Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed - Brexit reflections #17.

June 2016 and the Referendum now seem a very long time ago.  We were neophytes then, and in the slow and painful subsequent months both Remainers and Leavers have discovered more about themselves, their friends and cross-border trading arrangements.

I have re-read some of my previous sixteen Brexit reflections, and I'm pleased to record that I don't ever seem to have been a gung-ho Brexiteer.  Before the election I wrote "To be clear, there would be drawbacks and risks to leaving.  This isn't a choice between something self-evidently good and something self-evidently bad.  It's a choice between two almost equally unsatisfactory and dangerous things".  It's also heartening to record that even then I was quite clear that the doom-laden economic forecasts were rubbish, and that the pound was likely to fall, with knock-on effects for Britain's manufacturing and for inflation levels.

What is notably absent from my posts is any sense of the complexities of the situation regarding the Irish border.  I'm not suggesting these weren't aired at all in the media; they probably were (and particularly in the Republic of Ireland).  But they didn't figure largely in the UK campaign, or in the case the Cameron government put for Remaining.

Boy, has that all changed.

First, a quick point about the form of words (I'm not going to call it an agreement, for reasons which will become clear) reached last week which has enabled Brexit talks to move on to trade.  The Irish position - that there could be no trade talks without a guarantee of a soft border - was always unsustainable, both intellectually and politically. Intellectually because we won't know what kind of border there will have to be until we know what the trade deal will look like.  Politically because Mrs May depends on the DUP to remain in office, and the DUP will never agree to a border down the Irish Sea. 

The Republic got itself in this position, I suspect, largely because of the enthusiasm and inexperience of its Premier Mr Varadkar.  The EU has rescued him from his own naivety.

This morning the British press is full of warnings that the deal could unravel because of remarks allegedly made by David Davis (and other Tory politicians) to the effect that the UK hasn't agreed to anything binding.  But Davis, although perhaps tactless, is correct.  For one thing, the text of the agreement makes it clear that the arrangement is subject to contrary agreement between the parties.  But for another, and crucially, the document says at the very outset that it should be read "Under the caveat that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed . . . "  Including, presumably, the document itself.

None of that means that the border issue is one which will just go away.  It is a circle which will have to be squared.  But it does mean that Mrs May has got her way on the sequencing, and that the EU26 have grasped the fatuity of the Irish position.

Where does all that leave us?  The great risk is that the Remainers in the Government will push us towards a deal which leaves the UK paying EU contributions whilst having no say in EU regulations and being restricted to signing trade deals with only those third party countries whose regulations themselves comply with those of the EU.  Undoubtedly this is what the EU would like. 

My second fear is that, as the March 19 deadline approaches, the EU will lure us into complacency.  A deal will seem to be quite near.  Preparations for No Deal - hard borders, new customs provision - would be minimal.  But then, when it was too late for these preparations to be made, a deal would suddenly seem quite far away, unless agreed on terms demanded by the EU.

This second fear plays into the first in the sense that the HMG Remainers (including of course the civil service) are most likely to believe that a watered down version of present arrangements is the best we can manage, and thus the least likely to be arguing that, since No Deal has its attractions, it is essential that we prepare for it, if only to be able to point out to the EU that it is a viable alternative. 

If you doubt the Stockholm syndrome exhibited by HMG Remainers, I would point to the statement by Philip Hammond over the weekend that even if the UK ended up with No Deal we could still end up paying a divorce bill to the EU.  No one on either side of the argument has ever suggested that there is any legal basis for paying a divorce bill. The treaties contain no such provision. Mrs May's £40bn offer is a conditional sweetener for trade talks ("nothing is agreed until everything is agreed"). It can be just as easily withdrawn in the event of No Deal. Philip Hammond is so determined to do a deal, however compromised, that he is willing to surrender the UK's principal bargaining chip - the money. His conduct is extraordinary.

It's becoming clear that, whatever else, the EU is a tremendously powerful and slippery creature (like one of Blue Planet's octopuses), its tentacles reaching into every aspect of British life. Those who say our membership has entailed surrendering little sovereignty might like to reflect on our difficulties in extricating ourselves. They might also like to consider statements made by Messrs Juncker and Schulz in recent weeks concerning the EU's federalist ambitions.

All of these things make me more convinced that voting Leave was the right thing to do. The conduct of the pro-Remain establishment has been smug, condescending and manipulative, although this is a subject for another day. I have absolutely no doubt that Britain can do very well outside the EU, and my worry is that we are presently governed by people who did not believe this before the Referendum and who don't believe it now. There is surely going to come a crunch point for the Tories, where they have to decide what kind of Brexit they want. That will be Mrs May's point of greatest internal danger.

As for the Irish, it's ironic that, having struggled for centuries to throw off the British yoke, they seem petrified of a greater distance between Ireland and Britain.  And that having founded their national story on the fight for autonomy they seem so determined to prevent their countrymen in the North from having it themselves.

New music - no way to run a railway?

The other night I went to a concert.  A friend of mine was having a piece played.  A set of pieces actually, for voice and a small ensemble.  It took place in a small and chi-chi performance room in a reclaimed industrial building with the usual bare brick, entrance through a small temple to cappucino.  

I liked my friend's piece.  S/he is a talented composer.  There was a degree of hip-hoppery, with a bit of minimalism and some Second Viennese School spread over all.  The performers were all young, or aspiring to look young; black clad, with the disappointed but defiant mien that contemporary music specialists share with minor functionaries in a revolutionary state who have just learned that they have been denounced as fifth columnists by former colleagues.

The audience for this event numbered between 25 and 30. As far as I could tell from the social interaction, almost all were either friends, family or students of the composer (and/or the players).

Turning the programme over I saw that the event was made possible with the support of a variety of public funded organisations, including the Arts Council and other usual suspects.

An art that is dying?  A monument to elitism and cronyism?  Or merely no way to run a railway?

Philip Collins, Jeremy Corbyn and the social democratic dream.

"The electorate selects a Labour government to push the nation down the road of progress", writes Philip Collins in the Times today.

Ah, the P word.  A section of political thought describes itself with a self-approbatory adjective, and rests self-satisfied on its intellectual laurels.  So far, so tendentious.

But what's this?  Collins continues, "That effort inevitably leads to an excess of public spending . . . (the electorate) call on the Conservative Party to tidy up".

An admission.  Crikey.  A fascinating insight into the mental world of a Social Democrat, occasionally called to serve as speechwriter at Tony Blair's table.

 Mr Collins is too complacent.  Whilst UK's debt to GDP ratio fell consistently from the highs of WWII, it began to rise again with Gordon Brown's spending spree, doubling from about 30% in 2002 to 60% by the time the coalition government came into office in 2010.  Since then HMG has struggled to deal with the aftermath of the 2008 crash, bearing down on public spending to restore some order to the public finances.

Labour meanwhile has tried to have it both ways, criticising the Tories for cuts as well as for borrowing too much money. The worm in Mr Collins' bud is that, although now marginally falling, debt to GDP is now wobbling between 80 and 90% of GDP.  It has tripled in 15 years.  It would be astonishing if the ratio had dipped significantly by the time this Parliament limps to an end. 

Thus it is overwhelmingly likely that the next Labour government will take office with a background of vastly higher existing debt levels than at any time since the 1960s.   I wonder where Mr Collins thinks a Corbyn/McDonnell government would leave Britain's fiscal position?

The reality is that the cosy dualism Collins describes is broken.  The Tories have struggled to restore the public finances in an age of low inflation.  Public services are undoubtedly suffering (although when we are still borrowing £1bn every week just to stay afloat that's hardly austerity - profligacy lite anyone?).  An incoming Labour government will ratchet up spending still further. A crunch is coming.  The public's expectation of decent public services is meeting economic reality.  The Social Democratic dream is over.  Britain is going to look very different when the progressives wake up.

Finishing War and Peace

I have just finished War and Peace. Like most readers, I endured rather than enjoyed Tolstoy's ruminations on the nature of history and philosophy which interrupt and then bookend the trials and tribulations of Natasha, Pierre, their friends and families.  But I can see their importance, partly because the contingency of the characters' complex affairs makes in a human way the point about history Tolstoy sets out in his theoretical disquisitions.

War and Peace doesn't really finish - it sinks back into the earth, and so imperceptibly that at the end I had to leaf back through the pages to find the last mention of the people in it. That's where the real glory of the book lies.  Tolstoy shows the weaknesses of his characters without ever really seeming to condemn.  His is the magnanimity we might hope for from God.

He also shows something true about life which the translator Anthony Briggs puts so well in the introduction.  "Virtually everyone - even people in privileged or advantageous circumstances - finds the living of life a worrying and difficult business most of the time".

So true; and funny that when I read those words in the afterglow of finishing the book, I thought immediately of Larry McMurtry's peerless Lonesome Dove.  For McMurtry has the same compassion, and the same lofty sense of observing poor humans doing their best to be happy despite their manifold self-inflicted mistakes.  As much wisdom as folly is given to Woodrow F Call and Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove, and you don't have to search far into one of the many fan sites devoted to McMurtry's book (and, more particularly, the TV spin-off which followed) to come across the following.

(Lorie is the young prostitute yearning for the bright lights of San Francisco.  Her interlocutor is McCrae, the lazy, sardonic old Texas Ranger).

"Lorie darlin'", says McCrae, "life in San Francisco, you see, is still just life.  If you want any one thing too badly, it's likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself".

Amen to that.  But of course the genius of Tolstoy and McMurtry is that their characters are poignantly unable to take their own advice.  

