Lockdown disappointment, or why the truth is sometimes hard to bear

What a terrible disappointment those of us who live near Valencia had to suffer on Friday night.

We’re near the end of the eighth week of our lockdown in Spain. Reputedly the toughest in Europe.

As it happens, we’re now in phase zero of lockdown relaxation. That means we’re allowed out for exercise once a day, at specific times, alone, or for walks with one other person from the same household. You can get your hair cut, though only with an appointment. Chlldren can go out with their parents and dog owners can walk their dogs, close to home. Otherwise, we’re only allowed out to shop for food or medication, or attend healthcare centres.

Phase 1 is due to start on Monday, 11 May. That would allow us to travel together by car, and to go anywhere within the three provinces that make up the Valencia Community. We could go to the mountains! Or to the sea!

Cafes and restaurants and more shops would also reopen, with strict social distancing restrictions, and groups of up to ten people could even get together.

It was something to look forward to. We felt sorry for the other Communities, in particular Catalonia, which had decided not to ask for permission to move to phase 1, because they didn’t feel their health situation warranted it yet. As we were astonished to discover that the Madrid Community had asked to transition, despite being the place worst hit. The Madrid director of Public Health even resigned in protest over the local government’s drive for further relaxation.

Then the lightning bolt struck.

Ultimately it was up to the Ministry of Health at national level to decide which areas might be allowed to move to phase 1 and which would have to wait. In the end, only 51% of Spanish residents will be making the transition. Madrid certainly won’t. But even within the Valencian Community, only a few smaller regions will be allowed to, but most won’t, including the city of Valencia itself. That covers us.

Why won’t we be allowed to move to the next phase?

The Health ministry has looked at the trends in infections and compared them with the number of general and intensive care unit beds in the hospitals. They’ve looked at testing and infection monitoring facilities. They’ve looked at a range of factors. Their conclusion? Like Madrid, we’re not yet ready to manage the risks, or to handle a resurgence of cases if one occurs.

That’s not a popular decision. A lot of anger, above all from the Conservative and hard right opposition, has been directed at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and the Left-leaning coalition government. Even with two parties, it’s in a minority in Parliament and has to depend on smaller groups to get its measures adopted.

That includes the continuation of the state of emergency that’s being used to impose the lockdown. They had the guts to back him when it came up for renewal this week.

Pedro Sánchez battling for his strategy in the Spanish Parliament

It’s not quite clear what his critics expect. Presumably they realise he doesn’t have a magic wand to end the pandemic. Have they perhaps decided that the economic damage of the lockdown isn’t worth the health benefit it’s delivered? That benefit has been considerable, with new cases and deaths both dropping steadily. So do the critics think that money matters more than lives?

The strategy seems to be working

They’re not alone. State after state in the US is opening up. Some, like Nebraska, are doing so at a time when it’s obviously extremely risky. Not only are infections and deaths in Nebraska not falling, they’re rising steeply. But the governor is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, who wants the economy going again to strength his chance of re-election, whatever the cost in lives.

Last week, I wrote about the way lies flourish when people choose to believe them.

The attacks on Sánchez show the reverse side of that same coin. When the truth is unpalatable, people prefer to reject it and attack the bearer of the message. In my earlier piece, I quoted the American journalist H L Mencken. Here’s another view of his which applies just as well outside the US:

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

The truth is that a lot of Spain isn’t ready to move from phase 0 to phase 1 of lockdown relaxation. At least, not without putting far too many lives at risk. Our disappointment is real, but we just have to swallow it.

Otherwise we simply run from the truth. And we belittle human life, like Pete Ricketts, the governor of Nebraska. A far more enlightened governor, Andrew Cuomo of New York, asked recently, “how much is a human life worth?”

Those backing Trump and Ricketts, or attacking Sánchez, probably won’t admit it, but I suspect their answer would be pretty low.

At least, for any life but their own.

If you want lies, you'll get liars

It’s a lazy, easy accusation against politicians to say they all lie. In reality, many politicians only lie because it works. They’ve understood that enough voters want to hear their lies and believe them, which makes the right lies, told well, the quickest way to get power and to hang on to it.

The American journalist and writer H L Mencken summed up the process quite neatly, starting with a point I’ve felt for a long time: politicians – perhaps I should say most politicians – have no special aptitude for government, only an aptitude for getting into government.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

I’m not sure about its never being possible to satisfy B without looting A. After all, if US healthcare hadn’t been allowed to keep festering, and the British NHS hadn’t been repeatedly hacked at, for the last ten years, wouldn’t both A and B have benefited from better services in our present pandemic?

Perhaps I’m a little less cynical than Mencken. Or am I just less realistic?

What interests me most, though, is Mencken’s reference to the process of finding people who “pant and pine” for a promise that is unlikely to be kept. Isn’t that the incentive for politicians to lie? Or, put it in other words, if you want politicians to lie to you, isn’t it likely that you’ll end up with lying politicians?

Vote for lies and you'll get liars

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are saddled, for now, with political leaders for whom the lie seems to be as natural as breathing. At the start of the Coronavirus crisis, the UK Prime Minister claimed that the NHS was fully prepared for any eventuality. As well as the impressive rate of growth of deaths generally in the UK, the number of deaths of healthcare workers denied adequate protective equipment, proves how entirely false that statement was. Johnson’s good at thanking front-line staff for their courage and selflessness, less good at protecting them.

Trump’s lies have been more barefaced still, and compounded by irresponsible ignorance. Having suggested that injecting disinfectant might protect against the virus, whereas it’s much more likely to kill you, he attempted on the following day, to pass off the comment as “sarcasm”. That’s even though hundreds of millions have been able to see him on TV making the remark without the slightest hint of sarcasm.

