Brexit reflections - the 2019 election, and what happens when you grab the tiger by its tail

Yes, it really did feel like 1997 again, that glad confident morning when it was bliss for my 38 year old self to be a Blairite. 

But actually, this was better than 1997.  Then, it was only the riddance of a superannuated Tory government; this time there was Brexit too.  Then there was only Portillo to crow over; this time legions of the smug and traitorous lost their seats.

I have found 2019 an agony, as first Parliament blocked Mrs May’s deal and then undertook a war of attrition to stop Boris Johnson in his tracks.  The obvious perversion of the constitution by the Speaker (allowing MPs to take control of the order paper), by MPs themselves (initiating and passing legislation) and by the Supreme Court (inventing law ex nihilo) infused me with a deep, cold anger.  The Remain Ultras, people like Keir Starmer, Hilary Benn, Anna Soubry, were contemptuous of democracy.  The electorate may have voted for Brexit, they said, but they were mistaken; the people who knew better needed to make this decision for them. 

I knew they had lost their minds because they could not see how damaging this was to the principle of loser’s consent, one of the cornerstones on which democracy rests.  They could not see how it made them look.  But it was their undoing, which I’ll show in a moment.

Over all this the BBC presided regally, losing no opportunity to remind its audience that the EU would never open the withdrawal agreement, that the backstop was an insuperable problem and that Boris was a liar, a chancer and an incompetent buffoon. 

I predicted repeatedly that if Labour blocked Mrs May, then the Tories would elect Johnson as leader (and that if Johnson was blocked we would somehow end up with Farage, a foretaste of which took place in May’s Euro elections which the Brexit party handsomely won).  I also knew that it was madness to rule out no deal. 

May duly went.  Johnson won the leadership with a landslide.  And then a new deal.  And now the election. 

Ah, the election.  When it was called I felt a certain resignation.  If the Tories lost, this was surely game over for Brexit.  I thought the most likely outcome a modest Tory majority – twenty or thirty seats – but as the campaign went on and the polls narrowed a hung parliament seemed unavoidable.  So I was surprised as anyone by the result.

Why did Labour lose so heavily?  Partly because they blocked Brexit.  Partly because Corbyn has repeatedly consorted with terrorists.  Partly because he is anti-Semitic personally.  Partly because he is a security risk and gives the impression of hating his own country.  Partly because of Labour’s ludicrous welfare promises, which took voters for fools by pretending that it was all affordable if only a few affluent voters paid a bit more tax. 

But there is a more subtle point however, which is this.

I can see why poorer working class voters might see that Corbyn’s Labour had something to offer them economically (the traditional Labour offer - more generous welfarism, as opposed to the Tory offer – a flourishing economy and lower migration).  But I can’t see how Labour had anything to offer them culturally.  Labour is now a party whose ethos is that of the educated urban middle-class.  Direct contact with the less fortunate in their own cities and outside is for those people a rarity.  Where they have understood at all that others do not share their tastes in the matter of diet, dress, gender, leisure pursuits, patriotism and willingness to be offended, they often view this diversity (that’s real diversity, as opposed to having a brown face and the same opinions) with distaste and revulsion.  The modern Labour party, led by people like Corbyn, Starmer, McDonnell, Milne and Thornberry, is not just a metrocentric party (though it is – look at the new electoral map); it is a specifically London metrocentric party.  Its connection with its traditional support base is geographically tenuous and culturally skin deep. 

The bad news for Labour, even if it can grasp this essential point, is that when you’ve voted Tory once you can’t go back to being someone who’s never voted Tory.  It’s as hard as going back to being a virgin.

Thus far, Labour shows no sign of the self-awareness required to deal with its new situation.  Not surprising of the leadership perhaps, unwilling to take responsibility for their own nature.  But lower in the ranks the tone has been set by the likes of Clive Lewis MP, who suggested that the working classes welcomed the Tories in much the same way the forest welcomes the axe.  This is pitying tone is common.  The poor old working class has spurned the socialists who were desperate to help them!  In favour of the Tories who would exploit and suppress them!  Those poor deluded fools! 

These must be comforting thoughts for those reluctant to look in the mirror and ask, “Hang on, did we perhaps get something wrong?” 

