Mission accomplished: déjà vu

It’s always a little sad to see someone who really can’t be expected to know better, take credit for completing a job when they’ve barely even started. Worse still, they may have started down the wrong route. A child, say, who carefully paints all the parts of his new model before assembling it, only to find they no longer fit together afterwards.

Or the US President who claims to have achieved his objective when he has achieved nothing – or, worse still, achieved the opposite of his intent.

Dubya in 2003

That was my first thought when I heard that Donald Trump had claimed ‘mission accomplished’ following the US-French-British missile strikes on Syria. It was exactly the same claim as made by Dubya Bush back in 2003, giving me a thoroughly dire sense of déjà vu. That followed the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Dubya clearly felt he’d achieved a major success, a view that looks jaded fifteen years on, with fighting still raging in the region and the only winners in Iraq being the West’s great bogeyman, Iran.

That didn’t stop Trump making the same claim for his missile strikes. And I suppose he was right in the most limited possible sense: he gave the world notice of his intention to use missiles against Syria, and he has indeed used missiles against Syria. If that was the extent of his mission – to demonstrate the military power at his disposal – then I suppose the mission was indeed accomplished.

Donald Trump in 2018

One might imagine, however, that such an action ought to deliver more than that, however. More than allow Trump a feel-good macho glow (Macron of France, too, I suppose, though whether May enjoys machismo it’s hard to say – but then, little surprises me about her any more). Generally, one would expect the use of massive military force to advance some cause or another, beyond the purely personal. 

Topple President Assad, maybe? 

End the suffering of Syrian civilians after seven years of civil war? 

At least ensure that chemical weapons would not be used against them again?

Maybe that last goal may be achieved, though I think it would take a brave man to assert it. We shall see. And even if it, it’s unclear to me that being killed or crippled is that much less unpleasant by artillery fire than by chemical weapons.

As for overthrowing Assad or ending the war, it would take a high degree of naivety to believe that the missile strikes will have achieved that much. Or even that bringing Assad down, however desirable in itself, would do any more in Syria’s current crisis than the equally attractive overthrow of Saddam did in Iraq.

Perhaps there’s one negative benefit the strikes have produced: they seem not to have destroyed any Russian equipment or inflicted any Russian casualties. That suggests that we may have avoided a third world war for now.

No. It’s hard to believe that these strikes have done anything very much, except persuade people in the west that, because something had to be done about the chemical attacks, it was legitimate to just about anything, which is what has now been done.

That may have made Trump, Macron and May feel better about themselves. Which I suppose is a benefit of sorts. Though they’re unlikely to have done anything for the Syrians or, indeed, for anyone in the West.

Still, Mission accomplished. Again. In some sense of the expression.

Celebrating the first anniversary of Britain's latest foot-shooting incident

It was fun being in Sweden at the beginning of this week. Friday was going to be a big day there: the midsummer celebration when everyone eats, drinks and makes merry. Those with the energy, the legs and the sense of rhythm will even go dancing around something like a maypole. An entertaining tradition.

Swedish midsummer dance. They have something to celebrate

In Britain, the same Friday represented something completely different. It’s the first anniversary of the latest occasion when Brits indulged their enthusiasm for another, equally longstanding but far less entertaining tradition: shooting themselves in the foot. That’s as in going all intransigent over the American colonies and losing them, deciding that the best thing to do with soldiers in world War One was charge them at machine guns (OK, I know we weren’t alone in indulging that particular folly) or, more recently, invading Iraq. There are plenty more examples.

The anniversary we’re celebrating today is for the decision that people like the Swedes are just too foreign for us and the best thing we could do is separate from them, by leaving the European Union. It’s becoming clear each passing day how bad that decision was. Many passing days, though: one of the great delusions of the debate over Brexit was the shortsighted view of the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, that even to vote to leave the EU would precipitate disaster.