At least a large minority of Americans seem happy to maintain their trust in Trump despite his being caught repeatedly in easily exposed lies. In the UK, the position is worse: a majority of the electorate still believes in Johnson, however often he shows he can’t be trusted. They “pant and pine” to be told what they want to hear, especially in the atmosphere of fear that comes with a crisis,  when it’s comforting to believe government is looking after you,

Most recently, the UK government has made a number of unrealisable promises, just as Mencken warned. One was that the UK would be carrying out Coronavirus tests at a rate of 100,000 a day by the end of April. By the 29th, we had reached some 81,611, though that included people receiving more than one test in a day.

Then suddenly, on the 30th, the day of the deadline, the UK reached 122,347. A brilliant success. The Health Secretary manfully and modestly claimed it as a triumph not for himself, but for the Health Service. A matter for celebration, in any case.

Sadly, a lot of people, anxious to believe whatever they’re told by the government, will take that as gospel. But when we look at the detail, we see that those 122,347 tests actually only affected 73,000 people. Mark Twain once commented that:

Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” It shows that he did not know how to tell them.

Indeed. Most people understood that 100,000 target to mean 100,000 people tested, but if you do enough repeat tests on the same people, you can get there with just 73,000 people. Dexterous sleight of hand.

A still more curious fact is that 39,000 of those tests weren’t actually carried out on the 30th. They were sent to people who had ordered them. Who knows when the tests will be used? Or whether they’ll be used at all?

So people actually tested on the last day of the month may have been under 40,000.

That reminds me of one of the classic lies: “the cheque is in the post”.

How about “the test is in the post”?

Believe it if you want. But if you do, you’ll only be asking to be deceived again. And right now, a lot of people are dying.

BBC or Better Be Careful what you wish for

“Democracy,” wrote the American journalist and wit HL Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

There are times when some on the left seem convinced that they know what they want, and getting it good and hard might refocus their minds. Not that I’d like it to happen: we’d all suffer if they did.

What makes me say this is the internet meme I keep seeing, with a picture of Peter Falk as Columbo, making his trademark comment: “Excuse me sir… just one more thing” and then asking the (apparently) killer question, “why does the BBC never quiz the Tories about doubling the national debt to £1.9 trillion?”

Back in 2010, the Tories had promised that their austerity programme was a necessary evil to reduce the national debt. It is indeed ironic, at the very least, that after nearly a decade of the evil, the debt, far from being reduced, has doubled. So why doesn’t the BBC quiz the Tories about this sad state of affairs?

The BBC is primarily a news organisation. The doubled debt may be deplorable, but it isn’t news. It isn’t because nobody is quizzing the Tories about it. Not Labour, for instance. If Labour took up the issue in the current general election campaign, it would become newsworthy.

Why doesn’t Labour do that?

Because it would face a counter-attack demanding to know how it intends to reduce the debt. Since Labour is more concerned with some urgent spending commitments – on the NHS, Education and the Police, among many others – the last thing it wants to do is to paint itself into a corner as committed to debt-cutting.

The truth is that the national debt is not an issue in the election campaign. The NHS is. Education. The Police. Housing and homelessness. Workers’ rights. The issues, in fact, on which Labour is quizzing the Tories and on which the BBC also should.

That the BBC were planning to make life difficult for Boris Johnson on such matters is reflected in Johnson’s apparent reluctance to be interviewed by Andrew Neill. Jeremy Corbyn was badly mauled by Neill. Boris would doubtless prefer to be called gutless for ducking the same experience than run that risk. Not honourable or courageous, but wily.

If he doesn’t face the same inquisition as Corbyn did, that’s not the BBC’s fault. It’s Boris showing how deviously he plays the political game.

But back to the national debt. Let’s be clear: for instance, it would be wrong to think that the BBC doesn’t talk about it at all. It took me about three minutes to find a recent piece on the subject. It included a graph showing how the debt has climbed. It’s true that it shows £1.8tn rather than 1.9, but that seems to be down to its reasoning in terms of ‘net’ national debt. Don’t ask me what the difference is – at best I’d be guessing.

The BBC on rising national debt, in a piece from 6 November

It’s true, though, that the national debt isn’t front and centre of the BBC’s news coverage. We don’t get news bulletins telling us that “with the national debt at £1.9tn, double the level when the Tories came to power, rescue workers are still struggling to rescue survivors or recover bodies from the earthquakes in Albania”.

A TV channel that behaved in that way wouldn’t be providing news, it would be peddling propaganda. That’s the way things are in the US.

There’s nothing wrong with propaganda, as long as it doesn’t pretend to be news. This blog is propaganda, for a specific point of view (mine). If you don’t like it, that’s fine. There are plenty of others to choose from – the Skwawkbox on the left, for instance, or Guido Fawkes (or the Daily Mail) on the right. What those channels have in common is a lack of journalistic standards. We publish what we believe to be true, or in some cases would like to be true, without verification or evaluation.

If you’re more comfortable with reading material that confirms what you believe, stick to the propaganda. But I think we’d all do far better to have independent organisations publishing seriously checked material, which we can interpret as we wish. As C P Scott, the iconic editor of the Guardian put it, “Comment is free but facts are sacred”. I’d like to have my facts served up to me as accurately as possible. Then I’ll make up my mind.

The BBC doesn’t always get things right. But it does one hell of a lot better than most. For that, I’m hugely grateful.

By way of contrast, take a look at Hungary. It has just announced that it’s pulling out of the Eurovision competition. In itself, that’s hardly world-shattering. What makes the decision importance is its motivation: it’s undoubtedly because the Hungarian authorities see Eurovision as “too gay”. The Hungarian government is increasingly homophobic. There’s little doubt that’s why the nation has pulled out of the competition.