The Tories must be delighted by this unreflectiveness.

Brexit is now likely in six weeks’ time.  It is a step in the dark, of course, although one a self-governing nation has no reason to fear. 

I mentioned earlier the efforts of the Remain Ultras to block Brexit in Parliament.  I thought  - no, prayed - at the time that though their tactics might be sound, their strategy might be their undoing.  So it has proved, and I now wonder whether I should be thanking Starmer, Grieve et al for their idiocy. 

For consider this.  Labour could have let Mrs May’s deal through, perhaps by abstaining.  Corbyn would have gained some credit for statesmanship, and Labour Leavers would have been grateful.  Boris Johnson would have got nowhere near power, and in 2020 Corbyn would have fought a general election against Mrs May, whom he might well have beaten.  Instead by stymieing May, Labour made her position unsustainable.  They guaranteed a Tory leadership election which Johnson was bound to win.  Johnson would threaten a No Deal Brexit, the EU would take him seriously, the Withdrawal Agreement would be reopened, a new deal would be agreed which (unlike May’s deal) did not tie the UK to the EU’s apron strings, and eventually they would have to fight Johnson in a general election. 

All this was utterly predictable, and all of it came to pass.  Thus Labour’s Remainers ensured a harder Brexit deal and an election they were likely to lose.  As I say, their tactics were brilliant, but their strategy was idiotic.  Effectively, they grabbed the tiger by its tail.  This immobilises the tiger for a while, but they longer you hang on the angrier the tiger gets until in the end it turns round and bites your arm off.

In this analogy the tiger is the electorate.

Brexit reflections #21 - the consequences of the Chequers agreement - Mrs May's massive gamble

It's pretty common currency amongst those of a Leave persuasion that Mrs May's Chequers agreement, the proposal the Cabinet has agreed as a blueprint from a deal with the EU and which prompted the resignation of Johnson, David Davis and others, is a pallid version of what Brexit should look like.

It will prevent the UK doing good trade deals with other countries, and ties the UK by treaty to something called the Common Rule Book, not the least of whose off-putting qualities is that the weasel-word Common, with its homely reminders of having something in common, of a common purpose, of the Common Prayer Book, is merely a fig-leaf for the reality that it will be the EU rule book we abide by, something we must swallow whole or not at all, and something which we will be powerless to influence.

The usual response from Remainers is, "Why haven't you come up with an alternative?", which would be respectable were it not for the fact that the Government has been bombarded with competing and alternative suggestions from Cabinet members (remember Max Fac?), politicians and think-tanks.

We also often get "But the EU won't agree to anything else", as if a refusal in negotiations is to be taken seriously as anything other than a first response.

The Government has made a terrible hash of these negotiations.  First, it agreed to talk money before trade.  Secondly, it agreed (or at least it is behaving as if it agreed - the document actually reads differently) a backstop position in Ireland which is said to tie its hands.  Thirdly, it didn't prepare for No Deal.  Fourthly, it set out an opening negotiating position which was weak to start with and will only become more diluted as time passes.

The Remainers running this process from the PM downwards have weakened Brexit to the point that it no longer resembles what many Leave voters thought they were voting for.  Hell, it even crosses the PM's own red lines, since no country which has its border regulations tied - without influence - to another trading bloc can be said to control its borders and laws.

No doubt Mrs May feels that the softest possible Brexit is required to avoid economic damage; and she is not doing this for fun, but for what she considers to be the benefit of her country.  She is forgetting one very awkward fact.

Most Tory voters are pro-Leave.  

Most of them will feel betrayed by the Chequers agreement, even if it is swallowed whole by the EU.  Many of them will feel thoroughly screwed by their own party.

Now fast forward to 2022.  There will be another general election.  What chance do the Tories stand of a majority when they have spent most of the previous five years sticking two fingers up to their own natural supporters?

Not much, I would say.  I'm not the only centre-right voter to fear that even if Mrs May is right that her soft Brexit is best for Britain economically (but she doesn't know, and personally I think she's wrong), the damage of a harder Brexit would pale into insignificance beside the damage done by a Government led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Whether Tory voters would risk such a calamity must be in doubt.  But Mrs May is taking a massive gamble.  And for what?