I might just have to start on Lonesome Dove again.

Harvey Weinstein - Hollywood is another country

To be clear, if half the allegations against Harvey Weinstein are true, he should have been behind bars long ago.

The crimes of which Mr Weinstein is accused are commonplace in circumstances where priapic men have something approaching absolute power.  So far, so awful.  And so banal.

The fallout really is interesting however.  Actress after actress has come forward to accuse Mr Weinstein if not of rape, then of sexual assault; if not harassment, then threats to their career.  Where have they been until now?  Weinstein did not begin his behaviour last week.

Pressed on this point, a generous number of women have stressed that they feared their career prospects might have been in jeopardy if they reported Weinstein.  But although no doubt true (and unattractively tawdry) as far as it goes, it is not quite the whole story.  For they all must have known that their silence would expose other young women to auditions the Harvey Weinstein way.  

Their calculation went like this.  A - Expose Harvey = career jeopardy, but also the chance to stop Harvey doing it to anyone else.  B - Don't expose Harvey = career advancement, but also other actresses suffering the same fate.  

As we know, none of the people bleating about Weinstein now took option A when they had the chance.  They chose their own career prospects over the chance to protect others.  Few of us can truthfully claim we would have done differently, but it isn't very edifying.  The victims are now spotless.  On the other hand Weinstein has been condemned without trial.

Weinstein has claimed that mores used to be different, and that's true.  But what's really different is that Hollywood is a place where women whose USP is their looks are so desperate for money and fame that they're willing to ignore their moral compass to make it there.  And for every actress who walked out on Weinstein or fought him off there will be dozens more who thought, "Oh well, it's worth half an hour's misery for the sake of getting the part".

The Weinstein affair tells us a lot about Mr Weinstein, and a lot about his accusers.

Jonathan Liew's farewell to Henry Blofeld

Henry Blofeld, who has retired from Test Match Special after more than forty years in the job, was the subject earlier on this week of a withering assessment by Jonathan Liew in the Torygraph. Blofeld, says Liew, was the beneficiary of privilege.  After Eton and a tedious spell in the City, the broadcaster (a promising cricketer until his bike collided with a bus) fell into the BBC via a stint in county cricket reporting arranged by a personal contact.

Liew is not very forgiving of Blofeld's faults.  He points out that Blofeld wasn't a terribly good commentator (which is true, particularly in later years), being ill-prepared, prone to embarrassing gaffes and with a tendency to lean too heavily on his trademark observations about pigeons, buses, planes and (in the years before new stands obscured Old Trafford's railway station) trains.

Liew is shrewd enough to have worked out that to some extent Blofeld's upper-class twit persona is a front (and certainly no one watching Blofeld's final stint on TMS, broadcast live on Twitter, could have been in any doubt that here was a vastly experienced professional giving the occasion 100% of his attention), but he nevertheless makes the point that Blofeld got the job without by any stretch of the imagination being the best person to do it.  This does, Liew says, tell us something about the extent of our meritocracy.

I think Liew is only partly right.  It's certainly true that Blofeld got the job in the early 70s because of his connections, but times have changed.  Whereas in the old days personal contacts might have got you into Oxford (as Polly "One O Level" Toynbee might attest), into medical school or into a pupillage in Uncle Christopher's chambers, nowadays attempts to use such connections would be more likely to be greeted with embarrassment than with understanding.  Moreover, Blofeld may not have been the best cricket commentator but he was often an entertaining one, and the love which his colleagues and listeners evidently felt for him helped foster the sensation that one was eavesdropping on a friendly, slightly dissolute bunch of spectators who'd had a glass of wine before lunch high up in the stands.

More seriously, the kind of patronage Liew identifies is not only dead but has been replaced by another - tokenism.  Are Alison Mitchell and Ebony Rainford-Brent really the best people to do the TMS job?  I doubt it.  They were given the chance because they were a woman and - Holy Grail! - a black woman respectively.

I've mentioned before Robin Day's controversial assertion that Anna Ford only got her job on TV because men wanted to sleep with her.  Day was pilloried, but he was right. He wasn't suggesting that Ford couldn't do her job well enough (nor am I suggesting Mitchell and Rainford-Brent can't do theirs).  He was suggesting that someone else might have done it better.  Very much like Henry Blofeld in fact.

But ironically, whereas Blofeld was an entertaining gasbag, Mitchell and Rainford-Brent are competent broadcasters at best.  TMS now has quite a lot of these.  People like Blofeld don't grow on trees.

RIP Walter Becker

I'm trying to remember where I was when I first heard Reelin' in the Years.  Probably in my parents' bedroom listening to the radio.  This was a place more or less guaranteed to be unoccupied during the day, and therefore free from the fierce disapproval of my father, who hated pop music.  This would be about 1973, I think.  I have been listening to Steely Dan and therefore to the work of Walter Becker, whose death was announced yesterday, for nearly 45 years.

Thanks Walt.  To say that Becker's death leaves a hole in the world of music would probably not be true, since the years between 1972 and 1978, when Steely Dan released the six albums at the heart of their output, are decades in the past and their work still lives.  But it's sad all the same.  Ask not for whom the bell tolls, and all that.

Such is the pleasure their music has brought me, I once reflected that amongst the downsides of death would be that I would no longer be able to listen to it.

Unlike many great songwriters, Becker and Donald Fagen's material doesn't travel well to other artists.  Almost none of their best songs have been covered by others, partly because they were so brilliantly realised by the odd mix of Becker and Fagen themselves, regular players like Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias, and a coterie of session wizards; but perhaps more pertinently because the material was so idiosyncratic and so obviously a consequence of their own hipsterish personae. 

Becker and Fagen liked jazz as well as rock and roll, and the idea of the Sonny Rollins-loving cool cat with the black polo neck, the pallor of late nights, the succession of cigarettes and the copy of The Naked Lunch in the pocket oozes from their work, and from the way they presented themselves.

Although enthusiastic about jazz, it's hard to imagine Becker and Fagen being in favour of much else. A rich vein of cynicism courses through their stuff, and if they ever considered charting the obvious emotions it rarely shows.  There's little doubt that this was what Becker and Fagen were really like - there are interviews online which display their mordant humour to good effect: it wasn't a front.

They were sceptics at a young age.  Whilst still students at Bard College, New York, they quickly grasped that the 1968 Summer of Love was a sham.  "I heard it was you", Fagen sang on Only A Fool Would Say That a few years later, "Talking 'bout a world where all was free / It just couldn't be / And only a fool would say that".   Cynicism and irony can be overdone however - they are good responses to some aspects of life, but other emotions are useful too.  Becker and Fagen sometimes struggled in their personal lives, and Becker's descent into heroin addiction was one reason for the long hiatus in the pair's collaboration which followed Aja in 1978. 

Nevertheless, some of their best work displays a wonderful tenderness and subtlety.  Their songs are musical short stories.  I read Gaucho as a monologue by a man who returns home to find his gay lover with a young Hispanic.  Glamour Profession may or may not be the tedious boasting of a Hollywood driver-to-the-celebs.  Kid Charlemagne recounts the panic stricken flight of LA drug dealers.

And all these songs are set to a dazzling variety of jazz inflected stylings - ballad, rock and roll, gospel, waltz, reggae, disco, funk and blues.  Some - for example Your Gold Teeth II and Home At Last - seem to invent a new genre all of their own.  For me, it's no accident that the pair's most popular tunes - Reelin' in the Years, Rikki Don't Lose That Number, Deacon Blue, Do It Again - are the ones whose subject matters veer closest to the mainstream (they could have made a lot more money if they'd wanted).  Coincidentally or not, female Dan-heads are in short supply.

And yet I also feel that Becker and Fagen saw the limitations of jazz.  They worked very hard and spent huge sums of record company money to find soloists who could add something other than virtuosity - although there was plenty of that - to their material.  They were aware of the possibility of empty note-spinning, and of the blandness of jazz-rock fusion.  Music always says something, and a good deal of the genre seems to devote itself to saying, "Look at this F sharp 7th chord suspended over an A/G diad", or "Look how many million notes per minute I can play".  Not in Becker and Fagen's hands.  The writer Richard Williams described Steely Dan recently as "clever" above all else. Not so.  Yes, they were clever.  Smart arse if you like.  But they never allowed cleverness to be the goal.

Becker was a decent enough bass player and rather underrated guitarist, who also played a bit of keyboards.  Like Fagen, he preferred others to play on the band's records, and only performed himself when he had to.  Although he never sang on a Steely Dan record, those who bought his first solo album, Eleven Tracks of Whack, were surprised at the strength of his scratchy baritone voice.  With Donald Fagen, he mined an art form with results that can induce dizzying pleasure, and charted the underbelly of the American (and human) condition with rueful wit.  Thanks again Walt.

Andrea Leadsom, Mishal Husain and diversity at the BBC.

Andrea Leadsom MP has been widely mocked on Twitter for telling the BBC presenter Mishal Husain that it would be a good thing if some journalists could be a bit more patriotic.

This was a stupid remark, for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it gave the government's opponents the opportunity to ridicule Ms Leadsom for her naive devotion to the idea that a bit of patriotrism might be a good thing.

But there is another reason why Leadsom gave the wrong answer to Ms Husain's question, now forgotten in the hoo-ha, and this tells us a good deal more about the interviewer, and about Britain. The question was, in terms, "Is anything going right for the government?"  It was Husain's persistent repetition of this question which made Leadsom snap.

