A first glimmer of hope in the Brexit tunnel

Since the morning of 23 June 2016, when the British electorate demonstrated to the world that a referendum is a poor way of reaching good sense in politics, I’ve never felt so encouraged about Brexit as today.

A fine day in Winter. A good moment for a glint of hope on Brexit

Much can still go wrong. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove remain senior ministers in the British government. They were leading figures in an anti-EU campaign that took political mendacity to levels not often achieved in pre-Trump democratic nations. Leaving the EU would free £350m a week for the NHS, they claimed; the reality is that leaving the EU will cost huge sums and the NHS crisis worsens by the day.

Instead of being driven from power as such dishonesty deserves, they continue to exert great authority at the highest level of government. It would be unwise to write them off. They will counterattack and it would be sensible to expect them to be highly effective.

Nevertheless, we can still enjoy, at least for now, an outline agreement between the UK and the EU in which Theresa May in effect conceded that we might not actually leave. In order not to create a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, she accepted the principle that the whole of the UK might remain aligned on regulatory standards with the EU, at least for some aspects of trade.

That means that she has opened the door to the possibility of our staying in the EU Single Market in effect, if not in name. If we can hold off the wild men of Brexit, such as Gove and Johnson, and make sure this happens, we shall at least have limited the damage that Brexit could do to our economy. That’s both in maintaining easy reciprocal access with our major trading partners in Europe, but also in fending a threatened dependency on an arrangement with the US. Such dependency, it has already made clear, would mean our abandoning standards that matter to us.

We would, if all this happens, have limited the worst of the damage to us. We will have maintained values and standards that protect our way of life. What we will have given up is merely the right to have any say in defining those standards: we will no longer have a vote in the deliberations that decide the regulations we adopt.

In other words, we shall have cut off our noses to spite our faces, but at lest we won’t have completely shot our foot off.

For that small mercy, on this fine winter’s days, let’s at least be thankful.

Might it be a soft Brexit after all?

So Theresa May surprised me after all. At the eleventh hour. As all seemed set to fall apart around her ears, burying her under the ruins.

Theresa May and the EU negotiator Michel Barnier

She’d claimed at the beginning of the week that she had a solution. Specifically, a means of keeping the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland – the only land border between the EU and the UK – open. In other words, a way of allowing trade between the two parts of the island to continue unimpeded, without duties to pay or customs posts at which to wait.

But then it emerged she’d only achieved that by offering to maintain parity in regulations between Northern Ireland and the Republic. In effect creating a border in the Irish Sea, between the whole of Ireland and the UK, instead of within the island. To her astonishment – apparently – the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, on whose votes at Westminster she depends to keep her government in office, went ballistic. Arlene Foster, its leader, made it clear that her party’s continued support would be jeopardised by any such arrangement.

I say “apparently” because it’s actually hard to believe that anyone could have been surprised. The Democratic Unionists emerged in opposition to the mainstream Ulster Unionists because they felt the latter weren’t unionist enough. In other words, the DUP was first, last and forever a party committed to the union between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. Nothing, but nothing, mattered more.

It’s practically unimaginable that Theresa May has read so little Irish history but, hey, I never cease to be amazed by the sheer extent of her ineptitude, so maybe she really doesn’t know what tradition the DUP embodies.

On Monday of this week, therefore, the whole deal looked set to unravel. And, since agreement on Ireland, was an absolute condition of allowing the Brexit negotiations to move on to discuss trade, it looked as though May was facing a sticky future indeed. Defy the DUP: how could she let her government fall? Allow the talks to collapse and make a hard Brexit certain: how could she allow the economy to suffer that level of damage?

That’s where she surprised me. She came up with a different option. She made a full, unqualified and binding commitment to enter into a full, unqualified and binding commitment at some time in the future, and on terms yet to be agreed.

It was splendid! And so EU. Fudge has always been the preferred mode of operation of the Union, as is hardly surprising when you’re trying to maintain consensus between 28 nations each intent on defending its own interest. May even came up with this agreement to agree as we entered the final 72 hours to the deadline, and the only difference from previous EU negotiations is that they generally end after a final night of intense arguing just before the decision is formalised.