Not . . . not . . . HIGHER TAXES?

The Cabinet is wrestling with whether to give the NHS more money.  And if so how much.

The response to this has been telling. In the first place I don't detect any desire to extract structural health reforms as a price for a cash injection. And this despite, for example, a growing sense among some doctors that a modest payment for GP access, something routine in other European countries, might weed out some of the more frequent attenders.

The NHS is a money pit. An organisation that is paying prices for drugs which are many multiples of those charged on the high street is not the best custodian of public money.

Secondly there has been a chorus of outrage from those with vested interests in other areas of public spending (particularly defence), who have pointed out that every extra £1 for the NHS means less for them.

Thirdly there is the awkward fact that Britain is still living beyond its means. True, the Government is borrowing less than £1bn per week now, less than at any time before the financial crisis, but that's still money borrowed because we can't afford the standard of living we want now.  It might be legitimate to borrow to invest, but borrowing to finance current spending - to employ more nurses and doctors for example - is asking our children to pay taxes in future to sustain our lifestyle now.  This is something Conservatives have long felt was immoral.  And we have a Conservative government, remember?

You wouldn't think so, in particular because the talk is that any NHS boost would have to be funded partly by tax rises.

In a way, this is a hallelujah moment for me. I have long argued that Britain cannot afford its public spending at current rates of taxation. We have to decide what sort of public services we want, and how much we're willing to pay to get them. Excessive borrowing of the counter-cyclical type favoured by Gordon Brown from 2002 onwards has to some extent masked the acuity of this choice. But the long years of fiscal retrenchment under George Osborne and Philip Hammond, whilst nothing short of miraculous in economic terms (avoiding recession, cutting the deficit, creating record levels of employment, taking the lowest paid out of tax) have undoubtedly made public services worse.  And people are noticing.

The UK takes about 37% of GDP in tax. That's higher than the US, Canada, Australia and Switzerland.  Scandinavian countries pay more. We could pay more without the wheels falling off the wagon. Doing so might be better than borrowing from our children.

Brexit reflections #20 - the process is being driven by people and institutions who never wanted it in the first place

I often like to remind Remainers that the margin by which they lost in the 2016 referendum was just shy of 8%. 

Not so, they retort - 52% minus 48% equals 4%.  Aha, I say, with a flourish that makes me doubly unpopular (once for having voted Leave, twice for being better at maths), but 52 is nearly 8% bigger than 48.  They retreat, muttering, and calculating.  

Childish I know, but true.

How does this matter?  Only in that 4% seems a close result, almost within the margin of statistical error.  8% does not.  8%, if not a thumping majority, is a significant and decisive result.  

I'll come back to this.

The British press is always full of how badly Brexit is going, but a couple of pieces have stood out for me recently - Jonathan Powell's article in the Times under the headline, "Brexiteers play the blame game as they run out of solutions", and Ambrose Evans-Prichard's in the Telegraph, apocalyptically entitled, "Weep for Brexit - the British dash for independence has failed".  No need I think to sum up the substance - readers will get the picture.

I agree.  Brexit is a mess, and looks like being a failure.  Why?

Well, the people (see above) decided we should Leave the EU.  But how we should Leave has been decided by politicians, egged on by the media, civil service and academia.  Let us frankly enumerate their positions.

The Prime Minister is pro-Remain.

The Cabinet is mostly pro-Remain.

The Parliamentary Tory party is mostly pro-Remain.

The Parliamentary Labour party is mostly pro-Remain.

The House of Commons is mostly pro-Remain.

The House of Lords is mostly pro-Remain.

The Civil Service is mostly pro-Remain.

The media is mostly pro-Remain.

Academia is mostly pro-Remain.

Did I miss anyone out?

Now let's go back to Leave's majority.  Leave obtained nearly 8% more votes than Remain.  A significant and decisive victory in the biggest ever exercise of democracy in British history. And yet all of Britain's institutions have - conspired implies a conscious process - lined up to either prevent Brexit taking place at all, or, failing that, to ensure that it happens in name only.

