Boris Johnson second rate? No way.

When I look at the behaviour of the Johnson government, the thought “second rate” always springs to mind. Only to be replaced by, “that’s so unfair”. Followed by a swift reassessment.

Gentle humour, charmingly readable

Decades ago – oh, it was probably the seventies – I discovered the books of George Mikes. Most English speakers pronounce the name as though it were the plural of the nickname ‘Mike’. Or rather, since practically no English speaker even remembers him, perhaps I should say that they used to pronounce the name that way.

He was Hungarian by birth, though he lived most of his life in England. Strictly his name ought to be pronounced something like Mick-esh or possibly Meek-esh. But I like to think of him as Mikes.

He wrote a whole series of books commenting on the different nations he visited, starting with his adopted country, Britain. Just the title of the first of those books gives a feel for his style: How to be an Alien: a handbook for beginners and more advanced pupils. His books were light-hearted, humorous reflections on the behaviour and attitudes of various countries.

In one of his books, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to find the passage now, he mentions that a critic had called his writing second rate. He rejected this notion as a wild exaggeration. By way of explanation, he gave a ranking of authors, which again I don’t remember, but here’s a similar, if partial and entirely personal, ranking of my own.

In the ‘first rate’ I’d want to include Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Harper Lee, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett.

So in the ‘second rate’ I’d have to have Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, Joseph Heller, John le Carré and Hilary Mantel.

I’m not going to bore you by going down a whole list, but simply point out that the second rate is made up of outstanding writers, whose names will ring down the ages, and who produced extraordinary books.

Mikes reckoned that he was at best tenth rate, which is probably about right. He’s down there with other writers who entertain and help you wile away a dull hour – you know, John Grisham and Nevil Shute – good writers (well, Shute was a lousy writer but a great story teller) who hit the spot but are a long way behind the best.

Now we can take the same approach to government. We need to be careful, however, because there are more factors to take into account. Competence is crucial, but competence applied to do harm is a defect, not a virtue.

On those grounds, while Abraham Lincoln in the US, Clement Attlee in the UK or Pierre Mendès France in 1950s France, were all first rate, we’d have to say that Tony Blair, whose government might have been first or second rate without Iraq, tuned out at best third rate in the end.

Because they were competent and did more harm than good, I’d have to put the Wilson governments up into second rate. Equally, the Callaghan government didn’t do too much wrong, entitling his time in office to be viewed as third rate.

Maggie Thatcher was extremely able and powerful, but did huge harm, wiping out whole communities (a few years ago, I revisited a village in Yorkshire which was once thriving when it its mine was running, to find it run down, shrunk in population and with 40% of the population on either unemployment or invalidity benefit, victims of Thatcher’s vandalism).

Twelfth rate at best.

When the amateur burglars pay a call
A fine metaphor for the inept playing at Thatcher

I remember an advert from a long time ago for an insurance company. It showed a devastated living room, with books and records all over the floor, amongst the ruins of broken furniture, devices and pictures. The catch phrase was something like, “If you think professional burglars are a threat, wait until the amateurs pay you a visit”.

Well, if we think that the competent Thatcher was a damaging presence, we now need to absorb just how much damage an incompetent version of the same can do. Think of a government that stumbles from crisis to crisis with no plan or guiding philosophy except its own self-aggrandisement, that takes its decisions too late and applies them too weakly, that sacrifices lives to profits in cruel indifference to the suffering and bereavement it causes, and then seeks to blames its advisers for its shortcomings. Yep. You’ve got it. That’s the Johnson government. Thatcher redux, without the ability.

Second rate, this lot? Way beyond their reach

Shall we say twentieth rate for the Johnson government? Or, OK, let’s be generous, maybe nineteenth. But second rate? Nah. They’re nowhere near that good.

As Mikes made clear, second rate is pretty remarkable.

The Johnson crowd comes way, way down below that on the Mikes scale.

'Official Secrets' and getting the perspective right on Blair

“I think we were lied into an illegal war,” says Katharine Gun, excellently played by Keira Knightley in a film well worth watching, Official Secrets.

Back in 2003, Gun was working at Britain’s communications spying centre, GCHQ, when she was included in the distribution of an email from the States, asking for blackmail material against a number of UN Security Council delegates, to push them into backing a resolution authorising war on Iraq.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun about to take a life-altering step
Sadly, it didn’t stop the war

Gun, appalled that the resources of GCHQ were being used merely to provide cover for the UK and US governments, leaked the email. To keep the spoiler small, let me just say that the film includes a particularly telling exchange about her role.

“You work for the British government,” she’s told.

“No, not really,” she replies.

“No?”

“Governments change,” she explains. “I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people.”

The film was an excellent way of spending a lockdown hour or two. It also brought back memories. Not particularly cheerful memories, accompanied as they were by a sense of disappointment and even betrayal.

Huge demos against the invasion, in London and around the world
Also couldn’t stop the war

Huge numbers, up to a million, had demonstrated in London against the war. Dubya Bush, US President, and Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister, had flopped from one unconvincing source of authority for war to another. They claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but weapons inspectors on the ground had found none. Blair went for a United Nations resolution because British legal opinion said he needed one. When he couldn’t get that authorisation, he asked his Attorney General to provide a different opinion, which he duly did.

