A bad awakening on Friday the thirteenth

Friday the thirteenth. Unlucky for some. Unlucky for the British Labour Party. Above all unlucky for those the Labour Party is intended to protect.

A party goes into an election seeking a fourth successive victory, something that has only happened once previously since universal suffrage was introduced in Britain. It does it after nearly a decade of ruinous austerity leaving the nation unprotected by a police force starved of resources, and with its national health service struggling even to survive. It does it under the leadership of Boris Johnson, a man entirely exposed as a liar and a cheat.

Such a party with such a leader stands not a chance of success.

Boris Johnson: gloating, entitled, triumphant
The face of Britain for maybe five years, and maybe more

And yet Boris has not merely succeeded, he has emerged with a comfortable majority. Why? Because the forces arrayed against him were so utterly inept that they couldn’t win an election that was offered up to them on a platter.

The Liberal Democrat party had a new leader, Jo Swinson, who ran a lacklustre campaign which left her party with ten fewer seats at the end that it had had at the beginning. One of the seats lost was her own.

Outside parliament, the People’s Vote campaign, far from uniting all the forces favouring continued British membership of the European Union, fell into faction squabbling and purges. Other Remain organisations came up with recommendations for tactical voting to keep the Tories out which contradicted each other. An unedifying, chaotic babble of voices with no clear leadership.

The worst of all, though, was Labour, because it was the biggest party and therefore had the most responsibility.

Jeremy Corbyn consolidated his place in Labour history as the second worst leader the Party has had, behind only Ramsay MacDonald, its first Prime Minister, who betrayed everything it stood for by forming a coalition government with the Tories in 1931. His action reduced the party’s parliamentary presence to just 52.

Corbyn campaigned as a man of principle, but wouldn’t tell the electorate where he stood on the biggest question of his time, Brexit. Most suspected that he remained what he’d always been, a Brexiter, but he compounded that suspicion by making it clear that his refusal to say was designed to avoid alienating either Leave voters or Remainers. Since both sides knew he was equivocating in order to make them both think he was on their side, both sides turned against him.

Few voters understood what was honest about that kind electoral opportunism.

Equally, Corbyn failed to act on allegations of anti-Semitism in the party. At first, my sense was that he was just extremely indolent and couldn’t bring himself to move quickly on the charges that were brought. But then I realised that there were skeletons in his closet too. For instance, he wrote a foreword for the reissue of Imperialism: A Study by John Atkinson Hobson, in which he described the book as “brilliant”. The book talks about European finance being controlled “by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience,” which puts them “in a unique position to control the policy of nations”. No prizes for guessing which race Hobson meant.

Was that Corbyn’s problem in dealing with anti-Semitism? He might have had to take action against people expressing views like those he had endorsed in this foreword.

I don’t think many British voters care all that much about us Jews, either for or against. But they’re quick at identifying equivocation and evasion, and what Corbyn was doing over anti-Semitism was extremely dodgy. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism itself that killed him, it was the dodginess.

In the same way, it wasn’t the position he took over Brexit that damaged him, it was the sense that it wasn’t straight.

He compounded these strategic errors with tactical ones, starting with agreeing to the election being held on 12 December, to suit Boris Johnson’s timetable rather than his own. Corbyn, it strikes me, is not particularly bright and didn’t see that if Boris wanted the election now, that was an excellent reason for saying no. Instead, Corbyn went ahead and got creamed.

This is the second time we’ve been through this in my lifetime. The first was in 1983, the last occasion on which the hard left took control of Labour, and was reduced to its smallest parliamentary representation since 1935. That 1935 election, by the way, was significant because it was the first step back towards office by the Labour Party, after its catastrophe of 1931.

The election of 1983 was appalling, therefore. But it has been outdone by the 2019 one. In 1983, Labour emerged with 209 MPs, in 2019 with just 203. The 2019 election has taken over from 1983 as the worst for Labour since 1935.

The common theme Corbyn’s and the others’ dismal attempts to confront Boris was lack of leadership. None of them could rally the disparate forces opposed to his plans into a focused movement against him. Now he’s in with a vengeance, and his vengeance will be terrible.

He will, of course, now force Brexit through. Since it is not the fact of leaving the EU that will be hard or soft, but the nature of the trade agreement we negotiate or fail to negotiate with the EU, we are by no means yet safe from a hard Brexit.

Next will be the continued attacks on the poor and on public services. Boris will continue to promise greater investment in the police, in social care and in healthcare, but the reality will be otherwise. After a few years, the poor and many of the not-so-poor will be a great deal less well off than they are today.

What does all this mean? 

The fightback starts today.

The first step is to take back control of the Labour Party. Though Corbyn has said he will not lead Labour into another election, there are signs that some Corbynists at least will attempt to retain their dominance in the party. That may be less easy for them to do than they think. Some of the most zealous will certainly stick with the project but others may drift away, disappointed by the results. Others may simply realise that they would do better to work with other currents inside Labour, that a compromise that gives some of what they want is better than purity which gives them none of it.

Assuming that we can pull together to elect a leader who actually leads – and there are people who meet that requirement in Labour, such as Yvette Cooper or Keir Starmer – then a long slow process begins. After the crushing defeat of 1983, Labour lost two more elections before winning one. Can we win more quickly this time? Let’s hope so, but let’s remember what a long haul it was back then.

The other crucial step is to start the process of getting Britain back into the EU. That will certainly be a generational matter. I don’t expect to live long enough to see it myself, but it needs to be started. It is linked with the first step, since Labour has a crucial role to play in the process, and can’t while led by closeted Brexiters.

There are difficult times ahead. But difficulties aren’t overcome by not confronting them – Corbyn’s experience on Brexit and anti-Semitism shows that. A real leader will confront them, and real leadership is what we need.