If this is a tragedy (and it may be), it is not because Brexit represents the sunlit uplands and Britain's institutions are preventing us getting there.  It is because those institutions are doing their damnedest to prevent the exercise of the popular will as manifested in the referendum.  

Every Remainer politician who tries to control the direction of travel will tell you that they are only seeking to save Britain from national disaster. But they are forgetting that, however badly Brexit turns out, the fatal undermining of the democratic process their meddling is causing would be a far greater disaster. 

Collectively they have taken leave of their senses.

PS. A message to Jonathan Powell, by the way, he of the "Brexiteers play the blame game as they run out of solutions" article. The people running the Brexit process are those implacably opposed to it in the first place. No wonder it isn't working. Mr Powell - if you don't like the direction of travel, why are you so determined to hang on to the steering wheel?

Brexit re-run - a suggestion for Remain zealots.

Let's get one thing straight about the furore concerning electoral over-spending by the Leave campaign.  If anyone has broken the law they should be prosecuted.

Now, let's consider the impact on the legitimacy of the Brexit vote.  A chorus of Remainers in the press and on social media have said that the process is thus flawed and there must be a re-run. 

They would, wouldn't they?

Leave's margin of victory was nearly 8%.  (Don't be fooled by the people who tell you it was 4% because 52 minus 48 is 4; 52 is about 8% bigger than 48).  That's a substantial majority.  It's hard to see that a bit less spending by Leave would have made much difference.  Besides, since the accusation against Vote Leave was that effectively they controlled the organisation which spent the money, even if they didn't spend it themselves it's evident that BeLeave, the other organisation, would have spent it promoting the Leave campaign in any event.

Thus the nub of the accusation is that money was spent the way that Vote Leave wanted, rather than the way BeLeave would have spent it if left to their own devices.  Not much of a charge.  Not much of a difference.

Now let's look at the overall spending figures.  According to the Electoral Commission, the Leave side spent £13.4 million on their campaign.  Remain on the other hand spent £19 million.  In other words, Remain got to spend half as much again on the campaign as Leave did.  And moreover the Tory Government spent £9 million (of taxpayers' money) sending a pro-Remain leaflet to every household in the land.  Thus the total spending on behalf of Remain in the months leading up to June 16 was nearer £28 million.

In other words, according to official figures, the Remain campaign spent more than twice the amount Leave did. 

And Leave still won by a margin of 8%.

Remain zealots should take their re-run and shove it somewhere dark.

Muslim terrorists and Twitter - I have a bad feeling about this

Last summer I wrote here about the aftermath of the London Bridge and Manchester attacks.  The thrust of this piece was that whilst the predominant tone of media coverage and comment was to the effect that none of this had anything to do with Islam, Home Office figures suggested that Muslims were about 80 times as likely as non-Muslims to be convicted of terror attacks; it seemed to me incredibly unlikely that this was some awkward coincidence.  Common sense suggested that mad losers adhering to a religion which inculcated the belief that those not of the faith were dispensible un-persons, were more likely than, say, mad loser golf enthusiasts to exhibit their derangement in acts of mass murder.

There are no doubt many ways of describing the people who continue, from their well-paid high-status jobs in politics and the media, to tell us that this is merely correlative and there is nothing to worry about; their wilful blindness reminds me rather of Enoch Powell's description of a nation "heaping up its own funeral pyre" (one of the few times Powell came pretty close to being right).

As a matter of curiosity, I opened a Twitter account last year in which I posted links to press reports (Guardian, Times, Telegraph, BBC) detailing terrorist convictions.  These were done without comment - I merely posted the links.  All the reports were of offences committed by Muslims.  Ironically, it was because I had seen a report of a Far Right non-Muslim terrorist conviction and attempted to post a link to it that I discovered my Twitter account had been suspended.  I have contacted Twitter in an attempt to establish why, but there seems little doubt that this will be because of the content of the account.

So there we have it.  If you post evidence which shows that in the overwhelming majority of terrorist convictions the perpetrators are Muslims, your voice can be closed down.  That seems to me to portend something deeply worrying about British society.  Don't point out something awkward.  I half expect the police at my door.

I'll post an update when/if I hear back from Twitter.

Free speech, racism and semantic creep.

