dismissed as "project fear" whenever it was raised.

I just feel we have under-estimated its complexity. We are unpicking 45 years of in-depth integration. This needed to be done with very great care, in a phased and graduated way. It needs a hard-headed understanding of realities.

A brief glimpse of sanity amongst an ocean of deranged, hyperbolic failure.

Most reports see May's obsession with immigration at the heart of her continual denial of reality. Yet Labour shares it. They have repeated their commitment to ending freedom of movement. This is sold as an anti-immigration stance. It's completely misleading. There are two implications to it. The first is that this means leaving the single market and all its benefits, despite the weasel words about full access. A customs union is inadequate. It does not secure frictionless trade. It does not solve the Irish border issue. And it ignores services, some 80% of our trade. At the time of the referendum, leaving the single market was described as a 'hard Brexit.' I think that's a fair description. Labour is now advocating a hard Brexit while pretending that it's soft.

Secondly, Labour now proudly declares that it stands for stripping a fundamental right from all UK citizens. It takes away our freedom of movement, though they only talk about doing it to others. It shrinks our life chances. And it does so while talking about 'traditional voters' and the 'white working class.' That isn't a socialist class analysis. It's identity politics, not class politics. Socialism is about the interests that unite, not the identities that divide.

Nobody is critical of the effects of migration of northerners to London, Londoners to the north, the English to Scottish universities or Scots to English jobs. Few talk about the effects of young people leaving for a better life elsewhere or of the elderly retiring to small rural communities. No, what they want to stop are foreigners. Except they won't. Instead they want to stop Europeans coming, while frantically searching for people from other countries to replace them.

Cox's "45 years of in-depth integration" is about more than economics. It's about people. People who have worked and studied abroad. People who have retired and escaped the British climate. People who have made friends and built new, multi-national families. It's about their children and their birthright. It's even a staple of British popular culture, from Auf Wiedersehen Pet to Benidorm. Labour and the Conservatives are proudly announcing that they are going to take all that away from us and expect us to be grateful. It's mean-minded stupidity.

People's lives are going to be damaged, jobs will be lost, families faced with impossible choices, and xenophobia legitimised - for what? For something that will fail. The only way a policy that flawed could be adopted is if the normal processes of scrutiny, deliberation, and representation are by-passed. That's why the Brexiters demanded a referendum. It was their only chance because, as Otto English puts it,

Requiring the British public to vote in a binary referendum on a matter as complex as EU membership, was akin to asking a three year old to perform brain surgery with a stick of novelty cheese.

Don't blame the voters. Neither remainers or leavers knew much about it. None of us were qualified or understood the functioning of EU institutions, nor did we know about the effectiveness of the single market. That meant we were open to persuasion and unable to judge lies from facts. The only ones who knew were the experts who we were told to distrust. Otto English again:

As the Brexit fuse burns to its cinder, what the UK needs more than ever, is a little more acceptance that many Britons are simply bewildered as to what the hell is going on. That doesn’t make them stupid – it makes them normal.

Like us, the political class is out of its depth in this self-inflicted crisis. There is only one thing to do - revoke, breathe a sigh of relief, and become normal again.

Another fine mess

Everyone is sharing this, so why not me as well. Since June 2016 I have been bashing out stuff on here as a catharsis. I needn't have bothered, this says it all. A cabinet minister quoted on Newsnight the night before the withdrawal agreement gets defeated for the third time, despite offering the ultimate bribe, a crack at the leadership to Boris Moses Johnson. Never can failure be more deserved.



If we do leave, I think the traditional UK motto, honi soit qui mal y pense, should be replaced on our new blue passports. After all, it is in Norman French. This Anglo-Saxon would fit nicely. Fuck knows? I'm past caring. It's like the living dead in here. The new symbol of our nation.

And in case you are in doubt about the meaning of Brexit, look at the demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament. A knot of several hundred people being addressed by Tommy Robinson. Serious Eurosceptics of left and right, together with elderly right wing nostalgics yearning for imperial measures, are propping up an explicitly fascist movement. All the while the sharks of the ERG swim around, scenting blood, waiting to dismantle the post-war welfare state. It is against everything that Labour has achieved and everything it stands for. It has to be defeated, not just in numbers, but intellectually through a progressive, democratic Europeanism. We are winning, but clinging on by our fingernails at the same time.

An exam question

Given that:

1. The strength of a mandate is based on the size of the majority, not the number of people who voted for the winner. The number of votes cast only indicates the size of the population and the turnout. A 4% majority is a weak mandate.

2. Out of the total electorate, 17,410,742 people voted to leave. 29,090,500 didn't.

3. "The will of the people" is not a democratic concept. It takes a single fixed opinion and insists that it must be enforced regardless of opposition. It is populist authoritarianism. Consensus is a democratic concept. It is about negotiation and change, reaching agreement, listening and deliberating, with no predetermined conclusion.

4. The British Social Attitudes Survey (page 5, table 1) shows that there has never been a majority for leaving the EU. The only time that it came close (41%) was in 2016 as a result of the polarising effects of the referendum and support has been falling away ever since. According to Faisal Islam  there "hasn’t been a single poll in almost a year now with a Leave lead." Of the 70 polls since the 2017 general election only two show a small Leave lead, five were ties, and sixty-three had Remain leads. The latest poll showing a ten point lead for Remain is a sign that we are reverting slowly to the mean.

5. Every credible study of the economic impact of Brexit shows it to be damaging in most parts of the economy, and will hit the poorest people and areas worst. This reportage from SMEs is frightening.

Make a case for the EU referendum being a) democratic, and b) a good idea.

End times

Brexit died last weekend.

By that I don't mean that it won't happen. There is still a threat of political stupidity hanging over us because of the capture of a political party by loons (not an overstatement after reading Johnson channeling his inner Moses in the Telegraph). What I mean is that it has returned to the margins where it used to lurk as an eccentric irritation rather than as a horde of vandals set on sacking Brussels. The majority are still bored and baffled, but, as a few dozen devotees followed Farage, up to two million ordinary people gathered from all over the country to march in London to oppose Brexit. The visuals of the comparative strengths of the two events would not comfort Leavers. Leaving is no longer a viable political option.

The march was to demand a second referendum, but an online Parliamentary petition to cancel Brexit altogether by revoking article 50 and remaining in the EU, has gone viral. At the time of writing it has over five and a half million signatures and is still climbing. The largest demonstration ever has been joined by the largest petition ever. Material reality is on the march against religious faith. All Brexit has left is the appeal to belief.

