Rachel Sylvester and the five stages of grief - Brexit reflections #19

Under the banner headline "A second Brexit poll looks ever more likely", Rachel Sylvester writes in the Times today that "momentum is slowly but surely gathering behind the idea of giving the people the chance to approve or reject the prime minister's (Brexit) deal". To be fair, Ms Sylvester does not actually articulate the suggestion that this 2nd referendum might offer the electorate the opportunity to Remain instead, but she quotes many (including that strange individual Lord Adonis, who many regard as influential despite his never having been elected for public office) who undoubtedly do.  Her piece is, a very little thought reveals, a vacuous piece of journalism.

Firstly, it would be politically impossible for any government to say to the people, "We don't know what a final deal would look like, but we're pretty sure it's going to be a bad one so we'd like you to decide whether to press on to that bad deal or ask the EU to allow us to withdraw the Article 50 notification and stay in after all".

In other words no 2nd referendum would be possible until we know what a final deal will look like.

Secondly, it is impossible to say at this stage when we'll know what the final draft deal will be.  The negotiation timetable suggests that at the earliest it might be in the autumn, but experienced heads suggests it is likely to take many months, and perhaps even years to thrash out.

Alert readers will have noticed that amidst this open-ended stretch of time there is one fixed date.  It is the end of March 2019, just over a year away, at which point Britain will be out of the European Union.  We know that date because the clock started running when we issued the Article 50 notification (with the overwhelming endorsement of Parliament). At that point it will be impossible to hold another referendum to do anything other than decide between a draft deal and Brexit on WTO terms, because by that time we will have already left.  

I guess it's true that after next March a pro-EU government could invite voters to choose between a) accepting the deal on offer or b) asking the EU to rejoin. The difficulty with that scenario is that, upon a request to rejoin, the EU would undoubtedly play hardball, refusing to continue with Britain's budget rebate and demanding that we adopt the Euro. Even the most passionate Remainer would concede I think that such demands would require a 3rd Referendum, one which Remain would be unlikely to win. Which would leave Britain where?

Ms Sylvester is an arch-Remainer (married to a Guardian journalist, no less) and she is entitled to her fantasy. The five stages of grief are said to be denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  I would say Sylvester is at the bargaining stage. When Remainers wake up to the fact that the clock is against them, it's not going to be pretty. I predict a return to anger.

The President's Club - male / female relations in the #metoo age.

We live in strange times.  After Harvey Weinstein and #metoo comes the hoo-ha over waitresses groped at a charity dinner ("the President's Club"), and over the glamorous walk-on girls who titillate the crowd at televised darts matches (I have always wondered whether the darts girls were employed ironically, since the suggestion that anyone could find darts or the meaty blokes who participate sexy is, clearly, ludicrous; Formula 1 racing, just possibly but still no; darts, definitely not). 

If I sat down and thought about it I could have rustled up for this opening paragraph a dozen more examples of things that have recently been the subject of shrill condemnation.

To be clear, groping of the Weinstein / President's Club variety is unpleasant and probably criminal.  On the other hand initiating modest physical contact when you have some hope of getting lucky is just a dating risk. There are other physical gestures - a hand on the knee for example - which have graver implications when the person making advances is your boss.  Male/female relations are complex, and there will be many circumstances where it's hard to know where lies the line you mustn't cross.

What's new, and seems to have burst like lava upon the world, is the slightly hysterical edge and the desire to condemn; and the lack, particularly amongst younger women, of appreciation that wrong turns are an inevitable by-product of engagement with the opposite sex.  The comedian Aziz Ansari was named and shamed by a young woman who, in retrospect, wished she hadn't done all the things Ansari had asked her to do on their first date. He should, she said, have read the non-verbal cues a bit better. Poor Mr Ansari. I hope he got some satisfaction out of his evening.

By all means be quick to criticise, but take some responsibility yourself, and sometimes be forgiving too.

I have long thought that all societies get sex wrong.  The Victorians, so mightily prudish that they concealed the legs of their pianos, were enthusiastic users of prostitutes.  Islamic societies veil their women upon (and sometimes before) puberty.  The Romantics fetishised the beauty ideal and romantic love; women were virgins or whores. Our own time is just as confused.

A recent university study concluded that more and more pop songs are about sex, not love.  That sounds about right for the new times. A focus on sex forgets that intimacy is much more than Sid Vicious's two and a half minutes of squelching noises. In the age of Tinder, sex has become more transactional and, I suspect, dehumanised. In reality it always takes place between individuals, richly textured and complex.  

It strikes me that this transactional stuff is pretty much what a lot of men have always wanted, and it's striking how the idea of sexual freedom seems to have been designed to suit men. When I was young women generally wanted a relationship; sometimes I did too, although there times when I was appalled afterwards to find out that in fact I didn't. Now I gather that many women don't either. I wonder whether the notion of falling in love is now dead, or at least dying.

The notion of Finding the One and living happy ever after is of course a fraud, and whilst I wanted to believe it I never did - the complications and perils were too apparent too early on (Proust's lovely phrase "the intermittencies of the heart").  I wonder whether Tinder has made concrete what in the 70s and 80s we knew to be true in theory - there are always others out there.  Faced with the contingency of your relationship now, who would dare to commit?

