Boris Coup: Day 28

Isn’t it great? 

Today, on day 28 of his coup, we have official confirmation, from the highest court in the land, that Boris Johnson broke the law. Which means trying to avoid scrutiny by proroguing parliament wasn’t just a naked power grab, it was illegal.

The UK Supreme Court on its way to the ruling that
outlaws Boris and his coup

To those who’ve claimed that my use of the word ‘coup’ is over the top for what Boris has done, let me just say that an illegal power grab seems to be the textbook definition of a coup. No tanks on the streets, sure, but a coup all the same.

For the moment, the UK remains, however, a state ruled by law. This decision ought therefore to be obeyed. Johnson says he will respect it, but who knows? He broke the law with the prorogation itself, so no one can say with any certainty that he won’t try to break it again. One can only hope, but watch him carefully.

If Parliament holds its nerve, it can even bring him down now. If enough Tories, or more to the point ex-Tories kicked out by Boris, join with enough Opposition MPs, they can pass a no-confidence vote.

Then things would get really interesting. There would be an opportunity to form what many are calling for, a government of national unity. That’s when we’d come up against another hitch. Jeremy Corbyn, leader in name of the Labour Party, has said he would not support anyone other than himself to lead such a government. Few MPs – indeed few voters – would have any more confidence in him than in BoJo.

After all, why should they? Who led the fight back against BoJo’s coup, the one that led to today’s Supreme Court Decision against him? The Scottish and Welsh governments, and a series of individuals, most notably Gina Miller who has now won two major decisions against the government (the other one was to force a parliamentary vote on Brexit at all).

But where was Corbyn?

Why, he was plotting against his Deputy Tom Watson. He confirmed as much to Andrew Marr on BBC TV on Sunday, when he said that, while he knew there were conversations “about the role of deputy leader”, he “did not know that that particular motion was going to be put at that time.”

A non-denial denial. In other words, he knew about the plot. And to all those who say that Owen Smith mounted a coup against Corbyn when he ran for leader, I would reply that it was a legitimate political action, respecting the Labour Party Constitution, open, transparent, followed by debate, and with a result accepted by the loser.

What happened in the move against Watson was that a motion to abolish his position was brought in, without notice, at the end of a meeting, to try to nod it through with minimal debate. Now that’s a coup attempt.

So Corbyn played a minimal role in the fight against the Boris coup. And he showed himself capable of being as nasty and underhand as any machine politician. Indeed, rather like Boris himself.

So why would anyone want him to take over?

If a unity government is to be formed, therefore, there will be a lot of obstacles to overcome. We’d need both Labour and Tory MPs to rebel. In short, we’d need MPs to stand up to the deplorable leaders both main parties have inflicted on themselves.

Of course, we shouldn’t write off BoJo yet. There’s a chance he may just brave his opponents, even in defiance of the law. Or then again he may play on Corbyn’s obsessive ambition to get to Downing Street: Jeremy may not be able to resist the temptation of an election, even though he’s fifteen points behind in the polls.

Then Boris might get back with a Parliamentary majority. Which would mean he could exercise personal rule even within the law. Giving us hard Brexit, subservience to the US and an assault on basic rights.

Then we’ll really know what “taking back control” means.

Corbyn's courage is not enough

Afiz Shah, who describes himself as British Asian, is a Labour Councillor in Bristol. He recently called in at a police station to report a serious crime, and was promptly arrested himself. He apparently ‘looked like’ a suspect the police were looking for.

Let’s be clear: ‘looked like’ means he had a similar skin colour.

This kind of ingrained racism is something from which many suffer for the colour of their skin or because they are Muslim. Suffer not once but repeatedly.

By contrast, though my mother’s family suffered from antisemitic persecution in the 1930s and 1940s – ninety relatives in Lithuania disappeared without a trace – I haven’t personally suffered any kind of threat or insult based on my Jewish roots. In particular, in my membership of the Labour Party, I’ve never seen any antisemitic behaviour directed against me or anybody else.