If Brexit happens, it will do so in the teeth of widespread opposition and confront the most surprising event of modern British politics - the rise of a mass, determined, pro-European movement. Leaving will not be accepted, it will be fought through all the torturous negotiations in the years to follow, and, given the overwhelming sentiments of young people, it will be reversed. All we will be doing is damaging the country, permanently losing our many privileges within the EU, making people poorer, and diminishing our power in the illusion that we are gaining sovereignty. For what? An interregnum. Brexit is an exercise in futility.

As I have always said, leaving is a project of the right. It is the means to two ends, redoubling the Thatcherite revolution and winning permanent control of the Conservative Party. Though a small group of Lexiters have jumped on the bandwagon as well, with the opposite aim of greater economic collectivism. Both see the European Union as a constraint. But there isn't much evidence to suggest that either have come to grips with the nature of the modern economy. In this excellent article, Duncan Weldon looks at Brexit in the context of 20th century economic history and concludes that there is nothing original about it:

For all the talk of a radical change in the economic policy set‐up, it is just as likely that the end result is a very British attempt to ‘muddle through’ with a model which itself is not working and of which one of the key props (EU membership) has just been kicked away. The implication of this is that Brexit will not generate a new model for the UK, but simply an inferior version of the existing one.

It's hardly surprising that Leavers haven't got the faintest idea of what they want out of Brexit or of how to achieve it.

But it is a political revolution. It recasts Britain's place in the world as one of vulnerable isolation -sorry Global Britain. It is driven by nationalism. And that's the problem. It's attraction is emotional. Get to the details and the justification falls apart. It's a vacuous revolution, whose main aim seems to be the entrenchment of the Tory right in the leadership, regardless of electoral consequences. Indeed. consequences of any sort seem to be the least of their concerns.

In a couple of interesting posts Will Bott describes the structural causes of the increasingly radical noises coming from Leavers as they shift from Norway to nihilism. there are a number of factors, but the most appropriate here is that Leave has always had a problem of legitimacy, which is why they have never been comfortable with their victory. From the very first they have attacked Remainers, often in vicious and provocative language. They claimed the mantle of 'democracy' and used it it to fix the referendum result as the only democratic outcome for all time.

The political parties have acquiesced in this game too, bowing down before the altar of 'respect the referendum result,' regardless of how it was achieved, whether opinion has changed, or, most startlingly of all, whatever the consequences of the result actually are. Crash the economy? Respect the result. Make people poorer? Respect the result. Strip people of their rights? Respect the result. Threaten peace in Northern Ireland? Respect the result. Utter madness.

The other line is the psychic perception of 'they knew what they were voting for,' which, by coincidence, is always the favourite option of the clairvoyant. Paul Evans skewers this one here.

Saturday's march challenged the complacency. The 'will of the people' might not be as clear cut as leavers insisted it was. Their first impulse was to denigrate the demonstrators to try and strip them of their legitimacy. They were marching against democracy, rather than practising it. Then we got the sneering. For a long time we have had the strange spectacle of multi-millionaires decrying ordinary people as the elite. Now wealthy commentators declared that Remainers are middle class and so are inauthentic, which means that their opinions must be invalid. Lexiters jumped on the Tory bandwagon too. Picking up on some naff posters, middle class leftists decried middle class protestors for being middle class. The reality of a diverse demonstration, showing a depth of anger that could bring coaches to London from as far away as Orkney, should have made them question their world view.

Both left and right Leavers were caught up by the myth of Brexit as a working class rebellion to be romanticised in different ways. Duncan Weldon summarised why that is not so:

It is tempting to try to describe the Brexit vote as a revolt by the losers of globalisation—communities that had experienced de‐industrialisation and stagnating wages simply voting against what the elite desired. One could argue that the Labour party and the leadership of the trade unions have been disconnected from their traditional support bases and that class politics (despite appearances) actually drove the Leave victory. Innumerable newspaper opinion columns have indeed attempted to make this case. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Despite the popular image of Brexit being something which finds its loudest proponents in a stereotypical northern working men's club, the reality is that the most hardcore Brexiteers are usually to be located in the bar of a southern golf club. 

Labour's nervousness about the possibility of losing 30% of its vote and recklessness with the risk to the other 70%, led to a curious decision. On the day of the biggest street protest in history, against a Tory government and in support of official Labour policy, the Leader of the Opposition dodged it and spent the day in Morecambe, grabbing a photo opportunity with the statue of a dead comedian.

A cynical politician would have looked at that demonstration and the distribution of signatures on the petition and seen millions of voters in strategic locations that they need to win over at the next general election. The less cynical would have realised that forty years in the EU have produced, for enough people, an affinity, identity, and attachment to the rights it offers its citizens, to make Brexit divisive and toxic. A realist would have read the hard-headed economic analyses, seen the joint alarm of the TUC and CBI, looked at the millions on the streets and thought - no, this mustn't be done. I think it might take a bit more time for our current ones to cotton on.

That's why Brexit is dead, but it still lives on. It's a bugger to kill. The temptation of a zombie Brexit remains. It would be a disaster. Now's time to hammer a stake through its heart. 

Catharsis

Many miscarriages of justice have the same feature. The accused has confessed and the confession evidence is used to convict. What is important, though, is how that confession is obtained. The use of physical duress is one way, but the other is repetitive questioning until the moment the suspect cracks and says they did it just to make it stop. They withdraw the confession the next day, but that, and the hundreds of previous denials, doesn't matter, and they are charged. The one confession is all that counts. This is how May is approaching getting her withdrawal agreement through Parliament.

Parliament and MPs have failed in the past. They should never have voted for the referendum, nor should they have voted for article 50 without a detailed and agreed plan. But the current crisis is not a Parliamentary failure. They have woken up - belatedly. The Speaker has paused the interrogation process. Parliament is holding an overbearing executive to account. The crisis is that the executive refuses to listen or even accept the fact that it has suffered an historic defeat. There is no majority in Parliament for any one form of Brexit. The same applies in the country.

However much they try and blame someone else, the failure is the government's. The failure is the Conservative Party's. The failure is the Prime Minister's.