It's common for older people to feel estranged from the society they're living in.  My wife's godparents retired from somewhere in the south of England to a house by Loch Earn in Scotland.  When the modern world came to Loch Earn they moved again to Nethy Bridge, a small village in the Spey Valley.  If frailty had not overcome them they would surely in time have moved again, perhaps to Cape Wrath or Spitzbergen.

I have felt this dissonance acutely in recent weeks, partly magnified by the propensity social media has to bring you into the mental world of people with whom you profoundly disagree - perhaps you should not read too much into the views of random Twitter strangers - but partly also though it's a genuine reflection of the way the world really is.

According to the Times, a school teacher was interviewed by police last week because a transgender pupil had complained that he had used the wrong gender pronoun to refer to him (or her).  A warning about hate speech was given.  Now personally I have no overwhelming desire to offend people, but I quite like living in a society where I'm free to offend if I want to, without criminal sanction, but where the people I've offended are free to dislike me or disassociate from me if that's what they want. That's what freedom looks like.

How then have we got to a situation where the police can go round to interview someone who's said something someone else finds offensive?

It has been a long process, which began in the 1960s with the Race Relations Acts. Britain was struggling to come to terms with the Windrush generation of West Indian migrants, and use of the N-word was socially proscribed, even if it might not at first technically have constituted incitement to racial hatred.  This proscription has had far-reaching and largely unintended consequences.

Firstly it gave birth to the idea that there were some things you couldn't say. The law already applied to defamatory statements, or words which might lead to violence (or a fear of violence).  It has subsequently jumped enthusiastically on the opportunities for taking these prescriptions further. The Public Order Act 1986 forbade expressions of racial hatred.  The legislation was so successful in excising racially pejorative expressions from public discourse, that other groups began to see that they too, with a little linguistic tweaking, could gather under its protection.  If statements about (and behaviour towards) your group could be called "racist", you could begin to control the way you were treated. 

That meant expanding the definition of race from that widely understood in the 1960s. Today Muslims are a race (even though there are white Muslims, and what distinguishes Muslims from others is not their appearance but their adherence to a religion). Jews are a race too (even though there are plenty of black Jews).

The fact that you can convert to Islam and Judaism means that it is now possible to change race.  

Christians appear not to be afforded the same protection.

Possibly the most absurd manifestation of this semantic creep was the Northern Irish Catholic who tried to persuade me that she had been the victim of racism by Northern Irish Protestants. There is another word for this behaviour, namely sectarianism. Would-be race victims hate using this word, because, as with Israel and the Irish question, it always invites debate about the reasons for sectarianism; racism on the other hand is always stupid and much easier to dismiss without explanation.

The widespread idea that it is legitimate to stop people saying what they want has made it easy for the law to jump aboard this train. Labour's Telecommunications Act, originally passed to add electronic hate-mail to existing letter post legislation, is now being used to jail people who've said things other people don't like.  For example, a young man in Kent was sent to prison for posting on Facebook a picture of a burning poppy alongside the word, "Take that you squadey (sic) cunts". Successive Acts of Parliament have expanded prescription to expressions of hatred on grounds of religion or sexual orientation.

It's clear that we enjoy significantly less free speech than we did fifty years ago.

Does it matter? Once it becomes in principle OK for the state to tell people what they can and can't say at the margins, a series of small steps can be used (has been already used) to silence them elsewhere in the political arena. This is how dictatorships control the public space. And we are one election away from a Corbyn government.

It also matters because it tends to encourage racial minorities to focus excessively on racial matters. Britain is not on the whole a racist society. It might have been fifty years ago, and it's arguable that free speech proscriptions were necessary then. They no longer are. Britain became a (very largely) non-racist society because its people decided not to be racists. Restrictions on freedom of expression were never much more use than nudges by the state in the right direction. They have outlived their usefulness. Since the goal of anti-racists is to achieve a situation where race doesn't matter, it's striking how so many seem desperate to make race matter as much as possible.

But if such restrictions were perhaps justifiable on racial integration grounds, in other areas they are crazy. When I suggested that I might not always use the preferred pronoun with a transgender person a friend told me that doing so was a small sacrifice to make in the context of the struggles such people had undergone to find their gender identity. I might have replied that in such a heroic context the insult of being called he rather than she would be a sling or arrow the transitioning person could probably overlook.