But the decision isn’t the government’s to take. It’s up to MTVA, the national TV network. The problem is, MTVA does what the government tells it to do.

See? What happens when you start demanding that your national broadcaster serves one side more than it currently is? There’s no guarantee it’ll support yours.

Knocking the BBC in Britain doesn’t necessarily serve the cause of the left. It’s far more likely to assist the hard right, which is just as critical of the organisation and far more powerful.

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it a lot harder than you wanted. And there may be nobody out there to cover your denunciations when that happens.

Forecasts: crystal balls or a load of balls?

It is said, often by me, that it was the Danish physicist Neils Bohr who quipped ‘it is very difficult to predict — especially the future’.

It seems he may have been quoting an old Danish proverb, but ancient proverb or physicist’s witticism, it’s certainly true. I know that myself. I predicted, back in 2017, that Jeremy Corbyn would lead Labour to a catastrophic defeat in the general election that year. In fact, after a huge surge in support, he managed to lead the party only to a narrow defeat.

Sometimes I’ve got things right. After campaigning around the town where I live, Luton, to stay in the European Union, I was left with the distinct impression that we were heading for defeat. And, indeed, the nation voted by a narrow margin, and Luton itself by a substantial one, to leave.

So now I don’t know what to predict. It’s hard to see just where we’re going today. Corbyn could still pull off the trick, sadly, of leading Labour to a rout – certainly, his position in the polls gives little grounds for optimism. And as for Brexit, it’s beginning to feel unstoppable and even that the worst possible option, departure from the EU with no deal, a so-called hard Brexit, is now the most likely outcome.

Still, both those disasters may in the end be avoided. Corbyn may pull off another remarkable escape from complete meltdown, and Britain may still find a way to keep its Brexit soft. It may even find a way to avoid one altogether, though that hardly seems probable right now. Still, I’ve been wrong before, and predictions being particularly challenging when they concern the future, it seems wiser to wait and see on both counts.

H L Mencken: not always likeable, but sometimes right —
and funny with it

Instead, let’s focus on someone who seems to have got a couple of ideas spot on, even if they were only verified long after his death. That’s H L Mencken, American journalist and writer of the early part of the last century. Not the most likeable of men, not even admirable, as he was in private at least a racist in general and in particular an anti-Semite, he did get a few things right. And expressed them with a certain wit which at least makes him fun to quote.

No great democrat – he was suspicious of a system that seemed to give people he regarded as inferior to him a say over their superiors – he did at least come up with one view which later history verified in the most powerful way:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Consider recent Republican presidents.

There was Reagan, almost certainly as we now know suffering from incipient Alzheimer’s while in the White House. He was followed by George Bush the first, who couldn’t put a whole sentence together. We thought him bad enough until we had his son, George Bush the second or simply Dubya – and boy, was he simple – who clearly entirely fulfilled Mencken’s prediction. So entirely out of touch with reality was he, that he allowed affairs to be run by Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in US history, and one of the more dangerous politicians of recent times: he is responsible, in particular, for the Iraq War, dragging the US with Blair’s Britain in its wake into a conflict that left thousands of soldiers dead and killed maybe as many as 600,000 civilians.

The Republicans seem to have developed an extraordinary skill: providing us with a series of presidents, each of them making us regret the one before, awful though he seemed to be at the time. Who would have thought that anyone could make Dubya look like a statesman, but isn’t that just what Donald Trump has done?

With the Republicans: downhill all the way
Making sure the White House is adorned by a downright moron

At any rate, either of the last two Republican occupants of the White House would have entirely fulfilled Mencken’s inspired prediction. And one could make a case for saying the same of Reagan and the elder Bush too.

Now it’s our turn, in Britain, to verify another of Mencken’s aphorisms.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

I always thought that was just a tad too condescending for my taste. Too much of a caricature to be true. But now we’ve had the Brexit vote.

The people have spoken. Brexit is coming. And today it looks like it’s going to be good and hard.

It’ll be interesting to see just how much the people who voted for it find they like it.

It isn’t Brexit. It’s the austerity, stupid

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

That was the American journalist H. L. Mencken in 1917. His words keep coming to mind whenever I hear some Brexiter explaining that it’s time for the debate to end, and for Britain simply to leave. ‘Out is out’ one told me recently, uninterested in the obvious truth that even to leave a room requires choosing a doorway (or possibly a window), and that it might be best to pick one that led somewhere one actually wanted to go.

An interesting new attitude has also developed on the so-called left. I say ‘so-called’ because the real left has always been internationalist, whereas this strange left, inside Britain’s Labour Party today, is dominated by Little-England thinking. Some even argue that it’s easier to bring in a socialist programme in a small country, like Britain, rather than a large collection of nations, like Europe.

Stalin argued the same for the Soviet Union. And it didn’t work for him either.

These Lexiters (left-wing Brexiters) argue that the argument about the EU is a distraction from the real questions. A recent internet piece points out that these are austerity, the NHS, benefits payments, housing, food banks and homelessness (I’m not sure how homelessness and housing are distinct issues but, hey, I didn’t compose this list).

Lexiter propaganda: they have a little list...

Within that list, the most important issue is austerity. It is at the root of the other problems. It is the policy of reducing government spending in order to stop piling up public debt.

It’s based on thinking appropriate to an ordinary household. If I were to start spending significantly less, I could build up some savings and certainly avoid debt. The same, austerity politicians believe, is true of government.

However, if I changed my spending rather than reducing it, I might do far better. If, for instance, I bought another house and rented it out, I might be out of pocket for a while but, once inflation had boosted the rent above the loan repayments for the house purchase, I would be making money. On top of that, in the long run, I would have not only the rental income, but a fully paid-for asset in the form of the house.