To negotiate a way through the thicket created by a badly designed, legally non-binding, pre-legislative referendum, with no methods for leaving specified, would have taken intelligence, imagination, flexibility, good judgement, alliance building, listening, and negotiating skills. May has none of them. Instead we have a pretence of strength, that is really cowardice in the face of the bullying of the far right ERG in her own party. I fear that she is neither intellectually or psychologically suitable for the task. This Spiegel piece is damning, but seems to hit the target.

Ultimately, the blame lies with Brexit itself. It's a stupid policy with no consensus to back it. The referendum only gave a weak mandate (a narrow majority of the vote, making Leave the largest minority of the electorate on that one day). Never mind the illegalities or the lies, Leave promised what could never be delivered. A weak mandate to deliver the impossible is why we are here.

Accept that Brexit has failed. Accept that it has gone wrong. There's nothing humiliating about recognising the truth. And remember that suspect under interrogation. Even if Parliament accepts the withdrawal agreement under duress, that acceptance will be withdrawn afterwards. The result will be years and years of wrangling over our future. And as it goes on, the country will become poorer and our international reputation will collapse even more. We are already an international laughing stock, we will then be seen as untrustworthy as we are ludicrous.

I meant to write an analytical post about democracy, I meant to answer my blogger friend Harry Barne's comment a couple of posts ago. Instead, this is just a long scream into the void (or to the handful of people who read this blog). Stop it! Don't mess around with another referendum. Stop it now. Revoke article 50. It's time to begin the task of rebuilding our international relationships, to repair the economic damage, and to reform ourselves - to renew democracy, promote equality, and extend social protection. Let's reject the spivs and demagogues and deal with reality. Let's rethink our relationship with Europe in a sane, considered, and consensual manner. But will we? That's the biggest question of all.

The Photographer at Sixteen

The Photographer at Sixteen

George Szirtes

Quercus Publishing

London, 2019

ISBN: 9780857058539

Back in February 2008, George Szirtes wrote something on his blog about poetry that was so intriguing that I copied and kept it.

There is, most crucially, the ghost in language, the feeling that life haunts language in a ghostlike fashion, glimpsed now here, now there, offering a shudder here, a shudder there, but that when you put out your hand through the words to grasp it, it escapes you. Your hand passes straight through it.

When I read his poetry, I always thought that I could sense the ghost. It was the spectre of history, of the lingering smell of totalitarianism. I can now see that my understanding was inadequate. Ghosts are people after all. And in this wonderful book, George invites the reader in to meet the most personal ghost of all, his mother - more than three decades after her death. 'Come and get to know her,' he seems to be saying. 'Let me tell you as much as I can about her life. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin at the end.'

And so he does, winding us back through time, unravelling some of the mystery and enigma of a victim who refused to be one, of a survivor who would not be defined by her survival.

He tells her story with respect, tenderness, and honesty. It isn't a sentimental book. It's intelligent and affectionate, capturing the spirit of a forceful personality. Inevitably, her life was haunted by the great crimes of the twentieth century, but the book has more to say. I smiled recalling the shared familiarities of a 1950s Home Counties upbringing. I understood the pressures of intense maternal love while growing up in the shadow of a generation that had seen too much. That was personal to me, but a reader will find many other things to identify with and think about. George starts from his own memories, then steps outside himself and ransacks the recollections of others so he can fill in the story of her life before he was born. Those are the events that shaped her, and were what he needed to know. But they're also part of a collective experience that should never be forgotten.

His mother, Magda, was a photographer. And George's narrative is structured around those everyday ghosts that hang on our walls, sit in frames on our sideboards, or are tucked away in albums, waiting to be retrieved. They catch a moment in time, often ambiguous, demanding interrogation, and are a source of reflection. His intimate thoughts are bound up in those photos. He searches for meaning in each and every one of them – as, I suppose, we all do when one catches our eye and interrupts the progress of our lives with memory.

It's fitting that the penultimate chapter meditates on five photographs, the only reminders of life before tragedy. A fragmentary record of an unrecorded time. And when the ghosts have been properly scrutinised and laid to rest, what is left is language. Language is the vehicle for the imagination, to recreate the senses and emotions of past times, and to cautiously invent what is missing. And as George says, "The trick is to invent the truth."

The Photographer at Sixteen is an original and compelling book. It does tell truth. Truth that we need to hear. And when you reach through the words, the ghost of a life still slips away. You can't touch, but you have felt a presence, one that stays with you.

Breaking up the party

What's going happen now? I've not got a clue. Both main parties have seen defections to a new Parliamentary grouping. They both responded by going on manoeuvres, with nobody too sure about the sincerity of their new poses. Neither appear to be functioning and both are seething with discontent. Prediction is impossible and speculation is tedious. It's more interesting to think about how we got here, and there is something useful to be said on that.

Let's talk about the generic causes of splits in parties.

We should abolish the words 'centrists' and 'moderates.' They are meaningless. Both draw their language from the idea of a political spectrum – a supposed sliding scale of positions from far left to far right. I've always thought that's rubbish. What we have are clusters of ideas as part of more or less coherent world views. Those clusters overlap in certain key areas. Those areas are the basis of a coalition. Because of the way our electoral system works we have intra, rather than inter, party coalitions. Party loyalty and unity holds those coalitions together around the core shared beliefs. The non-consensual ideas exist outside the mainstream and compete, sometimes winning influence, sometimes losing. This is the 'broad church.' It is the core that holds the party together though.

But parties are also systems of power and problems emerge when one group is tempted away from small victories on the margins by the prospect of total victory, power to the exclusion of others. That pushes the consensual, unifying beliefs to the margins. Party unity ceases to be a compromise, it becomes a rhetorical demand for obedience and submission to a new ideological ascendency. The sentimental attachment to the myth of the party holds it together for a while, but it can't last. Dissidents will rebel or defect. And that's not all. Ideological purity is never enough. Deviation becomes betrayal. A new purity is found, and obedience sought. Purists fight purists for the only true purity. Ironically, compromise is the way to prevent schism and thus keeps an ideology functional, instead of splintering it into warring factions. Both parties have fallen prey to this temptation of purity, and it's the source of their troubles.

Secondly, we need to look at the specific, proximate causes. Today's splits are around Brexit for both of them and anti-Semitism for the Labour Party. These are both animating beliefs and symbols of allegiance. You can tell a person's politics by how they define themselves against either one of them. Brexiters and anti-Zionists are rebels against the mainstream.