Dubya had clearly decided to go to war in Iraq however weak the justification, and Tony Blair had decided to go along with him, with or without authority.

They went in, toppled a deeply unsavoury dictator, but at huge cost: as well as six-figure casualties in the fighting, the war spurred the emergence of ISIS, leading in time to its blood-chilling dictatorship and many more years of war to break it.

No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found. And, when the legal advice offered to the government was finally published, it confirmed all our suspicions: the Attorney General had warned that invasion would be illegal and potentially lay Ministers open to prosecution as war criminals, unless a covering resolution was obtained from the UN. He only changed that view when it became clear the resolution had failed.

Nothing people could say or do would change anything. Not the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. Not Katharine Gun laying her job and liberty on the line. Not even the law would restrict its behaviour: it was going to war even if the action was illegal.

It was all deeply depressing.

That’s why I find it ironic now to be labelled a ‘Blairite’, as I have been by many on the far Left of the Labour Party. Far from an enthusiast for Blair, I felt betrayed by his behaviour over Iraq. And there were other issues on which I felt his government behaved reprehensibly. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has left public sector bodies, in particular hospitals, still struggling today. Blair even repudiated one of his best initiatives, the Freedom of Information Act, when he realised it could be used to force him to reveal information he would rather hide.

No, I was never a Blairite. And today, the committed supporters of Blair are few indeed. But the difference, in assessing Blair, between those of us who refuse the label ‘Blairite’ but don’t belong to the hard Left, is that we’re not prepared to write off his governments’ achievements as though they never happened.

Among others, they include the major assault on child poverty. The minimum wage. The Human Rights Act. Devolution of powers to the nations of the UK. Freedom of Information. The Good Friday Agreement. Huge investment in the health service.

The latter is particularly topical, given that the health service is today struggling so pitifully to cope with Coronavirus. Had the investment started by Blair continued, instead of being reversed in the name of austerity, how much better-placed would the NHS have been to cope with the present pandemic?

Lives have been lost due to austerity. Thousands of lives. That’s worth bearing in mind when we assess the Blair legacy.

Without being a Blairite, I’m in no doubt that the governments he led were infinitely to be preferred to the one we have now. And, in arguing for a return to a Labour government, that’s something we need to proclaim loudly. Things would have been better without the last ten years of Tory government.

What’s more, he achieved far more than those who followed him as leader, and who lost power to the Tories or failed to win it back. He achieved far more than Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn. Whether their policies were good or bad, they were unable to enact any of them.

You can only do any good at all if you get into power. Which Blair powerfully demonstrated. And you don’t have to be a Blairite to understand that. 

I reject that label. But I also refuse to belittle the good he did among the harm.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a good way to spend a lockdown evening, you could do a lot worse than watch Official Secrets.

Keir Starmer's challenge

Just twenty minutes before the results of the election for a new Labour leader were announced, I was still on tenterhooks. The signs had all been hopeful, but I’ve been disappointed by election results too often before. It was conceivable that the Party membership might have decided that the best person to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be another Corbynist.

After two general election defeats under Corbynist leadership, it seemed insane to try our luck at a third. But was a presumption of sanity justifiable?

I’m glad to say that ultimately it was. Despite my anxiety, the new leader was Keir Starmer, elected on the first ballot with 56.2% of the vote. A comprehensive victory and a solid mandate.

Keir Starmer (right)
with Jeremy Corbyn, whom he replaces as Labour leader

Starmer is a former of Director of Public Prosecutions, leading all public criminal prosecutions in England and Wales, a role he played with great effectiveness.

Before that he had been a defence barrister, notably defending the McLibel case, where McDonald’s threw all its weight as a major international corporation, into persecuting two individuals who had protested against them.

He was elected to Parliament in 2015. That meant being caught up at once in the string of crises that started with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, followed by the 2016 referendum that led to Brexit, general election defeats in 2017 and, crushingly, in 2019, and finally the Coronavirus pandemic. If Starmer had been hoping for a quiet life, he must have been badly disappointed.

He served in Corbyn’s team for three years, even though he’s no Corbynist. That’s a key quality: without being a member, he’s established that he can work with a wing of the party which, though reduced to a minority now, still holds massive sway amongst the membership.

Corbynists were keen to drive non-Corbynist MPs out of Parliament. It’s deeply unpleasant and damaging to the party, forced to focus in on itself and riven by factionalism. That’s why, though there are understandable calls within the new Labour majority to retaliate in kind, they need to be resisted.

No purges has to be the watchword, and I think Starmer is well-placed to issue it.

That isn’t only for ethical reasons. A pure, homogeneous party is far too narrow. The insistence by Corbynism on its own version of socialism has driven many out of the party. Much more seriously, it has driven voters away. As Phil Wilson, a former Labour MP who lost his seat in the December 2019 debacle, puts it:

There was no need for Corbynistas to listen to them [voters]; they needed to listen to the Corbynistas. Corbynistas knew what was best.

We need to reach out to voters. That means that we need to reach out to those who walked away from the Corbynist Labour Party, without losing those who stuck with it because of Corbyn. We need to embrace all wings of the party.

In other words, we need to rebuild Labour as a broad church. That means including the Corbynists. Ironically, the very expression ‘broad church’ was treated as practically obscene in Corbynist circles.