Governments, too, can make investments that yield returns. For instance, to take one of the other examples from the list, it could pay for a lot of new housing. That would help tackle the problem of homelessness. It would also boost employment, reducing dependence on benefits and food banks – other items on the list. It would cost money at first, but in time the tax paid by the building workers might well outstrip the cost of investment, and with rents coming in on top of those taxes (or indeed income from house sales), the public sector is more than likely to end up making money. That means it could invest in the NHS and even, in time, begin to pay down public debt.

This is a special instance of an economic phenomenon known since the eighteenth century: the paradox of thrift. Saving money reduces spending and therefore takes demand out of the economy, leading to its contraction. That means that the revenue of a government pursuing austerity falls and, if its reaction is to reduce spending further, it takes more demand out and accelerates a downward spiral.

But who’s right? Does austerity economics actually work or is it true that there’s a paradox of thrift?

When the Conservatives came to power, leading a coalition in 2010 and on their own since 2015, public debt stood at just over £1.2 trillion. Nine years on, it’s a little over £1.8 trillion.

A centrepiece of the Conservative campaign in 2010 was that it was iniquitous to burden future generations with paying so massive a debt. But, far from reducing the burden, the Tories’ austerity policies have massively increased it.

So it makes sense for Labour to campaign to reverse austerity. Simple.

Simple maybe. But it leaves out a massive element of difficulty, so obvious that it’s hard to believe its proponents have missed it. Reversing austerity would certainly improve our position in Britain, if we could do it from our present level.

But Brexit will increase unemployment and prices. The change would be relatively small if Brexit were soft, far larger following a hard Brexit. That would make the benign cycle, of investment leading to more work, leading to more revenue, far harder to launch.

As the Red Queen told Alice in Through the Looking Glass: 

... here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

The Brexit race:
run as fast as you can and you might just stand still

Brexit will take us into a looking-glass world where we have to run very fast just to get back to where are now. And a lot faster still to improve.

That’s why combatting Brexit isn’t a distraction from the campaign against austerity. It’s an essential component of it.

Catalonia: another simple solution sure to fail

In the early part of last century, the American commentator HL Mencken pointed out, “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong”.

In Spain, elements in the troubled region of Catalonia have felt for a long time that they would be better off outside the Spanish state.

I say ‘elements’ because a great many Catalans are far from convinced that this is the right solution for their region – even if it is, in fact, a nation. Many on the left, for instance, are concerned by a separatist movement they see as xenophobic and conservative; many in the centre of the political spectrum see themselves as Spanish as well as Catalan, feel there’s no contradiction between the two and believe Catalonia would enjoy a more secure future linked with the other Spanish regions than on its own.

So which side commands a majority of Catalan opinion?

Opinion polls are only worth so much, as we have learned to our cost in numerous elections around the world. Even so, they’re about the only indication we have of where an electorate’s view stands, outside an actual election. The Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió (Centre of Opinion Studies) is a body that is run by the Catalan regional government, so one wouldn’t expect it to be biased against the views of that government, and yet even it has found a majority against independence in every poll bar one since late 2014, and in three of the last four, including both polls carried out in 2017.

The regional government is currently held by nationalists. They have decided that they wanted a referendum on independence in the hope that it would endorse their separatist views. In response, the central government in Madrid made it clear that it regarded such a referendum as illegal and ordered the Catalan government not to hold it.

Let’s pause a moment at this point.

Here’s one approach the Madrid government could have taken. It could have announced that it would not regard any referendum result from Catalonia as binding. That would have laid down that in no circumstances would a vote for independence have had any effect on the central government or lead to any change in the law concerning Catalonia.

The referendum could have gone ahead. If the opinion polls had proved accurate, the result would have been a rejection of independence, massively discrediting the separatist movement. The regional government might have fallen; the question of independence would have been off the table for many years to come.

Had the referendum delivered a vote for independence, the Spanish government would simply have confirmed that it was non-binding. They would have faced a reinvigorated separatist movement but, having made their own position powerfully clear beforehand, they would have had a strong, pre-declared position from which to build a new view of the Catalan situation resulting from the vote.

That’s a complicated solution to a difficult problem. It leaves many issues undecided, requiring the government to come up with solutions later, pragmatically, in the light of circumstances. Instead, Spain decided that it wanted a well-known, neat and plausible solution.

So it opted for repression. It sent in the police. On the day of the referendum, they were shown battling with protestors in the streets, inflicting some serious injuries. The optics, as marketing people call them, were terrible: here were Spanish police, acting on orders of the Spanish government, using often violent power to prevent people voting.

When you’re acting in the name of democracy, that’s a pretty lousy image.

Unarmed civilians in fear of the police
Not a great advert for democracy

Governments seem to like resorting to the use of force. It can be domestic, as in Catalonia, or foreign, as in Iraq, Libya or Syria. It’s always a simple solution, easy to reach for, close to hand. And it usually ends in tears, as it did in Iraq, Libya or Syria.

In Catalonia, the bloodshed on the streets will have only one effect. It will unify and galvanise the opposition to Madrid. Those who opposed Catalan independence before, will come under increased pressure to change their view. If they refuse, they will be accused of treachery, of betraying the sacrifice of the dozens who suffered injury from police violence, all in the name of Catalan freedom. Some at least who opposed separatism, will change sides and back it.

Blood shed in Catalonia:
shameful behaviour to would-be voters, a boon to the separatists

In other words, from the point of view of the Madrid government, the situation will be as would have followed a referendum result backing independence. Or, rather, far worse: whatever the result, the separatists will claim they have been cheated and will draw additional strength from the powerful emotional cohesion that the spilling of blood gives to a cause.

The Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy chose a solution, police repression, that was well-known, neat and plausible.

And, as Mencken could have told him, wrong.