Perhaps May knew well that the fudge was inevitable and felt she could do with a weekend. Why not agree on Friday rather than wait for Sunday? She’s had a torrid few months since losing her majority in an election she called injudiciously and fought incompetently. I expect she could do with a kip.

Meanwhile, on the far right, its most outspoken figure, Nigel Farage, is furious. Although the final terms haven’t been defined, the fudge makes it clear that Britain will have to accept the need to keep its regulatory standards aligned with Europe’s, at least on any matter that might affect the Good Friday peace agreement in Ireland. In other words, Britain after leaving the EU will still have to obey many of its regulations – it will merely have given up having any say on them.

The most encouraging aspect of this concession is that it might lead to something far more like a soft Brexit, where Britain remains closely aligned with the EU, in spite of the Brexiters. It will be a pity to have no say in making the rules, but even without that say, Britain will be far stronger for maintaining such a close relationship with its major trading partners.

On the other two substantive points of the deal, Britain has agreed to pay a lot more money than Brexiters throught we’d ever have to, and has even had to accept that the European Court of Justice would have some jurisdiction in Britain, over the way we treat EU citizens living here. That was enough to make Farage apoplectic, which in itself is enough to make me like the terms. On the other hand, I can see his point.

On all these terms, May has had to abandon her “red lines” and compromise with the EU. The EU has negotiated effectively and forced Britain to move further towards its positions than it has moved towards Britain’s. If these commitments to commit turn into real commitments the impact could be massive.

First of all, the US has made it clear that the trade deal that Brexiters have been relying on as their get-out-of-Brexit-free card will require Britain to align its regulations with American ones. Well, that wouldn’t happen.

Secondly, Britain has had to accept, explicitly at last, that it isn’t a lion roaring on the global stage, harkened to by everyone. If it’s a lion at all, it’s a much reduced one, its teeth and claws gone, having to supplicate rather than dictate. Britain has had to bow to EU demands, not the other way around.

That’s an invaluable lesson for Britons to learn, and long overdue.

In any case, anything that wipes the self-satisfied smile from Nigel Farage’s face, however temporarily, has to be deeply satisfying.

A fine way to start the weekend.

Progress always progress. Even when it's backwards

I’m really keen on the device on a new window in our place. It’s a sort of elongated round-bar at the top of the window. At first, I had no idea what it was for, except that it looked a little like a vent.

Curious device

It turns out that’s exactly what it is.

Why is this interesting?

Well, the history of window technology – there must be a PhD thesis or two out there on the subject – has, I humbly submit, been one of increasing impenetrability. The aim is to keep the weather out. Above all else, that means eliminating draughts.

But it seems that progress has gone too far. Or had unintended consequences. Proving that you really have to be careful what you wish for.

Because windows are so good these days, so airtight, that houses are simply not getting enough air. But the problem engineering created engineering can solve. So we now have a smart little vent to let air back in.

An artificial draught creator, in fact.

Having gone to great lengths to eliminate them, we have gone a little further to reintroduce them.

This all reminds me of A song of reproduction, made famous by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. It’s about the evolution of music reproduction, and starts:

I had a little gramophone, 
I'd wind it round and round. 
And with a sharpish needle, 
It made a cheerful sound.

And then they amplified it,
It was much louder then.
And used sharpened fibre needles, 
To make it soft again.

We make it loud, we make it soft again. We make it airtight, we make it draughty again. I love technology. 

Oh, and progress too, of course.

In praise of a great woman: people aren't dispensable

Time for a tribute to an exceptional mind. She left us extraordinary insights into the behaviour of man, particularly in extreme circumstances. Not just what we do but why we do it.

Two of her insights strike me as particularly important.

The first is the notion of the ‘banality of evil’. Hannah Arendt covered the trial in Jerusalem of former SS Officer and logistics coordinator for the final solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, Adolf Eichmann – he organised the transport of Jews to the extermination centres.

Hannah Arendt: a voice to listen to all the more today

What struck her most about Eichmann was his deep ordinariness. Many described him as a monster. What she saw was someone who could only speak in the clichés of officialise because he had no other vocabulary; in her world view, the inability to speak with clarity revealed an inability to think clearly; that made Eichmann literally thoughtless and unable to see the moral consequences of what he was doing.