Take Brexit to start with. Britain's EU membership was an answer to a real question; how we should deal with Britain's post-war relative decline. As the EEC economies grew rapidly, we were being left behind and were seen as "the sick man of Europe". The debate as to what to do polarised around two positions, nationalism and Europeanism. Right wing nationalists still had imperialist pretensions and called for an ethnically homogeneous nation state, aligned with America. The left were not bothered about ethnicity, but wanted an autonomous and sovereign socialist nation state. Pro-Europeans fretted about British vulnerability if we were to remain isolated in a world increasingly divided into power blocks. Their answer was to join the then EEC and become part of a growing economic alliance and political union.

The advocates of Europe won, and, with the progress of globalisation, it proved to be a wise choice – probably the only viable option. Today, a multi-polar, interdependent world is emerging through powerful regional organisations, the most effective of which is the EU. Britain's future had been successfully resolved.

From 1992 the single market accelerated and deepened the process of economic integration. The Social Chapter established social democratic rights. The result was a model of industrial production and trade in both goods and services that made leaving the Union phenomenally difficult without doing immense damage.

What's more, after Thatcher's disastrous monetarist experiment in the early 80s and the consequent rapid de-industrialisation of the country, Britain found a partial remedy through the encouragement of inward investment. Large industrial concerns, such as Japanese companies, were invited to base their operations in the country. The main attraction was Britain's EU membership, especially membership of the single market. Now they are leaving. They won't be coming back.

There was also a more difficult debate about the extent of the political integration of the EU. Should it be a loose federation of nation states with limited areas of competence, or a federal union – a United States of Europe? This debate was clouded with linguistic confusion. In European discourse, 'federalism' is understood to mean decentralisation, in Britain it became associated with greater centralisation of power – the fabled "European super-state." The issue was resolved by the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. The final form of the treaty was a victory for the decentralists. It defined and limited the spheres of competence for the EU both inside and outside the Eurozone. It emphasised the practice of subsidiarity, that wherever possible decision making should be devolved to the national level. Most importantly, it made it impossible for additional functions to be given to EU bodies without a treaty change, which meant that every member state and their legislatures had a veto on any proposal to extend the sphere of competence of EU institutions.

At last, Britain's position was resolved and secure. Except the nationalists hadn't gone away. They lurked on the crank fringes of left and right, but it was their ability to be destructive in the Conservative Party that won them a referendum. Yet the issues they banged on about were over. The EU was not about to become a super-state. Britain not only had a leading decision-making role, but also had a veto over the extension of future power and EU expansion. These were old debates, long settled (which, perhaps, partially explains the generational divide in the vote, the issues only resonated with those who had longer memories.) The result was that the Leave campaign had to invent a fictitious EU to rail at, while fighting a more general culture war to avoid dealing with specifics.

Then they won. That meant dealing with reality. And they hadn't a clue. So, they ploughed on with fictions and fantasies, tales of conspiracy and betrayal, all the hallmarks of the purist and the fanatic. All of them ways of avoiding the truth. In the meantime, companies are leaving, investment is drying up, and the costs are phenomenal. The only certainty is that if we do leave, we will be poorer than otherwise. Trust and respect for the country have been shredded. All Brexiters have succeeded in doing is to return the old question about Britain's role to the agenda. Only this time the answer will be more difficult in a substantially transformed world where we will be more isolated, having voluntarily abandoned the only viable solution at a huge cost to ourselves.

Whereas Brexit has enpowered the fringe group on the Tory right, who John Major famously referred to as "bastards," the Labour anti-Semitism crisis is the product of the new Labour leadership coming in from the margins.

This needs greater explanation. There has always been anti-Semitism in the left - always. However, the form it takes and the vehicle for its expression changes. The current version is intrinsically tied to anti-Zionism and is articulated through a virulent hatred of the state of Israel, a reversal of Labour's traditionally pro-Zionist stance.

There are two main factors underlying that shift. Firstly, there was a change in left thinking in the second half of the 20th century. Class analysis was eclipsed by 'anti-imperialism.' Instead of class conflict, this new left emphasised the struggle against Western capitalist imperialism. As a result, nationalism, where it opposed the West, was seen as a progressive rather than a divisive force. It was to be supported in whatever form it took and however reactionary its politics. This took hold in the far left and they took up the Palestinian cause.

This brings in the second factor, anti-Judaism. The term comes from David Nirenberg's book, a remarkable intellectual history. It traces the way Judaism has always been a cypher for one side of a Manichean struggle, the nature of which changed with the times. Whether it related to the reading of the scriptures, opposition to the Enlightenment, or finance capitalism, Judaism was seen as both the enemy of civilisation and the cause of its potential downfall. Apply this way of thought to 'anti-imperialism' and it isn't surprising that it's the Jewish state that's seen as the embodiment of modern evils – racism, colonialism, and empire. Thus, the enemy becomes the United States and Israel. Slowly, and inexorably, the insidious conspiracy theory that is anti-Semitism makes Israel the instigator, the hidden force, the sinister manipulator, through its all-pervasive 'lobby.'

And so, a fictitious Israel emerges from the left imagination. The language that describes it comes from two alliances that they made; Stalinist anti-Semitism, together with both Arab and Islamist nationalisms seeking to impose their hegemony over the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Middle East. Arab nationalism carried with it the contempt of the coloniser for the colonised and ended in the 'ethnic cleansing' of the ancient Jewish communities from the Arab world (they now form the majority population in Israel). Islamism introduced the worst of exterminatory European anti-Semitism into its discourse. Colonial settler state; Zionist Entity; Zionism is racism; Apartheid; the same as the Nazis; these are familiar terms in the milieu and often blend with older, more sinister tropes – child killing, organ harvesting, blood lust, and the ubiquitous use of money to corrupt and destroy. They see the Israel/Palestine conflict as the source and origin of all conflict in the Middle East. Without Israel there would be peace.

None of this is true. The conflict is real enough. The existential threat to Israel is ever-present. The ethnic nationalism of the Israeli far right is vile. The Palestinian condition is wretched. But the portrayal of this conflict within the anti-Zionist movement is false – historically and morally. But it has to be thought of as the truth to fit into the anti-imperialist world view and to justify hating Israel.

