Wonderland

Rachel Sylvester in the Times reports (£):

"We are trapped in a box,” admits one minister. “Parliament feels frozen by the referendum but people voted for a fantasy we can’t deliver. They can only have Brexit if they’re prepared to suffer the pain."

Let's get this straight. This is a minister speaking. This is a minister from a government that keeps going on in public about how wonderful everything will be, how they are making progress, that no deal is better than a bad deal, and every other platitude you can imagine. In private they call Brexit "a fantasy we can’t deliver."

In the meantime, the opposition repeat an even more meaningless slogan. What in hell is a "jobs first Brexit?" A Eurosceptic leadership scrambles around doing anything it can to avoid a commitment as it triangulates between the overwhelmingly anti-Brexit membership, the majority of their voters who are in favour of remaining, and a strategically placed minority of Labour voters who wanted to leave the EU.

So what to do? How about telling the truth. Maybe it's an idea not to pretend. After all, Churchill offered "blood, toil, tears and sweat" rather than "it will be all over by Christmas." Let them stop lying. Whether you support remaining or leaving, the facts are the same. It will be difficult. It will be expensive. It will cost money rather than save it. If there are any benefits, they will be a long way in the future. The risks are huge. The country is likely to be poorer, certainly initially. Most predict the best outcome to be a slow and continuous relative decline.

And if people are faced with that choice, a real choice, would they object if their representatives did their job and decided not pander to the ideological fanaticism of the lunatic right and destroy the country on the basis of a tiny, fragile majority in a one-off and ill-informed poll?

Telling the truth might be a bit much to ask for, but how about looking to their self-interest as this study of pro-remain tactical voting would suggest.

The Conservatives gambled by backing the leave voters exclusively and still came up short. They were punished by remain voters and stand to be punished further if they back an uncompromising Brexit. The Conservatives cannot win on a leave only platform.

Remain voters are the key to election victory. Both main parties are too terrified to speak for them. Until one of them does, we will continue to watch the consequences of the worst mistake in British post-war history take its toll on our national standing and the welfare of our people.

Playing with fire

This is a trailer for a book that is worth your time and money. Much of the discussion of Brexit is about economics, but a large section of the vote to leave was about immigration. What some people were voting for was the forcible expulsion of foreigners. They didn't phrase it that way. They used euphemisms like 'ending freedom of movement,' but they meant something a little more savage. The referendum has led to increased incidents of hate crimes, as this chilling Panorama programme shows. This and the book tell us about the human cost of playing politics with people, people who didn't even have the right to vote on their fate.

Racism was harnessed by the leave campaign to win it. This is not to say all leave voters are racist, far from it, but enough were to swing the result. Nor did Brexit create xenophobia. However, this accursed referendum has acted as a legitimating tool and has ended inhibitions against the expression of hate. Something good about the country has died.

Nationalism and racism are potent forces for mobilising the worst in society. They are a curse that has killed millions through war and genocide. The EU was a response, and a clever one. It didn't try and create the European super state of myth. It didn't try and abolish the nation state. Instead of utopianism, it gradually softened borders. It did that through integrating trade in a single market and through ensuring that every EU citizen became, in effect, a dual national. We are citizens of both our own country and the EU. It was practical too. Driving licences, pet passports, mobile phones, reciprocal health care, and others became Europe-wide, making life easier. Freedom of movement is part of that softening. It is a heavily circumscribed right. Any stay over three months is subject to stringent conditions (not that the UK enforced them). But it opened up opportunities to live and work in different EU states, without onerous bureaucratic restrictions.

Nationalists, and that means most Eurosceptic politicians in the UK, resented this and wanted to firm up borders again. They used the worst of populist rhetoric, spread lies, and dropped dark hints. It was playing with fire, but they preferred winning their game to the risk of being burnt. They thought they were safe anyway, the flames would only consume others. Their behaviour was contemptible. They encouraged dark forces to emerge from the corners to where they had been confined. They wanted their right-wing fantasy at all costs, costs that were born by the people in this book and documentary. I look at Brexit and sometimes wonder, what have we become?

An elegy

This is a gorgeous elegy for England, written in despair about Brexit, inspired by the death of Prince, all the while referring to the death of another prince, Hamlet. Not bad for a pop song. There's a personal element to this. One of the band members was a student in an 'A' level Politics evening class I taught back in the mid 80s. He was a guitarist changing himself into an academic. Now he's turning himself back again. I can't stop listening to it and I love the evocative video too.