Above all, we have to learn from our mistakes. We’ve been through it twice, in 1983 and 2019: the hard left takes charge and we’re thrashed in the subsequent election. That demonstrates the principle that if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you merely repeat them.

Two such routs were bad enough. Let’s make sure we don’t have a third.

Aftermath of a rout: calling time on Corbynism?

Question: what’s worse than a politician who sacrifices political principle to attract a few more votes?

Answer: a politician who sacrifices his principles and doesn’t even get those votes.

Despite being technically leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn has spent three years avoiding all leadership on Brexit, the biggest political question of his generation. He has, instead, tried to attract both sides of the debate, explaining that he wants Labour to be the party of both Leavers and Remainers. Apparently, he thinks he has only to express the wish for it to be so.

Unfortunately, and only Corbyn fans will be surprised by this discovery, attempting to please both sides of a bitter debate only puts both off.

Conservative collapse, Labour rout

Those who back Brexit have deserted Labour for the Brexit Party, which came top in last week’s elections to the European Parliament.

Those who oppose Brexit, and there are far more of them among Labour supporters, have abandoned Labour to vote for openly and actively anti-Brexit parties. Encouragingly, for those of us on the Remain side, though none of those parties individually outscored the Brexit Party, taken together they came well ahead of the total anti-EU vote, covering both that party and UKIP.

As for Labour, across the country it came third behind the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats.

Of course, Labour’s was not the worst performance of the night. The Conservative Party came fifth. It notched up the lowest popular vote it has had in its history, since its foundation in 1834. Both the big parties are in desperate trouble, with a mountain to climb to win back voter trust.

But, if Labour did less badly than the Conservatives, it nonetheless had a historically awful result.

The Labour Party first presented candidates in a national election in 1900. By 1910, at its fourth election, its share of the vote was struggling towards 10%. In 1920, its fifth campaign, it leaped forward to over 20%. It never fell below that level again until the European Election campaign of 2009. That was the tail end of the government led by Labour’s Gordon Brown. He was a good statesman, notably in the major steps he took towards eliminating child poverty, but he was a lousy politician, finding it hard to build empathy with voters. He achieved 15.2% of the popular vote in 2009 and was roundly, and rightly, criticised for that lamentable performance.

So it’s an extraordinary testimony to the Corbyn era that, in these most recent elections, he managed to reduce Labour’s proportion of the popular vote to an even lower level than Brown did: just 14.6%. The lowest level since 1910. It’s worse even than 1931, when Labour split after its leader, then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives. At the General Election that followed, Labour was reduced to 52 MPs, but it achieved over twice the percentage of the popular vote that Corbyn clocked up last week.

That’s not as impressive as the Conservatives, achieving their worst result in 185 years, but it’s still remarkable: Labour’s weakest performance for 119 years.

What makes this particularly ironic is that Corbyn’s supporters like to point to the increase in the popular vote Labour achieved under Corbyn in the General Election of 2017. It was the biggest increase since the end of the Second World War (though, and they sometimes seem to forget this, he didn’t actually win). His fans attribute that growth in support entirely to him.

I have to admit that I was surprised by the 2017 result. I had expected him to be crushingly defeated. Because I got it so wrong, a sense of shame kept me quiet at the time over what I believed had actually happened. Corbyn was still an unknown quantity that many felt offered them hope. He was also up against one of weakest campaigners I’ve ever seen, Theresa May, our soon to be ex-Prime Minister.

In addition, the Liberal Democrats had done themselves potentially irreparable damage by joining a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010, making them complicit in much of the harm inflicted on Britain in the name of austerity. At the time, I thought it might take a generation for them to come back.

Well, last week normal service resumed. Corbyn is no longer an unknown figure. Voters have seen him and they don’t like what they see. Weak and vacillating, he no longer inspires trust or hope. The damage I expected Corbyn to inflict in 2017 he did instead in 2019. Why, he even pulled off the extraordinary feat of making the Liberal Democrats electable again, only four years after the end of their coalition with the Conservatives, not twenty as I’d expected.

After nearly nine years of austerity, with millions dependent on charity to avoid hunger, the NHS withering for lack of investment, and the most vulnerable driven to despair by benefit cuts, Britain has never needed Labour in government more. But Corbynism has almost certainly left it unelectable.

Corbyn could and should go. He’s trying to change position to back a new referendum on Brexit, but after three years of resisting the proposal, will anyone think him sincere?

A leader who has failed as he has enjoys no right to cling on. The problem, however, is that Corbynistas still have a death-grip on the party. It’s not enough to part with Corbyn, if the Corbynistas can simply impose another of their inept favourite sons on Labour. It’s not clear how we do it, but we need to prise their fingers off Labour, or give up on it altogether.

Which would force anyone looking for a progressive alternative to turn to the Liberal Democrats. The Greens might be preferable, but the Lib Dems seem closest to power. On the other hand, they’re tainted by their association with the Conservatives. Can we trust them not to play the same trick on us again?

Well, we may not have much choice. If Corbynism continues to strangle Labour, what else can we do? We might just have to take our chance on Liberal Democracy.

Interesting times ahead.

And not in a good way.

A racially pure Britain

It’s been quite a month for racial awareness in Britain.

First we learned that the country’s first inhabitants were black. The first recognisably human people to populate the island, some 10,000 years ago, were dark-skinned, new research into so-called ‘Cheddar Man’ has shown. Bad news for those grieving for the ancient racial purity of the country. At least if they’re white.

Next we had the news that quite a while after Cheddar Man’s time, around 4500 years ago, a bunch of people showed up from the Continent. These were the ‘beaker people’, so-called because of finds of a distinctive style of pottery beakers with a flared lip. DNA analysis has shown that they’re distinctly different people. They turned up in Britain and the previous inhabitants simply vanished into the background, never to re-emerge.