It was always difficult with Cameron to know whether he was primarily clueless or mostly lazy. Personally, I’ve always wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and regard him as indolent, but I don’t disrespect the view of others who, less generously, see him as plain incompetent. He has, incidentally, had a worthy successor: I can’t quite work out whether Theresa May is completely out of her depth, or just completely out of touch with humanity.

The Cameron line that merely to vote for Brexit would be catastrophic was always nonsense. It was a shortcut to avoid having to explain the more complex truth of what Brexit would mean and, like so many shortcuts, it took us to the wrong place. The reality is that, like most economic phenomena, the effects of Brexit will take a long time to work their way through the system.

The quickest was the loss in value of the pound. At the time earnest Brexiters assured me that this would have no impact on inflation, since retailers would absorb the increase in prices. Sadly, inflation has gone ticking upwards, month by month, gradually but inexorably.

There was a lot of talk of how the EU needed Britain more than Britain needed the EU, and we would therefore have the whiphand in negotiations. But now that negotiations have finally started, itr’s Britain that’s making concessions.

The first concerned the principle that all matters would be negotiated as a package, so that, say, payments to the EU would be agreed at the same time as a trade deal for Britain. Now the sums to be paid will be discussed first and separately.

The second concession was on the fate of EU citizens resident in Britain. Theresa May is proposing that anyone who has lived here for five years will be granted the right to remain.

Don’t get me wrong. I welcome any move towards guaranteeing EU citizens’ rights. Indeed, I agree with the EU that Britain must go further. In the end, Britain will make further concessions because, contrary to Brexiter illusion, we are not in the driving seat.

That will disappoint the large numbers of Brexiters whose real motivation was that they simply didn’t like foreigners. They wanted to reduce immigration.

That’s a growing problem. The numbers of Central and Eastern European seasonal workers who come to pick British fruit and vegetables are seriously down. Some of our crops will rot in the fields. Why aren’t they coming? Britain is increasingly perceived as xenophobic, even racist. And indeed racist rhetoric was inflamed by the Brexit vote and, with terrorism adding fuel to the fire, hate crimes are on the rise. Besides, the falling pound makes it less interesting financially to work here.

Now this is how I expected Brexit to go. Not an explosion of disaster but a slow decline as departure from the trading bloc on our doorstep starts to strangle our economy. The knot is slowly tightening, and we haven’t even left the EU yet.

The Danish Finance Minister, Kristian Jensen, got it right. There are small nations, like Denmark, that know they’re small. And then there are small nations that haven’t realised yet. Too many Brits think the country is still a global player.

They’re in for an unpleasant shock. They think the US will come to our rescue? Hey, the US needs rescuing itself, with a President who makes foreign policy pronouncements only to see them contradicted by his own State Department.

They think Brexit will give them control back? It will give control over their lives back to the kind of government – Cameron’s – that got us into this mess and the kind – May’s – that seems intent on making it worse.

They think that left to our own devices we can attain a new prosperity? As Emmanuel Macron pointed out, it was Britain that was most intent on pursuing a brutal model of “liberal” economics. That means de-regulation for the super-wealthy, and erosion of wages for everyone else. Just what Brexit will deliver, continuing the seven years of Tory rule we’ve already had.

No, Britain isn’t destined to become a lion renewed, roaring on the world stage. Instead it’s chosen to be a classic third-world economy: a low-tax, low-pay, low-service marginalised economy. Self-shot in the foot, we stumble into the destiny to which May is leading us.

Ah, well. I’ll raise a glass tonight to my friends in Sweden. At least they’ll be having a good time, with something cheerful to celebrate.

Now the French too: looking for something new - or just saying none of the above

Another election. Another result. Another cry for change – or of uncertainty.

Back in May, his electorate handed Emmanuel Macron, a man with no previous experience of elective office, the top post available in French politics when they made him president. But that was only half the job. He had promised to transform the political environment, but without a parliamentary majority, he couldn’t legislate the changes necessary.