This is a paradox. Starmer has to rebuild the Labour Party with the Corbynists but in spite of the Corbynism. Why? Because it’s the hard Left, most recently represented by Corbynism, that has ensured that Labour has held power in only thirteen of the last forty years.

In my lifetime, I’ve twice lived through an experience I would have hoped not to live through even once. That’s Labour falling under the control of the hard Left. It happened first in the early 1980s. In the 1983 election, Labour won fewer seats in parliament than in any other election since 1935.

Making the Party electable again took fourteen years. The bulk of that work was done by a leader from the soft Left of the Party, Neil Kinnock. He had the misfortune of losing two elections himself, but at each of them he increased the tally of Labour MPs. That prepared for Tony Blair’s victory in 1997.

In 2015, Labour did it again. We let the hard Left take control. And, lo and behold, the result is that we’ve once more been reduced to the lowest number of Parliamentary seats since 1935. Worse even than 1983: 202 seats compared to 209.

Keir Starmer, like Neil Kinnock, is a man of the soft Left. He’s indicated his willingness to unite the party, claiming he would neither trash the achievements of the Blair Labour government nor those of the Corbyn period.

He has pledged to work with the government to combat the Coronavirus pandemic, but to oppose it actively when it does too little, or the wrong thing, or the right thing too late.

He seems to have all the right attributes. He could indeed rebuild the Party. Whether he can do it in time for the next election remains to be seen – Corbynism has left us low indeed. But he might.

What he, and the Party generally, must do, however, is learn from this experience as, apparently, we didn’t learn from the experience of 1983.

It’s important to keep the hard Left on board. They must be free to act as a ginger group, they must be able to influence policy, they deserve respect and cordiality.

But the hard Left must never be allowed to take sole control of the party again.

Once was an error. Twice was ridiculous. Three times would be suicidal.

The unrepentant Corbynite

There’s a story that US President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk, “the buck stops here”. It seems it isn’t entirely true. A friend gave him the sign and he put it up for a while, but later removed it. 

I don’t know whether getting rid of it was symbolic of anything.

The notion’s a good one, though. It says that ultimate responsibility for what an organisation does, in this case the US government, lies with the person at the top. They can claim credit for much that goes right but the counterpart is that they have to take the blame for most of what goes wrong.

Not so, it seems, within the Jeremy Corbyn faction of the Labour Party.

Corbyn facing his electoral debacle: getting ready to move into denial mode

You know those doomsday cults that regularly announce the ending of the world? They usually give a date for when it’s going to happen and even a time of day. Then it doesn’t happen (so far, at least) and they usually come up with some excuse for why it didn’t: another reading is possible of the relevant Biblical text, or maybe more than one date is possible and we’ve simply moved on from one of them to the next, or whatever.

Anything, at any rate, rather than admit they were talking cattle excrement.

What’s true of a religious cult is true, apparently, of this political one as well.

Corbynists have been assuring us for years that Corbyn was set for a win in the forthcoming general election, possibly even a big win, and the consequence would be a radical transformation of British society in a socialist direction. Those of us who were a little more sceptical were invited to go forth and multiply, and courteously described as red Tories or even – and I’m told by one of them that this is the most damning political insult available today – Blairites.

This is curious because, if the mission of the Labour Party is to speak for the voiceless in British society, to protect the interest of workers, of the unemployed, of the sick, the very young, the very old, the poorest and neediest, then Tony Blair actually did them some good. He did so by simple dint of actually getting into office, where he could lead a government that hugely improved the health service, for instance, and took a lot of children out of poverty.

Corbyn, on the other hand, by failing twice to win an election, has done no good for any of those people. Indeed, by gifting the Conservatives a victory in an election that was eminently winnable, positively helped to inflict more damage on them.

I say this, by the way, as a Labour Party member who did not back Blair to be leader and would certainly not back him now. I simply state facts: Blair achieved more for those Labour is intended to protect than Corbyn ever did or, now, ever will.

Still, facts apparently don’t need to stand in the way of a good argument. And Corbyn has assured us that he won the argument in the election campaign. Just not the election itself.

Make of that what you can.

Ah, well. There’s some satisfaction, I suppose, when things turn out as you expect. That’s true even if people live down to expectations rather than up to them.

I’ve listened to and read Corbynists for four years now. I’ve been told again and again that he’s hugely popular, as can be seen from the young people chanting “oh, Jeremy” at his rallies. I’ve seen carefully constructed arguments for optimism whose authors point to the numbers of young people, supposedly pro-Corbyn, registering to vote, while old people, often anti-Corbyn, leave the electoral register (for the cemetery); they point to the number of women who have seen their pension entitlement pushed back and can therefore be counted to rally to the Guru; they point to the popularity in the polls of individual policies proposed by Corbyn and ignore his massive unpopularity in those same polls.

Why, I’ve seen analyses even in the last few months, showing that all these factors point to an electoral win for Labour, even perhaps a landslide.

The fervour of Corbynists’ beliefs left me fully dreading their reaction to the long-predicted electoral debacle of 12 December. I sadly expected the worst of them: denial of any responsibility and a feverish pursuit of scapegoats to blame instead. 