One of Britain's original inhabitants, apparently

So the population of Britain was originally black. Those people were then supplanted by immigrants from Continental Europe, though what their colour was I don’t know: what I’m focusing on is that they came from what is now the EU.

What this means is that all those concerns about immigration that drive Brexiters are entirely misplaced. Especially when they target immigration from the European Union. We – and indeed they - are the immigrants from Europe. Without such immigration, few of us would be there.

The third piece of news that caught my attention in this context was the statement of Diane Abbott, the Shadow Home Secretary (Labour’s spokesperson on home affairs), that some use the term ‘immigration’ as a euphemism for ‘race’. Good for her for having said it. To be honest, the statement is so obvious that it really shouldn’t be necessary to say it, but it certainly is. There are far too many siren voices, particularly worried about the pro-Brexit sentiments of the North of England, who keep urging the rest of us to understand the ‘legitimate’ concerns in some communities about immigration.

Well, if it’s a euphemism for racism, as it all too often is, I see no reason at all to accommodate it.

In any case, these new findings of archaeologists should have left the xenophobes in disarray. Let’s say we do set out to get rid of the immigrants from our midst. One of the geneticists who worked on the Beaker people project reckons that “at least 90% of the ancestry of Britons was replaced by a group from the continent”. That would suggest something like 59 million would have to leave Britain.

Angela Merkel has been good about taking refugees in the past. Today, however, the pressure is on her to stop. And in any case – nearly 60 million? Could be tough.

Interestingly, that would leave a very small number of Britons on the island. It might be hard for them to keep basic services going – the schools, say, the hospitals, the trains. But then I suppose that’s the problem with people who want to create ethnically homogeneous nations: they don’t realise they’re cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

Still, they would at least have achieved their aim. The country would at last have shaken off the impact of 4500 years of immigration. It would be racially pure.

And, of course, black.

The funny thing about Trump and Brexit

As a student, I had the pleasure of attending the legendary London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s at a time when Ronnie Scott himself was still around to do his act during an interval in the music. One of the lines that has stuck in my mind was his dead pan reassurance to us all that, while we might not be the best audience in the world, we were certainly the worst.

There’s something about the Trump presidency that brings that back to mind. Whatever else he’s done, and to be honest he’s done precious little, he’s assured himself a place in the history books. Or at least, he will if there are still history books being written, and Trump doesn’t contrive to end civilisation (such as it is) in a conflagration followed by a nuclear winter triggered by his inability to find a peaceful way out of his confrontation with North Korea.

What is particularly outstanding about his presidency so far is that he’s clearly uncertain which party he belongs to. The leadership of the Republican Party was never happy with his candidacy, and aren’t particularly enamoured of his performance since entering the White House either. But just recently he seems, in his confusion, to have started to think he was a Democrat. Certainly, twice in two weeks he’s come to something like a deal with the Democratic leadership in Congress – Chuck Schumer, minority leader of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi, his opposite number in the House of Representatives.

Err... that's the Democratic leadership
You're supposed to be a Republican, Donald

Except that perhaps he hasn’t. That’s how exciting the Trump presidency’s proving. His tweets seemed to suggest at first that he hadn’t made a deal on steps concerning unauthorised immigrants who were brought to the US as children, later that he add. So who knows? Did he or didn’t he? We may discover in time.

The one thing certain is that he had Pelosi and Shumer around and not Paul Ryan from the House or Mitch McConnell from the Senate, the actual majority leaders, from the Republican party he ostensible represents. But does he really? See what I mean about exciting?

He may be suffering from a little confusion too. Making a deal with the minority party in Congress may sound like smart work, but that word “minority” isn’t without significance. To get things through Congress and into law requires a majority. For something to happen, it isn’t enough for Trump to decide that it should, even if he gets agreement from congenial company around honey sesame crispy beef.

The people you really have to sympathise with in all this chaos are the left-behind voters, mostly poor, who backed Trump as a way out of their desperate misfortune as well as a means of kicking the establishment that was letting them down. Whatever they were hoping for, Trump hasn’t provided it. If he’s now reaching out to the Democrats, then he’s working with the people who most excited their wrath.

Something similar is happening in Britain, where the government is in chaos over Brexit. As realisation grows of the damage likely to be inflicted on the economy by leaving the European Union, ministers are beginning to look for ways to soften the blow. Why, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (our Finance Minister) is even talking about a transitional period which would be indistinguishable from the status quo.

Now that’s not an approach likely to attract the many leave voters who chose Brexit, like Trump supporters, to give the establishment a kicking. They’ve found a spokesman in the form of Boris Johnson, a man whose main claim to celebrity has been principally based on an assiduously cultivated image as a buffoon. He is, however, currently moonlighting as Foreign Secretary. That’s an office to which he has brought the special gift of his buffoonery, to the amusement and sometimes anxiety of his opposite numbers in other countries.

To the surprise of his cabinet colleagues, he has chosen to sing the praises of Britain outside the EU, and the glorious future that awaits it. Why, he even repeated the claim, made during the referendum campaign, that Brexit would free up £350m a week that could be spent on the NHS. That particular piece of propaganda has been entirely discredited since, but that didn’t stop Johnson repeating it. Using it not just as part of his pro-Brexit campaign, but in support of the much important one that he hopes will take him to the Conservative leadership and number 10 in replacement of Theresa May. 

Sir David Norgrove, the head of the UK statistics authority, denounced the claim as "a clear misuse of official statistics".

We, like the Americans, seem to be living in a looking-glass world in which principle, consistency and certainly the truth, count for little. Britain and American seem to have reached a similar state, in response to the same frustration of the left-behind. But if Trump and Brexit have much in common, there is one big difference.

Americans need only wait until 2020 to get rid of Trump.

Britain will need a generation to realise what a mess it has made by leaving the EU and applying to join again.

Though, of course, if Trump manages to handle matters with North Korea as badly as he has so far, none of that may matter very much.