A month on, voters handed a majority to his party, a party that didn’t even exist sixteen months ago. While that majority wasn’t quite as huge as had been projected, it was nonetheless massive: his party, La République En Marche, took 319 out of 577 seats, a healthy majority; with its ally the Mouvement Démocratique, it controls 361.

Macron has the majority he needed

Two rival parties had dominated French politics for decades. The Conservative Républicains were reduced to 125 seats but the humiliation of the Socialist Party was more severe still, as it lost more than 200 seats, leaving it a rump with just 32.

In keeping with this mould-breaking, practically revolutionary change, most of Macron’s candidates were as fresh to politics as he was. The new MPs are academics or journalists or local activists – or in one notable case, a former bullfighter.

It’s hard to imagine a result that speaks more strongly of a thirst for change. France wants to renew its politics, breaking with the parties ruled the roost so long, and even with the people that ran them.

And yet, and yet. Only 43% of the electorate cast its votes, an exceptionally low turnout. Macron certainly won among the votes cast, and technically won because he’s emerged with the parliamentary majority he needed, but the popular majority went to those who sat on their hands.

Now my wife and I are French citizens. We gave up three hours on a Sunday some weeks ago, including an hour and a half in a queue that snaked around an entire block, to ensure Macron won the presidency. But there was urgency then: there was still a small chance that Marine le Pen might beat him from the far right.

This time we didn’t go, and not just out of laziness. There wasn’t the same pressure. It seemed a foregone conclusion that Macron would have his majority. Many others may have felt the same way as we did, which may account for the poor turnout.

That would feel like a possibly adequate explanation, were it not for one disturbing recent precedent: the British General Election.

That election was profoundly different from what happened in France. Far from seeing a new party come to power, it left the two main parties sharing a total of nearly 26 million votes, an unprecedented level, applying a debilitating squeeze on any minor parties. There’s nothing new or mould-breaking there – on the contrary, it’s a return to the post-World War 2 normality.

On the other hand, the only leader who improved his position in the election was Jeremy Corbyn at the head of the Labour Party. He presided over the biggest increase in Labour’s vote share since World War 2. He’s hardly a new man – he’s been a Member of Parliament for 34 years – but he represents a more radical kind of politics and, above all, a rejection of the austerity economics that has been the orthodoxy of government and business since 2010.

Paradoxically, in a reversion to the old, the election in Britain therefore also suggested a hankering for something new. In the same way as in France. And that takes us to the other key similarity of the two countries.

However much he may have advanced, Corbyn didn’t win. Theresa May’s Conservatives topped the poll; Labour came second. Neither won a majority: May had one but lost it at this very election, when her aim was to extend it. Corbyn advanced but nothing like far enough.

May came first but the electorate refused her the mandate she wanted. I’ve argued before that this was a case of choosing “none of the above”. Now that a majority of the French seem to have made the same choice, don’t we have to conclude that alongside the hankering for something different, there is also a terrible lassitude, a paralysing indifference emerging in our electorates?

Now we have to see what gets built on these foundations. Macron needs to deliver on his promises. Corbyn needs to win next time.

Then we’ll see whether the thirst for change prevails, leading where we might hope, or whether the rejection of all politics wins the day – and opens the door to something far worse.

Pounding the pavements before the poll

General Election time. 

When the notion of “foot soldier” truly comes into its own. It’s the time when we of the Labour Party infantry tramp from door to door around the Luton South constituency trying to persuade voters to re-elect our Labour Member in the last Parliament, Gavin Shuker. With, I’m glad to say, the presence and hard work of the candidate, not above being a foot soldier himself.

Preparing to go door-knocking in Luton South
with the candidate third from left

Far more conspicuously absent from these canvassing parties are the people who spent a small sum to join the party and elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. It’s as if they felt that having achieved that aim, they need do no more, their work was done and they could now sit back and watch the triumphal entry of their man into 10 Downing Street. Their approach does have one benefit at least: they don’t have to suffer the ignominy of hearing what ordinary Labour voters – in many cases, former Labour voters – think of their choice.