The answer she should have given was, "Well, since 2010 we have had a steadily growing economy, we've created hundreds of thousands of jobs, unemployment is at historically low levels, and we have succeeded in reducing the deficit from £150bn a year down to about £50bn, a fall of about two thirds. So I would say quite a lot is going right for the government, wouldn't you?" Game, set and match to Leadsom.

But if Leadsom's was a stupid answer, Husain's was a stupid question. It was stupid because she should have expected to receive both barrels from Leadsom. But Husain didn't anticipate the answer Leadsom could have given. Why not? Because Husain, a low-wattage intellect who surely was promoted from the ranks of other low-wattage intellects (and perhaps even higher-wattage ones) because of her beauty and diversity box-ticking qualities, does not think the government has achieved anything worth mentioning. She genuinely thought she was asking Leadsom a hard question. It was actually a long-hop outside leg stump which Leadsom, not the sharpest herself, comprehensively missed.

Partly that's the government's fault. It didn't campaign sufficiently on its steady economic record during the election. Partly its because people take the present situation for granted. But partly its because the BBC tends to employ people who went straight into the Corporation with a good humanities degree from a good university, where they were taught by academics who had never left university themselves after attaining their own humanities degree (recent research shows that the overwhelming majority of British academics are Labour voters). So of course Ms Husain is a Hampstead liberal of cliche whose distaste for Toryism is visceral.

I have no enthusiasm for Ms Leadsom, and I hope she isn't the next Tory leader, but it just goes to show that the BBC's enthusiasm for diversity only goes as far as diversity of appearance. Diversity of view? Not so much.

Reflections on the Grenfell Tower tragedy

After horror at the events last week, and trailing a long way behind, my strongest reaction has been contempt for the press. Not just the person from the Sun who posed as a relative to try and reach one of the injured in hospital, but for all those who jumped to conclusions about the fire and then excoriated Theresa May for failing to go and visit the survivors straight away.  Never have so many people have become experts in fire regulations and types of exterior cladding in so little time.

If you think you know why the fire happened, why aren't you calling for the cancellation of the public inquiry?  After all, it's just a waste of money now.

Journalists don't know why the fire started, how it spread so quickly, whether the wrong type of cladding was used, whether it breached fire regulations, whether the fire regulations were adequate, whether different cladding might have prevented any fatalities, why sprinklers weren't fitted, whether sprinklers might have stopped the fire, whether it could have been stopped if it weren't for cuts in the fire services or whether the instruction for tenants to stay in their flats rather than crowd the staircase led to unnecessary deaths.  Journalists don't know any of these things (and neither do the rest of us). They should wait for the public enquiry to report rather than pretending that they've already worked the answers out.  The Times journalist who described the heads of various sprinkler trade bodies as "experts" (instead of "salesmen") deserves particular contempt.

I would be willing to bet quite a large sum that the panels fitted conformed to building regulations.

As for Mrs May, she is no doubt not at her best in situations which require her to interact with other carbon-based bipeds, but the response to her failure to visit the survivors straight away is hysterical. These people have lost their homes, their possessions and in many cases friends and family.  I very much doubt whether any of them is saying, "What really pisses me off is that the Prime Minister didn't come and see me". Tellingly, it is other people who have been complaining.

You can learn a good deal about the leader of the Labour party and his acolytes from this catastrophe. Mr Corbyn was very quick to lay the blame on "austerity", even as public spending continues to rise. I guess we shouldn't be surprised by this sort of opportunism, but when a block of council flats, whose cheap rents are subsidised by others, has just had nearly £10 million spent on a face-lift, "austerity" is not the word which immediately springs to mind.

As for the Labour call for the displaced to be housed in the vacant properties of RBK&C's millionaires, this is populism writ large. Don't like the fact that other people have got a lot of money? Fine. Let's just confiscate their assets. Never mind that, in time, the rich will sue for damages and your gesture politics will end up costing the state and the council far, far more than, for example, bed and breakfast accommodation. We hate the rich, so let's do something than hurts them.

Messrs Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott, Lavery and Milne are dangerous people, for whom the rule of law means little. If you think this is hyperbole, McDonnell has called for a "million strong march" to drive the Tories from office. 

It's must be so tempting, when you feel the wind of public opinion in your sails, to disregard an election result and the rule of law. Like Donald Trump, Mr Corbyn tells his supporters what they want to hear. You only have to substitute "the rich" for "the Mexicans" to see the similarities.

Lastly, a word about the "poor". Let's be realistic about the residents of the Grenfell Tower. In some respects they had uniquely privileged position. They had a council tenancy at a low rent in a tower block in one of the richest cities in the world where jobs are widely available. Having lived nearby for many years at the end of the twentieth century, I can testify that Notting Hill and its environs are a great place to live. 

Ask any of the residents a month ago if they'd prefer to swap their flat for a bedsit in the private rented sector at the same price. You would have had no takers. Compared to the overwhelming majority of people at the bottom end of the socio economic scale in London they were well off.*  

This doesn't mean that their deaths don't matter, or aren't a tragedy, or that those at fault do not deserve to be punished. It does mean however that once again the Left and the unthinking press have a very sketchy relationship with the truth, particularly when distorting it can tug heart-strings and stir self-righteous anger.

*A couple of days after the fire I heard one of the residents interviewed on PM. He complained that the £5,000 bank transfer provided to residents by the Government was not enough. "It's a joke", he said. "My bed and my TV cost more than that".

PS As the days have rolled by, it has emerged that some dozens of tower blocks have been fitted with the same non-fire retardant cladding. Many of them in Labour controlled areas. Many during the Blair governments. These revelations make a mockery of Corbyn's attempts to blame Grenfell on "Tory austerity".

General Election 2017 - the big picture

It's easy to get lost in the minutiae of election results - swings, demographics, careers busted and revived. Here's a wider view.

The welfare state was created at a time when life expectancies were much lower and healthcare procedures much less sophisticated. Nearly 70 years later we are living longer. Elderly people are expensive to keep alive, both because they require more medical intervention than the young and because the state has to pay them a pension. The increased complexity of new medical techniques has driven the cost of healthcare upwards.

At the same time Britain has effectively outsourced its manufacturing industry to countries in the Far East where labour costs are lower. This has reduced the price of consumer goods, but has been devastating for Britain's balance of payments because the money we use to buy such goods goes out of the country. It pays workers abroad, whose taxes go to their governments, not ours.

To put it bluntly, running Britain has got more expensive just as our ability to pay for it has declined. The 2008 crash is symptomatic of this. It happened because both consumers and governments tried to sustain their living standards by borrowing.

When income declines and costs go up, a number of solutions are possible. One is to say "We must spend less". This has been the Tory approach since 2010; and it has been successful to the extent that the deficit (excess of spend over income) has been reduced from about £150bn per year to about £1bn per week. However there is now a perceptible effect on public services, and in the meantime Britain's public sector debt has continued to balloon towards a danger point whose exact location is of course unknown.

The other solution is to say, the best way to reduce long-term borrowing is more short-term borrowing. The economy runs faster and companies are encouraged to invest. A virtuous circle is created whereby investment begets investment and both beget growth. That growth raises the taxes which therefore pay for the extra borrowing (or at least makes the extra borrowing smaller as a proportion of newly increased GDP).

One weakness of this latter proposal is that economic policy is always implemented by politicians, whose view of the limits of prudence is always taken with an eye on the next election.  In a way it is fatuous to point out such defects, because there will always be a section of the public, of politicians and of the economics profession which wants it to be true even if it is not. That section can become influential enough to contest a general election, as the events of last week demonstrate.

I heard again again, from Mr Corbyn, his supporters and the media that "people are tired of austerity". I take this to mean, "people are tired of attempting to live within their means", which is not the same thing as "people think the case for living within your means has not been made out". The Times headline this morning is "Austerity is over, May tells Tories", so even the Nasty Party seems to have accepted that the public mood is against them, never mind that if you look at the figures, public spending has actually continued to rise.

I believe that ultimately we will have to live more or less within the limits of our income, and that we will all come to realise that sooner or later. I'm not surprised that a lot of people haven't grasped it yet, but they will, and I suppose it's only to be expected that they will only do so after all the vaguely plausible alternatives have been tried. Eventually, a Government will try to spend its way out of debt. I'm sure they will fail. Eventually the markets will rebel.

What society will look like then I shudder to think. The affluent (in other words anyone with a good job or who has built up some savings) will be told they must bear their fair share of the burden (this will be whatever the party demanding the money says it means at the time of the demand). Tax rates will rise to punitive levels, enterprise will be discouraged and mobile money will leave the country. It will, in other words, be a return to the '70s, but with this crucial difference: then the UK's debt to GDP ratio was below 50% and falling. It is now above 80% and rising.

Be afraid. The culture of entitlement has a sharp grip on the British public imagination, and the first response of many to the realisation that it is in jeopardy will be anger and denial.

General Election 2017 - are the baby boomers to blame?

In a post-election interview Jeremy Corbyn claimed that the Tories had "lost" the election and that Labour had "won". These strange interpretations of the words suggest that "post-truth" phenomena are not limited to the loonier reaches of the Republican party in the United States.

The Tories won most seats, and the biggest percentage of the popular vote. They won the election.

Just not as well as they expected.

I saw an analysis of constituencies into which the Tories had poured resources. It turned out that they had tried hard in areas which turned out to be unwinnable, neglecting more realistic constituencies which, had they won, would have given them an increased majority. Hubris, you might say. You might also ask why the Tories did not implement the Boundary Commission report while they had the opportunity. Doing so would have given them dozens more seats.

