Seeing off the far right: France was just a start. And we need to stand up for the EU

What a relief to see the French Front National, which came so close to an electoral breakthrough last week, trounced again. It led the field in six of France’s twelve metropolitan regions in the first round of elections on 6 December; it was poised to win control of at least two of them. But then voters closed ranks, choosing one of the other parties even if it wasn’t the one they favoured, to keep the Front out of power.

A relief, but only for a brief reprieve. The FN took a record number of votes. Over 1 in 4 voters chose them. Its strength continues to increase, as it has over the last twenty years. 

The lesson is that we have still to find an effective argument against the far right. One that will actually attract votes, instead of simply providing a way to block one party by voting for another we like only a little less.

Seven French regions for the Centre Right
Five for the Socialists
No room for the Front National

The French picture is particularly telling: François Hollande, the current president, is a member of the Socialist Party but is straight out of the same mould as many right wing leaders – he’s an “Enarque”, a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) which trains leading civil servants. Presidents Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing were Enarques too. It seems that Nicolas Sarkozy, former and possibly future President, attended the equally prestigious “Sciences Po” political science school, though his poor English prevented him graduating. Presidents who actually graduated from the school include Georges Pompidou, François Mitterand and Jacques Chirac. So of the seven Presidents of the fifth republic, from Charles de Gaulle to François Hollande, three are Enarques, and four were at Sciences Po (Chirac straddles both). Only de Gaulle attended neither school, but then he was at Saint Cyr, the top military college, equivalent to West Point in the States or Sandhurst in Britain.

These institutions aren’t just prestigious, they’re exclusive. They train a self-serving elite distinct from the general population. It’s no wonder that there is an appetite among many for something different. If neither main party offers it, they may look for it in a toxic grouping of the far right such as the Front National.

Support for Trump in the States and UKIP in Britain reflect the same phenomenon.

It’s urgent to find an answer. Many are looking for one. Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian, for instance, suggested that we should “fight with fire.” He quoted Sunder Katwala of British Future, who criticised Labour’s previous leader Ed Miliband for trying to tell people:

…that what they were really concerned about when they talked about migration was jobs, housing and wages. “He couldn’t talk about the cultural bit,” about people’s fears at the pace of change in their towns and cities. Instead he left those fears “festering in the subconscious”, waiting to be addressed by Ukip.

I’m not quite sure what this implies. Should we go along with the fears UKIP stirs up? Should we back right wing calls for tougher limits on immigration? Should we demand such limits even though we know they can only be achieved if Britain leaves the European Union?

Or isn’t that just fighting xenophobia with more xenophobia?

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and once more a Member of Parliament, gave us some more anti-EU rhetoric today. He wants the EU to limit freedom of movement.

There are three fundamental freedoms of movement guaranteed by the EU: of capital, of goods and of labour. None of them can be abandoned by a nation wishing to remain in the Union.

So far, I’ve heard no one call for limitations on the first two. They principally serve the owners of capital and producers of products.

The third directly benefits workers. In the US, anyone who finds an opportunity in another part of the country, however distant, can travel to take it up, with no need to establish new residence or employment rights.

The EU covers under half the surface area of the US. But it’s only thanks to the Union that workers within it enjoy similar rights. So giving up freedom of movement would mean losing a key right.

Nor is it the only right the EU protects. Nothing prevented UK employers imposing back-breaking hours of work on employees, until the EU’s working hours directive came into force. 

David Cameron is trying to obtain from the EU the right to deny in-work benefits for four years. The move’s aimed at immigrants, but would also affect young British workers (those with under four years of employment.) The EU has, so far, rejected that proposal.

Many British workers enjoy rights protected by the EU. On the other hand, freedom of movement also gives EU migrants the right to settle and work in Britain. Limiting those rights would accommodate the cultural resistance to change Freedland mentions. Is that supposed to be worth the price of leaving the EU? Fundamental rights to avoid cultural discomfort?

Seriously?

It surely makes more sense to marshal arguments against these views. Show, in fact, that the xenophobes have got it wrong. That way we really would find a way to answer the groundswell of support for the right. Which we certainly won’t do by going along with its prejudices.

The French FN, Donald Trump and British UKIP show how urgent that is.