That’s not to say that I think antisemitism doesn’t matter. On the contrary, I think it matters deeply. It is a pernicious disease, just like any form of racism, such as the far more widespread Islamophobia in our society. It needs to be resisted, above all by the political left of centre, which ought to be the beating heart of anti-racism.

This means that any trace of antisemitism within the Labour Party itself has to be extirpated quickly and decisively. Not because antisemitism is in any sense the most important form racism, but because if we are tolerant of any form of racism, we weaken our position to combat all the others.

We owe it Afiz Shah and so many like him not to let that happen.

Many Jeremy Corbyn supporters claim that the accusation of Labour antisemitism within Labour is merely a stick used by his opponents to beat him. It certainly is such a stick, which is another reason that makes it urgent to deal with the problem. That it isn’t only such a stick is made clear, however, by Corbyn himself, in his statements of the seriousness of the problem.

‘We have not done enough to get to grips with the problem… my party and I are sorry for the hurt and distress caused’ he said before a meeting with Jewish leaders on 24 April.

Corbyn: not doing enough. Maybe not capable of doing enough?

It takes courage to admit that the party that made him his leader has not done enough to tackle a key failing.

On the other hand, who if not the leader is responsible for making sure that sufficient action is taken?

The Jewish leaders he met were deeply dissatisfied. They could not, for instance, persuade him to adopt the definition of antisemitism used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. For information, this is:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

This seems so uncontentious a definition it seems hard to understand why Corbyn could not accept it and pledge himself to campaign for the party to accept it. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

The most telling criticism came from Jonathan Goldsmith from the Jewish Leadership Council who said that Corbyn ‘engages in conversation until you ask him to do something.’ Or, as he told the BBC, ‘when you ask him to do something he has this habit of staring and just shrugging.’

Corbyn has been a backbench MP for 35 years. For 35 years he has been paid to talk and write about politics in the highest forum Britain offers for it, but he’s never been called on to take responsibility for putting anything into action. Indeed, his image of a kind of saintliness depends on it: he’s never sullied his hand by actually having to deliver anything in reality.

Thirty-five years is a long time that produces ingrained habits. Perhaps to stare and shrug when asked to do something. It is now nearly a month since Jews protested in Parliament Square against antisemitism in the Labour Party, and we are still in a position in which Corbyn has to admit that ‘we have not done enough’.

I said before that it took courage to make that admission. Unfortunately, while leadership certainly requires courage, it needs more than courage alone. Another essential quality is decisiveness.

Sometimes Corbyn can be decisive. He quickly fired Owen Smith from his team for publicly espousing a position on the EU with which two-thirds of the Labour Party agrees. Unfortunately, there’s a suspicion that some of the antisemites against whom he’s required to take action are supporters, possibly friends, of his. Is he less decisive with his friends than with an avowed opponent such as Smith?

Wobbly with his friends. Accustomed to speaking a lot but doing far less. Corbyn seems fated to disappoint on an issue needing to be addressed urgently – not for the sake of the Jews but for all those facing racial bigotry.

The question Corbyn really needs to answer is this one: is he up to the job? Now, making an admission in answer that one will need far more courage than just accepting that too little has been done. An admission, after all, would have grave implications for his own position – implications he may not be willing to face.

Any more than his supporters are.

Age of midgets

As Britain staggers into an ill-considered Brexit, it feels to me that future generations, struggling with its painful consequences, will look back and wonder at the age of midgets that led them there.

Corbyn, Cameron, May
Do we really deserve no better?

Britain has been here before. Neville Chamberlain trying to buy peace from Hitler. Anthony Eden taking Britain into war over Suez. John Major crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Second or third-rate Prime Ministers failing to meet their challenges.

These are Tory examples, but Labour has its own spectacular mediocrities to add to the mix.

Ramsay MacDonald, as Prime Minister in 1931, led Labour into coalition with the Tories. His austerity policies crucified the people Labour was set up to defend. Tony Blair, though a giant when with Gordon Brown he battled child poverty and invested in the NHS, chose to be a moral pygmy when he obsequiously followed the US into a needless, harmful and unjustified war in Iraq.