Unfortunately, the unrepentant Corbynites have entirely lived down to my expectations of them. The buck, for them, certainly didn’t stop with the man at the top. It might have been more decent of them to show a little humility now that their doomed project has failed so dismally. They might have admitted their errors, if only to ensure that they don’t repeat them. They might have stopped talking down to the rest of us, as though events had fully vindicated their baseless beliefs instead of refuting them so comprehensively.

It would have been more decent. But it isn’t going to happen.

Please, Daddy, leave me my Corbyn blindfold. It's so comfortable

It has been obvious since the earliest days of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, that his supporters have been wearing rose-tinted spectacles.

Indeed, it is their very inability to imagine any kind of flaw in their hero that marks them out as forming not so much a political current within the Labour Party, as a veritable Cult. Members have urged me to “have faith” in the leader or to “believe” in his vision for the future. That’s the very language of religion, and it leaves no place for the rational, questioning thought essential in politics.

Keir Starmer (l) and Jeremy Corbyn
Colleagues but not mutual admirers

Given that Corbynism was a Cult, it was obvious that when Jeremy led us to inevitable defeat, his worshippers would quickly set out to find explanations that cleared him of all responsibility.

In passing, I should say that the sheer scale of he defeat surprised me. I hoped right to the end that, even when defeated, we might at least deny Boris Johnson a majority. I knew that would take a miracle, but I kept hoping. It struck me as much more probable that Boris would emerge with a majority of up to 40. In fact, his majority was 80, while Labour was reduced to just 202 parliamentary seats, our worst result since 1935.

That will certainly see the Conservatives safely through to the next election and, quite probably, to the one after. Only twice, in single general elections, has Labour gained the more than 124 seats it would need for even a bare majority next time. Once, in the landslide it won under Attlee after the Second World War, it did so after a period in government as Churchill’s coalition partners; just once has it done it from Opposition, in 1997 under Tony Blair.

Labour has a mountain to climb from the pits where Corbynism has consigned it.

If the scale of our defeat was greater than I expected, I have also been surprised by the sheer relentlessness of the Corbynists in pursuing their alibis. The preferred line at first was that much-loved whipping boy, the media. Vicious, biased coverage of the election in particular, and Corbyn’s leadership more generally, had undermined Labour and handed Boris Johnson his victory.

But that was only one of many ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuses. Today another seems to be gaining ground. It is that it was Labour’s endorsement of a second Brexit referendum that lost if for us. The argument goes like this:

• Labour did ‘very well’ at the 2017 election. I’ve put ‘very well’ in quotes because one Corbynist said exactly that to me today. Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t know, Labour lost in 2017, so ‘very well’ doesn’t seem terribly accurate. ‘Less badly than expected’ I will, however, allow.
• In 2019, Labour went to the country with the same leader and broadly the same manifesto, and it lost massively.
• The only thing that had changed in between was that Labour had endorsed the Second Referendum position. So that’s what caused the rout.

QED

Unsurprisingly, the argument does, however, omit to mention one or two other key factors. The stance on the referendum wasn’t the only change between the two elections. Here is a small selection of others:

• Corbyn had become better known to the electorate. The more they knew him, the less voters trusted him. By the time of the election, he was the most unpopular Opposition Leader since records began.
• The 2017 election had been flattering to Corbyn because Theresa May, then Prime Minister, turned out to be by far the weakest campaigner I had ever seen at the head of the Conservative Party. By the time of the 2019 election, she had been dumped.
• Boris Johnson, her successor, was utterly unscrupulous, entirely deceitful and ruthlessly effective in campaign mode and, as many of us forecast, ran circles around Corbyn.

So why are the Corbynists coming out with this line about its all being down to the Second Referendum stance?

It may not be unrelated to the fact that Keir Starmer has now emerged as at least the initial frontrunner to replace Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. He has a large lead in a poll of Labour members over his nearest rival, the Corbynist candidate. He is, of course, one of the chief architects of the endorsement of a Second Referendum

Naturally it suits Corbynists to paint him as the villain of the piece.

But it isn’t just to favour their candidate that they do this. It’s also because it is another piece in the Denial Wall they’re building around their Corbyn Dreamland. It was that nasty Keir that snatched our defeat from the jaws of victory. The Cult guru remains as flawless as ever.

We’ve seen that this belief takes some wilful blindness to inconvenient facts. That wilfulness is forcing me to revise my view that they wear rose-tinted glasses. It’s beginning to look to me as though they’re wearing a blindfold.

One that’s made of velvet, of course. It’s beautifully comfortable. Which is why they dread the idea of being forced to take it off.

BoJo: a sight probably best left unseen

A statement generally attributed to the outstanding German Chancellor of the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck, declares that “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made”.

The same is true of democratic decisions. Or perhaps I should say semi-democratic, or even partially democratic, decisions, since I’m thinking of the ‘election’ of the UK’s new Prime Minister, Britain’s buffoon Boris Johnson, or BoJo as we like to think of him, without affection.

Would you buy a used car from this man?
(with apologies to the campaign against Richard Nixon)

He was elected leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore Prime Minister, by 92,153 members of his party. Rather fewer than 100,000 people, mostly male, mostly elderly, mostly white inhabitants of South-East England, chose the man to fill the most powerful post in a nation of 67 million. Over half of them women. Mostly far younger than the Tory Party average. Many of them non-white. The vast majority living outside South-East England.