After an Earthquake, reconstruction

So now we’ve had the earthquake in Britain. UKIP topped the poll for the European elections. We know the worst, and we know its extent.

After an earthquake, the first task is rescue and recovery. But actually this one wasn’t that scary. It’s nasty to see success for a party which, while strenuously declaring itself to be neither racist nor homophobic, somehow keeps turning up spokespeople who express thoroughly racist and homophobic views. Nevertheless, these were elections for the European Parliament, and though UKIP ran a campaign claiming that 75% of our legislation is made in the EU, the reality is that power still remains in London.

Victory in a forum which exerts little power over us? It’s not as catastrophic as success in Westminster elections would have been.

So no rescue or recovery. Instead we move straight to the next phase: reconstruction. And there we certainly have a lot of work to do.

While UKIP came top, it took just over 2% more of the vote than Labour. The last time the elections were held, in 2009, Labour fared miserably; it has rebounded into a perfectly respectable position. It has even forced the Conservatives into third place. That’s the first time they’ve fallen so low in a national poll. Not the first time for ages, the first time ever, in their entire history.

All that’s good. What’s much more worrying is that Labour took under 1.5% more of the vote than the Conservatives. That’s far too anaemic a lead for an Opposition party a year out from a general election: there tends to be a swing back towards government in the last few months and Labour is perilously close to losing its lead.

It isn’t clear whether that wisdom remains true in the new environment created by UKIP, with four parties in contest. Or five, if we include the Greens, and we should, since they overtook the Liberal Democrats, junior partners in the present government, last week. 

Maybe there will be less of a resurgence of government popularity in these circumstances than in the past, but I don’t think Labour should rely on that faint hope. Especially as a lot of UKIP supporters in these elections are likely to return to backing the Conservatives next year.

No, reconstructing a politics in Britain based on simple liberalism and tolerance is going to depend on Labour taking positive action itself. And the big question is going to be, what sort of action?

Commentators are all saying that UKIP’s success is going to force the other parties to consider its agenda more seriously. And that agenda has just two points: anti-immigration and anti-EU. The Tories will find it easy to move closer to those positions, but what about Labour?

Ed Miliband's task for Labout
win support back from UKIP without adopting its positions

Adopting a similarly little-England and xenophobic stance would be wrong in itself. Labour stands for inclusiveness and for international collaboration. Coming down hard on immigrants and opposing the EU means betraying fundamental principles.

But in any case it would do Labour no good. If I’m going to vote for a party which has those views, why would I vote for one that has only adopted them recently and doesn’t really believe in them? I might as well vote for the real thing. No, Labour needs to do something much harder. It needs to take on the UKIP discourse and show how profoundly misguided it is.

It has to argue the case for the EU, a reformed EU by all means, but the EU all the same; and it has to argue the case for Europe’s open borders – surely one of the great extensions of human liberty the European experiment has given us. And also deeply necessary, at a time when we need immigration to shore up an ageing workforce.

Labour needs to argue that case with conviction to win back enough supporters from those tempted by UKIP to give it a 5 or 6 point lead. That would be sufficient. But it isn’t going to be easy.

Put off by the scale of the challenge? 

Marine le Pen: the French have a real, devastating earthquake

Think of our friends in France. There the elections were won by a Front National which even UKIP is shy of, because of its racism. And the Socialists, far from coming second, came a poor third, massively diminished by a weak and ineffective President Hollande.

At least reconstructing after our own earthquake is a much more manageable task.

A cup that doesn't cheer: why the French and the Americans can't make tea

It’s ghastly trying to drink tea in the US or France. They bring you a sorry offering of a cup of hot water, distinctly off the boil once it’s made it to your table, with a tea bag by the side. You dunk the bag in the water and what emerges is an insipid liquid which shares with tea only its colour, and even then in a paler shade.

The cup that cheers but never inebriates
Not that it's particularly cheerful in the US or France

It’s long been a theory of mine that, in the case of the States, the problem was caused by the Boston Tea Party of 1773. In that deplorable incident, a bunch of rebels – or possibly freedom fighters, depending on your point of view – dressed as ‘Indians’ (though the real one were just as much native Americans then as now, they weren’t called that at the time) boarded a tea clipper, broke open its chests and tossed the precious leaves into the chilly waters of Boston harbour. 

