Wholesale prejudice

I have been saying all along that Brexit is a victory for the right. It was the obsession of parts of the Conservative Party who saw leaving the EU as the true path to paradise – either a libertarian one with a free market and a minimal state, or a nationalist heaven of restored Victorian values and imperial preference. We are in this mess purely because of their persistence and their ability to wreck the Tory party if they didn't get their way. Yet they have had fellow travellers from the other side, a dogged band of leftists from a variety of persuasions. Whether they are after creating socialism in one country or some form of nationalist socialism, the historical precedents are not pretty. Simon Wren-Lewis has superbly eviscerated the economic case they put forward here. I thoroughly agree.

"Lexit" raised its head again last Sunday as Corbyn, to the horror of trade union leaders, committed Labour to a hard Brexit, only mitigated by meaningless platitudes and erroneous suggestions about the single market, jobs, and "tariff-free" trade.

Despite having said precisely the same previously, John McDonnell rowed back once it became clear that this was kicking up a row, suggesting that Britain could stay in the single market if public opinion changed. Whether this was tactical or genuine is open to question, though it's clear Labour is as split as the Tories.

What incensed me is that Corbyn also put himself firmly in the anti-immigration camp. He blamed "wholesale" Eastern European immigration for worsening working conditions and reducing wages, particularly in the building trade. As a result, he insisted, free movement of people had to end. It was an evidence-free assertion and an ancient trope. Research points to immigration as being a net benefit, though some anecdotal accounts suggest that there may be problems at the margins (never nice if you are one of the people in that margin of course). Regardless, there are three big difficulties with his argument.

The first is that any problems are not ones of immigration, but of exploitation. To say that exploitation will cease if we stop foreigners coming into the country is risible. It blames the victims.

The second is that it's the sort of red meat that some on the middle-class left think that you have to throw at working-class people to make them like you and abandon UKIP. It's facile and condescending, but, most importantly from a left perspective, it addresses what are often described as the 'white working class' in terms of their whiteness and not of their class. It's the kind of divisive narrative socialists used to despise.

Finally, this marginal problem is not solved by dealing with the issue itself, but by removing a universal reciprocal right. His solution to exploitation in the building trade is to stop British pensioners retiring to Spain.

These are not left-wing views.

I would like him to answer this question from an Anglo-Belgian family:

"Do these Brexiters ever consider how many ordinary people’s lives they have harmed?”

Does he? Do they? Johnson, Gove, Farage, and now, openly, Corbyn?

This whole farrago is the consequence of the obsessions of nonentities producing a situation that is being managed by mediocrities. As the incredible difficulty of extracting anything reasonable from increasingly difficult negotiations become ever more apparent, opinions are starting to change.

The details of the negotiations are nightmarish. The government is unprepared, divided, and has no vision of what it wants. The debate that is going on is one that should have been held before the referendum, not after invoking Article 50. There is only one reasonable option open to us – don't do it.

In the meantime, those tempted by anti-immigration rhetoric should remember that, however long ago, we are all the products of migration. It is one of the most ubiquitous experiences of humanity. We are all in its debt. George Szirtes put it magnificently.

As for refugees they are, as we were, like leaves blown off a tree, drifting where the wind or sea takes them. But not just leaves. Leaves wither and die and return to earth. Refugees, migrants of all sorts, are also seeds of new growth and always have been. Few of us present here now live in the places where we were born. We too drift and seed. On good soil with a little tending we become part of the landscape. That is our history, our present and, with luck, our future.

Look on my works ... and despair

I haven't been blogging much lately, there have been a lot of other things going on in my life, but that isn't the main reason. I have more or less run out of things to say about the political class. It's awful. And it's tasked with managing the most complex, pointless, and utterly self-destructive policy imaginable. When you are holding a gun to your own head, the sanest thing to do is to not pull the trigger. Instead, in the words of Martin Wolf in the Financial Times,

Remember what has happened. In an unnecessary referendum, a small majority chose an option they could not understand, because it had not been worked out. Thereupon, a new prime minister, with no knowledge of the complexities, adopted the hardest possible interpretation of the outcome. She triggered the exit process in March 2017, before shaping a detailed negotiating position. Some 70 days later, in an unnecessary election, she lost both her majority and her authority.