Brexit, good and hard

So it’s official: Brexit is to be hard, with the UK leaving the Single Market and European Customs Union, as well as the EU itself.

As Donald Tusk, Chairman of the EU Council of Ministers, points out this position, espoused by Theresa May in her speech of 17 January, is “more realistic” than some of the aspirations that had been voiced before. Staying in the Single Market would mean virtually not leaving the EU, while giving up any say in the way it’s governed. Staying in the Customs Union would probably entail accepting the continued applications of certain regulations on Britain that most Brexit voters abhorred.

Theresa May announcing that Brexit will be hard

A hard Brexit certainly seems closer to the wishes of the majority who voted to leave the EU last June.

That reminds me of H. L. Mencken’s view that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”.

Just because hard Brexit comes closest to the popular view doesn’t mean that people will enjoy the outcome. It’s the old business of being careful what you wish for. The pain that Brexiters will have inflicted on themselves – and, sadly, on the rest of us too – will only become apparent over the next few years, but it will be no less painful for that.

Friends tell me that Britain is in a strong position in international trade negotiations because we import so much: no one would want to imperil such a lucrative market. My view is that imports principally enrich us. They mean we can buy the goods we want, cheaply. Cheap clothes? Fresh produce throughout the year? Foreign cars or household goods at competitive prices? It would hurt British people far more than those of the producing countries to have to give them up.

Again, I’m told that we can negotiate trade deals with anyone in the world. That’s true. But if anyone thinks it would be easy, they might do well to think again.

The EU has been negotiating with the US over the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership since 2006. Negotiations are now set to continue until 2019 or 2020 at least. One of the holdups has been that many in Europe regard TTIP as deeply slanted against Europe, or even against the common people of both Europe and the US, in favour of multinational corporations.

If that is a problem for the EU with its population of 550 million, why should we assume that Britain would find it any easier?

After all, in 2003 Britain signed a new extradition treaty with the US. A freedom of information request from 2012 revealed there have been no extraditions of US citizens to the UK for offences committed in the US, though there have been cases of extradition the other way around. It’s hard to believe the treaty’s even-handed.

No doubt Britain can obtain a trade deal with the US. But quickly? And one that is equitable? That seems unlikely.

In any case, the EU isn’t simply about trade or economics, just as the Euro isn’t simply about a currency or finance. At root, they are measures designed to move towards collaboration instead of the centuries-old conflict between European nations, always damaging even when it didn’t explode into outright war. Nations that profit from trade with each other, and even more nations that even trade in a common currency, are far less likely to fall out.

Brexit says that Britain wants no part of this. It fears the consequences of remaining in the EU more than it values the benefits of peace and a slowly, painfully emerging collaboration that it embodies.

Why does it fear the EU so much?

Again, May made the answer clear. Britain insists on having control of its borders back. It must be able to limit immigration across the borders, including immigration from the EU. And yet, is there any serious evidence that such immigration is causing us harm?

The answer is clearly no. Proportionately fewer immigrants than native-born residents draw on benefits or are imprisoned for offences. The vast majority work, allowing services to keep functioning, and pay taxes that more than outweigh what it costs Britain to have them here.

So what’s the problem?

We’re up against the essential issue of xenophobia. There is an inherent tendency to dislike outsiders. Their food is different and it smells different. They speak another language, which I can’t understand, on streets that I regarded as my own. Worst of all, since they are often highly motivated individuals, they may work harder and better than I do. So they take what I felt was my job, work I regarded myself as entitled to, by birthright.

It’s true that they may also work for a lower wage which depresses the earning power of the native born. But that’s easily fixed, as Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party has pointed out: we have to put regulation in place to ensure that unscrupulous employers can’t use foreign labour to undercut domestic.

That measure wouldn’t mean leaving the EU. But a majority of Britons want to leave. Like the EU or the Euro, it seems the motivation isn’t economic but political: a dislike of foreigners as foreigners, particularly if the foreigner may be rather better at what they do.

That’s a base motive. Base motives seldom lead to good outcomes. Now we know that the outcome is going to be hard Brexit.

The people have voted. Seems they’re going to get what they chose. Good and hard.

Brexit: some of the people apparently fooled all of the time. And happy with it

“No one in this world,” H L Mencken claimed, “so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Mencken wasn’t particularly charitable and the judgement is harsh, but the Brexit vote and its consequences do seem to confirm his point. Or at least Lincoln’s view that you can fool some of the people, all of the time.

The pro-EU campaign was unfortunately led by a number of the weakest politicians we’ve had in Britain for decades: David Cameron and George Osborne for the Tories, Jeremy Corbyn for Labour. The first two came up with dire predictions of what would happen after a Brexit vote, which have naturally not been fulfilled – we’re still in the EU, for Pete’s sake, how could a disaster have happened already? And even when things start to slip, nothing happens that fast in economics. Even the crash of 2007-2008 took pretty much a year to develop fully.

As for Corbyn, he said practically nothing throughout the entire campaign, which at least has the merit of making him immune from being disproved by events.

On the other side of the fence, there were Labour figures such as Gisela Stuart MP, campaigning with the anti-immigrant lobby though she’s German-born herself, renegade Labourites like David Owen who split Labour in the eighties, the hard right like Nigel Farage of UKIP or nearly-as-hard right of the Conservative Party, such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (the latter so disloyal, to rebels and loyalists alike, that not even the Tories can stomach him in government any longer).

As the devil has the best songs, so the Brexiters had the best campaign. They travelled up and down the country in a battle bus emblazoned with slogans pledging that Brexit would save “£350 million a week” that could be used for the NHS.

Economical with the truth, effective for the campaign
The battle bus with the £350m claim

The figure was a lie and plenty of people pointed it out. But the lie took hold and many voters believed it and passed it on. Fool me once, they say, shame on you. The Leave campaigners certainly fooled enough people once to feel that shame, but clearly don’t: in fact, lying served them so well that they’re using the tactic again.