It’s such midgets who dominate the British political scene once more.

In both main parties, leaders are giving precedence to the health of their parties over the wellbeing of citizens. Britain is sleepwalking into Brexit, a slow-motion car crash which the rest of us can only watch with growing horror because we don’t have a leader with the guts to step on the brake or turn the wheel.

The Tories are the most culpable. David Cameron, the previous Prime Minister, called an unnecessary referendum in the hope that a comfortable victory for continued EU membership would see off the toxic and insurgent Eurosceptic wing of his party.

Unfortunately, as we know, the result went the other way.

That result was deeply flawed. And not just because the victory was wafer thin.

First of all, it was a choice between a single option – there was just one way to stay in the EU – and a myriad of others – leaving the EU with no relationship in place (hard Brexit), agreeing a trading arrangement, staying in the Customs Union, staying in the Single Market, and there may be others. A plethora of Brexit campaign groups testifies to the diversity of views.

Secondly, Brexiters made false promises. Far from saving money, Brexit will cost us more. New trade agreements will be harder to sign than was claimed, and the terms will be less favourable than those we are giving up. It’s unclear how we can avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

It seems likely that once the real nature of Brexit is known, the level of dissatisfaction would produce a majority for the Remain side at least as big as the Brexit camp won in 2016.

There’s a majority in parliament for staying in the EU, though making it effective would require cross-party cooperation, with pro-EU Tories and Labourites voting together. Against the Tory leadership of Prime Minister Theresa May, but also against the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Alongside Cameron, these are the other two midgets of our time.

May claims to be pro-EU but refuses to oppose Brexit. Corbyn’s a long-term Eurosceptic, but his party has a 2:1 Remain majority. Though his fans trumpet his honesty and courage, he refuses to come clean as a Brexiter or to endorse a Remain position. Again, his fans like to underline the contrast between him and Tony Blair, but this kind of spineless prevarication is like nothing so much as the spin Blair fed us on Iraq while proclaiming his honesty and demanding our trust.

May won’t oppose Brexit for fear of splitting her party. Corbyn won’t oppose it for fear of losing a number of supporters for his own. Both hide behind the ‘will of the people’ as expressed in the referendum. However, Britain isn’t a plebiscitary democracy but a parliamentary one. We elect MPs and delegate decisions to them, reserving the right to remove them next time if they go against our wishes. Constitutionally, nothing stops MPs voting against the referendum result.

That may be too much to ask. Still, the referendum said nothing about what kind of Brexit we should accept. Once the real terms of Brexit are clear, what’s to prevent a specific question being asked about them? Voters could choose between accepting the terms, going for a hard Brexit instead, or staying in the EU. A new referendum would protect MPs from the accusation of rejecting the people’s will.

What would be the harm?

May’s ruled it out. She feels, probably rightly, that it would deepen the rifts in her own party.

Corbyn’s ruled it out too. Though, as is his wont, in no consistent way. When Diane Abbott, a supporter within his leadership team, called for a second referendum he took no action. That was odd, because she has a trail of public relations disasters behind her, for which most Shadow Cabinet members would have long ago been sacked. When, on the other hand, his rival Owen Smith made the same suggestion, he was fired at once. It seems that Corbyn, a serial rebel – 500 votes against the party leadership before taking the leader’s mantle himself – is happy to be a top-down autocrat when it suits him. He also endorses the conservative principle of collective cabinet responsibility over the national interest, when he can use it as a weapon against an opponent.

Like Blair, he prefers pragmatism to principle and personal authority over the national interest. He also seems committed to preserving another fine tradition, that of political double standards.

So the midgets at the head of both parties keep the country firmly on the road to Brexit and the slow-motion car crash continues to unfold before our fascinated but impotent gaze.

The final judgement will be made by later generations. It is they who will suffer the consequences of Brexit. I suspect they’ll be asking, ‘how did our parents choose such petty and incompetent leaders when we so badly needed figures of stature?’