There was a time when I shared the view that many of my fellow Labour Party members still hold, that a party’s leader should be elected by its members. I’ve begun seriously to doubt that idea.

Jeremy Corbyn was elected by 303,209 Labourites. Some of them were councillors, representing around 5500 people. Most of them were simply individuals, representing no one but themselves. Unknown, self-selected, not subject to any kind of public scrutiny, they chose the leader of the Labour Party.

Just as 90,000 odd Conservatives have just chosen our Prime Minister.

Each Member of Parliament represents around 70,000 voters, since it is the duty of MPs to represent all their constituents, whether they voted for or against them, or didn’t vote at all. We know our MPs. They’ve been through a public vetting process.

It’s beginning to feel to me as though we’d be serving democracy better if we let them take the decision on who should lead their party or the country.

Especially as we live in what we like to think of as a parliamentary democracy.

Still, I have to admit that my view may be coloured by the choices party members have made in recent years. There was a time when the British system could point to a couple of virtues alongside its many faults. One was that it tended to produce stable governments. The other was that it produced able leaders.

Well, stability is a fading memory. In this decade, only Theresa May held a parliamentary majority for her own party, until she threw it away in an unnecessary and disastrously-run election. Apart from 2015-2017, government has been a cobbled-together business since 2010, made of coalitions or inter-party agreements.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Plenty of countries are run all the time by coalitions. It’s just that Britain seems not to cope with them well, and the governments we’ve had over the last ten years have seemed to be always on the brink of tearing themselves apart.

So much for stability. What about the ability of the leaders? In the past, this came from people serving years in parliament, then for a while as hangers-on of government, then junior ministers, then in Cabinet. The process turned them from neophytes into experts, able to get the most from the system because they knew how it worked.

From time to time, there’d be people who shortcut this process. William Pitt the Younger, in the eighteenth century, Prime Minister at 24. Or Tony Blair, who became Prime Minister without previous ministerial experience, but then Labour had been out of office for 18 years and had precious few experienced people of the right kind of age to call on.

Pitt and Blair were exceptionally talented, think what you like of their policies. They rose to the challenge. But look who we have now.

In the red corner, we have Jeremy Corbyn. 32 years as a backbench MP, never having to deliver anything. A man who could limit himself purely to words, since no one with a sense of responsibility would let him anywhere near the authority to take action. He talked long and eloquently about a range of worthy causes which fascinated Islington dinner tables or Luton pub bars, but touched no one in the mass of the electorate. The results were predictable: unable to take a position on Brexit, he has put off voters from both camps; incapable of taking an intelligent position on antisemitism until just a few days ago, and then only under huge pressure, he has lost the trust of all but the shrinking band of his true believers.

In the blue corner, we have BoJo, who’s worse. Why, he has actually been through the experience mill. He was Mayor of London, with a tenure probably best summed up by his purchase, against expert advice, of second-hand water cannon from the Germans, no doubt with the intention of quelling resistance to his high-handed rule; they were never used and were finally sold for scrap at a massive loss, covered by taxpayers.

His most recent government experience, as Foreign Secretary, was even more deplorable. His ignorance of his briefs meant that officials were constantly having to correct his errors (“cleaning after him was quite a full-time activity,”, according to a Foreign Office colleague); he was rude to his hosts in a number of countries; he imperilled the life of a British subject imprisoned by the Iranians, and certainly extended her captivity, by his mishandling of negotiations with the Tehran regime.

In other words, he’s been tested. But far from making him any better, it just found him wanting. That, however, hasn’t stopped him being elected Prime Minister.

By 92,153 people.

Not an edifying sight. In fact, like the making of sausages, probably best left unseen.

Spain and England, a leader and a ditherer, a victory and a defeat

It’s been an interesting few days, watching a general election in my new home country, and local elections in my old one.

In the former, Spain, the right was routed. It’s true that the hard nationalist party Vox won 24 seats in the new parliament. This was presented as a lurch to the right by some in the foreign press, but the reality is that where the two main parties of the right had 167 seats in the previous parliament, now all three together – including Vox – have only 147.

Essentially, therefore, the election redistributed the votes of the right and then cut them back. It’s as though the hard wing and the more liberal wing of British conservatism broke off to form their own parties, and all three parties were returned with a total of fewer MPs than the Conservatives previously held on their own.

So it was a conclusive victory for the left. In particular, it was a major success for the incumbent Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who gets to form a new government. Under the Spanish proportional system, he won’t be able to do so alone – he doesn’t have an overall majority – so he’ll have to come up with accommodations and agreements with other groupings. But he should be able to do some good.

Sánchez: the leader who won

My prediction? That’s exactly what he’ll do – some good. It won’t be enough for those on the left who believe all we need to achieve a Socialist utopia, is to elect a Socialist and have him wave a magic wand. That Sánchez won’t do, any more than Tony Blair did in Britain. I only hope that the result won’t be that Spain in turn has to suffer another ten years of conservative rule, and learn the hard way that demanding too much of your allies can let in your opponents, who give nothing at all and, indeed, take a great deal.

What about the elections in England?

Brexit continues to poison the atmosphere there. And the first victim has been the Conservative Party. Theresa May promised to deliver Brexit and has spectacularly failed to do so. The party was punished in the local elections, losing 1334 seats, over a third of those contested that it held before the election.