A good deal of blame has been attached to Mrs May for calling an "unnecessary" election. I think it's misplaced. Some people have reacted with horror to the notion that a politician might try and outmanouevre their opponents by exploiting a time of weakness. That's fake outrage. Labour would have done the same; and keeping a foot on your enemy's throat is a legitimate and necessary posture in any oppositional endeavour. Besides, Mrs May can argue that even as things stand she has bought for HMG a further two years in which to get Brexit done and implemented, instead of the electoral cycle coinciding awkwardly with the end of the negotiations. She can even argue that the country has benefited from that extra period of grace. She has also shot the SNP fox.

It's surely OK for Tories to criticise May for running an ineffective campaign, but for her opponents to lambast her for not winning by a big enough margin is an approach which scarcely qualifies as a thought, let alone one which has been pursued to its end.

All depends on May being able to stay in office long enough. At this stage a confidence and supply agreement has been reached with the DUP in principle. May's critics are outraged by the party's more fundamentalist aspects, but unpalatable as the DUP may be, these are the same people who excused Tim Farron's attitude to gay sex just a few short weeks ago.

You see, it's different when liberals are homophobic.

No, we must blame the result on the electorate. They - we - voted like this. Now they - we - must live with it.

The most depressing aspect of the result is not the what but the why. Corbyn's Labour Party showed that if you promise people the thing they most want and tell them that someone else will pay for it, they will vote for you en masse. Large numbers of young people have no experience of Labour's propensity for wrecking the economy. They don't know that every Labour administration has ended with unemployment higher than when it began. They see Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness as benign paternal figures rather than the cold-eyed murderers they were when Corbyn was cuddling up to them. They shrug when you point out that an MP (Naz Shah) who had to apologise for anti-Semitism only last year is still in the Labour Party and was re-elected last week with a massively increased majority.

The young shriek that they are hard done by, and yet they have enjoyed staggeringly higher standards of living than the baby boomers they despise, and emerge from the - far more extensive - higher education opportunities available to them to find massive numbers of jobs available. I contrast this with my own experience as a school-leaver in 1977 and despair at the impossibility of getting even my own children to accept they are better off.

The young seem to have one legitimate grievance, which is the shortage and expense of housing. And yet this too is a chimera. In the first place housing is expensive because of the excess of demand over supply. Which demographic is most likely to approve of the migration which has substantially caused it? Why, it's the young. Moreover, once you can get on the housing ladder, interest rates are the lowest they have been in my lifetime, making mortgage repayments reasonably consistent with historical standards.

The problem is the deposit required to buy your first house. Deposits are high because house prices are high. It requires saving. And yet when I go about of an evening, I don't see empty pubs, restaurants, theatres and cinemas. I see young people out spending and enjoying themselves. Perhaps my generation has taught them to live for today. But that is I think the only responsibility we should bear.

Some claim it is legitimate for Labour to appeal to pensioners because the Tories appeal to the old. But there is a difference. The Tories are insisting on protecting the interests of vulnerable people on less than £10,000 a year. Labour is trying to protect people in their first flush, with their peak earning years ahead of them.

Those of us on the centre and right of British politics thought that the lessons of socialism had been learned. We were wrong. Unless the Tories are very very careful in the next five years they are going to have to be learned all over again.

General Election 2017 - God protect them from ignorance and inexperience

Early reflections on the election.

1.  It's been a really crap night for Lynton Crosby.

2.  Theresa May now lacks authority.  At the time of writing the word is that May will stay on (an announcement is due in an hour's time, at 10 a.m.). On the face of it this looks absurd. She increased her party's vote share, but she called an election thinking it would increase her majority. It didn't. 

I would prefer her to go. For one thing, she would be widely hated otherwise, and have to run again in a few years in a general election when the public would no doubt relish booting her out. In the intervening period she would be unlikely to have become any more persuasive a campaigner. A successor would come to the job with a clean pair of hands. 

My preferred choice, having thought about it for 30 seconds, would be David Davis. But whoever (please not Andrea Leadsom), he would struggle for a working parliamentary majority, and would have no electoral mandate. He might have even less authority than May. Neither option looks great.

2.  Pro-Remain Twitter is agog this morning with the thought that this might be the end of Brexit. I would invite them to look at the results. Parties running on a pro-Brexit manifesto will take up the overwhelming majority of seats in Westminster.

3.  It's been a bad night for the SNP, but quite a good one for Nicola Sturgeon. The SNP has seen its seat count almost halved, but they're still the largest party in Scotland. That's good for Ms Sturgeon because it makes no practical difference to her at Holyrood but she will now be able to resist pressure from her supporters for a 2nd Independence referendum which she knows she cannot presently win. Those of us hoping peak-SNP has passed will be cheered by the ousting of Wee Eck himself, Alex Salmond. So will La Sturgeon. Her back-seat driver has just been booted onto the verge.

4.  The Labour leader's acceptance speech was revealing. He said, "[P]eople have said they have had quite enough of austerity politics, they have had quite enough of cuts in public expenditure, underfunding our health service, underfunding our schools and our education service and not giving our young people the chance they deserve in our society. People are voting for hope in the future and turning their backs on austerity".

He's right in his analysis, but the Labour voters he is referring are not. Labour supporters are wishing for something without first making sure it is practicable. The intractable economic reality is that even current spending is not affordable at current rates of tax, let alone the vast sums that Corbyn wants to splash out. Corbyn thinks all this can be fixed by borrowing and taxing the rich more. It can't. His supporters are voting for pie in the sky. They're voting for jam today. For La La Land. Indications are that the surge in Labour support could be accounted for by a surge in turnout by the young. God protect them from their own ignorance and inexperience.

5.  I enjoy politics far too much to have been depressed by the result. Besides, Labour's better than expected showing has cheered my wife up no end. She woke up at 6 a.m. and shagged me before breakfast.  

General Election 2017 - campaign vs. manifesto

The 2017 General Election is tomorrow. Some thoughts.

This is very much squeaky bum time, as all polls show a narrowing of Mrs May's previously unassailable lead, and some of them show the race to be very close. How have the Tories come within an ace of throwing it away?

Firstly, the press has hated the Tories' boring election campaign. It may have protected Mrs May from exposure as a charisma-free zone, but it gave journalists nothing to write about. So they wrote that May was wooden and reclusive instead. When the Tory manifesto turned out to have plans for dementia care which were unfair and attacked the middle-classes, they leapt on the discovery. When May did a U-turn they leapt on that too.

The fact that the social care plan represented a genuine and courageous (if misguided) attempt squarely to face an intractable problem got lost in the media glee.

That's pretty much all the stick the press has had with which to beat the Tories, but boy have they wielded it hard and frequently.

Now contrast Labour. The deficiencies of the Party's manifesto and leadership are so vast that as a journalist you wouldn't quite know where to begin. Taxes? The party is putting them up, despite evidence that doing so tends to bring in less, rather than more, revenue. The nation's finances? Labour is going to borrow and borrow in a fiscal situation that is already parlous; breaking even is always a "rolling" five years away. Tuition fees? Labour is going to abolish them, largely for the benefit of middle-class kids, at a cost of £10 billion. Terrorism? Labour encouraged multiculturalism, is too terrified of racism accusations to make hard decisions, is in hock to the Islamic vote, and is led by people who can't quite seem to decide (vide the IRA and Hamas) which terrorists are OK and which aren't. National security? Mr Corbyn won't press the nuclear button. Brexit? The party is utterly divided on the issue, and the manifesto says that even a bad deal for Britain is better than no deal (I bet M. Barnier was rubbing his hands when he heard that one).

For journalists there is so much material to go on that the mind reels at Labour's inadequacies. To be clear, I'm not saying the press as a whole is pro-Labour (only some of it is); merely that the deficiencies of the Tory campaign (dullness, social care) pale into insignificance compared to those of the Labour manifesto.  But both deficiencies have been given equal emphasis.

And this is a crucial difference. Mr Corbyn has proved a capable stump campaigner. After all, he's spent his political lifetime campaigning rather than governing.  Labour's campaign has been quite good, although its manifesto is a monstrous, gleaming pile of unaffordable crap. The Tory campaign on the other hand has been ill-judged; but their manifesto is on the whole sensible and realistic. If I had to point to a failure of reportage it would be that the press hasn't distinguished the two things (manifesto vs. campaign) well or at all.

But if Labour wins, or, God forbid, there is a hung parliament, it won't be because of the press. It will be because enough people took Labour's promises seriously, in particular perhaps its tuition-fee bribe of the young, who don't just have short memories but no memories of pre-Thatcherite Britain. For those of us who consider even a lacklustre May infinitely more persuasive than Corbyn, our hope must be that the young won't turn out to vote and that the reports from party foot-soldiers - who say that Labour is doing really well in the big cities but terribly everywhere else - turn out to be true. Otherwise we are all fucked.

Voting is about the choice between two evils. Let's hope the lesser of the two wins then implements the Boundary Commission report a.s.a.p.

After Manchester, now London Bridge #2

So much of the response to the attacks in Manchester and London Bridge in the last few days has been of the utterly half-baked "We stand together / It's not about Islam" variety.  It's easy to ridicule because like so much virtue-signalling it is a substitute for action.

So what action should be taken?

As long as the security services were able to keep attackers at bay, the status quo was defensible. But as they used to say of the IRA, the terrorist only needs to get lucky once: the police need to be lucky all the time. Events of the last couple of months demonstrate that there are enough would-be terrorists in Britain for the police to need an awful lot of luck. The current situation will not do.