Our society is just as messed up as its predecessors.  Young women might shag you on the first date, but woe betide you if you misread the signals and your hand strays a little below the small of her back when she doesn't fancy you.  You can't pay a woman to wear a tight dress and heels and walk to the oche in front of Phil "The Power" Taylor, but porn at the touch of a button is absolutely OK.  People spend thousands and thousands on "themed" weddings (complaining that they can't afford to buy a flat), but break up at the first sign of trouble .

Men will always objectify women, and be willing to delude themselves and others in order to have them.  No amount of burkafication prevents the average young Iranian frotting himself silly at the thought of Islamic totty.  If you think Toby Young is unfit to do a job because of his Twitter comments about women, you must explain why someone who has merely said or thought such things (and we all have) is so much better. Otherwise just don't employ any men.

I remember with affection the scene in Friends (itself now the subject of much Millenial agonising) where Monica asks Chandler, "D'you know nothing about women?"  "Er, no", he replies. It's the answer I'd have given myself, but I contend that most women, particularly young women, don't know much about men either. 

Men desperately want a shag. They will use power to get it, and if society allows they'll bend the rules to do so; some of them will break the law and hurt others.  Yet despite their sexual unscrupulousness, Shakespeare, Mozart, Ibsen, Lorca, Dickens and Hemingway were all men. The true mystery is how such contradictions could nestle within the individual; women might do well to consider that.

We evidently live in times when one step out of line is enough to ruin your career, and I'm glad that I'm not a prominent figure and that my pursuit of sex has been (if not always kindly then at least) pretty ineffectual.  But the political correctness police, intent as they are on rooting out lust and exploitation, will never stop men ogling attractive women and thinking beastly thoughts about them, no matter how hard they try. Attempting to do so makes men into silent hypocrites and blinds women to the miraculous conundrum which is the opposite sex.

A frank exchange of views - Brexit reflections #18

Relationships have sundered over Brexit.  Last week I got together with two old friends, both Remainers, and eventually the conversation meandered round to the inevitable. 

What did I learn about the Remain case?  

One of us was very concerned that the poorest Brits, the people most likely to have voted Leave, would be the people most hurt by it.  He did however concede that it was impossible to tell what the economic outcome would be.  It might be good for those at the bottom end.

One of us had some good examples how reversion to WTO tariffs might hurt British businesses such as farmers.  40% of British lamb is exported, he said.  What would happen when tariffs had the effect of pushing prices up? The fact that lamb might then become cheaper for British consumers would not be much consolation for those engaged in producing it. I tried to suggest that British cars might be more attractive as tariffs made imports more expensive, but I admitted that some sectors would be affected.

There seemed to be acceptance that constriction of the supply of foreign workers might increase wages at the bottom end. How, one of us wanted to know, would that help the NHS? The only way to give NHS staff a pay rise would be to raise taxes.

(I wished I had asked at this stage whether my friend was suggesting low wages for all was preferable to low wages for some).

One of us was indignant at the suggestion that trying to stop Brexit was undemocratic or unpatriotic. I agreed to some extent, but said I thought the tone of the mainstream press actually was unpatriotic in its assumption that everything the UK government did was incompetent or thoughtless whereas (in a strange suspension of the rules of human behaviour) everything done by Barnier, Merkel, Juncker et al was sage and judicious. I thought the UK press had, on the whole, totally failed to grasp (or report) the extent of the EU climb-down over the Irish border issue.

As for undemocratic, I said I thought it very unfair at least that a process for deciding whether to Leave to be implemented, only for the losing side to argue for the process to be reopened because it didn't like the result. I thought the consequence of trying to subvert the process would be devastating for democracy.

One of us said that people only voted Leave because they didn't like foreigners. 

For me this was the lowest point of the evening. It is palpably untrue and in any event insulting to Leavers present. 

One of us was sure the other had only meant it as a joke. The other neither confirmed this nor apologised.

One of us has substantial funds invested in the stock market and stands to lose significantly if higher wages for the low-paid lead to lower dividends for shareholders and thus lower share values. Fortunately it did not occur to me to point this out at the time.

One of us said he was perfectly happy for a top tier of control to be exercised by the EU, in much the same way that a parish council might be subject to control by a county council and by Parliament. I told him he was the most pro-EU person I'd ever met. 

I tried to say that voters in one part of the UK didn't mind people in another part having a say in what laws they lived by because they were after all part of the same nation and people. But a lot of us (me, for example) did mind being governed to some extent by people in different countries (and moreover had no desire themselves to tell people in different countries what to do). The existence of a supranational layer essentially operated to negate the distinctiveness and cohesiveness of nation states and cultures. This was after all the stated aim of the EU. 

I might have added that the quality of decision making of the EU was very often poor - Schengen, the Euro, Mrs Merkel's refugee offer, the failure to accommodate David Cameron in 2016 - and when not poor was sometimes inflexible and draconian - see the sacrifice of Greece to preserve the Euro. Who would reasonably want such people exercising a degree of control over British life?

One of us voted as recently as 2014 for Scottish independence.  He saw no conflict between this position and a fervently expressed opposition to the UK regaining some of its own.

Some injudicious words (carried on a modest tide of beer) were spoken on both sides, but it was an unavoidable and perhaps even necessary conversation.  You can't go around pretending differences don't exist, and anyway there is much to be learned from hearing other points of view and having your own tested.