It’s normal for a party in power for nine years to lose local council seats. But on this scale? That’s a rout.

And yet it wasn’t quite the rout it should have been. The Labour Party, the official Opposition, should have been romping home. The seats lost by the Conservatives should have fallen to them. But they didn’t. Instead, Labour too lost 83 councillors – far fewer but a massive loss when it should be winning big against a government party in such disarray.

Corbyn: the ditherer who lost

Labour’s led by a man entirely after the heart of those who hanker for a magic wand. His supporters view him as a socialist and a man of principle. Neither claim seems particularly supported by the facts.

Those supporters like to claim that Labour, by not taking a position either for or against Brexit, has become the party of both those who believe in remaining in the European Union and those who want to leave. In other words, Corbynism refuses to back the EU and, instead, takes a non-committal line. As it admits itself, it does so in the hope of not putting off Leave supporters.

It’s not clear to me that sitting on the fence in this way is a principled position. On the contrary, it strikes me as the rankest opportunism, of just the kind that Corbynists like to allege against Tony Blair.

Nor does it seem to me to be particularly socialist. Opposition to the EU is a key view of the right, and especially the far right, anti-internationalist, xenophobic and insular as it is. What on earth is a socialist doing in that company?

In any case, this opportunist, electoral calculation isn’t paying off. As was predictable and predicted. By trying to please both sides of a deep divide, you end up pleasing neither.

The local election results make the point. Brexiters see Corbyn taking a lukewarm stance so they don’t vote Labour; they see May failing to deliver and don’t vote Conservative; so they stay home and vote for no one. Meanwhile, Remainers see Corbyn refusing to back the EU, so they too either don’t vote or vote for a party that explicitly endorses their stance – the Liberal Democrats, the biggest winners in this election, with a gain of 703 council seats, and the Greens, the second biggest, gaining 194 seats.

Corbyn’s paying the price for his lack of integrity.

The contrast between my two homelands is powerful. A real leader, with clear positions, won the Spanish general election. A fence-sitter, dithering on the great question of his time, lost the English local elections.

Oh, for a British Sánchez to lead Labour. Oh, for the chance to win a victory like his. And oh, for the chance to watch the wishful would-be wand wavers leave the scene.

Poor old Jezza - he just doesn't get it

Poor Jeremy Corbyn. He really is completely out of his depth, a man promoted far beyond his level of competence. He flounders and flails and sadly sinks.

Greeted like a pop star at the Glastonbury Festival, he went with his advisers’ instincts and organised his own festival in London, Labour Live. In the end, by dint of slashing ticket prices, they were able to attract a turnout of 13,000, way below expectations.

At ‘Labour Live’: a voice Corbyn should be listening to

Why was the turnout so poor? For the same reasons as he is still trailing the Tories in the opinion polls, even though Theresa May’s government is divided, unpopular and distrusted. He simply doesn’t know how to build a majority.

What threw many of his critics, including myself, at the general election of 2017 is that he won a huge surge of support from young voters. That fooled opinion pollsters who expected that the 18-24 age group would be the one with the lowest turnout, as in most previous elections. But, inspired and mobilised by Corbyn, they confounded that expectation and gave him a far more healthy score than we’d predicted for him.

His supporters presented this as some kind of victory, even though he did in fact all the same come second, and there are still no silver medals in elections. Fail to come top and you’ve lost. What he achieved was a more honourable defeat than had been forecast, but it was still a defeat.

However, there’s something else about that 18-24 age group. It is massively pro-European: 71% voted to stay in the EU. Indeed, even the next age group up, 24-49, voted 54%-46% to remain.

In other words, to hold on to the youth vote, Corbyn needed to adopt a Remain stance. That shouldn’t have been hard since it is, after all, the official policy of the Labour Party he leads. But he has two problems that have led him to make no unequivocal statement on the issue: the first, is that a large proportion of Labour MPs represent constituencies with a Brexit majority and they’re frightened of alienating them; the second, that he has traditionally belonged to the anti-EU group on the left of the Labour Party.

All I can say about the fear of Brexit supporters is that leadership does sometimes involve challenging the views of voters. The greatest fear of working class Brexiters is immigration. Labour will truly sell its soul if it tries to accommodate that kind of xenophobia for electoral considerations.

But when it comes to the Brexit left, I have to say that I’m bemused. The central tenet espoused by these people is that the EU is a neo-liberal institution forcing casualisation of the labour market and poor wages on the working class. This vision seems to suggest that Britain is a nation thirsting for radical change, held back only by the vicious free-market ideology of the EU. The reality is that Britain usually leads the charge towards deregulation. You have only to compare worker rights and labour regulation in France or Germany with Britain to see how much further Britain goes in this direction.

Indeed, many of the rights enjoyed by British workers are protected by the EU against serious objections from entrenched interests in the UK. Unsurprisingly, it is the very people who want to tear up regulation and rights that most strongly back Brexit. The Brexiter left has therefore found itself in bed with some strange people, perhaps most strongly symbolised by veteran left-winger Kate Hoey campaigning in a boat on the Thames alongside the hard-right Nigel Farage.