Murder most foul

A few days ago the Daily Telegraph led its front page with the speech of that egregious liar, our Foreign Secretary, under the by-line: "The Roaring Lion." This is quite mad. So is the speech by this arch reactionary in fancy dress who talks of Brexit in terms of Agincourt. Theresa May's speech, dogged by a virus, a prankster, and collapsing scenery worthy of the worst 1960s soap opera, was a disaster. But it was one of cringe making pathos, as the inadequate attempted the impossible. It wasn't the worst speech of the conference. She was inept; Johnson and Rees-Mogg were worse, they were sinister.

Whenever I hear the nationalist right expressing their deep love of our country and the glories that will come to us when we shake off the tyrannical yoke of our biggest trading partners and closet allies, I don't think of their disregard of simple things like facts, evidence, or truth. Instead I think of Oscar Wilde:

And all men kill the thing they love, 
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look, 
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Nationalism kills patriotism; and it kills the country it professes to love.

It's one reason why nationalists like referendums. They are faux-democracy; they flaunt democratic values, even as they undermine them. Democracy is a network of interlocking institutions, checks and balances, underpinned by elected representatives. Referendums by-pass all these safeguards and offer a one-off marketing exercise. Sell your fad or obsession to enough people just once and the entire structure of democracy is undermined. Referendums kill democracy.

All British national and regional institutions were opposed to Brexit. All parliaments, councils, and assemblies were opposed. Business and trade unions were opposed. Academics and the medical profession were opposed. Scientists and all our trading partners and allies were opposed. It could never happen. There was one shot. A referendum, where a bare majority of the honest but inexpert could overrule the lot. This wasn't the triumph of democracy, so much as its betrayal.

Nationalist crimes agains democracy are being committed in Hungary and Poland. While the polarisation in Britain is now being experienced by Spain. I don't know enough about Catalonia to have an informed opinion, other than a revulsion at the brutality of the Spanish Police, but the Catalan left are making it clear that they do not support the nationalists.

The appalling scenes of police violence that took place on 1 October in Catalonia along with the most baffling disrespect for democratic procedures and democratic substance that preceded them a month ago in the Catalan Parliament urges us to raise a collective voice.
This voice belongs to the democratic, non-aligned left, a left whose expression we have been longing for. While this voice unequivocally and strongly condemns the authoritarian violence endorsed by the central government, it sternly and democratically resists nationalistic discourse. We refuse to accept this binary as the choice we must face.

And in the same way we should cancel Brexit, assert our democratic values, heal our divisions, and end the xenophobic hostility that the referendum raised. In that way we can save the country we love, rather than let it be transformed into the plaything of a deranged and obsessive right.

A hard choice

I can't make up my mind.



For those not in the know, this was in the League Cup. Palace's league record this season is played 7, lost 7, goals for 0, goals against 17. Well you have to laugh - I suppose.

Health and the nation

During the past few months, indirectly, I have had need to be extremely grateful to the NHS. In fact, over the last couple of years friends and family have made me too familiar with hospital wards and waiting rooms. I looked and saw the technology, the profound expertise and the sheer hard work all around me. I saw skilled people dedicated to saving the lives of my friends, solely because they, like me, are citizens of a civilised country. I know that anyone, whoever they are, can get the best help possible. This is what the Americans denigrate as "socialised medicine." And, my, are we lucky to have it.

Now read this article from Jonathan Lis. It's a brief summary of the risks posed to the NHS by Brexit. It's not that it could be suddenly dismantled, but it's more the worry of a long, slow erosion of the service as the result of pressures on resources, staffing, and funding. Lis picks up on some of the consequences of leaving the EU that are not as frequently mentioned too.

While remain campaigners stressed the risks to the NHS of reduced immigration and a diminished economy, few mentioned the €3.5bn supplied by the European Investment Bank to the NHS since 2001, or publicised the dangers to cancer patients of leaving the European Atomic Energy Community or the European Medicines Agency. The government, for its part, is so consumed with fire-fighting that it is neglecting to recognise the NHS for what it is: one of Brexit’s key issues, and potentially its most high-profile piece of collateral damage.

This is something that everyone, leaver or remainer, will experience at some point in their life; a service made worse for no good reason. Once again, I can only hope that someone stops this madness now.