Which is my own question precisely.

Labour devouring itself 2: Pharmaceuticals, an infernal industry. Really?

Many years ago, I led a small team developing a financial reporting application for a new biotech company near Geneva.

It was a strange experience. We went through their existing ‘system’ – essentially a series of linked, and hopelessly confused, Excel pages – and put together a prototype for the customer to approve. But suddenly I realised I’d left out a key element.

“I’m not showing any revenue,” I said, and checking through all the Excel worksheets the company had supplied, asked with some shock, “I don’t see any revenue here.”

“Revenue?” they replied, “there isn’t any. We’ve only been going a couple of years. Maybe in eight more? Generally, it takes at least ten years to get a new product to market.”

“Ten years without revenue?” I exclaimed, “for a single product?”

“Well, to be fair, we’re hoping that the hundreds of molecules we’re working on will eventually enable us to generate two products.”

The figures were in front of me. Ten years would cost something like £200 million. If they emerged with two products, they each would have cost £100 million. They wouldn’t actually take them to market: they would sell them to one of the big pharmaceutical companies who would then invest much more money still to get the drug into production, announce it, promote it and start distributing it. I can’t see how the cost of each could possibly be under £200 million.

Why am I telling this story now? Because in the last piece I posted here, I talked about the sheer ugliness of the present dispute between wings of the Labour Party. Without hiding my sentiments, I tried to be relatively impartial between them. Today I’m throwing impartiality to the winds, and focus on one of the aspects I find particularly irritating in the Corbyn camp.

It’s particularly ugly of Corbynistas to make mileage of the fact that Owen Smith spent some time working for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. This, it seems, represents a blot on his character that can never be erased. Pharmaceuticals are evil, and the evil is contagious.

The infernal regions?

It’s a naively binary view of the world, where everything’s good or bad and there are no shades of grey. Naivety, however, is entirely forgivable – it can even be endearing. What really has me laughing wryly is the kind of comment I had from a Twitter correspondent, that the Pharmaceuticals are vile gougers because they charge pounds for pills that cost pence from generics suppliers. As my experience in Geneva showed, that’s a notion that reflects merely ignorance of the issues. To paraphrase one of the better lines from that iconic TV show The West Wing, it’s the second and all subsequent pills that cost pence. The first one, as I discovered in Geneva, cost at least £200 million.

The generics manufacturers never pay for the first pill.

So what does that say about Pfizer? Well, their published accounts suggest that in 2015 they made a profit (EBITDA) of $18.45 billion on revenue of $48.85 billion.

I’ve been in business for approaching forty years. When I was working for companies in which I was part-owner, we aimed for 20% profit on turnover but usually had to settle for 10% or less. It’s not at all rare for companies to scrape along on 3%.

Pfizer’s profit represents nearly 38%.

So they’re running extremely rich.

As Owen Smith puts it, “Yeah, I think medicines should be cheaper, generally. That’s the key criticism I have. I think medicines should be cheaper across the world.” Absolutely right. I like the impact of the generic suppliers, because they pressurise the big companies to cut their costs and generate more reasonable profits. We need more, and a Labour government should legislate to cut into this gravy train.

Smith also faces the accusation that his previous role as a spokesman for Pfizer, a private company supplying the NHS, proves his desire to privatise the service. Backers of this view suggest that somehow the NHS should produce its own pharmaceuticals. That strikes me as extraordinary: the NHS is there to deliver healthcare, not to carry out biotechnology research. That’s not their skillset. And they certainly don’t have the £200m and more it takes for the first pill. Again, as Smith argues, “It would bankrupt the NHS even if it were possible, which of course it isn’t…” But, he goes on, “it’s completely wrong to suggest that… I’m in favour of private provision. I’ve never been in favour of it.”

I like Smith’s attitude and believe he has the will to take the measures we need against excessive profits. He also has the knowledge of the industry to do it well. He understands both the cost of the first pill, and the unacceptably excessive profits of the industry.