We can't send Muslims home. For most, home is here. But we can come down much harder on those the security services suspect of terrorist involvement. Internment? Perhaps. There would be injustices, although personally I can't think of a greater injustice than that sustained by the murdered and their families. My reservation about internment is that the innocent are locked up along with the guilty, with the inevitable consequences of radicalisation both for the innocent themselves and their associates on the outside. Internment risks making more terrorists rather than fewer.

I think we have to consider how Muslims are radicalised. The most obvious way is via the internet. The software giants who have our society by the balls are privatising the profit they cream whilst shrugging off the social consequences. They do not want to hire moderators, proof-readers and lawyers. Besides, in the Californian La-La Land they inhabit the immediacy and freedom of the internet is part of its hey-guys-this-is-cool appeal. Who wants to be subject to the same responsibilities - er, stifling repression - as the print and broadcast media?

It baffles me that if, say, the Murdoch press provides a platform for defamation or incitement to violence it is subject to the law, but if Google does it they are merely allowed to apologise for failing to take the offending item down sooner. Social media companies must be made to take responsibility for the content they propagate. If this killed the internet (and it wouldn't), I seem to remember we managed OK before.

The other day I watched a lecture by the historian Tom Holland (well worth following on Twitter). Holland knows a good deal about Islam. He said something I've been banging on about for years - Islam needs a Reformation (I think my take was that we need a British form of Islam). I am not an expert, but I gather that a lot of British Islamic teaching is of the Wahabist variety, often funded by Saudi Arabia. The British Government needs to exert pressure on mosques to get their own house in order. It should consider banning foreign funding, if necessary closing down mosques which (or whose members) transgress.

It will be pointed out that this approach is hardly consistent with freedom of speech. But the libel laws already constrain what can be said, and our old principles - that the only other limits should be in circumstances where violence was threatened or likely to break out - worked well for more than a century (until the Blair government started to tinker with them).

The difficulty with some Islamic teaching is that it is essentially non-violent extremism. That's to say it teaches Muslims that the khufar (that's apostates like me) are trash. From there it is a short step to beheadings in Borough Market. Such non-violent extremism is not an exhortation to violence, but it is an act which lays the groundwork for such violence.

I like to draw an analogy with the constraints on freedom of speech placed on white British people in the 1960s. It was undoubtedly necessary in a society trying to assimilate black people that you could no longer refer to them as "nigger" or "Paki" (personally I think we are now approaching the point where such constraints are no longer necessary, since Britain is waking up to the fact that "race" is a pretty pointless way of trying to discriminate, and - as the Muslim terrorism crisis so clearly shows - the real battleground lies in the field of culture). In just the same way, Britain now needs to deal with the assimilation of 2 million British Muslims, encouraged by well-meaning multiculturalists to consider themselves separate. I think controls on what can be taught at the Mosque are now necessary and justified.

If Muslims disliked such controls and wanted to renounce British citizenship for that of Iraq, Libya or Syria, many would be happy to see them go.

In Tom Holland's talk I was particularly struck by his assessment that, although different and competing strains of Islam had been around for centuries, the relativist Reformation he sought was still along way off. He said that although he didn't think the Muslim Luther had yet been born, his parents or grandparents might yet be walking among us.

For me that is very cold comfort. That an enlightened liberal such as Holland (much too wet for my taste), should take such a view of Islam's prospects is bleak indeed.

I hope Mrs May is elected, not because I think she is any great shakes but because the prospect of a pro-immigrant anti-semitic Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot, under the influence of hard-faced "community leaders" in East London and West Yorkshire, will be far, far worse. I hope May now puts her money where her mouth is and beefs up not only the Government's Prevent strategy (which the Labour party opposed) but its Control Orders and scrutiny of Mosques.

It will be said that you actually have much more chance of being run over by a bus than being killed in a terrorist attack; and this is true. But it is to miss the point, which is that unlike fatalities on the roads terrorist attacks have the effect of dividing people from each other. Britain cannot afford such division.

Enoch Powell was wrong in many aspects of his analysis of the consequences of immigration (not the least because he didn't understand the difference between race and culture, and didn't realise that black/white intermarriage would deal with many of the problems he foresaw), but one phrase from the Rivers of Blood speech haunts me. "It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre".

As long as we do nothing to address the growth of British Islamic extremism we are standing by and wringing our hands while others build the pyre.

After Manchester, and now London Bridge #1

What are we to make of people who think it's OK to kill children at a concert with a nail bomb? Who will slit the throats of people on a night out without a second thought?

It's useful to understand one's opponents, on the off chance that there might be some way of accommodating them. But opponents who are willing to reduce happy girls to a tangle of bloody meat are beyond the pale. And besides which, as Douglas Murray has pointed out, we know very well why they do it. After all, they will keep telling us.

As a Mancunian, it was tempting to go into town the other day to mark the awfulness of the occasion and pay tribute to the dead. But these events are full of platitudes and are an excuse for doing nothing. "We stand together", the assembled cry. No we don't. If "we" stood together these atrocities would not happen. They happen because in fact "we" are divided. That's to say, years ago we allowed into our country devotees of a religion most of whose adherents lead separate lives to the majority, and a small minority of whom hate everything the rest of us stand for.

I was going to write "we stand for", but in fact the importation of Islam into the UK has made it impossible to write "we" in this context. "We" implies me and all my fellow Britons. But many British Muslims in fact stand for something else entirely, and therein lies the rub.

There are over 2 million Muslims in the UK. If 1% of them are potential terrorists, that's 20,000 people. In fact the security services apparently reckon the number to be more like 2,000, which is a tenth of 1%. That seems more reasonable. According to the Home Office, in the period 2001 to 2012 175 of 241 convicted UK terrorists were Muslim. Not only were Muslims overwhelmingly the majority, but when you consider that this is 175 of about 2 million people it turns out that during the period in question Muslims were about 80 times more likely to commit a terrorist offence than non-Muslims.

It has always seemed obvious to me that if Islam's ideology was not the sole cause of Islamic terrorism, it must at least be an influencing factor. In the UK there do not appear to be many Anglican terrorists. Or Quaker terrorists. Or Methodists, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or, to broaden matters out, terrorist golfers, estate agents or stamp collectors.

The extraordinary over-representation of Muslims amongst convicted terrorists revealed by the Home Office figures is testimony that there is something about Islam which leads some of its adherents to do this kind of thing.

And yet still they come. I'm not referring to Muslim immigrants (the perpetrator of the Manchester outrage seems to have been home-grown in any event). I mean the brain dead apologists for Islam, whose blind devotion to the cause of multiculturalism is such that not only are they willing to overlook the forced marriages, honour killings, FGM and female subjugation, but they make excuses for Islam when yet another pumped up wanker high on the promise of righteousness and six dozen virgins smears "our" streets with blood.

I've written here before about Mishal Hussein's statement that Islam had no more to do with the murder outside the House of Commons recently than Yorkshire did with the murder of Jo Cox MP. Ms Hussein is absolutely typical in her head-nodding stupidity (Yorkshire doesn't have an ideology, Mishal, unlike Islam; now do you see why your comforting comparison is so inept?), but Twitter has been replete with celebrities and opinion-formers like her in the last week or so. When I hear their lame accommodations with the people who are murdering British families it makes me feel sick.

"We all stand together", "The terrorists will never win", "I love Manchester", "It's nothing to do with Islam". These are all just ways of making us feel better while doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. And as long as we do nothing we make repetition of the Manchester bombing more likely.

There are people alive today who are going to be killed in the next terrorist attack. For them, time is running out. And the rest of us just sit on our hands.

The Tory Manifesto, and taxing inheritance - our final creative act.

So the General Election campaign continues apace, largely ignored by me and by most of the general public. Most people don't make up their minds during the campaign. But every now and again something emerges which makes one perforce sit up.

Such is the Tory plan for social care. Broadly speaking this involves a charge being placed on your house, and the post-death proceeds being used to pay for your care until there's only £100,000 left. The care system is undoubtedly in crisis, but this isn't the answer and won't, I think, stand. For what it's worth, it's already done immense damage to Tory prospects of a sizeable majority (and given Labour's recent surge, may even stop them winning altogether).

What's wrong with it? It's not fair. Firstly, if you get cancer, the state will pay for your treatment. But not if you get Alzheimers (and not if you don't get either). The welfare state was set up to take some of the consequences of ill-fortune away from the individual. The Tory plan breaches that principle.

Secondly, it makes no allowance for how many children you have. An only child? You get the whole £100,000. Four siblings? That's £25,000 each. Unfair.

It's also a form of sequestration. You may not pay it until after death, but the charge is placed on your property while you're still alive. Your asset is effectively confiscated by the state. This is demeaning to the individual and a retrospective tax on assets acquired many years, perhaps even decades, previously.  Moreover this is the confiscation of an asset that you worked hard to secure, with money on which you'd already paid tax.

My own parents lived modest and rather frugal lives, but if they hadn't built up an asset, or if their house had been heavily mortgaged, they would escape the Dementia Tax altogether, unlike someone who'd lived large. To be clear, I'm not short of cash and my future plans don't depend on my inheriting all their property. But I saw them last week, and their distress at the prospect of not being able to pass the bulk of their carefully acquired assets to their sons was palpable. Leaving an inheritance is our final creative human act.