The result is a dismal failure to even begin to negotiate the best EU deal we can hope for, which would be something merely significantly worse, rather than catastrophically worse, than what we  already have.

On the first anniversary of May becoming prime minister, the tributes have been coruscating. Two stand out. John Crace, inventor of the jibe "Maybot," is cruel, funny and accurate. His conclusion:

In just a year, the Maybot had imploded entirely. It had come to this – from being lauded as the saviour of the Conservative party to begging Labour for some policy ideas. A year in which her true mediocrity had been exposed.

Meanwhile, Ian Dunt resorted to a list. It's long and damning.

On Thursday, we reached the first anniversary of Theresa May's time in Downing Street. During this period she has pursued a hopelessly mangled Brexit strategy, rebranded the Conservative party with hard right-wing nativism, trashed Britain's global reputation and thrown away her own majority in a fit of imperial arrogance. We are unlikely to have to mark her second...

The list of her failures goes on and on. They are moral, political, economic, strategic and presentational. She is a full-spectrum political disaster.

Then there is Labour. When it came to the election, the result was a narrower defeat than expected, aided by the collapse of third party votes and the worst Tory campaign imaginable. Corbyn scrubbed up well. He is now dressed in expensive suits, carefully groomed, and when tieless looks preppy, rather than scruffy. He didn't lose his temper on TV, came over avuncular, but was confined mainly to mass meetings of the adoring. I still can't see any evidence that he he has the ability to be Prime Minister, but I suppose that what really gets to me is the bizarre cult of personality that has been generated around him. This worship is disturbing, it's uncritical, and every objection to his saintliness is met by a tirade of abuse. And the object of this fevered veneration is so vacuous. I mean, what has he actually said of interest? Most of his speeches are content-free rhetoric or vague promises of the impossible. Can anyone say what on earth a "jobs first Brexit" means? It's an endlessly repeated platitude worthy of Theresa May.

The weird thing is that when he says something, like wanting to leave the single market, his fan base don't believe him if it's not what they want. He is a vehicle for people's political fantasies, a symbol of being on the left, rather than the advocate of a coherent political programme. Eventually, this will be found out. Brexit is the most likely cause, but even on a flagship policy like abolishing university tuition fees, they have started rowing back expectations. I suppose being vague on Brexit is a necessary tactic, given that the party is split and the voter base is overwhelmingly pro-remain. But eventually people will begin to notice that on every Parliamentary vote on it, Labour has offered no official opposition to the policy of the Tory right.

I have always felt that Corbyn's past stance on foreign affairs made him unfit to lead the Labour Party. It hasn't turned out to be an obstacle for him as his supporters can't remember the IRA, and even if they don't share his virulent hatred of Israel, they have an antipathy to it. As for his disgusting "friends," they don't seem to make much difference either. The issue cropped up again last week when he shared a pizza with Marcus Papadopoulos, a pro-Assad denier of the Srebrenica massacre (a position Corbyn has flirted with in the past).

Corbyn is often described as a pacifist. He makes his association with peace politics known whenever possible. It sounds nice. But he isn't a pacifist. He isn't even a principled non-interventionist. No, he is an appeaser. It's a long political tradition. It was derided in the 19th Century by working class radicals as being "peace at any price." To avoid war by making concessions to a potential aggressor may be a political necessity at times, but it is morally ambiguous at best. The problem is that if you want to pretend that it is virtuous, then you have to move beyond Orwell's famous observation about pacifism being objectively pro-fascist, to being materially so. Pacifism may refuse to resist evil, but it doesn't pretend that it isn't evil. Appeasers argue that the evil actually have a case, that they are being reasonable, and that our goodwill in conceding their demands will win them over to virtue. It's wishful thinking, and from there it is a small step to become a fellow traveller, apologist, or even an outright supporter. And that's where Corbyn's Irish republicanism and anti-Zionism took him. But the association with the word peace has allowed him to effectively lie about his actions, to the ecstatic joy of his fan base.

So what can you say? In the middle of a deep, self-inflicted crisis, we have domestic politics that is reduced to a contest between Joseph and Neville Chamberlain. It is dominated by cowardice and confusion. It is organised failure. It has to change, but until it does, there is nothing more to do other than to look on in disbelief.