A shameful moment: left-winger Kate Hoey (right)
with ultra-right winger Nigel Farage (left) campaigning for Brexit

In this context, it’s interesting to see that some of the small band of young people who attended Labour Live hoisted a banner calling on Corbyn to ‘stop backing Brexit’. The truth is that he dodges and evades rather than openly backing Brexit, but I share the suspicion of the banner-holders that he does, indeed, secretly back leaving the EU, lacking only the courage and honesty to say so.

It was interesting to discover from the Guardian’s Tim Adams, that a group who wanted to raise a pro-Remain banner during Corby’s speech were bundled away and prevented from protesting. So it seems that the Corbyn regime is not only as ready as Blair’s to evade and fudge, it’s also happy to block the freedom to oppose its views. I know I’m in a minority in this view, but it has often struck me how much more Blair and Corbyn have in common than is generally admitted, at least in the way they operate.

Meanwhile, the anti-Brexit voice was gagged at Labour Live (suggesting that ‘Live’ is a bit of a misnomer). But even more striking than the young people who were silenced is the number of young people who stayed away. It seems to me that they too suspect Corbyn of favouring Brexit, and therefore diametrically opposing them on the biggest question of the day.

He doesn’t get it yet, but maybe it’s time Corbyn worked out this was why he couldn’t get young people to a festival, or to back him again in the polls.

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.

Austerity: is it really a Tory blind spot?

A joke frequently told against Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour governments led by Tony Blair, that he was having an extramarital affair. The object of his affections was a mystery woman known as Prudence. He simply couldn’t stop himself mentioning her whenever he spoke, so that the catchword for everything he did in dealing with the country’s finances was that it was down, he claimed, to Prudence.

“Mock on, mock on”, he might be saying today. And “what side of your face are you laughing out of now?”

After David Cameron brought the Conservatives to power, Prudence was unceremoniously dumped for a much less attractive siren known as Austerity. Far from seducing the Chancellor alone, Austerity seems to have bedded most of the senior figures of the Tory Party. Which isn’t to say they weren’t warned. Anyone at all familiar with the ideas of Maynard Keynes pointed out that there was a paradox at the core of the notion Austerity: when a government puts the brakes on spending the result isn’t necessarily a saving, but often the exact contrary. Reduced spending leads to reduced economic activity, and therefore reduced taxation, and far from emerging from indebtedness, the government merely sinks further into debt.

UK Debt as % of GDP: steadily growing under austerity
Source: BBC

Seven years on, it’s clear that this is exactly what has happened. Back in 2010, Cameron made a great deal of the supposedly unbearable cost of debt Labour had amassed, a toxic burden being passed on to the future generations. It was approaching the trillion-pound level at that time. Seven years on, it is now projected to reach £1.8 trillion by next March, but curiously the Tories have stopped talking about it.

Despite years of austerity, with constant cuts to essential public services, even the government’s deficit – the amount by which spending exceeds income – is rising again. In June, it was nearly 50% higher than it was in the same month last year. Keynes’s paradox of thrift is being verified with a vengeance: thrift cuts revenue and not just cost, so it can make things worse rather than better.

Anyone reading this piece might feel there’s nothing new in my making this claim. I’ve said it all before, haven’t I? So why am I saying it again now?

Because now we learn that the Tories are not only persisting with their austerity policies in the face of evidence that they aren’t working, but even in the face of evidence that they’re costing them votes. 

Now that’s truly odd. Because if the Tories are anything, they’re an election-winning machine, hypersensitive to any chance to win a vote, or any risk of losing one. It’s quite extraordinary that they’re sticking – for now – to a policy they know might lose them power.

Which leads to a further question. If it isn’t working financially; if it’s costing them votes politically; then why on earth are the Tories continuing to pursue austerity?

Could it really be that they are, ultimately, entirely heartless? Do they truly believe that the poor need to be punished for the offence of being, simply, poor? And the best way of punishing them is to impoverish them further?

I find it hard to believe that any but a few of the Tory leaders are quite that ruthless. Sadly, though, that leaves only one explanation: that they simply can’t see what they’re doing. Which suggests that the Parliamentary Conservative Party has simply lost all contact with reality.

Surely we wouldn’t want to suggest that Tories might be that benighted, would we?

Trump, Climate Change, and Britain's abandonment of independence

America first, we now learn, seems to mean the planet second.

That may strike you as a paradoxical position to take, America being, like it or not, part of the planet. If that’s your reaction, it only means that you’re one of those who feel we’re duty-bound to take reality into account in forming our beliefs. A great many others, and not just in America, seem to regard reality as an inconvenient obstacle, to be overcome in the quest of some transcendent truth.

Trump digs coal so much he’s prepared to sacrifice the planet to get it

Not just in America. Certainly not. If you’re a Brit in your thirties or older, you probably remember that great May Day in 1997, when Tony Blair grabbed Downing Street for Labour after eighteen years of Tory rule. A new age appeared to be dawning, hope was resurgent, a better future seemed within our grasp.

These days, it’s fashionable to focus on the disappointments that followed. That however is to belittle, to betray some remarkable achievements: a huge onslaught against child poverty, an unprecedented and sustained level of investment in the NHS, the incorporation of the convention on human rights into domestic law, devolution to the constituent nations of the UK, the Good Friday agreement, to name only some of the more remarkable. It seems a pity to focus instead on the poor performance in education and certain areas of benefits: it was a mixed bag, perhaps, but infinitely preferable to the unmixed bag of injustice and cruelty we’ve seen since Labour lost office.