This is the milieu that shaped Corbyn's world view. His alliances were indiscriminate. His anti-Zionism an article of faith. He is extremely uncomfortable when challenged and incapable of seeing this as anti-Semitism in any way. He sees himself solely as a defender of the Palestinian people. This too is a problem. It feeds a form of denial. Whether that is the harassing of the Jewish Labour Movement by the newly formed fringe group Jewish Voice for Labour, or the accusation that this is an imaginary 'Blairite' plot dreamed up to attack Corbyn (sometimes with the suggestion that they have been paid to do it by Israel!), it indicates the existence of institutional racism under the McPherson definition"

The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

When Jews said that they experienced this as anti-Semitism, they were disbelieved, something that would be inconceivable if the same was said by another minority. And there was worse. This is where social media can be poisonous. Log on to Labour supporting forums and twitter accounts and it won't take long for you to come across vicious and unambiguous Jew hatred. Social media also allows that to be sent directly to its targets. Harassment and abuse are widespread. It needs stopping, instead it's spreading into the mainstream.

It needn't be like this. To be pro-Palestinian doesn't mean denying the right of Israel to exist. Parts of the revolutionary left have the intelligence to reject this crap. For instance, take your time to read this open letter to Corbyn by the Trotskyist Sean Matgamna of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty.

Both Brexit and anti-Semitism share common features. They are both the symbol of political change within their respective parties, and both mark the entry of conspiracy thinking into the mainstream. They tell us that their targets are conspiring to undermine us all. The EU is trying to subjugate Britain, reducing it to a "vassal state." Zionists are using their wealth and power to secretly rule the world. These are articles of faith that bind their adherents together. Neither are true, and both run aground on the rocks of reality. But they don't have to be real for people to act on them, and the actions themselves are only too real and can hurt real people.

A stench of unreason is seeping through from fringe movements, and with them comes the threat of violence borne on the sanctity of their belief. If parties split, it's of little importance compared to the urgent need to end our complacency over the risks we face.

There's a lot of talk about how we are reliving the 1980s. I don't buy it. Things are very different from then, even if some politicians are consciously trying to re-fight the old struggles that they lost previously. However, I don't find history comforting. It shows a habit of confidently embracing folly and fervently believing bollocks. The consequences are rarely benign.

Representation

Another day, another farce. That's the narrative. Parliament voting in wildly contradictory ways, making it clear that there is no agreement on any way of managing Brexit, is a sign of dysfunctional politics. The real irony is that the current impasse could result in the thing that the fewest people want - no deal. I shall stick my neck out and suggest that this shambles indicates something else.

There is no consensus in Parliament because there is no consensus in the country. The baleful effect of the referendum has been to take an issue of marginal interest and polarise the nation around it. It's been a disaster, an utterly unnecessary disaster. In that sense, Parliament is representative of the nation as a whole. It is a representative picture of a broad dissensus.

Let's first think about how radical - revolutionary even - Brexit is. It means ripping up and replacing the entire economic infrastructure of our trade in goods and services. It requires a complete reinvention of our foreign policy and our place in the world. It needs a re-writing of much of our constitutional law. It also strips every British citizen of their rights, protections, and legal redress given by their EU citizenship. This isn't a minor change. It is huge.

Managing a change on this scale requires careful planning (ha!), but, above all, there needs to be a national and informed consensus that this is what we want to do. There hasn't ever been one. Expert opinion and the most directly effected parties have been adamantly opposed. Public opinion has been split. The best that can be offered as assent to the change is a narrow majority of votes cast on one day in June 2016 without any attempt to gain losers' consent. That isn't the consensus needed to implement something like this. Without it, all you can ever expect is a destructive mess. Brexit has been handled with incredible incompetence, but it was never going to be anything other than a contentious disaster. It was an impossible task.

As a result, Parliament is representative of the nation. However, it is supposed to be the nation's representative rather than its mirror image. It has to act in the national interest, rather than in accordance with the wishes of the electorate. This morning commentators were saying that May's deal is dead and the choice is now between the customs union compromise and no deal. This isn't true. The EEA/EFTA option is still there, but we are also in the land of the Condorcet Paradox. Even if there is a majority for leave, remaining is more popular than any of the individual options for leaving. Deciding to remain is in our power. We can unilaterally revoke Article 50 at any time. If Parliament is to act in the national interest, it should vote to do so and then begin the immense task of dealing with the damage that has already been done. If it doesn't and the government proceeds with Brexit, then it will have done so by deliberate choice.

None of this is necessary. There is nothing that says we have to do this to ourselves and our allies. There is no consensus behind it. Politicians who argue that it would be too dangerous not to go ahead should remember the old adage about airline safety: "If you think safety is expensive, try an accident."

Conventional wisdom

I am not a statistician and so I am posting this with a caution about my ability to read the data properly. This is speculative and an over-generalisation. However, it chimes with experience.

I have always worried about the "left behind" narrative about the leave vote, which says that people voted for Brexit as an act of despair about damage they had sustained through austerity. There has always been a paradox lurking in there. Some of the most deprived areas voted Remain. When I saw this comment thread on Twitter it seemed to make sense. Marios Richards points out that the commonplace narrative depends on how you slice the data. The reality, he says, is that the poorest, the ones who are the most vulnerable, tended to vote Remain. Their preference was masked by being bundled in with a larger and comparatively wealthier lower middle class. It was they who voted Leave. The difference was that they were more likely to have been bypassed by the worst effects of the financial crisis and austerity, sheltered by things like home ownership and pensions, unlike the poorest who were reliant on income alone and thus highly vulnerable to change. These Leavers were not rebelling against austerity, but were mainly untouched by it. The class profile of the vote then looks more like a sandwich. Remain is the bread - poorer and wealthier people tended to favour Remain, with a solid lower middle class Leaver filling. The filling is a mainly Conservative cohort, the one captured by the Tories in their successful election years

This is an oversimplification, all psephology is. Age, region, education, identity, social values, xenophobia, even internal migration, etc., all played their part, sometimes eclipsing class. But it is one way of pointing out that the narrow vote to leave was complex and cannot be pinned down to a single factor, let alone simplistic cod-sociological theories - people from somewhere v people from everywhere, the revolt of the left behind,* imperial nostalgia, political realignment, or Fintan O'Toole's eccentric insistence of the importance of the legacy of punk rock. There are many more, none of which provide a complete answer, because there isn't one. The one thing they have in common, and I think this is true, is that they had little to do with the reality of EU membership. The EU only mattered to the committed few. I have my suspicions that this is still the case despite the endless queue of commentators lining up to tell us that they know precisely what people were voting for. The vote was shallow and the commitment weak. It wasn't really about Europe, something that few understood well. If we abandoned Brexit, I doubt whether it would continue to be a factor in British politics in a few years time. It would be an episode that we would look back on in embarrassment.