Sadly, none of this is inspiring. It’s an argument based on evidence, it takes both sides of the problem into account, it attempts to think rationally about the real nature of the problem. In short, it’s grey and rigorous and less easy to follow than a simple declamation of radical slogans.

It’s so much easier just to say “the pharmaceutical companies are robber barons. Anyone who has ever spoken for them, as Owen Smith has, is hopelessly tainted. We need to reject everything they stand for.”

Much easier. Much simpler. And entirely summed by one of HL Mencken’s best lines: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Labour devouring itself: 1. Mutual Malice

They say the first casualty of war is the truth.

In an internal party battle, it gets knocked on the head more quickly still. There’s no worse offence than apostasy: the friend who turns against you is far more hateful than the open enemy.

That’s what’s happening in the British Labour Party now, with a chasm opening between its two wings.

There have been few instances of physical violence, and none against the person: a brick through an office window was the most egregious example. On the other hand, the verbal aggression is pretty ferocious. It means that it’s a less painful experience these days to debate with Tories, officially our opponents, than to fellow party members who favour a different candidate for the leadership.

At its mildest, supporters of Owen Smith (of whom I am one) are all of us categorised as Blairites. That’s bad enough, seeing as rather a lot of us feel that, despite Blair’s many achievements, he lost our respect forever by the unconscionable act of following Dubya into a misguided invasion of Iraq. But the insult is actually far worse, because to Corbyn supporters (of whom I am absolutely not one), ‘Blairite’ is a synonym for ‘Tory’. Indeed, we’re repeatedly referred to as ‘red Tories.’

That’s particularly irritating, because if there’s one constant in my political outlook, it has been complete opposition to the Tories. An organisation which exists to protect privilege and the link between wealth and power strikes me as utterly out of place in our times. So to be called a supporter seems nothing short of ludicrous.

But this isn’t to say that my side has been any more sensible. The accusation these days is that the 300,000 new members of the Labour Party, most of whom seem to be fervent Corbyn supporters, represent a take-over by ‘Trotskyists’.

Trotsky must be spinning in his grave. He did indeed recommend the tactic of ‘entryism’, which meant going into a mass working class movement, taking it over and turning it into a revolutionary organisation. But I’m sure he never intended entryist groups to stay in such an organisation for unlimited periods, as the so-called Trotskyist group Militant attempted to do until its expulsion in the 1980s.

Trotsky rousing Red Army troops
Corbyn or Smith? Nothing to choose between them, he would have said

All Militant achieved was to turn Labour Party meetings, never the most exciting way to spend an evening, into something excruciating. Presumably, the hope was that anyone not of their persuasion would be driven out, if only to try to get themselves a life. Since Trotsky was particularly susceptible to the fault I mentioned before, of hating the dubious friend more than the avowed enemy, I expect he would have had the whole of Militant carted off to a Gulag somewhere. And most of the rest of us would have regarded that as a welcome gesture towards keeping politics interesting and maintaining a sense of humour.

In any case, Trotskyist groups can at best mobilise a few thousand people in Britain. And that’s on their own count. There are probably only a few hundred.

Oh, go on then, let’s be generous: the very low thousands.

Certainly, there are nothing like the 300,000 who have joined Labour. Among that new memberships, there may be a few Trotskyists and some may even be playing a leading role. However, the vast majority are just Corbyn-supporting social democrats. Misguided, in my view, but hardly died-in-the-wool, red-toothed followers of the founder of the Soviet Red Army.

So, on either side of the fence, the slanderous name-calling is tossed back and forth. And there’s no sign of its stopping.

It’s a shame, though perhaps inevitable. Passions are running high, as the stakes are so significant. But that does nothing for the quality of our lives.

To say nothing of our chances of beating the Tories.


Next: one or two of the more irritating slanders.

The cost of Corbyn: how Labour's woes are Britain's woes

Every now and then you get a new batch of statistics which are actually interesting. Today we had two.