The Holy Grail and other aspirations. LIke European unity.

My wife points out that we face the possibility of moving, for the first time in our lives, to a place where we’ve chosen to live.

That doesn’t mean that we’ve always lived in places we dislike, just that in the past we’ve always moved to them because we’ve had to. It’s either been to take up a new job or, worse, to respond to having lost an old one. Buffeted through life by the whims of redundancy, a tedious fate.

That makes it a pleasure to be in Valencia, in Spain, where we hope to retire at some as yet distant date in the future. As it happens, it won’t just be the first place we’ll have moved to entirely voluntarily, it’ll also be the first place we’ll have chosen before we even knew it.

That’s why we’re out here now, discovering the place.

My first impressions have been excellent. I mean, the city has a town beach of golden sand a kilometre or two long. A beach inside the town? Hey, that alone gives it full marks right off the bat.

But then I discovered more. For instance, I had to make a visit to the cathedral as soon as I learned that it houses the holy grail. I kid you not: the holy grail. They call it the holy chalice but, hey, that’s what the grail is. The thing’s in a side chapel, in a display case, for all to see.

The hunt for the Holy Grail is over:
look no further than this display case in Valencia cathedral

Seems a real pity that no one told the Arthurian knights. Think of the trouble, the desperate quests, the lives truncated that might have been saved. All they had to do was hop on an Easyjet flight in the morning, pop into the Cathedral at lunchtime to take a look at the grail, and they’d have had time to spend the afternoon on the beach with an ice cream. Or a mojito if they preferred.

On the way to the cathedral, I was struck by another sight which was almost as moving. More, to be truthful, if you see things the way I do. The symbol of an aspiration almost as unattainable as the holy grail seemed to be until we found it hidden in plain sight.

Wandering up a Valencia street, I was struck by the sight of three flags flying from masts over the entrance to a court building.

Three Flags in Valencia

On the left was the flag of the country and city of Valencia. It consists of the Senyera, the banner of gold and red bars that marks Catalan nationhood. To it, Valencia adds a blue strip with gold leaves. The whole thing is a proud and attractive statement of local attachment.

In the middle was the flag of Spain, representing the national state to which modern Valencia belongs.

And to the right was the familiar pattern of gold stars on a blue ground of Europe, the free confederation of which Spain is a member, by its own will and with pride.

It struck me as an interesting collocation of local, national and supranational adherence. It says, my roots are here, but I realise I belong to a wider community and, through that community, to something beyond even the old and timeworn concept of the nation, source of so much needless conflict, pain and death down the centuries. Indeed, I belong to an evolving union designed to end all that bitterness and slowly, painfully build something better.

It was encouraging to see that the people of Valencia seem capable of reconciling those three levels of attachment. But it was a little disappointing to think that my own countrymen, back in England, are apparently unable to show that generosity and breadth of vision. They prefer the parochialism of Brexit over the internationalism of Europe.

Ah, well. It’s enough to drive you back to the beach and another mojito. It would have been fun to drink it out of a grail, of course, but hey, a glass will do. The setting and the drink itself are just as good, whatever the container.

A glass is perfectly appropriate to salute the generous courage I saw symbolised out here, and drown the memory of the petty-mindedness back home.

Brexit and Malaria and what they have in common

An old friend of mine was an intensive care specialist at a prestigious hospital. He told me of a case he once had to deal with, of a wealthy business man who went hunting in Africa every year. All had gone well for ten years but in the eleventh he’d returned suffering from malaria in an advanced state and spent several weeks in Intensive Care, much of the time close to death.

“But,” my friend asked him, “didn’t you take anti-malaria tablets?”

“Not this time.”

“You mean, you always had before, but just decided that this year you wouldn’t?”

“Yes,” replied the patient, “you see, I never had any trouble in the previous years, so I decided I didn’t need them this time.”

Christmas this year was fun. As well as many English friends and relatives, we also saw people from abroad, mostly from other countries of the EU. We took full advantage of the opportunity to do so since, in two or three years, it may become a great deal harder. 2016 has turned into the year of the wall: Trump won office in the States on a promise to build one, England and Wales voted to retreat behind new barriers to separate them from their nearest neighbours.

So, though fun Christmas was also poignant.

Still, I’m assured by Brexiteers, not least on Twitter, that I’m wrong to see Brexit as anything but an opportunity. It seems that it will give us the chance to strike some exciting new business deals.

Presumably that would be impressive deals, like the one that allows us to trade without customs or other barriers, with the world’s biggest trading block, embracing over 500 million people and three of the world’s top seven economies. That would be the rest of EU. The organisation to which we still belong, for the next two or three years, and which absorbs over half our total trade.

We can get out and strike some new deals with major economic powers. Like Bahrain, recently visited by Theresa May, and worth 0.3% of the EU’s Gross Domestic Product.

Bahrain: ideal post-Brexit partner, worth about 1/300th of the EU
And the labour practices are a great model for the times
when all those pesky EU regulations have been swept away

Still, she also went to India, whose GDP is about 44% of the size of the EU. Per head of population that’s only one-seventh of Germany, but let’s not get pedantic about matters of detail.

Anyway, we’ve been a member the European Union for 43 years, and we’ve barely notice the trade benefits. Why should we need them now?

It’s just like malaria tablets. Take them, and you never get malaria. And if you never get malaria, why bother to take the tablets?

And again: just what does 'Brexit means Brexit' mean?

“Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May and the backers of Britain leaving the European Union keep assuring us.

Like a lot of slogans, it’s pretty meaningless. Does it mean leaving the Single Market and Customs Union too? Or just the EU institutions themselves? A hard Brexit in other words, or a soft one? 

No one’s saying, least of all May.