She saw in Eichmann a man with little or nothing to distinguish him, a middle-class figure who had struggled to build a career or even make a living, and whose only talent turned out to be for the administration of transport for colossal numbers of people – no small task in war time with huge pressure on the railways.

Eichmann knew what would happen to the Jews once he got them to Auschwitz. But that wasn’t his problem. His task was just to get them there and he set about it with all the dogmatic persistence of a dedicated minor functionary. An accomplice in mass murder on a historically unprecedented scale was just the kind of man any of us might meet behind a counter or in a nondescript office somewhere. Indeed, we might him anywhere because he could be any of us.

That’s what makes evil banal: it can appear in the most everyday of people.

That’s the chilling conclusion of the notion of the banality of evil: any one of us could be capable of it. It is not the exclusive preserve of a particular type of person, a monster born.

The second of Arendt’s idea that particularly strikes me here is that western societies have, over the centuries, moved towards considering humans as dispensable. Arendt was Jewish and brought up in Königsberg. It’s a neat reflection of the terrible impact of the first half of the twentieth century that her city, the home of the great German philosopher Kant, is no longer in the far east of Germany but now belongs to a small exclave of Russia, beyond the Baltic states. Even its name has been expunged from the record. It is now called Kaliningrad, named for one of Stalin’s henchmen.

Germany eventually became a dangerous place for her to live. She was fortunate enough to get out (in 1933, when Hitler came to power), and eventually reached the US, with plenty of pain on the way, including internment in a camp in France. Over the next few years, it became increasingly clear that what the Nazis were working to achieve was the entire extermination of a group of people – several groups – simply for who or what they were, with no consideration of their guilt or innocence of any offence, indeed of anything they might have done. 

That led Arendt to the principles on which she based her colossal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the totalitarian view, the human being counts for nothing. People can be wiped out, even tortured to death, because they have no importance in themselves compared to such notions as historical inevitability or the emergence of a race of supermen.

Why do I mention all this now?

Two reasons.

The first is that 4 December 2017 is the 42nd anniversary of the death of Arendt. She deserves to be far better known. Whatever I can do to help that, I do.

The second is that the concepts I’ve been describing seem horribly relevant again today. Around us we see people of complete banality playing with great evil backed by great power – not least the occupant of the White House who could, still, plunge the world into a most terrible war in Korea.

What’s more, Trump recently retweeted violently Islamophobic videos by an extreme right-wing group from Britain. Some Muslims have behaved outrageously badly – maybe one in three million Muslims, but in the Eichmann approach to humans, we don’t take the time to think things through, to distinguish between the tiny numbers of the guilty and the huge numbers of the innocent, to reject the simple approach to write off all Muslims en masse.

I’ve argued before that the Muslims are the Jews of today. By writing off an entire faith group in this way, the far right takes us further down that road. And Trump has endorsed it.

For the moment, Trump threatens merely a travel ban. But where will he take things? Especially if the target becomes North Koreans rather than Muslim? 

We’ve seen where that kind of thinking has gone before. Which is why, on the 42nd anniversary of her death, we need Hannah Arendt as much as ever. And need to listen carefully to what she taught us about human behaviour.

A sprinkling of comfort. In case of fire

We’re not quite home and dry with work on our home.

It turns out that to be home and dry we need to install a means to make part of our home thoroughly wet. Contrary to the oft-repeated views of our contractor, building regulations require us to have more sophisticated precautions in place against the risk of fire. That means installing sprinklers in our sitting room and dining room. 

Sitting room and dining room are really one large room – well, large by our standards – which is the problem: the alternatively would be to split them once more into two rooms with a wall in between, at the same time walling off the staircase which is currently open-plan. That’s how things once were, no doubt, but we’d regret going back to that layout. So it has to be sprinklers.

Open Plan. We like it. But the price is sprinklers

They also want us to put in a first-floor window through which we might be able to escape to the street ahead of any flames.

Well, there are now neat round holes with protruding hoses in the ceilings of both the sitting room and dining room. For some reason, the sprinkler people had to send a couple of young lads round to do that work a week or two ago, but a second team has to come out to finish the job. That isn’t now due to happen for another two and a half weeks. We shall have holes in the ceilings nearly till Christmas now. So it will truly be a holy season. A holy holiday, indeed. 