Although there was a lot I didn't like about the Tory manifesto, it did, as you would expect, make some attempt to address head on the many difficult problems Britain faces. Unlike Jeremy Corbyn's pie-in-the-sky fantasies it showed distinct signs of being the work of realists. But if social care is a massive problem, this is not the answer.

Instead, make everyone pay a kind of social insurance against the event that they will need care. You could think of a short, snappy name for it. "Tax", perhaps.

PS  Within half an hour of my posting this the Tories had done a U turn on the manifesto policy. "This isn't the answer and won't, I think, stand". I'm often wrong, but in the context these words have a certain ring to them. There would additionally be a cap, unspecified, on how much an individual will have to pay. This doesn't look terribly competent, although to be fair to Mrs May the manifesto did speak of a green paper (a consultation in other words, rather than a policy set in stone) and the contrast with the Labour party is telling - their crap policies remain, unchanged.

Is Labour now the Stupid Party?

What to make of the General Election campaign, with nearly a month to go?

The Tories have bored us rigid with their "strong and stable" mantra.  The press hate it, for it gives them nothing to write about.  The Lib Dems are still trying to reverse Brexit.  The SNP is struggling with a resurgent Tory party which threatens some of its leading lights in Westminster (has peak SNP already passed? Let's hope so).

And Labour. Oh Labour. Yesterday a draft copy of its manifesto was leaked. Amidst the predictable repeats of socialism's greatest hits, the obvious stand-out fact was that Labour wants a much bigger and more lavishly funded state. It thinks this can be paid for by increased taxation and borrowing. As I've long argued on here, I think they're wrong.

For example, an increase in Corporation Tax, previously prayed in aid by Labour to fund a number of wish-list pledges, is said to bring in £19 billion p.a. So it might, at first.  But companies which like the idea of the UK because its Corporation Tax rates are low will be tempted to relocate elsewhere. How much money will be raised after two or three years? Not £19bn. You can raise taxes, yes, but there aren't enough rich people to make a massive difference, and the more you tax wealth creators the fewer incentives there are to do any creating.

Then there's the deficit. Labour is going to borrow a lot more money, it says, but only to invest. But that's what Gordon Brown said too, and he bent the rules to blur the distinction between current and capital spending. Debt is already at about 90% of GDP, and fast approaching the point from which some economists think the state cannot recover (because it ends up paying more in interest than it can afford).

Astonishingly, in view of this, Labour says it wants to reduce the deficit to zero.  I doubt this in the same way I doubt the existence of unicorns, but let's say they really do.  Unlike the Tories however, Labour wants to reduce the deficit in a rolling five-year window. That's to say, at any point in the future Labour will be able to say, "Our aim is to reduce the deficit to zero within five years from now".

Eh? This is no pledge at all. It is a convenient way of never reducing the deficit to zero, on a par with St Augustine's "Please make me chaste, Lord.  But not yet".

If this is the high point of Labour's financial stupidity, it is surpassed for naivety by the promise that in Brexit negotations (and Labour still doesn't seem to have fully committed to respecting the referendum result) it will under no circumstances walk away from talks without a deal. So picture the scene. Mr Corbyn is offered terms by M Barnier. Corbyn doesn't like them. He offers other terms. "Non", says Barnier. What does Corbyn do then? He has already told the EU a bad deal is better than no deal. What is his response? He has none.

I put this to my wife, who, I'm afraid, said, "Well perhaps that'll send out a signal to the EU that we'll negotiate in good faith and we can reach a deal which suits both sides". For me this is equivalent to the rabbit promising under no circumstances to kick the stoat.

I have long resisted the notion that the Labour party is finished as an electoral force. I remember people said the Tories were finished after 1997. A big difference between the two however is that the Tories, like them or loathe them, are dominated by quite clever and pragmatic people with experience in business or law. Labour on the other hand is full of people who passionately want to make the world a better place and would rather not sully their hands with the tedious details of whether and how that could be accomplished.

I seriously wonder whether, if the Tories are the Nasty Party, Labour is now the Stupid Party. I look at the nomination and election of Corbyn, the elevation of John McDonnell and (the innumerate and under-prepared) Diane Abbott, the see-sawing over Brexit, the anti-semitism row which ended with the ennoblement of Shami Chakrabarti, now the leaked manifesto, and I think to myself, "Perhaps these people are just a bit thick."

Take another manifesto promise - to ban unpaid internships. A good idea in theory, but in practice? Its only effect would be to drive internships underground. You may not be able to advertise any more, but what's to stop you ringing your friend in law, accountancy, advertising, architecture and so on? "Tamsin is seriously considering the profession and would really like to come in and shadow you for a few days.  No need to pay her.  I'll sub her a few quid for lunch and travel". The only impact of a Corbyn ban would be to confine internships to the well-connected and affluent. At least now everyone gets to work for nothing.

It's tempting to say that all this stupidity is all the fault of a few hard-Left activists; but, sadly, Corbyn, McDonnell et al are the people who were elected by the generality of Labour supporters. These are the pudding-headed individuals that those most keen on the Labour party elevated to its very highest reaches. They are the Labour party in excelsis. They are the fullest and best-realised expression of what Labour is like.

This isn't to say that the party doesn't have any clever people. There are always outliers. But if Labour loses, and if a new party is formed, it will be the clever people who do the breaking away. Labour will become the political wing of Momentum. Then it really will be finished.

Jonathan Portes and the strange world of the migration lobby.

I only read stories in the papers which are actually surprising.  Most of them aren't.  North Korea on brink of nuclear meltdown?  Really?  Donald Trump does something daft?  No!

But a couple of things in the Times this morning caught my eye.  This first was that in a story entitled "Plea for barista visas to keep coffee shops running", the Migration Watch head Lord Green is reported as arguing for two year visas for young people to help the hospitality industry.  I'm slightly suspicious of Migration Watch, and it was strange to find Lord Green saying something so liberal, and, it must be said, so daft.

The paper's Leader, probably written by Oliver Kamm, also had things to say about migration, and came close to acknowledging the flaw at the heart of the pro-migration case.

Those of us sceptical about the merits of unrestricted migration have argued for years that it has a distorting effect on the labour market. If you increase the supply of something the price of it tends to do down. Fine for the affluent like me who get cheap access to the service industries. A disaster for the low-paid however (and that's to say nothing about the impact on the NHS, school places or the availablity of housing).

Ah, say the pro-immigration types like the egregious Jonathan Portes, but this is to fall victim to the lump of labour fallacy, the idea that there is one fixed body of work to be done which does not grow according to the number of people available to do it. Migrants, argues Portes, create jobs by just being here.  Every 100 migrants who come to the UK create more than 100 additional jobs.

I once tried to get Portes to say how many jobs each 100 migrants create. This was on Twitter, so it was not a particularly sophisticated exchange. Portes would not (could not?) give a figure. He blocked me. Our exchange must have left an impression on him however because - I still follow him - he referred to me only the other day in an exchange with someone else, well over a year later.

Still, you get the picture. Migration is a great creator of employment.

That being the case, what would happen if you cut migration? It's obvious. The number of available jobs would start to decrease. If fewer migrants come to the UK, fewer jobs will be created and unemployment would go up.

This would, you might imagine, be the cry of those arguing for more migration. But curiously it is not. From all corners of academia and business the fear is not of higher unemployment. It is of a labour shortage.

What happens if there's a labour shortage? The price of labour goes up. The Times leader could not bring itself to acknowledge this. It warned of higher prices, but it could not bring itself to accept that this would be because people would be paid more.

The pro-migration lobby wants it both ways. More migration equals more available jobs. But less migration equals more available jobs too as there will be fewer foreign workers to fill them. It's an argument that the Mad Hatter would have been proud to own.

In the meantime the UK has nearly one million unemployed people under the age of 24.

If only we could be sure of more foreign workers to help them into the world of work!

PS Jonathan Portes has now started urging journalists to question Tory politicians about the "cost" of reducing migration to tens of thousands per annum. This has been predicted by the OBR to be in the region of £6bn p.a. Portes' enthusiasm for this idea has reached the BBC's Reality Check department, set up by the corporation to challenge "fake news". But hold on. The OBR's is a prediction. It is an economic forecast. Its value is pretty close to zero. Economic forecasts are there to be revised upwards. Or downwards. One can understand a lobbyist like Portes jumping on the OBR forecast like a ram on a sheep at tupping time; but the BBC? Don't they know what a forecast is? Apparently not. Not much of a Reality Check, but a pretty handy stick with which to beat the Government.

The Great Repeal Bill, Gina Miller and the SNP

So Article 50 has been triggered at last, as the British ambassador yesterday delivered Theresa May's six-page letter to Donald Tusk, the EU president.  It was hard not to feel sorry for Mr Tusk, one of the EU's better individuals. He did not deserve to be singled out for the UK's Dear John letter ("It's not me, it's you"). Despite the many months of warning he looked shocked and close to tears as he uttered a few words of response ("We miss you already").

I'm not so sombre; but neither am I exultant. The referendum was always a choice between two things which were very nearly equally unsatisfactory. I'm not going to crow about the achievement of something I felt would be marginally less bad than the status quo.

(Incidentally, I wonder how Gina Miller felt yesterday when she saw the news. I suppose it would depend on how much of her money she got back following her Judicial Review. Not all of it, I hope.)

In so far as there will be any benefits from Brexit, one of the more obvious ones is the return to Parliament of powers under the so-called Great Repeal Bill, which will put reams of EU legislation directly into UK law. Sadly, this has not been obvious enough for Sir Keir Starmer. The Labour Shadow Secretary for Brexit has been urging the Government to undertake that workers' rights in EU legislation will not be watered down once the legislation has been transferred.