That pouring of tea into cold water seems to me to have been a traumatic moment in the development of the American psyche, leading to the nation’s inability to make tea properly to this day.

However, I’ve recently come to know – and enjoy enormously – the work of Edith Wharton. Don’t know her writing? The Age of Innocence is well worth reading. I strongly recommend it.

The early pages of The House of Mirth contain a description of tea making in New York at the turn of the twentieth century that can leave one in no doubt that they knew how to do it. It would seem that the loss of that ability is much more recent than I had believed.

I’m forced to conclude that something far more profound is at work here. Might it be that later waves of immigrants, from such coffee-drinking nations as Italy, left the country with a population that really didn’t understand tea and, what’s more, probably didn’t care?

Because if that’s the answer, I can understand the attitude. It may be true that attaching so much importance to how tea’s made might just be one of our national bad habits over here. Perhaps US indifference to how the stuff should be served is just a salutary hint to us to lighten up a bit.

That would explain the French too, of course. Teaching the British how to behave is very much a French national sport. Why, François Hollande was indulging in it yesterday, telling David Cameron that it was all very well for him to decide he wanted EU laws changed to suit him, but that didn’t mean the rest of Europe was going to go along with the idea. Least of all France.

Such a lot of symbolism riding on the cup that cheers. Just like back in Boston in 1773. It’s clearly much more than a mere beverage.

Enough of such deep thoughts. They’re enough to work up quite a thirst. Time for a cuppa, I reckon.

Just got to make sure the water’s piping hot before it hits the tea.

Sarin in Syria and toxic reactions

So France and Britain have unearthed evidence that the Syrian government has used the nerve agent Sarin against its own people.

That’s a shameful act, and it’s understandable that for the US as well as the French and British governments, it represents a red line they’ve said they won’t let the Assad regime cross. So their accusations, coming on top of the successful British and French move to lift the EU arms embargo on Syria, suggest there’s a head of steam building up to intervene against Assad. At the very least, the governments seem intent on supplying weapons to the rebels.

What’s impressive, at first glance at least, is that they’ve gone to the trouble to build up some evidence for their view before acting on it. The problem is they’re ignoring rather a lot of other evidence.

The first is that Western intelligence agencies don’t have a terribly good track record on information about inhumane weapons in the Middle East. We went down that road over Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and it didn’t lead anywhere we’d want to go again.

Qusair. Now recaptured by government forces.
Is this somewhere we really want to get sucked into?

The Iraq experience rather makes my second reason for reticence over renewed Western intervention in the region. All these Arab springs, they’ve had mixed results. Probably the one that has done best was Tunisia, and even there there’s plenty to question, not least the current trial of feminist activists. But whatever Tunisia achieved, it managed without Western involvement. On the other hand, where we have stuck our oar in, things have often gone pretty badly. 

In Libya the results have been at best patchy. And in Iraq, they were disastrous: at huge cost, above all in Iraqi lives, we’ve converted that country into a client state of Iran, the nation the West most loves to hate in that part of the world. Which presumably wasn’t the aim of the exercise.

It looks as though we could end up doing the same thing in Syria, by putting entirely the wrong people in power. Al Qaida elements are increasingly dominating the rebels. Certainly, we’d be supplying arms to the nice guys, but how could we prevent them sliding into the hands of the bad guys afterwards?

It’s hard to see how anyone can possibly still believe that getting involved in warfare around the Middle East will do the West the slightest good. That our governments still indulge that fallacy can only be a tribute to the power of their faith, or at least its capacity to overwhelm any aptitude they may have had for sober policy-making.

The faith in British and French government circles may not move mountains but it can shift arms and involve us in another debacle. Which has already started: the first, and dramatic, consequence of the ending of the EU arms embargo is that Russia has provided Assad with advanced anti-aircraft missiles. Emboldened, the regime has since recaptures Qusair, for a long time a major rebel stronghold. And the conflict now has the potential to become a proxy war between Russia and the West.

That the British government should be that wilfully blind is perhaps understandable: Britain has previous form on blundering into Middle East wars on misleading or even faked evidence. But the French? They had the good sense to stand out against the Iraq disaster. They got that one right, so why are they out there beating the drum with Britain this time? Such a disappointment, that Hollande fellow.