Sprinkler hose in place. Wholly in tune with the holiday spirit

Still, you can imagine, I’m sure, that I now sleep a great deal better at night. I am no longer consumed by terrible dreams of being burned to a frazzle by a horrific blaze. We just have to hang on a little time longer and fine systems will be in place to protect us from so vile a fate.

I thought at first that if the terrible circumstances arose, I’d make for the new window and a break for freedom. Not that I understand why. It seems a little silly to go up to the first floor only to jump from the window, when I could just open the front door and leave the house on the same level as the street. But, hey, I didn’t make up fire precaution regulations and I suppose the people who did are far more qualified than I am to reach intelligent decisions on these matters.

In any case, I’m much more attracted by the idea of the sprinklers. I think my view is that if it comes to it, what I’d far rather do would be to make for the sitting room in the event of fire. Then I could sit in my favourite spot, the couch, and be sprinkled with water from the ceiling.

There I could enjoy the delights of a cold shower while I watch the flames moving inexorably closer. In all the comfort my couch affords.

I concede that there are downsides to that prospect. But you must admit it’s pretty dramatic. And all thanks to the considerate design of building regulations.

Fire? Bring it on, I say. We’re ready.

Or, at least, we shall be in a few weeks.

Poor little Britain

It’s cold out there at the moment.

Sean Bean in Game of Thrones: “winter is coming”

Still, it is November, in the Northern Hemisphere, so we have to expect temperatures to be pretty uncomfortable. And at least we know that there are only three weeks to go before the days start to grow longer again. While the cold will be even more bitter, at least the lighter evenings will contain a promise of better times to come.

So much, at least, for the physical weather. When it comes to its status in the world, the cold has only just started to grip Britain. It will deepen a great deal further in the coming years, and not start to recede until British people at last emerge from the illusions behind which they prefer to hide.

Most central among these is the sense that their country is still a world power. A lion whose roar is heard around the globe. Some will cling on to that belief for a long time, but others are beginning to take the tough object lessons reality is delivering to them.

For many months, the hard Brexiters in government have been insisting that they will not move on the amount Britain will have to pay the EU on leaving. This is the so-called ‘divorce bill’. While a member of the EU, Britain entered into a number of commitments many of which involved the payment of money. Among other things, there are people who have retired from the EU Civil Service, to whose pensions Britain pledged to contribute. There is a sense in Brussels that these commitments have to be honoured despite Britain’s departure.

The hard Brexiters have been insisting that the figure should be low.

Take the case of Priti Patel. She had to resign from her post as International Development minister earlier this month, having demonstrated her humility in public service by conducting her own foreign policy while on holiday in Israel, where she had meetings with senior ministers including Benjamin Netanyahu, without reference to any other member of the government including the Foreign Secretary. Demonstrating the diplomatic self-control which make her such a loss to foreign affairs, she announced at the weekend that the EU could just “sod off” with their demands for a divorce bill.

It must have come as quite a blow to find that her erstwhile boss, the Prime Minister Theresa May, is now talking about paying as much as £50bn, perhaps twice the sum many had hoped. Ultimately, of course, there will be a compromise and a sensible figure will be agreed, whether near the £50n level or not. The key point is that Britain blinked first, and had to. In a doubtless unwelcome reminder to Brexiters, May had to admit that Britain is not in the driving seat, it can’t call the shots, it has to move towards the EU before the EU will move towards us.

Then came the affair of the Trump far-right Tweets. When Britain leaves the EU, it will be more dependent than ever on the US. President Trump (it still feels slightly unbelievable to write those two words together) early on made it clear that he was keen to offer Britain a trade deal, a piece of news Brexiters reacted to with glee. Sadly, Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Commerce Secretary was in the UK at the beginning of this month. He stressed that the US was ready to give Brexit Britain a trade deal, but we might just have to make a few minor accommodations. Like giving up on European-style regulation – shorthand for our having to abandon our unreasonable demands for our food to be edible.

Just over two weeks later his boss, the President himself, decided that it would be judicious to retweet three tweets with Islamophobic videos attached.