Well, if she isn’t saying, she’s certainly been hinting of late. People voted to get control of immigration, she tells us, and I suspect she’s right. You can’t tell from the referendum results, because it wasn’t mentioned in the question, but listening to the conversations in the media or simply in the streets, it’s clear a great many people voted Leave to put an end to free movement of people into Britain. A great many of them are worried that Poles are taking their jobs, or they simply don’t like hearing Polish on the streets – “this is England and people should speak English”.

They forget that at one time a lot of Celts must have resented hearing Anglo-Saxon spoken in this same green and pleasant land. But then they probably wouldn’t care even if they did remember.

May has been playing to this particular group, with promises about control of immigration. That’s not possible without a hard Brexit including departure from the single market, since membership of market requires acceptance of freedom of movement of EU citizens. So, though she hasn’t made it completely explicit, for May it seems that “Brexit means hard Brexit”. That would leave Britain having to deal with the EU on the same terms as any other member of the World Trade Organisation, except for any more favourable terms it could extract by negotiation. Tough, considering that the EU is the world’s biggest trading bloc, and right on Britain’s doorstep.

Business isn’t keen on this option.

Still, the uncertainty continues. May isn’t committing herself to hard Brexit. She claims she’s playing her cards close to her chest and doesn’t want to reveal her negotiating stance to other EU leaders. Many of us have wondered whether it might be because she doesn’t have much of an idea what her stance is. Basically, she can’t get off the fence.

Well, yesterday we had the excellent news that car manufacturer Nissan would be building two more models at its plant in Sunderland, in North East England. That secures 7000 jobs in the plant itself and many others in the supply chain. It doesn’t just protect jobs in a region that desperately needs them, it provides new ones.

A matter for nothing but celebration.

However, it’s odd. The Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn made it clear this summer that Nissan wouldn’t be investing any further in its UK operations if it couldn’t guarantee continued easy access to the European Single Market.

Carlos Ghosn leaving Downing Street after meeting Theresa May

The British government has let it be known that it gave ‘assurances’ to Nissan before the new investments were announced. But, in typical May economical-with-information style, no one’s saying what those assurances were. Was it a guarantee that Britain would remain in the Single Market? A soft Brexit, in other words? That seems to contradict the position she’s been taking for several weeks. And does it depend on her? Doesn’t it require the agreement of the other EU states?

Alternatively, has May assured Nissan that Britain would either remain in the Single Market or compensate the car manufacturer for any financial loss it incurs as a result of leaving? That would be costly. She can’t offer such a deal to Nissan and not to other car makers. She can’t offer it to car makers and not to other exporters.

We continue to live in interesting times. There are a great many more questions than answers. And one of the more intriguing is still what on Earth does “Brexit means Brexit” really mean?

The first victim of Brexit was the Truth. Swiftly followed by Good Judgement

It’s become a commonplace to say that the campaign which led to Britain choosing to leave the European Union was riddled with lies.

It’s a cliché, but clichés aren't necessarily untrue. Both sides spouted a lot of rubish, making it one of the least edifying campaigns I’ve ever seen. Sadly, the flow of misleading claims hasn’t stopped and, indeed, looks likely to sweep us all the way to the Brexit door.

For a time, the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, wouldn’t say what kind of Brexit she favoured. The broad options are:

• soft Brexit: Britain remains in the European Single Market. That would minimise the negative impact of departure on the economy, but it would mean continuing to contribute to the EU budget and accepting EU regulation, including freedom of movement of EU citizens into this country, without having any further say in the matter
• hard Brexit: where Britain leaves the Single Market and accepts the cost, but takes back control over its legislation and its borders

Recently, May has begun to lean towards the hard Brexit option. She told the recent Conservative Party conference, “let’s state one thing loud and clear: we are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration all over again.”

That was a rare moment of honesty in the Brexit debate. It confirmed the glaring fact that a lot of those who voted for Brexit were actually interested in only one thing: how do we get Johnny Foreigner out of our green and pleasant land?

Apart from that glimpse of truth, the continuing debate seems mostly drowned in falsehood or ignorance.

The most glaring deficiency of the vote was that it answered only one question: should we stay in the EU or leave? It’s one thing to vote to leave, but there was no way of specifying what kind of Brexit you wanted. Hard or soft? No one said because there was nowhere to say it.

To call for a second referendum once we know the actual terms proposed is, however, to be considered a traitor to the democratic will of the electorate. It can lead to accusations on Twitter of refusing to accept the verdict of the “massive majority” in favour of Brexit. That was one explicit charge made against me, as part of an indictment of my allegedly anti-democratic views. 

A 52%–48% split? A massive majority?

Even to call for a parliamentary vote on the matter leads to virulent denunciation. And that’s quite curious, because it usually comes from people who clearly view themselves as patriots. And yet denying Parliament a vote strikes me as a fundamentally anti-British stance.

Our constitution doesn’t place sovereignty in the hands of the people. Unlike the US, we don’t have a founding document that opens with the words “we, the people.” In fact, we don’t have a document at all. We have an unwritten constitution which evolves, sometimes dramatically – votes for women, for instance – but mostly in a slow, barely noticeable way.

Sovereignty in Britain doesn’t reside with the people but with the Sovereign in Parliament. That’s why an essentially silly ritual continues to matter so much.

At the beginning of each parliamentary session, a man in tights – he holds the title ‘Black Rod’ – approaches the doors to the House of Commons, which are ritually slammed in his face. That underlines the principle that the Commons is under no obligation to admit the monarch or her representative. He then hammers on the door. My wife and I visited the place just a few days ago and were shown by our able guide and local Member of Parliament, the place where the wood has been worn away by the hammering.

Black rod hammers on the doors of the Commons

The members of the House of Commons then emerge and troop along the corridor to the House of Lords. There the Queen delivers a speech – wittily entitled “the Queen’s Speech” – in which she outlines her legislative plans for the coming session.

Thus it has been for centuries.