In praise of pragmatism

I have just passed my 65th birthday. I'm officially an old age pensioner. This isn't a bad time to reflect on the most important division in modern British politics. Sure we are split by class, region, and by big geographical differences. But there is one thing that cuts through it all, something that is consistent within all classes, groups, and areas - it's age. Unlike people of my generation, the majority of young people are overwhelmingly in favour of being a member of the European Union and much more likely to vote Labour.

That would be cause for optimism from my point of view if it weren't for the fact that we have a Conservative government hell bent on leaving the EU. They have their dream too. It's of an independent, ethnically homogenous Britain, one in true Trumpian rhetoric that has been restored to greatness. The young look at this and don't see utopia; they see a prison. Nostalgic Britain is somewhere to escape from. Europe offers liberation. Unconcerned by immigration, freedom of movement promises them a continent of opportunity that Brexit removes.

The irony is that 2016 is probably one of the last years where it would be possible for leave to win a referendum, and then only narrowly. The demographics are overwhelmingly against the possibility of Brexit in the future. Yet the future is to be bound in perpetuity by the present.

Both generations are dreamers. But the blissful vision of one generation is the nightmare of the other.

Dream is the right term too. I saw recently one of those little articles that provide a condensed version of an idea for easy digestion. This one contrasted the difference between opinion and evidence. You could just as easily substitute the terms the ideal and the material, fiction and reality, belief and truth, abstract and concrete. The problem is that opinion can be held contrary to evidence and be bloody difficult to shift. Brexit is an example.

Brexit is a fantasy divorced from reality. Eurosceptics spent forty odd years arguing that we should leave the European Union. They never bothered to ask the question about how it could be done, or research the real consequences. No details, just wishful thinking and empty rhetoric, bolstered by a few comforting myths. The result is that they haven't a clue. In deciding to interpret a narrow majority as the "will of the people," and, by implication, to see the other half of the population as "enemies of the people," they now have to manage reality. And they can't. It's too difficult.

Now turn to the Labour Party. I should be feeling optimistic. But though the future looks assured, there is another problem. Youthful enthusiasm is directed towards another dream. They are lionising a rather mangy old lion. They are wrapped up in adoration of an elderly backbencher of minimal achievement and limited ability. He is adored as a symbol, not as reality. Like Brexit, Corbyn has become whatever his adherents wants him to be. This is also divorced from reality.

The biggest contradiction for the enthusiastic pro-EU Corbynista is that he is an old Bennite Euroscpetic. He has always been opposed to membership of the EU. And despite a carefully calculated ambiguity, the leadership is adamant that Britain is going to leave the European Union. What's more, he keeps repeating things about the single market that are simply untrue. Yet Labour hoovered up the votes of remainers. Image and reality are completely at odds with each other.

Let's get material. It's time to drag out that old, semi-forgotten word, pragmatism. It's been discarded because it became a euphemism for acceptance or inaction. In my book it means dealing with reality. And radical pragmatism was defined beautifully by Patrick Geddes: "the realizable best that can be made of the here and now, if we invoke and use all the resources available, physical, mental and moral."

A radically pragmatic approach to Brexit would be to abandon it. There are no material benefits. It would make us poorer and diminish our role in the world. Membership of the EU on the really advantageous terms we already have is the best option available. The political consequences of remaining and the loss of face it would entail are as nothing to the damage of leaving.

And beyond that, the realities that are eroding the Tory party and animating the young are the problems that face people in their everyday lives – housing, poverty (both in and out of work), low pay, rotten employment, insecurity, debt, and many others. How are we to deal with them? Not by creating some imaginary future, how are we to do it now, as quickly as possible, for everyone today? That's what would drive a radical pragmatic politics.

Because I am old, I remember earlier times. In 1978 the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm published an essay, The Forward March of Labour Halted? It was reissued in extended book form in 1981 after Margaret Thatcher's election victory. It has dated, but its significance was that it argued that British society had changed, the working class had fragmented, and Labour needed to respond to a different world. Its conclusion was that Labour needed to "formulate not only what we would want to do, but what can be done." Indeed. It's time to wake from the reverie and deal with complex reality, to value the contribution of experts, and to elevate practical knowledge over vague illusions. It won't be easy. It never is.

Silence

Sometimes golden, but sometimes due to difficult times.