Among the disappointments, however, one is particularly unforgivable: British participation in the Iraq War, which introduced further instability to the Middle East and precipitated a wave of international terror from which we’re suffering still today. It’s most recent manifestation was the suicide bomb attack in Manchester.

The seeds that disastrous adventure can be traced to the greatest weakness of New Labout. Peter Mandelson, always perceived as the would-be puppet master of the Labour government, summed it up when he declared himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. Those are words I never expected to hear from the mouth of a Labour Minister. That people can get rich by contributing to society seems only fair, but that:

• Bankers can drive their banks into the ground and precipitate a financial crisis while taking eye-popping bonuses? 
• Tony Hayward, then Chief Executive of BP, point out that he’d like his “life back” after the Deepwater Horizon disaster on one of his company’s oil rigs? 
• Alex Cruz, Chief Executive of British Airways, refusing to take any responsibility for his company’s apparent inability to run a reliable computer system?

These are indeed examples of people who are “filthy” rich, rather than deservedly rich – who have taken their remuneration rather than earning it – and no one should be relaxed about them, intensely or not, least of all in the Labour Party.

New Labour suffered from a tendency to be star-struck by wealth and power. Its proponents felt at ease with the filthy rich and powerful. No one is more prosperous and powerful than the United States. That was enough to drive us into that war, even though it was led y the man who surely then held the uncontested crown of worst US President even, Dubya Bush.

Today Trump has seized that crown from Bush’s head. The new worst President has pulled the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change. And the saddest aspect from Britain’s point of view? While Germany, France and Italy were quick to oppose Trump, Theresa May’s Britain – Brexit Britain – wouldn’t, or possibly couldn’t, line up with them.

Certainly, there’s no reason to believe a Tory government would be any less star-struck by the US than New Labour was. But in addition, we now have another constraint on our independence of action: Brexit means we have been thrown into far greater subservience still to the US. We can’t stand up to Trump because we need him.

It’s another strange paradox. Many backers of Brexit claimed that its aim was to make Britain independent. The reality is that it will reduce our independence. And just when we should be learning what dire consequences it has on our lives when we abandon it – surely the Iraq War was lesson enough.

Taking back control? You sure? Or are we just handing it to yet another appalling US president?

Anyone but Corbyn? Don't be silly...

It began to feel like a trend when the third person in two days referred to me as belonging to the “Anyone but Corbyn” group, neatly abbreviated as “ABC”.

It seems this is the latest term that supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, current and flailing leader of the Labour Party, have come up with in their increasingly desperate attempt to label everyone else as part of one, homogeneous and, it goes without saying, despicable group.

We were all at one time “Blairites”. It was hard to get that label to stick to people, like me, with a long track record of opposing Blair as energetically as they now oppose Corbyn.

“Red Tory” didn’t work for people who’d spent a career opposing the Tories, in some cases winning elections against them. 

The label “plotters” (because they supported the supposed “coup” against Corbyn) suggested that there was a conspiracy embracing a couple of hundred thousand people, and you have to be profoundly paranoid to believe such a plot even possible.

They still, though, seem to need a single, simplifying term to brand us all. “ABC” is the latest attempt. Sadly, though, it merely shows how hopeless it is to impose such a simplification on a phenomenon far too complex for it.

I would never go for anyone but Corbyn. Why, we could end up with someone even worse – and there are people who would make an even more dire job of leading the Labour Party than Corbyn. John McDonnell, his Shadow Chancellor, for one. If we can cast the net beyond Parliament, the devious and authoritarian leader of the Unite union, Len McCluskey, would be another.

Perhaps “ABTC” would work: anyone better than Corbyn. Unfortunately not. I thought Ed Miliband, the previous leader, was desperately weak. More lamentable as leader even than his own predecessor, Gordon Brown. But either of them would be an improvement over Corbyn, and the last thing I want to see is either of them back.

What about “AALBTC”, anyone a lot better than Corbyn? I’m not sure that works either. You see, Tony Blair was massively better than Corbyn (or Brown or Miliband) at winning elections; he was dismal at resisting the lure of power and therefore followed the then most powerful man in the world, Dubya Bush, into the catastrophic Iraq War. That’s Dubya who was himself the worst President of the United States, or so I imagined until I discovered Trump.

No. We need someone with the ability of Blair to win elections but the guts to say “no” to power. An earlier Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was good that way, refusing to take Britain into the Vietnam War, but he wasn’t exactly the straightest of individuals and he does suffer from the inconvenient handicap of being dead.

Harold Wilson: said no to LBJ over the disaster of Vietnam
But not exactly pure as driven snow...

So what we really need is anyone but Corbyn who’s a lot better at winning elections without being opportunistic about essential principle or kowtowing to inept political leaders. Sadly ABCWALBAWEBWBOAEPOKTIPL doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue.

Which perhaps makes my point. We’re talking about a complex view, not susceptible to simple summary. Trying to encapsulate it with a single word or pithy abbreviation is bound to fail.

On the other hand, if you absolutely insist on coming up with a single term for those of us who oppose Corbyn within the Party, I do have one that I feel goes a long way towards filling the bill.

I like to think of myself as a Labourite.