The British electorate is way ahead of its government in the good sense stakes. Polls suggest that three quarters are apparently opposed to our arming the rebels. Sadly, however, I remember the biggest ever demonstration in British history: two million people opposing intervention in Iraq. Blair took us in anyway.

We seem to be standing on a dangerous slope we could slip down to results as toxic as any nerve agent being used in Syria.  That would put us in danger of proving Hegel right: ‘What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.’

We fail to learn from our errors and condemn ourselves to repeating them. The saddest consequence is that the price will be paid first by the Syrian population, and then by our own.

The sword-waving politicians responsible will merely wipe the blood from their hands, write best-selling memoirs and make a fortune on the speaker circuit.

Salute to an unassuming woman

From time to time I come across a politician that it pains me not to be able to support. They display qualities of decency, moderation and good sense that excite my admiration, but like a young man gone astray, they get in with the wrong sort of people, and there you go: I can’t bring myself to vote for them.

For perfectly good reasons, such as nationality, I can’t vote in German elections, but if I could, it would certainly be for the Social Democrats. Next spring, I would cheerfully cast my vote for them, especially if they were led by Hannelore Kraft, currently Prime Minister of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine Westphalia. She’s made it absolutely clearly that she has no intention of swapping Düsseldorf, her state capital, for Berlin in a run for the Chancellorship, which I suppose means that there’s a chance, if applied to with sufficient enthusiasm by friends and supporters, that she’ll emerge as a candidate yet.

Hannelore: will she, won't she? She'd get in if she did.

I’d vote for her and the polls suggest she’d get in. But I’d still feel more than a little sorry for the outgoing Chancellor, Angela Merkel. 

She first won her way into my admiration by being utterly without charisma, the most overrated quality in a politician. It makes people fall for the entirely superficial features of a demagogue, who then gets the opportunity to do the appalling damage without anyone noticing until it’s too late. Take Ronald Reagan, who had charisma by the bagful, but who used his office to force through the bonfire of banking regulation which has led to the agonising crisis we’re going through today.

Yet Merkel, despite her lack of charisma, has charm. My favourite image of her is the dowdy figure celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by wandering into the crowd, shaking hands and sharing her joy with anybody who wanted to talk to her.

Angela mixing with the great and the humble.
Despite the weather

She also has a competence and a quiet confidence that I value far more in a leader than mere charisma. Generally, she has sailed a steady ship in her time as German Chancellor, and kept her country as the economic powerhouse of Europe in consequence.

Where she has shown less skill has been in her handling of the Eurozone crisis. Here she has suffered from the defects of her virtues: her steadiness and prudence transformed into wariness and obstinacy, so that when the situation required boldness and imagination, she chose over-cautious and blinkered devotion to retrenchment instead of investment.

In fact, she became a far more conservative figure than she had seemed in the past.

That led her to a major political error when she threw her weight behind Nicolas Sarkozy in his campaign to be re-elected President of France, and refused to meet his opponent, the eventual victor François Hollande. That compounded her error in economics, driving Greece, Spain and Italy deeper into recession by treating the policy of austerity as a rigid orthodoxy.

Since François Hollande’s election, however, she has begun to shift, principally under his prompting. Gradually she’s giving ground, she’s loosening the strings on the German purse, and giving the struggling economies of Southern Europe a better chance to emerge from their difficulties.

And that awakens my admiration for her again. Because she’s doing things that her successor would find extremely difficult.

With her hold on the Chancellorship is weakening, she must know she has only nine or ten months left to go. It looks as though she is going to use that time to implement policies she knows will be unpopular with the German people, who resent being expected to bankroll Europe. She’s taking hard decisions so the next government won’t have to.

If that’s what she’s doing, then it’s an act of extraordinary maturity in the exercise of power. Faced in Britain with a government rich in charisma but miserably lacking in either competence or compassion, I can’t help feeling Merkel’s qualities are infinitely preferable. And I think her legacy will be all the finer for them.

A voice to the voiceless

Curious how interesting conversation can be on Twitter despite the draconian limitations of its format.

Today an exchange with a fellow tweeter Diana Smith (@mulberrybush) introduced me to a remarkable video, Game's Over (@GamesOverFilm):




Ironically, Diane is based in Stafford where we used to live. A shame our paths didn’t cross at that time. Still, at least our 140-character exchanges are making up for it now.