One of the more colourful summaries was given me by the man who told me, “we need a Prime Minister with balls. Theresa May has them. Corbyn doesn’t.”

A more strictly political view was that of the man who said he couldn’t “begin to imagine putting Corbyn up against world leaders”. I could see his point: sending Corbyn to bat for us against Putin, say, seems a bit like calling on the boy scouts to defend the nation against Hitler’s Wehrmacht. What would he do? Suggest Vladimir join him to settle our differences over a cup of tea and a slice of cake, perhaps down at the allotment? He’d probably take the polonium Vladimir was pressing on him as a new kind of artificial sweetener.

But my problem was that I couldn’t see how we’d be any better off with the admittedly more forceful Theresa May fighting our corner out there. If all that force, all that drive, all that determination is only used to get us to the front of the queue to lick Donald Trump’s boots, I think I’d prefer the tea and cake approach.

As it happens, I don’t imagine this voter would have backed us this time anyway. He wants a hard Brexit. He’s in the business of selling planes to European clients and is frustrated with all the bureaucracy the European Union puts in his way. I didn’t ask him how he thought the bureaucracy would be any less when he’s selling from outside to an EU nation still bound, from outside. It seemed unfair to point out so obvious a flaw to someone so fervently persuaded of his stance.

In any case, it’s our job to be invariably polite to the voters, and it seems discourteous to make people aware of the incoherence of their arguments.

I’ve yet to meet a voter who has decided to back us because Corbyn is leader. However, this morning we did meet a Corbyn fan whose admiration for our leader has convinced her to not back us. “Shuker’s too right wing,” she maintained, “and he opposed Corbyn, who I’m really keen on, so I can’t vote for him.”

Again, one doesn’t want to point out obvious inconsistencies, so we didn’t tell her that it would be hard for Corbyn to become Prime Minister if people didn’t elect MPs from his party.

As it happens, her position seemed of a piece with the left-leaning Americans who refused to back Hillary against Trump, and so got Trump, or the French supporters of Mélenchon who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Macron against Le Pen, boosting her chances. It’s a hard-left attitude which likes to sit on its hands if it can’t get exactly what it wants, and thereby helps the hard right in its unremitting pursuit of autocratic power.

Well, I shall be going out canvassing again in the remaining weeks of the campaign. To be honest, I position myself to the left of Gavin Shuker and don’t see eye to eye with him on all questions. But I want him re-elected because no disagreement on detail undermines our broad agreement on principles, and above all because I find him honest, hard-working and committed to serving the interests of his constituents.

If that’s not sufficient for some of our Corbynites, I can’t help feeling that says a lot more about them than it does about him.

What links Soweto with Wembley; plus not letting evil prevail

What an iconic image the first multi-racial elections in South Africa left us. Do you remember the pictures of the queues snaking around the fields under the blazing sun for hours? Those who had been denied the right to vote turned out in millions to exercise it for the first time.

Voters queue to vote in the South African presidential election, 1994

Now I’ve lived a rather more restrained version of that experience myself.

There was a lot less sun. In fact, it was frankly cold, but this is an English May and you have to expect just about anything. It also didn’t take anything like as long: we waited an hour and a half, not the eight hours many South Africans had to hang around for back in 1994. But still, the queue was impressively long and gave a powerful sense of the commitment many feel to their rights.

The setting was a French school, oddly called the ‘Lycée Winston Churchill’, in Wembley, an outer suburb of North London, most famous as the home of the English national football stadium. The occasion: the second round of the French presidential election, pitting Emmanuel Macron against Marine le Pen.

As I hold French citizenship as well as British (a bit of a bolthole, that, against Brexit), I was entitled to vote. I went with my wife (French from birth) and another French friend.