The campaign has morphed into “Change Britain” but the usual suspects are back: Gove, Johnson, Stuart and Owen are heading the organisation once more. What are they saying about that £350 million pledge?

It’s brilliant! They’re saying absolutely nothing at all. Dead silence. To admit it was a con trick would be out of the question and I didn’t expect it. But simply to pretend it never happened is pure George Orwell.

Instead they’re now offering to fund agriculture, poorer regions of the UK, scientific research and the universities out of savings generated by Brexit. In other words, to replace the funding that the EU currently provides and which we’d continue to receive if we didn’t leave.

There can be only one judgement of that pledge: it’s worth exactly the same as the one they made before. There’s zero chance of its ever being honoured. That’s not a problem, though: these are promises not intended to be fulfilled. They’re only intended to suck in the gullible again. And just watch: the gullible will lap them up.

Fool me twice, they say, shame on me. Plenty should feel that shame but just like the con artists themselves, they’ll know no shame. Because they don’t even know they’re being fooled.

Some of the people, you see. All of the time.

Trump, Corbyn and the power of faith

“Credo quia absurdum”, “I believe because it is absurd”, may sound like nonsense but it’s a powerful statement of faith.

Attributed to Tertullian, one of the earliest Christian authors, the phrase means that there’s no need for faith when it comes to the rational. I don’t need to believe that an unsupported weight will fall if I release it, because I can see it happen each time and have no reason to imagine that the next time the weight will hover or rise.

When it comes to the virgin birth, on the other hand, or the resurrection of the crucified Christ, I am dealing with events for which there is no rational explanation. Accepting them as true does require faith because I have no evidence for them. In terms day-to-day existence, they are absurd and therefore can only be believed or rejected, not proven or disproved.

That’s a perfectly legitimate stance, though it doesn’t happen to be mine. “I believe what can only be accepted by belief” sounds fine for anyone so inclined, but it works less well for those who prefer to know than to believe, and therefore seek evidence rather than faith. In any case, what I find essential is to limit belief to religious matters and not let it interfere with other domains where it can only be damaging. In particular, complete separation of faith from politics seems to me the only way to keep our forms of government sane.

That’s why I find it worrying that faith is entering our politics once more. That's the case in the US, for example. A huge minority – and I hope it remains a minority – seems convinced that Donald Trump is the way forward. They believe that it’s possible to build a 2000-mile wall and make it formidable enough to keep immigrants out; they even seem to believe that they can persuade the country just outside that wall, Mexico, to pay for it. They believe it, I presume, because it is absurd.

Essentially, at the back of Trump-mania is a specific form of belief: the worship of the messianic man, the providential figure without whom nothing can be achieved. Curiously, we have the same phenomenon in Britain, though not on the right of the political spectrum, but on the left. Here, the article of faith concerns Jeremy Corbyn, apparently believed by a great many Labour Party members – at least the new ones – to be the indispensable key to success. “If Jeremy can’t do it, no one can do it,” I saw on a poster at one of his rallies.

The venerable Corbyn
But is the veneration political or devout?

This is a belief based wholly on absurdity. There is simply no evidence at all that Corbyn is well-placed to realise any kind of Labour programme in office. In fact, all the evidence points the other way: he’s most unlikely ever to form a government.

His supporters regularly tell me about the by-elections Labour has won, with increased majorities, since he has been leader. They simply ignore that Ed Milliband, the previous leader, had exactly the same track record: actually, one more such by-election win (five rather than four), lulling the party into a false sense of confidence, shattered when we were badly defeated in the 2015 General Election. It is absurd to believe that with the same track record in opposition, the new leader will achieve anything more. Unless we simply believe because it is absurd.

The true believers claim is that Corbyn’s dire poll figures are not to be accepted. It’s true that polls are often misleading, but sadly the evidence (if evidence is what you like) is that their error is to overstate Labour support. But, I have been assured on Twitter that’s simply not the point:

“Polls don't reflect public opinion, they try to influence it. The sooner you eejits realise that, the Labour Party will do ok.”

What doesn’t fit the pattern of belief is rejected as untrue (and only believed by eejits). So, for instance, when Corbyn put out film of himself sitting on the floor of a “ram-packed” train because he couldn’t find a seat, that made an important point about the state of our (privatised) railways. When the railway company, Virgin, released film of him walking past empty seats, we were told that was a distortion of reality, that the true situation wasn’t as the film seemed to suggest.

For a while, I lived in what today is called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At one time, there was a rebellion by a movement that called itself Simba. Its priests assured the young men of the movement that if they simply ran at guns, looking neither right nor left, shouting “Mai! Mai!”, “Water! Water!”, any bullets fired at them would simply turn to water. Sadly, some of these young men were killed by bullets, but that didn’t invalidate the priests’ beliefs: clearly, the victims had looked right or left and brought death upon themselves.

Similarly, if Corbyn tries to make a valid point about privatised rail companies, but does it in a cack-handed way, stage-managing the setting for his statement so poorly that he’s quickly exposed, that isn’t evidence of his ineptitude, it’s evidence of how biased the media are against him. Just as when the parliamentary Labour party loses confidence in him, by a 4:1 majority, that doesn’t prove he can’t win his colleagues’ support, it only proves their base, treacherous plotting.

If Corbyn is re-elected leader, as seems likely, and goes on to take the party to a historically catastrophic defeat, which seems just as probable, the fault won’t be his. It will be down to the traitors in the parliamentary party or the jackals of the right-wing media. The fact that previous Labour leaders have faced the same obstacles but managed to overcome them will not be a consideration.