Does this matter? Yes, it does for two reasons. First, it affects reportage. I would happily abolish the vox pop. Sticking a microphone under the noses of unsuspecting and unrepresentative passers-by and expecting to learn something is silly. But the selection of where to go and who to speak to is conditioned by assumptions about who we are looking for and where. Even the better social reportage follows a pattern of class prejudice. Reporters seek out areas that voted leave (preferably in the north). They aren't interested in Remain areas. They talk to as many working class people that they can find until they finally hit pay dirt, the person they can build their feature around. Yes, they find the nutter they can present as representative - you know the type, a balding man with union jack dentures who declares that even if we have to kill and eat our children to survive, it will have been worth it to escape the clutches of BRUSSELS! It's a freak show mentality posing as anthropology, and it's posh Remainer porn - look at the lower orders, aren't they ghastly. It's why there is so little reportage of working class Remainers. Nobody is looking for them. Nobody is going to Remain areas and speaking to them. They are neglected, left out of the narrative, invisible.

Secondly, these perceptions shape policy. That the Labour leadership is pro-Brexit (though anti-no deal) is not in doubt. That Labour members and voters are overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU is also certain. Where does that leave Labour MPs, the people who could make or break Brexit? If they think that their working class voters are pro-Brexit and anti-immigration (and misunderstand the role of a representative), then they are caught and will sway towards making Brexit happen. They do not want to alienate Labour Leavers. But what if the poorest are pro-remain? And what if, as polling suggests, they are not as bothered about freedom of movement as they are about economic prospects? Where then would MPs stand? But how could they possibly know if the mainstream narrative excludes this possibility? Middle class prejudice is hiding working class Remainers. They don't fit the stereotype. In their determination to reflect the views of their working class supporters, Labour MPs may have chosen to genuflect to Tories. They may be about to facilitate a mistake based on a misapprehension.

Instead of the left behind, maybe we should be talking about the left out - the working class Remain vote that nobody seems to want to hear about in case it disturbs their world view.


* I still can't type that with a straight face thanks to jazzlover's comment on this post.

Through the looking glass

Curiouser and curiouser. As we reach another round of Parliamentary votes on Brexit, the detachment of the debate from reality is getting ever more bewildering. Much of it is a mirror image of reality.

For leavers on the right, the EU is an invading, colonising power to be resisted - The Soviet Union, Hitler, and Napoleon rolled into one. It is an oppressive, hostile monster that we joined voluntarily and held a commanding position in. We can leave if we want to, but we also want all the benefits of membership (and there are plenty of those), none of the costs, and all because of who we are - we are great, they owe us, Dunkirk (oh, perhaps not), D-Day (yes, that's better) and all that. But they won't let us have everything unconditionally, the bastards. Who won the war anyway? We want to be out and in at the same time. Schroedinger's Cheshire Cat.

For the far smaller number of leavers on the left, the EU is a monstrous vehicle imposing a vicious neoliberal ideology on plucky socialist Britain. We need to escape to free ourselves from this hostile, and suspiciously foreign, economic horror. We must reject their Thatcherism! Thatcherism? Er ... where did they get it from? Oh. Margaret Thatcher. She was British, wasn't she? And Conservatives bitterly resented the old-fashioned, social democratic EU's determination to resist and protect the workforce, even if they did come to share what had become a broad international consensus. Never mind, now they are the ideological aggressor. We must free ourself by facilitating an extreme neoliberal project to leave the EU and turn Britain into Singapore.

Then there is the withdrawal agreement. The critical word is "agreement." That implies that two or more parties agree. As we did with the EU over the Northern Ireland backstop - in December - December 2017. It looks as if the government might try to defeat itself again so that it can go back to the EU to unagree what has been agreed so we can have an agreement that they have said they will not agree to.

Next up, democracy. Yes, a nice word. A very nice word. However, it does have a few different meanings. We are a representative democracy, not a plebiscitary democracy. Except that we held a non-binding referendum that is, apparently, binding, allowing some MPs to openly say that they think Brexit will damage the country, make people poorer, that they oppose it, that they want to remain, but they will support leaving because democracy and that sort of thing. A sovereign Parliament bound by a non-binding referendum. How novel.

Then there are the voters. They might turn nasty if we don't leave. They will be so angry. Beware of unrest. We must do as they say. No, not those voters. Not the ones that voted remain. They don't matter. Angry? Well they might be a bit pissed off, but who cares? They are only about half the electorate anyway, or if the tracker polls are right a majority these days. But they don't count. They may be the majority of the people, but they aren't the will of the people.

Have we gone mad? Have the German leaders who wrote to The Times urging us to stay not understood that our "legendary British black humour" is not humour at all but our principles of government? The answer is no, we're not crazy, not really. Accident has trapped us into attempting to implement an impossible policy and we are thrashing around trying to do it. Even those who advocated it didn't know how to leave without doing major damage, which was why they never offered a plan. The minimalist approach, sometimes referred to as the Norway option, was to rejoin EFTA and become members of the EEA. That meant giving back control, but remaining within a beneficial set of economic arrangements. That was the only well thought out proposal. Everything else meant stripping out the nation's economic infrastructure, an economic revolution with uncertain, but deeply damaging results.

Of course, we got here by a mad route - a mistake that ended with an unintended result. Otto English put it beautifully:

The uncomfortable truth is that whether you voted Remain or Leave in June 2016 you probably voted emotionally. Very few people understood it. Inviting a largely uninformed public to make a judgement on something as unfathomably complex as our membership of the EU was akin to asking a six-year-old to perform delicate brain surgery – with a crayon.

And it's not just Brexit. Most people simply do not fathom politics. Most have no understanding of concepts like pooled sovereignty, or how net migration works, or what first past the post is, or how our unwritten constitution functions. Many, frankly, don’t even care. Why should they?

In a parliamentary democracy we elect politicians to make important decisions on our behalf. That’s how the system has functioned for decades and also why the British have traditionally astutely avoided referendums – which reduce perplexingly multifaceted matters to a binary choice. 

The problem though is that this ignorance was shared by our representatives. Worse still, they have misunderstood their role in a Parliamentary democracy.