We were there because we believe in the principle, often and probably incorrectly attributed to Edmund Burke, that “for evil to prevail, it is sufficient that good men do nothing”. Sitting on your hands is to do nothing. And a victory for the hard-right Le Pen would have given us a nasty object lesson in what it means to see evil prevail.

This makes it a little surprising that many on the left were calling for their supporters to abstain. They didn’t particularly like Macron so they preferred not to vote at all. It’s quite a common view – many on the left refused to back Hillary Clinton in the US, for example, and many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain believe that Labour has to retain him as leader because he’s “right” (or rather “left, therefore right”), which makes him preferable to someone who might actually win.

Sadly, we’ve seen the consequences of that kind of view. In the US, you get Trump. In Britain, you get May – not as dire as Trump, but she’s going to inflict a great deal of pain nonetheless.

Well, we wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t happen in France. So we travelled three-quarters of an hour each way and queued for an hour and a half to make sure there would be at least three more Macron votes in the count.

We queue to vote in the French presidential election, 2017

We did that with pride. It was good to be in that crowd. In the first round, French voters in Britain gave Le Pen just 2.9% as opposed to the 21.3% she notched up across all voters. Those who live in other countries are perhaps less keen on narrow nationalism, more open to others and to the free mixing of peoples. It felt good to be among them.

But it also felt good to be backing someone who could win an election. As he now has. In Britain, I’m campaigning for my local MP who faces a tough re-election challenge. I very much hope he’ll get back in, as he’s likeable as well as being honest, hard-working and competent. And, though it’s going to be a hard fight, he has a chance.

The same, sadly, can’t be said for our party leader. He doesn’t stand a chance in hell. That means it’s damage limitation all the way.

Macron, France's youngest president, will do less good than many will have hoped. He’ll even do some harm. Overall, he will surely disappoint, as Tony Blair did. But at least he can do some good, again just like Blair. After all, you can do nothing at all if you lose, however good your intentions. Macron and Blair won and if their achievements belie our hopes, at least they got into a position to achieve something.

In any case, the three of us in that Wembley queue will know one thing at any rate: that we can be counted among the good men (and women) who, by doing something and not sitting on our hands, prevented a far worse evil prevailing.

Left and right: opposite wings or the meeting point of a circle?

“Any delay in the ranks of the left exposes us, at the very least, to a further advance by the far right, which will further reduce the social and political strength of the left in the parliamentary elections.”

That was French Socialist Party politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2002, the first time the far right National Front saw its candidate, Jean-Marie le Pen, win a place in a run-off election for President.

In 2017, no longer in the Socialist Party, Mélechon took a stance on the far left of French politics and came fourth in the first round of the Presidential election, with a respectable but insufficient 19.5% of the votes cast. Once again, the far right is through to the runoff – in this case represented by le Pen’s daughter, Marine. But, amazing to relate, Mr Mélenchon seems to have forgotten his wise words of 2002 about the damage of delay, preferring indeed to delay day after day instead of coming out in favour of the centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron, front-runner in the first round and now the only candidate able to block “a further advance by the far right”.

Now, why might that be? Could it perhaps have something to do with the sense that rather a lot of Mélenchon’s voters might prefer to go with the hard right in the second round, than with the soft left? And that Mélenchon would rather go along with that than lose contact with a voter base he rather values?

Call me cynical if you like, but that’s what I think is going on. There is in the hard left a holier-than-thou attitude which claims that it’s more principled and honest than the rest of us, but it’s capable of being just as opportunistic and evasive as, say, a Blair or a Putin.

At a deeper level, there is also a deeper link between far left and far right. Both are far out. They like to reason in terms of simple, pure solutions to complex problems, which avoid any of the complexities and messiness of reality. Compromise? That only dilutes the purity of our principles. Instead you end up defending a maximalist policy which, on the left, can lead you to defend the rights of the poor so hard in Venezuela that you bankrupt the country and starve your people. On the right, it leads to taking Britain out of the EU to escape from international control, only to leave it entirely dependent on the whims of the United States (or, worse still, the Trumpiverse).