What frightened me most about the government that took power in Britain in 2010 was not so much its delusions, its mendaciousness or even its incompetence, but its indifference to the plight of others.

‘Lack of compassion can quickly slip into cruelty, and this is going to be a cruel government,’ I told a friend who’d voted Tory.

‘Oh, come on,’ she replied, ‘you’re not giving them a chance. And how can they be worse than Gordon Brown?’

That comparison with Brown was striking. In trying to understand politics, I find myself increasingly using two sets of polar oppositions based on terms which might at first glance not seem that opposed: politician and statesman on the one hand, empathy and charisma on the other.

The essential task of a politician is to win office, and charisma helps enormously. David Cameron had bags of it, as did Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and they won the highest offices in their respective countries.

Gordon Brown, on the other hand, was a hopeless politician and short on charisma. He came across as boorish, churlish, uncouth. His defeat came in large part because voters chose charm over unsmiling competence.

For competence is what Brown had in spades. And he made up in empathy for what he lacked in charisma. He could understand the pain felt by people whose suffering he didn’t necessarily share.

The effect was striking. Within eighteen months of the most serious economic crisis the world had seen for a century, the Brown government had Britain back to growth with unemployment falling.

That’s statesmanship.

Cameron’s crew have taken us back into recession and sent unemployment climbing towards record heights, and it isn’t just incompetence. As Game's Over shows, the fundamental problem is that they don’t care.

Their charisma makes them articulate, even inspiring. Most of the people they are harming are tongue-tied or even voiceless.

A politics that matters, a politics that leads to justice will set as its key goal to give such people their voice. To speak for them when that’s necessary, but far better, to help them speak for themselves. For that we need statesmen not politicians and, while charisma will do no harm, what matters far more is empathy.

That’s why next week’s election in France is important. Sarkozy has panache  but no empathy and, as he’s shown over five years, precious little competence. His challenger, François Hollande, has made a virtue of his very ordinariness. What he has promised to do is to speak up for the powerless and he shows every sign of meaning it. 

Of course, like all leaders of the Centre-Left, he can disappoint too. He’s started talking about the need to limit immigration, a subject he’d studiously avoided previously. But then, you do have to get elected to do any good and, with 18% of the electorate voting for the far right, he presumably feels he owes them some concession.

Still, he’s ordinary and empathetic, and he’s up against charismatic and remorseless. And at the moment the polls are showing him on 55% to the incumbent’s 45%, with nearly a quarter of even the far right voters coming over to his side.

Maybe, just maybe, the French are showing us that our celebrity-obsessed societies are beginning to see through charisma and understand that a good politician can’t hold a candle to a real statesman.

We in Britain also have a leader of the opposition who’s having trouble connecting with the electorate, a Gordon Brown rather than a Nicolas Sarkozy. Though his Labour party sits on a comfortable lead over Cameron’s Tories, Ed Milliband is simply not setting the electorate alight. On the other hand, every time he speaks out he does so with increasing authority and he shows his ability to empathise with the marginalised, the underprivileged, the suffering.

A government led by such a man won’t be perfect, any more than a government led by Hollande would be, but it will at least aspire to social justice and decency. There’s no such aspiration today, as Game’s Over shows. A society which at least sets out to ensure none are excluded, all have a voice, is a better and healthier place for everyone to live, whether we are among today’s victims or not.

Mr Ordinary may win in France next Sunday. And if he does he will set an example for us on this side of the Channel.

One I hope we shall emulate at the earliest opportunity.

Rachida gets her claws out

One of my favourite politicians has to be the French Member of the European Parliament, Rachida Dati. Rachida is blessed with near film star good looks, and a pattern of behaviour that says film stars actually have nothing on her. That probably explains her perpetual air of being denied her proper due in life. 

How's that for winsome?

Formerly ‘keeper of the seals’ (Minister of Justice) she was so inept in the post that even Sarkozy, no slouch himself at incompetent government, had to fire her eventually. He instead posted her off to the European Parliament where she was overheard, in one of those glorious live mike incidents, complaining about how boring it was to be stuck in Strasbourg, a city where our family, presumably less demanding in our tastes, spent an excellent ten-year period.