Because what we’re up against isn’t reason. It’s faith. It doesn’t matter how irrational it is, we believe it precisely because it is absurd.

Credo quia absurdum.


Postscript H L Mencken once wrote, “Tertullian is credited with the motto ‘Credo quia absurdum’ – ‘I believe because it is impossible’. Needless to say, he began life as a lawyer.”

Mencken’s remark isn’t really relevant to my argument, but I just like it.

Politicians indulging in an act of faith. To launch more war

I believe it because it is absurd. Credo quia absurdum.

Not many people of faith would accept that as summing up their approach. But it strikes me as the most powerful statement of what faith really is. After all, it takes no faith to accept things that we know, or can deduce from observation. We don’t believe that the sun rises in the East, we know it, if only because we know that’s how the East is defined.

Faith is for what isn’t explicable in natural terms. A virgin birth. The execution of son of the God. His resurrection three days later. These are, in naturalistic terms, impossible, so those who accept them, accept them on faith.

That strikes me as a legitimate way to behave – on matters of faith. But when it comes to politics, we should demand something else. Political decisions should be based on firm evidence, and only on evidence. Which is why it’s so sad that faith plays such a role in determining policy.

Nowhere is that clearer than in decisions concerning war. In particular, that’s the case of the British government’s demand for airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. David Cameron constantly tells us how hard it is to make a decision for war; in reality, nothing is easier. Taking on Al Qaida after 9/11 was an immensely difficult task; invading Afghanistan and Iraq a couple of years later was simple. The easy action, satisfying the demand to do something, and do it now.

But did those missions achieve anything? There was no sensible exit strategy from either country.

We’re gradually pulling out Afghanistan. But it now looks as though the Taliban, our foes there, are poised to sweep back into power. It will leave the country in much the same position as when we invaded – but after having been suffered another decade and a half of vicious fighting.

The West has withdrawn, more or less, from Iraq, but what did we leave behind? A nation run by a dysfunctional, sectarian government heavily manipulated by Iran, with its Kurdish region autonomous to the point of near-independence, and large tracts now occupied and run by the very terrorist organisation that we’re now having to fight – ISIS. So our intervention has left Iraq, which previously hosted no terrorist threat against us, is now the base for the worst we face.

So here we are again, planning further military action in the Middle East. And again we have no exit strategy. We have no picture of where the action will take us. We have no idea of what the consequences are. But Cameron calls on us to back him. On faith.

Worse still, there’s no evidence whatever that the action will even be effective. The Americans have been bombing ISIS in Syria for a year, but that didn’t stop the organisation running its attacks in Paris. It doesn’t look as though the bombing has really been able to degrade ISIS, its declared aim, significantly. Indeed, we even know that many missions – three-quarters of the strikes being run by Britain in Iraq, for instance – are returning without even having fired their weapons. The obvious targets have already been taken out, and ISIS has become considerably smarter at not offering new ones – for instance, they don’t travel around the country in large masses that can be easily hit.

It’s hard to see how adding ten British planes to this campaign will make any useful difference.

Indeed, the only real gains there have been, have occurred when Kurdish ground forces in Iraq followed up on airstrikes and took back territory from ISIS. Most notably that was achieved in Sinjar, where the Yazidi people were persecuted by the terrorist organisation.

Again, Cameron has asked us to have confidence in his statement that there are ground forces in Syria which can follow up our air campaign. 70,000 of them, he argues. But but there are not 70,000 such fighters in a single coherent group. Far from it. Split among 110 factions, most of them are scattered all round the edges of Syria with very few of them even in contact with ISIS.

Russia's already taking part in the airstrikes
Not in a particularly helpful way...

Curiously, it is those so-called moderate fighters that have been taking the brunt of the bombing of one of the nations in action over Syria – Russia. So we’re bombing ISIS and our Russian partners are busily bombing the people we’re counting on to follow up our strikes.

In any case, it’s hard for Cameron to ask for our confidence. Two years ago he was calling for our support to bomb not ISIS, but its enemy President Assad of Syria. And yet he spoke with exactly the same conviction then as he is today. Within just two years he’s had to change his mind about which side to bomb? It leaves me short of confidence in his judgement.

Conclusion? There’s nothing but confusion on all these matters in government. There is no evidence to support what parliament is being called on to support. The position is, quite simply, absurd.

Which is why it takes faith to support it. Not, of course, anything like a Christian faith founded on a desire for peace, but something much bloodier. For which, God help us all.

PS The brilliant wit HL Mencken once wrote “Tertullian is credited with the motto ‘Credo quia absurdum’ – ‘I believe because it is impossible’. Needless to say, he began life as a lawyer.” Well, a lot of politicians started as lawyers. I’m not sure whether that’s significant, but it feels as though it ought to be.

Dumbing down the electorate? According to the OECD, there's no need

Now here’s an interesting insight into our societies.

England and Northern Ireland (Scotland and Wales decided, perhaps wisely, not to take part in this study) are 14th out of 24 countries rated for literacy by the OECD. The United States is 17th.

On numeracy, England and Northern Ireland are 18th, the United States 22nd.

I particularly liked one of the test questions, in which respondents were asked whether the following sentence makes sense or not: ‘a person who is twenty years old is older than a person who is thirty years old.’ 

I think that tests a key skill: the aptitude that allows us to understand that the taxation system in the UK and US favours the poor over the rich, or the concept that in England we’re all in this struggle against financial crisis together, all being called on to sacrifice in the same way and to the same extent.

Interestingly, the OECD does lots of studies. Another shows that once you take taxation into account, the UK is 28th out of 34 countries when it comes to income equality, and the US a near-championship level 31st. The populations can barely read or count, but boy are they good at getting themselves ripped off by the guys with their hands in the till.