If people do not understand something that is now as ubiquitous, then they have to find a narrative that is familiar enough for them to understand. The result is the dominance of heroic fictions invested with strong emotional attachments - on both sides - rather than prosaic reality. As Jeremy Cliffe puts it, what motivates the EU is "the quest for the quiet life." It's about stability through prosperity and creating institutional arrangements to allow states to co-operate to achieve it. It's not very exciting.

Can't we go back to being a normal country? Might we not take this revolutionary leap in the dark, informed by bollocks? Can we be ordinary please? The mantra at the moment is 'respecting the result of the referendum.' But why? Why, if it is a mistaken policy produced by a necessarily ill-informed vote in a poorly constructed, flawed referendum, can't we say 'sorry, we made a mistake.' There is no shame in admitting error. Can't we judge the referendum result on the quality and consequences of the decision, rather than implement it regardless solely because of the way it was made?

The evidence is clear from all those who actually do know something about it. Business are against leaving. Trade unions are against leaving. All our allies are aghast at our leaving. Our international reputation has been trashed. Our influence and power is diminished. We were a significant world power because of our commanding role in the EU, not despite it. Now we are irrelevant. Even before we leave, there is a process of disinvestment in the UK going on today. Investment decisions are not coming our way. We face a long drawn out transition or a catastrophic rupture. Why not stay? There will be a lot of work to be done to repair the damage, but at least we will stop more taking place. It's in our power. It's our choice. We can unilaterally withdraw Article 50. There's no need for another risky referendum if Parliament accepts its duty and explains it well. We can abandon plebiscites. It might be rather a good idea.

And if we do become normal again, we can put all our energy into doing what matters - tackling inequality, ending austerity, redressing poverty, and rethinking the failures of democracy that got us into this mess. And let's pledge to not use referendums unless absolutely appropriate, especially not poorly constructed ones to try and resolve an internal party dispute by risking the future of the country.

Unreason

What troubles me the most these days is the detachment of anger from reality. Comfortable people in prosperous and peaceful societies, living longer and healthier lives than ever before in history, put on yellow jackets and riot, demand to leave the European Union, campaign against vaccinations that have eliminated some of the worst diseases that have plagued humankind, rage against medicine and bio-technology, embrace convenient fictions to explain away inconvenient facts, and think that even the most commonplace things are phoney. And when you ask them why, the answer will be at best fallacious and at worst uncritically thoughtless.

Commentators write earnest pieces about how this is the fury of the dispossessed, the downtrodden, and the forgotten. Except it never is. The poor are too busy surviving. And on the rare occasions that they do take to the streets, they are driven by hunger rather than their desire for homeopathy.

As we have seen with Brexit, demands that are not concrete can never be appeased, anger cannot be dissipated by success. Rage becomes an addiction.

The glue that holds all these together - that binds the ludicrous, the prosaic, and the sinister into one incoherent discontent - is conspiracy theory. It's the idea that everything can be explained by malevolent others plotting against you, thereby thwarting what you and your overwhelming self-esteem think you deserve, while frustrating the glorious future that awaits if only they would allow it.

There are so many cruelties and injustices in the world. They have causes and remedies, though none are quick or easy, many are complex, understanding them means insight and nuance, and conflicts may often be resolved only through imperfect trade-offs between incompatible demands. Conspiracy theory denies this. It says everything is simple. There is one cause - them. Eliminate them and all will be well.

Today of all days, a day of remembrance, we mustn't forget that the ultimate and foundational conspiracy theory is anti-Semitism. If you scratch the surface of any of these movements, you will soon see Jew-hatred festering away. It's rarely as crude as in the 1930s. It is expressed though symbols - George Soros, the Rothschilds, Zionism, all woven into a subterranean racism. It's growing. It's suppurating in the left and right. It's evil.

Piously repeating mantras, like "never again," is not enough to defeat it. Instead, we need to rediscover reason - using analysis, self-awareness, and a sense of humility in the face of our own ignorance and prejudices - which we can never escape, but may come to know. In the meantime, we should remember where this leads.



(Thanks to Allan for the music)

Fail

If Brexit goes ahead, in any form, it will enact a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represent an unprecedented failure of British statecraft.

This is from Chris Grey's latest assessment of British policy from his blog. It is a fine summary of the bizarre way Britain is abandoning all it's strategic and economic interests in favour of the unknown. Calculation has been replaced by wishful thinking.

This is the clearest brief description of the economics of Brexit that I have read:

It is not necessary to make or accept economic forecasts, only to understand basic institutional realities, to see that detaching a country from its regional bloc and then seeking to re-attach it on unknown, but by definition worse, terms to that same bloc, in an unknown time frame, is going to have adverse consequences for businesses and trade, and hence for employment and tax revenues. 

This is something no sane government would suggest, let alone attempt, especially one under no compulsion to do so. This is entirely voluntary and completely unnecessary. There are no benefits. The best that can be hoped for is damage limitation from the ruinous expense of leaving. This thread has gathered together more than one hundred and forty verified examples of disinvestment, costs to businesses, job losses, and extra government spending all because of Brexit. These are not predictions, they have happened. Billions have been spent - not on the health service or to fix the housing crisis, but on preparations for a no deal that may (I hope) be a bluff - such as ferry services without ferries, running from ports that can't handle them (on both sides of the Channel), with fake traffic jams as an added extra. This will continue. Unless and until Brexit is resolved everything stands in abeyance. It is no use wittering on about how we should be talking about bread-and-butter issues, because the remedies for our many complaints are wholly dependent on Brexit and the damage it will do.

It is indeed an "unprecedented failure." And it is an institutional failure on many levels.

First, it's a failure of representative democracy.

Rather than being 'the biggest democratic exercise ever,' the referendum was the biggest betrayal of representative democracy ever, and one carried out by its elected representatives.

What on earth were MPs doing when they voted for a referendum on a complex, specialist issue that was so manifestly unsuitable for decision by referendum? What were they thinking when they elevated the obsession of a small minority of fringe politicians and wealthy ideologues into a major existential question? How could hobbyists, who revelled in their intense anger over things that were not a problem and about which few others cared, be allowed to wreck the country? I suppose MPs justified themselves by legislating for it to be an advisory referendum only, but then they treated it as binding.