However, though the forms endure, the substance alters. The monarch now performs an essentially ceremonial role. Her speech is written for her by Ministers, in particular by the Prime Minister. She appoints the Prime Minister, but no one can hold that office who does not command a majority in the House of Commons. Indeed, Lord Salisbury who left office in 1902, was the last Prime Minister to have led a government from the House of Lords. These days, though some ministers may sit in the Lords, the great offices are held by members of the Commons.

That means that sovereignty, while apparently unchanged, is in face exercised by the elected representatives of the people. There are still some matters of royal prerogative, but even there the sovereign’s supreme authority is actually exercised by her ministers acting in her name. In any case, their scope is being constantly reduced. For instance, after the debacle in Iraq, Parliament took to itself the authority to decide whether the nation should go to war, previously exercised by Ministers in the name of the Queen.

The evolution doesn’t stop. It feels to me that there is a big step coming, perhaps in a still relatively remote future: the replacement of the House of Lords by an elected chamber. It’s been in the air for so long that I think it will inevitably occur. 

Eventually. As is the British way.

You may like or dislike this way of doing things, but it is the British way. Power flows from the Sovereign in Parliament, but the powers of the Sovereign are now exercised by Ministers, who are themselves Parliamentarians. So political authority belongs to Parliament in creative tension with those of its members who also happen to be members of the government.

There is no provision in this arrangement for a referendum. If one is held, it takes place by Act of Parliament. Its result has no binding force on Parliament. The only obligation on MPs to follow it is the moral consideration that to ignore it would probably be career-limiting. But they and they alone have the authority to decide how they react to it.

So when Brexiters proclaim their enthusiasm for returning control to our own institutions from Brussels, what they’re calling for is the return of power to Parliament. How, in simple consistency, can they then deny Parliament a say over that process?

The alternative is simply to leave it up to the government itself, free of parliamentary scrutiny – the kind of arrangement, now abandoned, that led to the Iraq invasion. Not terribly British, is it, to go back on the process of extending the power of elected representatives and return it to an Executive answerable to no one? I suspect a lot of Brexiters would reject the very idea as the kind of misguided thinking generally associated with that pitiable figure, Johnny Foreigner.

Trouble is, if truth was the first casualty of Brexit, good judgement was close behind.

Brexit: trying to tame the monster

George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer – the quaint British term for Finance Minister – who campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU and was unceremoniously dropped by his boss David Cameron’s successor as soon as she took over – has said that “Brexit won a majority. Hard Brexit did not.”

One of the other figures who disappeared in the wake of the vote was Michael Gove. He’s a real hard case. He betrayed his old friend David Cameron by campaigning for Brexit alongside his new friend Boris Johnson. He then betrayed Johnson by announcing he would stand against him for the Conservative Party leadership, in effect forcing him out of the contest. He then went on to be soundly trounced. By then he had become too toxic even for the Tories, which is pretty remarkable in that company. So he found himself relegated from any kind of office, cast so far into the outer darkness that he can’t even hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Even so, he’s managed to make his voice heard, and even he, unworthy he, has a point worth making:

George Osborne is absolutely right that a hard Brexit has no mandate and would be no answer to the problems Britain faces.

In fact, it would put jobs and livelihoods at risk by erecting new barriers to trade with Europe. As he said, being close to Europe despite the Brexit vote is vital for Britain’s future.

Our economic future depends on membership of the single market, while cooperation with Europe on security is crucial in the fight against terrorism and organised crime.

So even Gove, keen Brexiter though he was, is panicking now that he sees just what benefits Britain would be giving up. His solution is to stay in the single market.

Mike (top) wanted us out, George wanted us in
Now they have to try to stop the runaway train

I’m afraid that might cause some ructions. Because a great many of those who voted for Brexit did vote for a hard Brexit. They want out, and completely out. In particular, a great many of them want to get out of the EU to put an end to what they see as the sheer horror of immigration – they belong to the growing camp of xenophobes who are rounding on people they feel they can scapegoat, but don’t realise that it isn’t they who will gain from attaining their aims.

As I argued before.

Interestingly, even Theresa May, Cameron’s successor, who started off constantly repeating “Brexit means Brexit” (whatever that means) has been softening her tone on the single market recently. It really is possible that we shall see her government come up with an arrangement whereby Britain would remain in the single market despite leaving the EU.

That would be gloriously ironic. Because staying in the single market means accepting continued freedom of movement of people. Norway, which never joined the EU but is in the single market, has long had to accept that EU citizens can freely move there, live there, work there. It also means continuing to pay contributions to the EU budget. As Norway does. Finally, it means accepting EU regulations. As Norway does.

Leaving the EU in these conditions only means giving up any say in making regulations or setting budget levels. Amusingly, the Norwegians used to rely on Britain to speak up for them in EU deliberations. But who now will speak for us?

The Brexit backers who were voting for a hard Brexit won’t be at all happy about that state of affairs. Their dissatisfaction is more than likely to lead to tensions within the Brexit camp.

The statements by Osborne and Gove rather suggest that they’re trying to head them off. Gove and his mates let the Frankenstein monster out. Now they want to prevent his doing the damage they have at last learned to fear.

I don’t think they’ll succeed. Instead we shall simply see another phase in the debate, in which the Brexit camp itself splits, into the hard and soft trends. That only strengthens my conviction that we need another referendum. Not a second referendum on the EU, but a completely new referendum on what the alternative to the EU actually means.

You see, we know what the majority in the first referendum were against: they wanted no further part of the EU. But it didn’t make clear what they were for. And I suspect they won’t be able to agree on being for any one option.

In which case, given no satisfactory alternative to the EU – hey, why not decide to stay in after all?

A second vote on the EU: why not?

It’s not something to say too loud these days and, believe me, even I find it hard ever to express agreement with Tony Blair, but he’s right in what he says about the UK and Europe.