And the best news of all? This is all going to get even more intense. Among 16 to 24 year olds, England and Northern Ireland outperform the United States on literacy, coming 22nd out of 24 and leaving the US trailing behind at 19th; but on numeracy, young Americans notch up the perfect score, a straight bottom, 24th out of 24 where England and Northern Ireland can only get to 21st – honourably into the 20s but hardly comparable to the US.

That means that, without undue optimism, we can expect our electorates to get still dumber, especially in the US. With such levels of numeracy among the young, there are good grounds for hope that the Tea Party will be able to go on persuading voters that it’s a fine thing to lay off half a million people without pay, that this won’t have a knock-on effect when those people start defaulting on their obligations, and that still more to the point, there’ll be no consequences when the country defaults on its debts too.

John Boehner looking impressive.
The OECD's finding explain why he impresses so many

With a younger generation boasting such enviable levels of skill, there’ll be no difficulty getting people to accept that it’s perfectly reasonable to pass legislation, get it cleared by the supreme court and endorsed in a presidential election, and then refuse to fund government until it withdraws it. I think that’s called demanding with menaces, but the literacy results suggest that enough people won’t be able to read or understand either word.

We should be deeply grateful to the OECD for providing the hard evidence for why it is that, though the US is playing on the financial brink, and Britain’s anaemic recovery is benefiting only a tiny minority of the population,  the American Tea Party and British ConDems still enjoy otherwise inexplicably strong poll positions.

‘Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,’ said H L Mencken. The OECD has shown us why he was right. And that the sentiment can be applied just as confidently in Britain. Or at any rate in England and Northern Ireland.

First prize for effort

There are films that leave you asking ‘how on earth did they make that?’ For others the question is ‘why?’

We watched one of the latter the other night. I was divided between one friend strongly warning us against the film and another strongly recommending it. Unfortunately we listened to the wrong one and watched Black Swan.

Nathalie: top marks for trying

As far as the plot is concerned, it's just one more in a lengthening series about how tough it is to be at the top of your profession in music, the theatre or, as in this case, ballet. Everyone wants the role you’ve been given and is just waiting for you to trip up so they can pounce. Plenty of dramatic material there, and it’s been mined many times before and will be many times again.

What was different in Black Swan is that they took it all much further, with a descent into madness by the key character, where scenes of rivalry or attraction – or both – degenerate into gory violence or passionate sex – or both – only for them to be revealed to have been fantasies.

The final act of (literally) bloody violence turns out to have been a fantasy about something that really happened. Or perhaps not. It’s never made fully clear. I guess it depends on whether you can believe that someone bleeding to death from a fatal wound can dance a particularly gruelling passage of ballet. You decide just how far your capacity to suspend disbelief will stretch, and you make your choice.

All that being said, obviously I can't really be in any doubt as to why the film was made. It was a money spinner, up into the seven figures. As H L Mencken put it, ‘The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists.’ That’s Black Swan to a T: craftsmanlike, professional, uninspired and uninspiring.

The real ‘why’ question concerns Nathalie Portman’s Oscar for her performance. Now she may be an extraordinarily good actor, but how could anyone tell from that role? She seemed to spend practically the whole film looking frightened. A woman at the top of her profession, the envy of all around her, supremely gifted and supremely capable – and she spends the whole time looking like a child outside the headmaster's study. Or was that what the Oscar was for: best performance in a leading role as a frightened woman?

I’ve been assured, however, that the Oscar wasn’t for her acting but for the way Portman danced so much of the role herself. OK, right, but however fine an actor she is, she certainly isn’t a top flight ballet dancer. Do they really hand out Oscars for doing better than one might expect at something one doesn’t do terribly well? Has it become a prize for effort?

Dr Johnson once said that ‘a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ Underneath the misogyny, there’s insight in Johnson’s point about the sense of wonder at something being done, however badly, by someone you wouldn’t expect to be able to do it in the first place.

Feels like Portman got a Johnson Oscar. In a Mencken film.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple

We all get a bit fed up from time to time. And when that happens, what we need is a quick remedy to put a smile back on our lips. Struggling to work on a dismal Monday morning in January, we need something that will act as a splash of sun to relieve the greyness of the day. 

For me, one of the best tonics is to absorb a flash of wit. It’s even better if the wit is laced with a touch of cynicism. I feel that anchors it more firmly in reality, and if you want a real laugh, have a laugh about something real.

That’s why I’ve developed such affection for the American journalist H. L. Mencken, who died over half a century ago. Five minutes reading some of his quotations, and there are loads on the web, is an excellent antidote for boredom or depression, perhaps brought on because you’re at work when you'd rather be almost anywhere else.

Mencken: deserves to be better remembered

He isn’t always right, of course, by which I mean that I don’t always agree with him. But right or wrong he always gets me smiling. Or at least sneering.

A taster for you:

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

Some of his comments on politics are particularly striking. Here’s one I’ve found more and more convincing as the years roll by and I realise that, judged by their achievements, the guys in government have absolutely no edge over the rest of us in skill or understanding. Mencken grasped that ages ago:

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

But here’s the sentiment that really bowls me over because it sums up what so many tell us, in churches, in politics, in the press – in business for God’s sake:

There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong

Right now several governments around the world explain our economic problems on the grounds that ‘the nation has maxed out its credit card and has to reduce its debts.’ This is such a simple idea, so close to the experience of individuals, that more or less any voter can grasp it.

All it leaves out of account is that, like a company but unlike an individual, a government can spend money so that it makes more money – for instance, a smart investment can get people out of benefit and into taxes. And unlike either individuals or companies, a government can set its own income – by increasing or reducing taxation.

So how is government like a man with a maxed-out credit card?

Remember Mencken. It’s an easy idea. It’s neat. It’s plausible. And it’s wrong.