If that madness wasn't enough, MPs voted (on three-line-whips from both opposition and government) to give the absolute right to the government to submit article 50 notification to leave with no safeguards and without even a hint of a plan as to what we would want as a post-EU settlement. And guess what, there is still no agreement.

MPs have abandoned their responsibility and are only now, at the very last minute, wondering whether they should take some back to rescue the nation from this unholy mess.

(This is on top of the Party leadership questions showing us the folly of allowing policy to be controlled by self-selected and unaccountable party members, rather than those who have been elected by the voters at large.)

Second, it shows the failure of our attempts at the devolution of power to constituent nations in a centralised polity. What was the point of Scotland and Northern Ireland voting decisively to remain if they could be overruled by English votes and be removed from the EU regardless? And that's without mentioning Gibraltar. Brexit shows just how centralised our political system is, and how devolution has not remedied it. The devolved administrations are powerless to shape the most significant policy since the War.

Third, it was a failure of electoral systems and electoral law. The franchise was denied to some of the most deeply affected people and the law was broken with impunity, possibly with decisive effect, and with no redress for the laughable reason that the referendum was constitutionally advisory. To authorise this fundamental constitutional change on a majority of 50%+1 of the vote, regardless of turnout, was another piece of astonishing negligence.

Finally, it was a colossal failure of political communication. It didn't help that most of the electorate and many politicians, including the senior cabinet ministers, had little or no understanding of what the EU is, what it does, and how integrated we are within the single market. The result has been a debate dominated by fictions, fantasies, wishful thinking, and delusional generalities. People who actually knew something about the complications, costs, and problems were countered with fairy stories from the ideologically committed. The press had long prepared the ground with blatantly dishonest reporting. Social media became a cesspit of misinformation targeted at people through dubiously acquired data. Political parties have been more concerned with electoral strategy (Labour has also been disingenuous and delusional in offering its alternatives) rather than principle.

It's a mess. Though there is one way out.

Edwin Hayward added this tweet to his comprehensive list that I linked to earlier:

Plan B: "Revoke Article 50"
- Cost: £0
- Saving vs no deal mitigation: £billions
- Planning time: none
- Additional preparations: none
- Soldiers on streets: 0
- Fake ferry companies involved: 0
- Irish border situation: 100% resolved
- Passport colour: any

You're welcome.

A functioning democracy would do just that. It would explain precisely why it is necessary. It wouldn't privilege the decision making method over the quality of that decision. Having done that, MPs and their parties would be answerable to the electorate at the ballot box. That is why we elect representatives. At last there are signs of life. The success of Yvette Cooper's amendment designed to obstruct a no-deal exit shows that MPs are beginning to realise what their job is.

I would love to be wrong, but I still don't think it will happen the way Hayward suggests. At best we could be plunged into another referendum. But, when this whole episode is over, it will be time to brush off our self-congratulatory complacency about our democracy, address the failings, and actually decide what sort of democracy we want to be. God forbid that we turn to plebiscitary populism, instead I hope that we reaffirm our nation as a representative democracy, preferably one augmented through enhanced participation and a commitment to local and national devolution of power.

A new year

I don't make New Year resolutions. I never keep them and these days I would probably forget about them. Instead, in the spirit of such failure, I want to make some wishes for what I would like to see in 2019, none of which will come true.

1. An end to the delusion of British greatness.

Both Remainers and Brexiters cling to this. Brexiters think that we can be a global power once again, Remainers that we should "remain and reform" - take the leading role in changing the EU from within. Well, if this was a job interview for the post of EU Lead Reformer, then the way Brexit has been handled would mean we wouldn't make the short list. Remain and reform ourselves after this shambles would make much more sense. As for the global power nonsense, I though we got over that one after Suez in 1957. Brexiters forget that before we entered the EU, we were known as "the sick man of Europe." If we leave, we will become like a broken down drunk sitting in the corner of a seedy pub telling all the people trying to avoid him that he used to be an empire.

How about a bit of humility and realism. Being a partner in a successful international enterprise is not vassalage, it is not oppression, it's what a successful and prosperous modern nation looks like.

2. The abandonment of the word 'weaponise."

This is a Corbynista favourite. Anti-Semitism is being weaponised to get at Corbyn. The latest version is that the campaign for a "People's Vote" on the Brexit deal is another weapon invented to attack their hero. It's an old ploy, an accusation of bad faith. It's also a classic logical fallacy and a diversionary tactic. Actually, people attack anti-Semitism because it's poisonous and growing. They support a second referendum because they oppose Brexit. It has bugger all to do with Corbyn. But when his supporters suggest that it is being weaponised, they are saying that it can be, and that therefore there must be some truth in the accusation that he is an anti-Semitic Brexiter. I don't think that they have spotted that bit.

Can we just recognise and deal with the real issues please?

3. People stopping rabbiting on about the "will of the people" and misusing the term "democracy."

So many examples, but here's one drawn from my own prejudices. It's the tiresome Brexiter line about how 17.4 million people voted for Brexit as if the 29.1 million who didn't don't count (16,141,242 voted Remain and 12,949,258 didn't vote as opposed to the 17,410,742 who voted Leave) let alone the 4-5 million people who were most affected by the decision but were not allowed to vote (UK citizens overseas and non-UK EU citizens legally resident in the country). On top of that there is the tiresome insistence that opposing Brexit and trying to stop it is failing to respect democracy. I'm sorry, but democracy gives you the right to oppose policies, campaign against them, and overturn them. Opponents of leaving the EU are not betraying democracy, but practising it.

4. Going on about how the Brexit vote was all about "the left behind."

The Brexit vote was not predominantly working class. There was an identifiable section of working class Brexit voters, mostly from smaller urban areas, however, taken on their own they could never have won the referendum. There wasn't anything like enough of them. No, dig down in the figures and you will see that the majority of Brexit voters, as well as being older and more socially conservative, were relatively affluent and typically suburban. Fed on decades of anti-EU fabrications drawn from a genre established by Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, and embedded in a saloon bar culture of moaning about how everything has gone to the dogs, the majority of leave voters were anything but "the left behind." Brexit is the triumph of the suburbanisation of politics, a phenomenon that hasn't been discussed often enough.

Of course we should deal with the problems of 'the left behind," and with poverty and inequality. But we shouldn't do it because of Brexit. We should do it because we should.

***

This post has been an exercise in futility, but wishing a happy New Year to those who pass by this place isn't. Have as good a one as possible.