Even the most elegant of houses has to have a sewage system. All nations have to have their political cesspools. Britain’s is called ‘Britain First’, a neo-Fascist grouplet of no significance in our politics. Indeed, the woman who put up the tweets the President chose to pass on, chalked up the triumphant total of 56 votes in a run for parliament. Just to give some perspective on that figure, the winner of the election took 16,897 votes.

She is now facing criminal charges for religiously aggravated harassment and for using threatening and abusive language.

This is the person whose views the President decided to endorse.

In another example of our unreasonable attachment to certain standards, many of us in Britain rather resented this behaviour. The Prime Minister isn’t famed for her courage in standing up to Trump – she was the first head of government to visit him in the White House and issued him with an invitation to a State visit immediately, without the customary waiting period we generally like to take to see what kind of a President we are dealing with.

Yet even she felt she should speak out this time, telling Trump explicitly that he had been wrong. His reaction? To tell her to mind her own business.

When Home Secretary Amber Rudd spoke to the House of Commons about the Trump row, she repeated her boss’s rebuke to Trump. But then she went on to remind her listeners that the relationship with the States is vital. Which is true, and particularly now. But does she mean that we have to be careful what we say about him – even when he endorses our Fascists?

Many have been asking whether the invitation to Trump for the State Visit would be cancelled. It looks as though what Britain’s going to do is leave the invitation out there, but simply fail to set a date for it. Which, if you’re feeling generous, is a classic British compromise; if you’re feeling a little more severe, you might view it as something more like moral cowardice.

But what choice does Britain have? We’ve chosen Brexit which means we’ve chosen dependence on the States. Even under Trump.

Game of Thrones got it right. Winter is coming, and it’s going to be cold. For a very long time.

The faith that moves mountains. But not apparently nations

The head of the Catholic Church visits a country which has a majority of Buddhists, representatives of a religion that is a byword for peacefulness and tolerance, but who are busily exterminating members of another of the world’s great faiths, Islam. The Pope carefully avoids naming the victims as Rohingya, because that might further inflame those gentle Buddhists and turn their attentions to Christians as well.

The Pope in Myanmar: don’t mention the Rohingya

Those Rohingya are members of a religion that believes that to save a single life is tantamount to saving the entire human race. And yet members of that religion, Islam – admittedly a tiny minority of it – seem to have convinced themselves that it is holy work to kill large numbers of people in its name.

The behaviour of that minority has inflamed many in the West into passionate Islamophobia. Some of those justify their hatred on the grounds that they are Christians, or belong at any rate to countries that are Christian in their roots. This is a curious notion, in many cases.

In Britain, for example, only around one in twenty people regularly attends a church service of any Christian denomination. But then, maybe they’re thinking of the underlying values rather than actual Church practice. Principles such as

Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him

or

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God

or

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these

The first of those is a little hard to reconcile with Britain’s long love-affair with weapons, a little reduced these days but only because austerity is enforcing cuts even on the military.

The second is just as hard to reconcile with the other side of the austerity coin, which has been to enrich the wealthiest members of society still further, making it, I assume, harder than ever for them to get into the kingdom of heaven.

As for the third, that commitment to children is proclaimed by most Brits, but rather subverted by the discovery that the country has one of the worst rates of stillbirth in Western Europe. Why? Here are the words of Gill Walton, Chief Executive of the Royal College of Midwives:

We’ve got a real concern about staffing levels… we really need more staff and more capacity in order to safely care for mums and babies.

Austerity hammers children too, it seems. As we find in the recent reports that two-thirds of English children referred for mental healthcare remain untreated. And it’s not just children: refuges for women escaping domestic violence are being forced to close through lack of funding, hospital Emergency Departments are being increasingly staffed by unqualified doctors, and the hospitals themselves are, in greater numbers than ever before, facing bankruptcy without more finance.

It seems that our Christian values aren’t strong enough to insist on the support the vulnerable. Instead we prefer to elect and re-elect a government committed to serving the wealthiest by imposing these cuts on services that would otherwise protect the poor. Perhaps our supposed Christianity has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, and merely provides a justification for our dislike of the other, the foreigner, the person from outside our community.

Faith without compassion. Whether in Myanmar, in ISIS or, sadly, in Britain.