Certainly, if British voters change their mind, they have the right to a second vote. There’s nothing immoral or undemocratic about that. After all, the first vote was entirely negative: British voters opted to leave the EU, but they didn’t choose to go anywhere in particular. It’s one thing to decide you don’t like your job but, though some do it, it’s always struck me as a little imprudent to resign before you have a new one. How do you know it won’t be far worse?

The vote on 23 June was exactly like that. A small majority voted to leave the EU without expressing any preference on where to go next. That means that majority was made up of people with profoundly incompatible views about what they wanted to happen.

There are at least two major scenarios for what comes next, with many variations in detail between them.

The first is that we really, genuinely leave the EU. Completely. So that in our trade relations with the rest of the world – including the EU – we start from scratch, having to negotiate individual bilateral deals with no particular advantage as a starting point. A deal with China. A deal with the US. A deal with the EU. A deal with Ecuador, Bhutan, Burkina Faso. Our opening position is simply the rules of the World Trade Organisation, with no favourable arrangement with anyone in particular.

The second scenario is that we somehow manage to stay inside the Single Market. That means highly favourable trade terms with the EU – the same as we enjoy right now. That’s an option that comes with conditions, however. The most striking is that, unless Britain negotiates with consummate skill and the leaders of the other EU nations decide to be far more flexible than looks likely, we would have to accept freedom of movement of people and therefore unlimited rights for EU citizens to move here and work here.

The first of these options will, I suspect, look gloomy to a great many people who voted for Brexit. Britain will be paying for years, probably decades, for a decision to reset its trading relationships to zero.

As for the second, Theresa May as Prime Minister has made it clear that there can be no compromise over freedom of movement. By saying that, she endorses the xenophobia which, it’s becoming increasingly clear, was the main drive behind probably a large majority of the Leave voters: keep the foreigner out.

With the alternative to the EU clear, it’s possible the majority might crumble.

“You wanted out,” we’d in effect be saying, “but do you still that way if it means having to face the world alone and start making new deals with every single other nation, without the punch that either an Empire or EU membership gives?”

Or, alternatively, “You wanted out, but do you still feel happy with that arrangement if you have to accept the same terms as Norway, paying in the same contributions as we used to pay, with freedom of movement still in place, accepting all EU regulations but no longer having a voice over them?”

I wonder whether the majority would stand up faced with a stark realisation of what its choice really meant?

Good move on the anniversary of a declaration of war

Postscript It was good to see demonstrations taking place around Britain in favour of the EU, on 3 September – 77th anniversary of the declaration of war between Britain and Germany, for the second time in a generation, back in 1939. It’s worth remembering the depth of horror the EU was designed to avoid in the first place.

Lessons of Rio

So Britain has come second in the Olympics medals table.

Most of us Brits will take some pleasure in that result.

Letting the elation pass, though, and thinking about the symbolism of the games, gives a somewhat less satisfactory picture.

Iconic moment from the iconic athlete Mo Farah:
Completing the double double: 5000 and 10,000 metres in successive Olympics

First of all, what were taking so much delight in isn’t winning, it’s coming second. Winning would have meant beating the US, and no one even dreams of pulling that trick off. Not just in the Olympics, come to that. 

Secondly, while finishing ahead of China is satisfactory, it’s not entirely down to British prowess. A part of it reflects China’s underperformance. Again, that’s probably a reasonably accurate reflection of the world situation: between Britain and China, what’s being played out is a zero-sum game. What one gains is lost by the other, good performance here is mirrored by poor performance there. Similarly, in other fields, China’s growing economic and political might won’t pull Britain up with it, but lead to her decline.

Finally, add together the medal hauls of all the other EU nations – a post-Brexit EU, in effect – and they’d be way out in front, with 74 golds and 235 medals in total. In comparison, the US took 44 golds and 119 medals in all.

So, if they pull together, the European nations can beat the world – even the US. Only if they pull together.

The big lessons for the British? They could do it without us.

Still. We can enjoy the Olympics results for now. As long as we don’t think too hard about our post-Brexit future. In a world where we face the real China and the indomitable US. On our own.



Postscript: the talk today is of Mo Farah, who took gold in both the 5000 and 10,000 metre men's races, in both London and Rio, being given a knighthood. 

Sir Mohammed? Wouldn’t that be fabulous? A magnificent poke in the eye for all the xenophobes and Islamophobes: a Somali immigrant and devout Muslim winning a knighthood for the glory he brought Britain...

Kataryna and the sad tale of lost English opportunity

Kataryna left her home in central Poland to establish herself in Brussels because, she told us, she was “in love.”

The object of this love was a fellow Pole, and they married in Belgium. But it didn’t really take. Two or three years later she decided that it was time to call it a day: they had no kids, nothing that really tied them to each other, and there was no point in struggling on with a marriage that wasn’t going anywhere.

It was a hard decision for her to take. “I’d said for the rest of my life, and I meant for the rest of my life. It was difficult to change that.”

Her Catholic Polish upbringing was against it, but she went through with the divorce.

Her family clamoured for her to come back home. But she resisted.

“I had a life here. And I felt something was waiting to happen for me in Belgium, which wouldn’t back in Poland.”

Kataryna in her Polish bakery and café

So she stayed on. She works in a Polish bakery and café in the mornings – that’s where we met her – but, in term time, she teaches Polish to children in several schools in the Etterbeek district with its large population of Poles.

“And there really was something waiting to happen for me. I fell in love again, with a Belgian, and we’ve been married ten years. He’s 50, thirteen years older than me, and my friends all warned me that he would betray me and leave me. But he hasn’t, not yet. At least, I always feel he’s there behind me, supporting me, and I don’t feel he’s ever been unfaithful. Maybe I’m a fool, but that’s what I feel.”

It seems that she gets physically ill when he’s away, and then miraculously recovers when he returns. Apparently he also feels lonely and incomplete when he’s separated from Kataryna.