The first was the revelation, from a study by the Trades Union Congress (TUC). It showed that real wages had fallen in Britain by 10% since the start of the credit crunch in 2007, with only Greece among the advanced economies faring worse. By comparison, real wages grew by 14% in Germany and 11% in France. Indeed, they grew by 23% in Poland: any Brit whose main concern is with high numbers of Polish immigrants, rather than, say, how their own living standards are falling, then they can relax. Far fewer will be coming as the wage differential narrows. Indeed, my wife has met several Brits working in Poland during her own business visits to Kraków in recent months.

A joy for Xenophobes: as they watch their living standards continuing to decline, they can at least take comfort from the falling numbers of Poles entering the country.

The more significant message of the drop is that it confirms what most of us no doubt guessed: it’s anybody who relies on wages, rather than income from capital, who’s footing the bill for the Tory obsessions with austerity.

Fortunately, we have a clear alternative to that policy. Labour is temporarily preoccupied with a leadership contest, but both candidates – the present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the challenger, Owen Smith – are equally wedded to putting an end to austerity. We desperately need someone to do that. Despite Tory promises, austerity hasn’t dented the national debt and growth has remained at anaemic levels. The only impact has been to impoverish us all – first morally, as the most vulnerable members of society, the disabled, the long-term sick, the unemployed, the working poor – found all help being withdrawn; but now, we see, materially as well as our incomes are pared down.

So let’s get the Tories out and Labour back to fix the problem.

Sadly, that’s where we hit the other piece of news, and it’s far from good. The Tories, under their ‘new’ leader – the quotation marks are there because she’s been Home Secretary for the last six years, so she’s hardly new to government – are now 12 points ahead of Labour in the latest YouGov poll.

By way of contrast, at this stage in the 1979-1983 parliament, Labour had a high single-figure lead, but went on to be crushed in 1983. In the 1992-1997 parliament, which ended with the 1997 landslide for Labour, the lead at this point was in the high teens or low twenties.

It’s too early to make anything much of that. A new Tory leader, a new Prime Minister, was bound to get a boost in the polls. We have to wait and see how things go in the next few months to see where they settle. Even so, any lead when the Tories should be behind, is desperately bad news for Labour.

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn will point out that the attacks on him by his parliamentary colleagues, and the current leadership contest, will have undermined Labour’s position, adding to the Theresa May effect. Except that even before the rebellion against him, the Tories already had a six-point lead. Since the Brexit vote, in which Corbyn played a lamentably low-key role, the gap has merely increased.

To heap on further bad news, the YouGov poll found that only 18% of voters favoured Corbyn as Prime Minister, against 52% for May.

Amazing. Despite falling wages and collapsing public services,
voters still prefer her to him

Worst of all, 29% of people who voted Labour in 2015 say that they prefer May as Prime Minister to Corbyn. That’s a loss of over 2.5 million votes.

That, Labour members need to bear in mind, is the cost of insisting on retaining a Leader voters simply don’t see as a potential Prime Minister.

Corbyn’s followers keep telling me that what matters is that Corbyn has the right policies. I also keep hearing that we need to get away from an approach that’s too focused on winning elections at all costs.

There’s truth in that. But, as should be obvious, Labour’s great achievements only came with victory. Labour was down to 154 MPs after the 1935 election. After winning 393 seats in 1945, it created the NHS in 1948. A triumph now being undermined by austerity, and which can only be defended with power.

In opposition, policies may be wonderful, but they’re just wishful thinking. In government, they can change society.

In any case, as Corbyn shows, it isn’t policies that persuade voters. It’s perceptions. The YouGov poll shows how poorly Corbyn is perceived.

A couple of million votes down? If we had to face anything like that Corbyn price at the next General Election, we might see UKIP winning seats and Labour down again to its levels in 1935. Or worse.

It’s true Labour went on to win a landslide in 1945. But that meant waiting ten years.

With services like the NHS being ground out of existence and, as the TUC has now confirmed, real wages on a downward slope, do we really want to wait that long?