Sir Keir doesn't seem to have noticed that part of the point of Brexit is that Westminster can make its own laws, and that workers rights is only one amongst many fields in which the government could now act. If the government wants to restrict workers' rights it can do so (although you may think it has bigger fish to fry just at the moment).  It could also extend workers' rights if it wanted to. You might think Starmer would welcome this power, as perhaps he might if he thought there was any prospect of Labour winning an election.

Instead he seems to think that we should keep forever laws agreed by previous governments along with 27 other EU states, rather than amending them from time to time at the wishes of our own government. 

It's a curious kind of political cringe. If a law was passed by the EU it must be good, and we must keep it. Why? It is precisely because acting within EU tied the hands of our own parliament (in so many fields, not just workers' rights) that so many in the UK felt we had to leave. 

Of course for sheer stupidity the SNP can outdo Labour any day. Its Westminster MPs are calling on the government to hand control over farming and fisheries to Holyrood. Anything else would be a "Westminster power grab".

To appreciate how ridiculous this is you have to understand that the SNP would prefer that control of farming and fisheries would remain with Brussels. 

Yes, that's right. The SNP would prefer to have those policy areas dealt with in a forum where Scotland is represented as a tiny minority of the UK's 1-in-28 voices, instead of a Westminster parliament where Scottish MPs votes count as about 1 in 10 (and are in fact over-represented, according to the Boundary Commission).  Moreover inside the UK there is every chance that in future farming and fisheries could be devolved to the regions.

Has anyone heard the SNP complaining of a Brussels power grab recently? Has anyone heard them demanding the return of powers over fisheries and agriculture from Brussels? No. On the contrary, the SNP is determined, upon Independence, to return to the EU's embrace as quickly as it can.

Truly these people are stupid.

Katie Hopkins, Mishal Husain and Khalid Masood - blind deaf and dumb

The first casualty of any terrorist atrocity is common sense.  Here, following the murder of PC Keith Palmer and other innocent people outside Parliament yesterday, is a selection of utterances.

"Islam is no more responsible for this attack than Yorkshire is for Jo Cox MP's murder".

This one came from Mishal Husain, the BBC presenter. It does make you wonder what degree of intellectual calibre she brings to the job. What Ms Husain does not appear to have noticed is that Yorkshire, unlike Islam, does not have an ideology.  It is the combination of that ideology with, no doubt, other influences (which might include mental health problems, drugs and general criminality) that makes an Islamic terrorist. After all, there are not many Yorkshire terrorists (and the one who killed Jo Cox was not a terrorist because he was a Yorkshireman).  There are not many terrorists without an ideology. There are no golfing terrorists, for example. Or stamp collecting or estate agent terrorists. As someone put it today, British Islam has 5% of the population, 95% of the terrorists. The idea that Islam has nothing to do with the preponderance of UK terrorist attacks is frankly stupid.

"This has got nothing to do with immigration because the guy was born here".

A general trope on social media, this one. I've yet to discover how many generations back the murderer's ancestors came to Britain, but it makes not a jot of difference. The UK has admitted a lot of people who adhere to a religion which often holds British values in contempt. For the majority of Muslims, immigrants or otherwise, that just means living peaceful but somewhat separate lives. For a small but significant minority it means treasonable violence. Their place of birth is irrelevant. It is the ideology which has been imported.

"The response of the medics who tried to save the murderer's life is a magnificent tribute to British values".

Unfortunately this is only partially true. If there is any inference to be drawn from the murderer's birthplace it is that some Britons now hold a different set of values altogether. Whereas the laudable desire of bystanders to save the murderer was Britain at its best, the murderer was a Briton too. His set of values encompassed driving his car as fast as possible into people he had never met and who could not conceivably have done him harm, before taking a knife to the person of a policeman whose job it was to protect our democratically elected representatives as they went about the business of governance. We have to accept that these are the values of a small minority of people whose ideology has been allowed into Britain. If we don't do that we are just deluding ourselves.

"Violence will not work".

On the day of Martin McGuinness's funeral (some wag asked, "Will we ever find out where the body is buried?") a moment's reflection should remind us how wrong this is. Does anyone really imagine that the Good Friday agreement would ever have been signed had it not been for the violence? Violence does work. It may not have worked for Islamic extremists yet, but that's only because there hasn't been enough of it.

"Everyone gets on fine in London".

To the extent that this is true it is only because communities tend to live parallel lives (and see below). Besides, does anyone remember Muslim Patrol, the fundamentalist vigilantes of the East End?

"The cancer of radical Islam in our society . . . . needs to be cut out".

Little though I like him, I don't think Paul Nuttall is exaggerating in describing radical Islam as a cancer. But how can it be "cut out"? Had the murderer survived the Westminster incident he could not have been deported. He was born in Kent. He could have been sent to prison of course, where he would have been free to radicalise impressionable young men, just as he was radicalised himself by other Muslims not currently in jail. But you cannot "cut out" British people. You can only try and persuade them that they are wrong. You could start by ceasing to treat Muslims as if they were something separate and un-British. You could start to turn back the tide of multiculturalism and identity-politics. But it would only be a start. There would still be a long way to go towards a goal that was always receding.

"Liberals convince themselves multiculturalism works because we all die together too".

And lastly Katie Hopkins, writing in the Daily Mail.  Ms Hopkins characterises the conflict as, "The patriots of the rest of England versus the liberals in this . . . city of lead, so desperately wedded to the multicultural illusion that it can only fight those who love the country the most".

Perhaps it's a mistake to take Ms Hopkins too seriously.  She over-emphasises for shock value. But regarding London she has a point. London is a unique place, emphatically not like the other cities only bigger. It is an international city, which has lost much of its "London-ness". Manchester is still defiantly Mancunian, Glasgow is still Glaswegian, and so on. Not London. Partly that's because London attracts people from all over the world, who go there believing they can make it big and have a good time. By definition they are the last people to mind others being different from them. It's one reason why they go there.

But London is not a community or series of communities. It is a hive of individuals. On the flip side its tolerance shades into indifference. People live alongside others utterly different from them by not interacting with them. It can be a lonely city. People famously do not talk to each other. David Goodhart's new book The Road to Somewhere characterises these people as "Anywheres", which is to say they are often well-educated, affluent and unrooted types (of which I guess I should be one) with everything to gain from maintaining the status quo. Their liberalism is theoretical and involves little personal sacrifice.

This phenomenon is of course a subject for another day, but Hopkins may not be wrong when she writes that London is an "entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And dumb".

Nicola Sturgeon? Give me Donald Trump any day.

A few days ago I posted a piece which argued that Nicola Sturgeon knew Scottish independence would be a disaster for the poorest in her country. Yet she persisted with the policy because, I suggested, she hated the English far more than she loved Scotland.

Today comes a delicious reminder of Ms Sturgeon's very special qualities.  She told Sky News's Sophie Ridge that iScotland would "keep the pound".  She said sterling is "our currency as much as it is the currency of anywhere else". This is an informative statement.

While true up to a point (although it is also true of any other currency you care to name, including the Azerbaijani manat), it ignores that iScotland would have no central bank and no lender of last resort. It also ignores the fact that the Bank of England would no longer be taking into account economic events in Scotland when setting interest rates. It isn't an exaggeration to say that using the pound post-Independence would actually make Scotland less independent rather than more, because Scotland would lose such influence it currently has over monetary policy.

It would also make it harder and more expensive for Scotland to borrow money on the international markets; and as we've already discussed, Scotland is going to have to borrow an awful lot of money if it leaves the Union.

But there's more. I noted in previous posts that Ms Sturgeon is nothing if not well-informed. She knows all these things. She knows what she says is misleading to the point of dishonesty. She also chooses to use words which encourage grievance. Notice that she says sterling is "our" currency, as if all Scots could be subsumed within the possessive, and as if anyone had proposed to take it from them (no-one has: they've merely pointed out that sterling is the currency of the Union, and any country choosing to leave it will fall beyond the remit of the Bank of England's powers of assistance).

There's an interesting comparison here with Donald Trump. Sturgeon tells her supporters things she knows aren't true. She uses language to try and stir up their feelings. So far so similar. The National, the SNP's free-sheet, told its supporters today that the GERS figures, which show with pitiless clarity how stuffed iScotland would be, are unreliable. Scotland must move beyond GERS.

GERS are the Scottish government's own figures.

The principal difference however between La Sturgeon and the US president, liars and manipulators both, is that Donald Trump genuinely if mistakenly believes his policies are for the benefit of his countrymen. Nicola Sturgeon knows they are not.

Give me Trump over Sturgeon any day.

There is a very special ignominy reserved for Ms Sturgeon. In one scenario she fails to take Scotland out of the Union and retires from the field defeated. In another, more dire, she succeeds. It is a disaster, and she lives to be reviled. If it happens, it will be richly deserved.

Has Brexit shot the SNP's fox?

Since the Brexit referendum it's been fashionable amongst Remainers to point out that those who loved the UK so much they wanted to wrest it from Brussels' sticky embrace might, by having voted to Leave, end up driving the Scots out of the Union.

Scottish adherents of this view - stand up Alex Massie of The Times - tend to imply that in voting the way it did, England should have spared a thought for the Scots, ignoring the fact that as we all trooped to the ballot box last June we had no idea how Scotland would vote, and that in any event not caring much either way was part of our democratic right.