Her husband brought her a ready-made family of three. His first wife left him with all three soon after the birth of the last. Kataryna finds the youngest easy, since he has only known her. The other two were more problematic, especially the middle child, a girl now entering teenage.

“It isn’t simple,” she says.

We wished her well. I hope the marriage is as good, as solid as she believes it is. I hope life continues to treat her as well in Belgium as she feels it has so far.

Her café drew us to it on both days we were in the area. Our breakfast was all the more pleasant for listening to her story, although it was surprising that she should speak so openly to strangers. Surprising but also cordial and friendly.

Many more Poles will be able to follow in Kataryna’s footsteps if they wish. And Belgians will be able to go back in the other direction: as my wife and I know from several trips to Kraków, the flows are beginning to reverse, with other EU citizens seeking careers in Poland.

Sadly, in the future, neither Belgians nor Poles will find it as easy to choose to settle in England. Brexit will see to that. Equally, English people who might want to pursue a dream, or love, or just simply a job opportunity, elsewhere in Europe, will no longer find that an easy option.

In England, sadly, we’ve chosen to give up the right to free movement. A freedom, not an obligation. We gave it up so that we wouldn’t have to grant it to our neighbours. We have restricted ourselves in order not to be generous to others.

With her ready smile and open spirit, Kataryna was a living symbol of how valuable a liberty England has decided to abandon.

Voting Remain: it's about a lot more than a point or two on GDP

When German troops entered Alsace in Eastern France in 1940, the Gestapo arrested a great many potential opponents. One of these was the father of a friend of mine. The friend was four at the time and never saw his father again. Indeed, he never found out what had happened to him.

He told me this story soon after the introduction of the Euro, holding a Euro coin in his hand, with tears in his eyes, as he said, “I never thought I’d see the day when we had the same currency as them.”

A fluent German speaker living just a few kilometres from the border, he was a regular visitor to the other side of the Rhine. He had nothing but the most cordial feelings towards the erstwhile enemies of his country. In the Euro, he saw the embodiment of a determination that they would never be enemies again.

That’s why I find the EU debate in Britain today so lamentably trivial.

The EU isn’t about a few points on or off GDP, or the cost of holidays in continental Europe, or even whether immigration can be reduced or will rise still further. The EU and even the Euro, which is far more than merely a financial instrument, are about a political will to prefer peace over war and cooperation over conflict.

Just some coins – or something rather more significant?

That’s after a millennium and a half, since the end of the Roman Empire, regularly punctured by increasingly destructive wars.

How can we bear to make it about the accent of the woman serving us breakfast in a hotel? Or whether a Polski Sklep has opened where there used to be an Italian tailor’s? Or whether those young men cleaning our car so efficiently are Bulgarian rather than East Anglian?

That being said, there will naturally be economic consequences if we leave the EU. There would be short-term disruption. The currency is likely to fall. Unemployment would probably rise. Inward investment would fall. Tariff barriers might be erected, making it harder to export our goods to the Continent, and more expensive for us to buy imports from it.

None of this would spell catastrophe for Britain. The country would muddle through the short-term pain. It might be a little poorer, but it wouldn’t go under.

In the longer term, though, this is a world increasingly for the big battalions. China is a dominant power. India isn’t far behind. The US, smaller in population than either, remains the financial powerhouse. In such company, the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc with a population of half a billion, can hold its own. It will be taken seriously. Britain will not – and it may not even be Britain if, as seems likely, Scotland made a second and successful bid for independence, followed by re-entry to the EU.

Britain would be with the also-rans. The countries that get included in deals that others have negotiated. Brexiters often point to Norway as a successful European nation outside the EU. They fail to mention, or may not know, that Norway makes substantial contributions to the EU, as Britain does, and has to accept EU rules, including freedom of movement. That’s the price of trade with the EU.

So the difference between Norway and Britain is that Norway has no say in the rules it has to obey. Brexit will deprive Britain, or England-and-Wales, of its say too.

Naturally, England-and-Wales might decide not to accept EU regulations, and deal with the major economic powers alone. It could do that, but when China has to prioritise negotiations with the US, EU, Russia, India or England-and-Wales, it’s unlikely to be the minor off-shore European player that will preoccupy it most.

What this all means is that on its own, England-and-Wales would continue its decline from world power to minor island. We’ve been there before. 300 years ago a French visitor to England wrote a traveller’s book about the country: people knew little about this little, fog-shrouded island to the North West.

That was when England was on the way up, becoming a major economic power, not in its decline.

Far from spelling the end of British values, I therefore see in the European Union a way of preserving them within a structure that we can help make far more than the sum of its parts. The alternative, it seems to me, is continued descent into irrelevance. And relative poverty.

That’s my positive case for staying in the EU. 

There’s a negative case against Brexit too. It came out most clearly when Nigel Farage unveiled a new poster campaign on the theme “Breaking Point.” It showed a queue of people trying, apparently, to get into Britain, taking us to the point where we might break under the strain.

Nigel Farage showing off his poster

The photo is of Syrian refugees in Slovenia. None of them is ever likely to get anywhere near Britain. On the other hand, they’re all dark-skinned.

That makes explicit something semi-hidden inside the Brexit campaign. It draws a great deal of its strength not from economics, not from a commitment to Britain’s culture and its prospects for the future. Instead, it draws on something much uglier than that: a hatred of other people, of foreigners, above all, of other races.

As Brendan, husband of murdered MP Jo Cox, said, “She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.”

Hatred is poisonous. Even if there were a compelling argument for Brexit, that bitterness is enough to put me off. There’s a toxic drive behind the Leave campaign from which our nation, or any other nation, can only suffer.

That, more than anything, needs to be resisted.

Jo Cox, murdered pro-EU MP
Her husband launched an appeal for love, and against hatred.