Lastly - and you could not make this up - the police are apparently in some areas so short staffed that they don't have time to investigate domestic burglaries; but they do have time to harass school teachers who use the wrong pronoun. This is almost comical, were it not a symptom of a situation in which police hesitated for years to investigate Muslim sex gangs for fear of "racism" accusations.

Where are the car keys?  I'm heading away from civilisation.  Spitzbergen may not be far enough.

Czech spies, and a few reasons to be cheerful about Jeremy Corbyn

There's been a great deal of wailing in the centre-Right press about the likelihood of a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government.  I share the fear of what such a government would do, but for all the much-vaunted enthusiastic endorsement of Corbyn by the young, or youngish, I wonder whether, as with the SNP surge of the last couple of years, his momentum has peaked.

For one - and this is a trivial point perhaps - what the internet creates, the internet can just as surely destroy.  You can be a meme, go viral, one week and the next be stale buns.  Social media is adept at creating phenomena, but phenomena don't necessarily last.

Secondly, it is very hard to imagine that the Tories could run a more incompetent election campaign than theirs of 2017.

A more subtle point however is that the longer Corbyn remains Labour leader the more the public finds out what he and his Momentum friends are like.  This week's storm about Corbyn's contact with the Czech "diplomat" may well not prove that he sold or gave spies to Britain's enemies - it's hard to think of information he might have had which wasn't freely available in an open society - but his willingness to consort with people whose professional aim was to subvert the British government says a lot about him.  It is moreover all of a piece with his flirtation with Jew-hating Arabs and Irish Republicans, his oft-expressed admiration for brutal and repressive failed Socialist states and his enthusiastic espousal of the kind of state interventionism which would rapidly take Britain back to the 1970s.

Ah, you may say, but JC's admirers don't care about these things.  They're too young to remember the 70s, they're not interested in the realities of Britain's fiscal position (precarious) and they're indifferent to the plight of the poor in places like Venezuela which once promised so much but now, conveniently as their failure has been made manifest, seem to have dropped out of Corbyn's Overton window.

This may be true, but, as Tony Blair will tell you, Labour cannot get elected on the votes of just their core support. The hardcore supporters may be enthusiasts (although others will be holding their noses and others still walking away from the Party altogether), but what about the general public?  What about the working class?  The reality is surely that many working class voters will be contemptuous not only of the sheer nastiness of much of Momentum's public manifestations ("Tory scum" amidst a shower of spittle), but also the trigger-warning, cisgender snowflakery of its PC-gone-mad faction.  

Labour may have something to say to the political interests of the working class, but it has almost nothing whatsoever to say them culturally. This for me represents a wedge which the Tories could drive home with a big hammer. It's an open goal.

The craven folly of (most) Labour MPs is becoming more and more apparent. Some of them - even the sainted Frank Field, one of their best - let Corbyn onto the ballot paper, failing to grasp that a process which enfranchised the organisation's enthusiasts was likely to elect someone who closely represented their proclivities. Having committed this error, they see the new leadership beginning to compete with the Tories for the title of "The Nasty Party". And what do they do? They hang onto their seats, and hope. 

Only 18 months ago a vote of No Confidence in Mr Corbyn was passed by 172 to 40 members of the PLP. That did not shame him into resigning; the Hard Left is nothing if not Hard Faced. The PLP could have set up an alternative opposition, but MPs fear for their jobs and pensions. They remind me of Groucho Marx - "These are principles! And if you don't like them - I have others!" What a contemptible shower. Some are Hard Leftists like him and revel in their new found eminence. The rest however are fellow-travellers, lacking the courage to derail the train.

Labour's best chance would seem to be a collapse of the government amidst Brexit bickering. It's possible that Tory Remainers could so lose their sense of proportion that they will embrace the risk of a Corbyn government to avoid Brexit. In those circumstances it's possible to imagine a successful Labour campaign on a platform of a competently managed departure. But if Labour lose next time it is likely the party will by then have been so thoroughly transformed into a Hard Left SWP facsimile that a new Centre Left party could sweep Labour to oblivion. 

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.

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".