I am however slowly coming round to the view that Brexit might actually make Scotland less likely to leave the UK than more.

It's all about the timing.

It now seems pretty certain that there won't be a referendum pre-Brexit. This drastically changes the nature of the offer the SNP can make. A referendum held while we are in the EU enabled the SNP to say, "Once we're independent we'll just carry on as before". This would probably not be true, because iScotland would probably be out of the EU; but it was a pitch that was made by the SNP in 2014 and it is not readily disprovable.

After Brexit this argument will no longer fly. Scotland would be out of the EU and would have to decide whether to reapply. If it applied it would have to join the Euro. I doubt whether this is a sellable proposition.  Comically, the SNP had almost worked this out, which is why Nicola Sturgeon said before the weekend that Scotland might not reapply for EU membership, and might consider joining EFTA or the EEA instead. A handy way of parking the Euro issue, you might think.

However it was only a matter of hours before someone pointed out how strange it was that the SNP should cite Brexit as justification for a second referendum, but then say that Scotland might not rejoin after all.

At the time of writing the SNP's policy has veered back to renewed membership.

That might have changed by the time you read this.

If Theresa May holds her nerve (and whilst I'm sure Nicola Sturgeon is a "bloody difficult woman", Ms May is a bloody difficult woman with a lot more power) there will be no 2nd referendum until after Brexit, possibly not until after the Holyrood elections of 2021, and possibly not at all if the pressure of incumbency tells on the SNP and it cannot muster a majority.

Of course even if I'm right about this, it's arguable that without Brexit there would have been no pretext for another referendum, and that the Nationalists would have remained quiescent. That may be true. But don't forget that the SNP leadership are grievance-seekers and their members zealots. It's not hard to imagine that they would, as the crest of the Nationalist wave receded, clutch at some straw - perhaps a renewed Tory mandate in 2020 - as a pretext for another poll.

Whatever, it looks as if next time Independence is an option at the ballot box Scotland would face losing the Barnett subsidy, having to make EU financial contributions, having to make eye-watering spending cuts to reduce its deficit to an acceptable level, joining the Euro, losing free movement of its citizens to the rest of the UK and losing free access to its largest export market in order to be able to trade freely with a smaller one across the North Sea.

All that because of Brexit. I'm waiting for Alex Massie to say thank you.

Nicola Sturgeon and the two types of SNP supporter

There are two types of SNP supporters, and they can be neatly separated by attitudes to the annual GERS statistics, compiled by Scottish civil servants to show Scotland's income and expenditure.

These statistics show that if Scotland were independent now it would have to find an extra £1700 or thereabouts per person every year just to maintain public spending at its current level.  That's because Scotland gets about £1500 p.p. p.a. more than citizens in less fortunate parts of the UK (courtesy of the Barnett Formula), and because Scotland raises about £250 p.p. less by way of tax revenue.

The first type of SNP supporter is the person who has never heard of the GERS figures, or who has but does not understand them, or who fears they may contain something nasty and would rather not look, or who understands them only too well but maintains they are inaccurate.

Then there are those who understand the figures, understand their consequences for an independent Scotland, understand what they mean for services used by the poorest Scots, but just don't care.

The first category I would class as pitiful, ignorant and/or self-deluding.  I feel sorry for them, because they are dupes.  But it's the second who really get up my nose; and particularly the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.

We are constantly being told what a clever and shrewd politician Ms Sturgeon is.  Although she has done some stupid things (telling us there must be a 2nd referendum because we are leaving the EU, but then admitting that Scotland may not rejoin anyway is only one of them), I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on this.

I also believe that she is well-informed.  She is the First Minister of Scotland and she has lived and breathed politics all her adult life (and probably a lot of her adolescence too).  So she will have seen the GERS figures.  She will know what they mean.  

She will know that iScotland will either face spending cuts of some 15% post Independence (cuts of a severity that George Osborne, on a Class A high in his gimp-suit could only dream of); or it will have to raise taxes across the board by a swingeing degree; or it will have to borrow an awful lot of money (despite not having its own currency or a central bank).  Ms Sturgeon knows all this, and she knows what the consequences will be for every Scot who uses the health service, education system or is in receipt of benefits.  

Here's a piece of circumstantial evidence which supports this hypothesis.  The Labour leader Kezia Dugdale put the reality of Scotland's deficit to Ms Sturgeon at Holyrood the other day.  Sturgeon did not even attempt to address the issue. She snapped back a phrase familiar to Holyrood-watchers. Dugdale was, she said, "talking Scotland down".  If the First Minister could refute Dugdale's point, she would have.  She cannot. She knows it. But she is still arguing for Independence.  

Why?  It is it at this point that I run out of answers.  A decent person, politician or no, wants the best for his or her country.  I believe that the overwhelming majority of British politicians outside the SNP want this.  At some deep and grudging level I even believe it of Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage. But I don't believe it of Nicola Sturgeon or Alex Salmond. I believe that they are motivated by something far, far deeper and visceral.  How else to explain their enthusiasm to take their country on a race to the bottom?  I think they would rather bury Scotland in a dungheap so long they chose which one.

What it so unattractive about this is not the suspicion it arouses that Sturgeon et al hate England far more than they love Scotland. No, it's that they personally, no matter how bad things got post-Indy, will be OK.  No doubt the speaking engagements, the newspaper articles, the media appearances, the non-exec directorships and finally the generous Holyrood pensions will sway comfortably into view for Ms Sturgeon. She would retire to some West of Scotland retreat amid the carnage of her country's reduced circumstances, secure in the knowledge that the consequences of her mistakes could not touch her personally.  Arguing for Independence is easy for her, because she will be immune from its consequences.

Comically, Ms Sturgeon appears to believe that she holds the moral high ground. Scotland must be independent, she intones, because it operates to a superior set of values to Tory England. That may be so. But not the part of Scotland she occupies herself.

Nicola Sturgeon - impulsive gambler

So this morning Nicola Sturgeon has announced she will put in hand the legislation required to start the process for a 2nd Independence referendum, to take place between the end of 2018 and spring 2019.

I think this announcement reveals Ms Sturgeon to be a gambler.  It seems to me the act of someone in a weak position who has played her strongest card early, knowing that the longer the game goes on the smaller the chance she has of winning.  It also confirms that, far from being the clever politician of popular wisdom, she is impulsive and prone to fits of pique.

The SNP doesn't like Brexit much, and Scotland voted by a significant majority to Remain. In the immediate aftermath of the Leave victory Ms Sturgeon made a number of remarks which gave her supporters to understand that this was a game-changing event which would inevitably lead to Indyref2.

This was a mistake, because it left her with so little room for manouevre. It forced her subsequent management of events into choice between backing down, thus infuriating her own supporters, or following through with a process which she cannot be remotely sure will result in success. The tone of her announcement, and the way she handled the press afterwards, suggest decisions made in genuine anger. Really clever politicians don't do things in anger.

Having been forced by Brexit and by her own rhetoric into putting the Indyref2 process into motion, Sturgeon has decided to go early rather than wait for events. She knows she cannot afford to have the referendum after Brexit, because, faced with a choice between ceding sovereignty to Brussels and being in the Union, Scots may well think that remaining in the UK looks the more attractive option. Moreover, the longer she waits, the more her party's record in government will be scrutinised.

It's actually quite hard at the moment to work out what the SNP's policy on Europe is. Mrs Sturgeon left this tantalisingly blank in her announcement today. Are they in favour of EFTA membership? Or of being in the EEA, keeping the pound in both options (with all the disadvantages that entails, including the absence of a central bank)? Or they in favour of joining the EU, which would almost certainly mean adopting the Euro (that did after all used to be SNP policy)?  Sturgeon has conspicuously failed to be specific on this, but she'll have to commit herself long before any referendum.

Being in the EU means losing the rebate and swallowing the Euro. It may mean tariffs and a hard border. Remaining in the UK means maintaining the Barnett formula, and retaining tariff-free access to Scotland's biggest export market. Scots may well wonder why they should leave a Union which has served them well for three hundred years in favour of one which is widely perceived, even by its supporters, as undemocratic, bureaucratic and corrupt. It is bizarre that Mrs Sturgeon should be so upset about "leaving the EU single market" when as part of the UK Scotland is already part of a single market which is significantly bigger.

So the fact that Sturgeon has gone for the quick contest tells us a good deal about what she considers to be the nature of the battlefield.

A further point.  Ms Sturgeon herself does not have the right to call a referendum. She has to pass legislation at Holyrood (something which will require the support of the Greens), and then ask Westminster. Mrs May has little option but to accede to such a request, but she can decide the timing of the referendum. She should play hard-ball. She can say, "Yes, you can have a referendum. But not till after Brexit." Sturgeon would huff and puff, but May's position would be perfectly defensible. She can point out that it is unreasonable to expect Scots to make an informed decision when they don't know the nature of Brexit. As it happens I expect that we won't have a signed Brexit deal within two years from now, but there's absolutely no reason why May should allow a referendum until a deal is signed.

If I were Mrs May I'd point out that I am Prime Minister of the whole of the UK, including Scotland, and that Mrs Sturgeon is merely the woman elected to run 10% of it.  I'd say that I'm negotiating the UK's decision to leave the EU, and that I certainly don't intend to jeopardise the UK's chances of getting a good deal by allowing myself to be distracted from the job in hand by the SNP's desire for independence.

Sturgeon could of course defy Westminster, and have a referendum anyway. The No faction should then call for a boycott. An unlawful referendum would have no legal or moral status.