She has now joined in the battle to return her erstwhile boss to the Elysée Palace for another five-year term. Recently the government launched a ‘Marshall Plan’ for the impoverished suburbs of France; the frontrunner to replace Sarkozy, the Socialist François Hollande, chose his words badly when he denounced the plan, suggesting that jobs and financial support were needed, not a reference to a ‘Marshall’ of whom the likely recipients of any aid would probably never have heard.

It might have been wiser of him not to appear to cast doubt on how much knowledge of history the people he was defending were likely to have. It does sound a little patronising from a member of France’s most highly-educated classes, someone who may be in the Socialist Party but is also a member of the nation’s elite.

Dati has waded into the fray denouncing Hollande for underestimating the education of the underprivilieged. ‘They go to school, Mr Hollande!’ she declaimed, ‘they follow the same history syllabus as your children, thank you very much.’ Clearly, she felt, no-one needed to be told who Marshall was.

Well, she may be right, but I did enjoy the fact that Agence France Presse, in its report on the spat, added a final paragraph: ‘The expression ‘Marshall Plan’ has been part of the political vocabulary for some years now. It refers to the plan put forward in 1947 by the American General George Marshall to provide economic assistance to European nations after the Second World War.’

And it wasn't just for the benefit of the underprivileged inhabitants of the tough suburbs that they wrote those words.

How to interest the public in the public interest

It is perhaps because politics tends to be so dull that we go to such lengths to remove all political content from it.

So its not the near-bankruptcy of Italy that puts us off Berlusconi, it’s his inclination to buy sexual favours from under-age girls. In Britain, what really interests us isn’t the fact that the (now former) Minister of Defence wanted to buy an aircraft carrier and leave it without aircraft, as an economy measure, it’s that he’s been flying his boyfriend – or perhaps his non-boyfriend – round the world with him, to make sure that they don’t even have to be separated by international summits.

Of course, the politicians have got smart to this as well. It’s been fascinating to watch what’s been happening in France. The opposition Socialist Party recently launched an exciting new initiative: a primary election to pick the candidate to stand against Sarkozy for the presidency next year (basically to select someone to take up the baton so lamentably dropped by Strauss-Kahn in a New York hotel room – more histories de cul as the French so colourfully express it).

‘Let’s consult the electorate,’ the Socialists claimed, and allowed anyone to vote, whether members of the party or not. So they presented the exercise as a major extension to democracy – but then they would, wouldn’t they? And I’m sure it was tremendously democratic. 

But there was a second benefit, too, which just goes to show that when you do things right, the gods smile on you. Because for months the media kept focusing on what the different candidates were seeing, about politics and – far more – about each other; they gave the Party conference much higher-profile coverage than usual; and, since the election, as is traditional in France, took place over two rounds, the Socialists had public interest up to near frenzy pitch not for just one Sunday, but for two in a row with the full week in between. What a great launch for François Hollande's drive for the Elysée Palace.

Now as an old and unredeemed marketing man, let me assure you that you just can’t buy that kind of publicity, even if you had the budget for it. All round Europe, other opposition parties must be green with envy. They’d give their eye-teeth to be treated that seriously by the media. It drove such minor matters as Sarkozy’s war in Libya or his eleventh-hour negotiations to try to save the euro right off the front pages.

Of course, he did his best to get back at them, reacting with precisely the kind of political initiative that one might expect: his wife produced the first child ever born to a sitting president in France. Good attempt, but sadly not enough by a long stroke. The French aren’t that impressed. After all, compared to a Socialist Party pulling off a marketing coup, it isn’t all that striking to learn that Sarko and Bruni knew how to produce a child. After all, they’d both done it before.

The happy expectant couple
But we knew she had it in her

And it’s all terribly sad, in a sense, because for the first time since I've heard of Sarkozy, he's just done something for which I can feel unqualified admiration. Yesterday he told David Cameron, Britain's Prime Minister and misfortune, that this might not be a bad time for him to stop moaning on about the Euro, which his country isn’t part of, and shut up.

Sarkozy telling anyone else to put a sock in it is all a bit pot and kettle, of course, but if the kettle really is black, who can reasonably criticise the pot for saying so?