There is today a taste for the simple and uncompromising. And it leads to the far right and far left both exerting greater appeal than they usually do – and almost interchangeably. Which is why voters can switch from Mélenchon to the National Front without apparent inconsistency.

Nor is this an exclusively French phenomenon. Kate Hoey, left-wing Labour MP for Vauxhall, has an enviable reputation for standing up for the rights of her hard-pressed, poor constituents. And yet, seduced by her enthusiastic dislike of the European Union, she found herself working shoulder to shoulder with Nigel Farage, then leader of UKIP, the British equivalent of the French National Front. They may have come to their common position from opposite directions but ended up, like two halves of a circle, meeting at a single point.

Hoey with her buddy, and supposed inveterate opponent, Farage

In the pursuit of fantasist, simple solutions, people can find themselves with strange bedfellows, though they approach them from different directions. Britain, sadly, is going to be living with the consequences of those fantasies for decades to come, struggling to find a role outside the EU. In France, on the other hand, if the defeat of Mélenchon is followed and confirmed by the defeat of the National Front, that fate may well be dodged.

At least for now.

Birds of a Brexit feather?

Birds of a feather flock together, they say. Or to put it the way the French do, tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Erdoğan, Trump and May. Birds of a feather? 

Germany has just elected a president of the centre-left, backed by both the two biggest parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and her coalition partners, the Social Democrats.

It was interesting to be in France last week. Support for the Conservative candidate for the presidential election in May has collapsed, following the publication of revelations about his use of nearly a million euros of public money to employ as political assistants his wife (who claims she did no work or him) and his children (who weren’t qualified for the work they were ostensibly asked to do. Meanwhile, the far-right candidate, Marine le Pen, may we have seen her support peak, at a shockingly high level – perhaps as high as 30% – but with a growing probability that she’ll struggle to raise it any higher and will therefore miss her chance at the presidency. This has raised hopes that  a moderate candidate of the centre left, Emmanuel Macron, may take the prize.

Following on from the defeat of the hard right candidate for the Austrian presidency, it begins to feel as though the unappetising xenophobic nationalism that has gripped Trump’s America and Brexit Britain may not after all be unstoppable. It may, indeed, already have reached its high-water mark.

There’s a glimmer of hope in the darkness, then. A sense that the infection that has been poisoning our societies can be resisted. A growing feeling, even, that Europe can pull together, stand united, and uphold the kind of values we thought, in pre-Trump days, were secure in the democracies.

Sadly, for those nations where the populist currents have already wreaked their toxic harm, that doesn’t make life any easier. Facing a cold, bleak world out there, Britain is having to go, cap in hand, to some dubious friends. In order that it can leave the EU and turns its back on the old friends who may soon be making a stand for the principles we previously believed Britons held dear.

Theresa May was proud to be the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump. That’s the man who, on grounds of security against terrorism, has been trying to exclude foreigners from seven countries which have never been the source of an attack on American soil. Foiled by the judiciary in his first attempt to impose that diktat, he has resorted to attacks on judges worthy of autocrats anywhere. He’s not keen on journalists who dare to criticise him either.

His visitor, it seems, isn’t that keen on them either. It has been revealed that May’s government is planning legislation against whistle-blowers that threatens them, and journalists who publish the information they provide, with prison. Another hallmark of the authoritarian regime.

Which leads neatly into the tale of May’s next foreign visit, to Turkey. There she called on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the strong man who hasn’t merely attacked the judiciary in words, but has dismissed 125,000 people from their jobs, including police and judges, on no better grounds than a denunciation by anonymous informers. Indeed, he even has 45,000 in gaol facing terrorist charges.

Trump and Erdogan. These are the people Brexit Britain has to hang out with.

Does that tell us what Britain’s becoming? Because that feels like a pretty dismal picture of the nation.