Is there anything edifying about the World Cup at all?
If sweeteners were distributed and consumed by FIFA officials when the competition was awarded to Qatar, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that Brazil did its fair share of palm-greasing to get the competition too. We then have the tawdry spectacle of a country whose citizens mostly live in conditions which justify outrage spending billions to build the necessary infrastructure, that infrastructure being shoddily done and in some cases unfinished by the time the football started last night.
Ah, but the football, you say. It's all about the football.
OK then, the football. After Croatia get a slightly fortuitous early goal, a Brazilian player elbows an opponent in the throat and escapes with a yellow card. Then after the hosts have equalized, a Brazilian forward, Fred, throws himself to the ground in the area, but instead of booking him for a dive the referee gives a penalty. Because after all, we can't have the hosts faltering at the group stage can we?
The World Cup is a tournament funded on the backs of the poor, organised by the corrupt, played by cheats and refereed by the incompetent. The whole thing is squalid beyond belief. Only the mentally-negligible, to adopt Wodehouse's phrase, take any interest in it.
Which possibly, soberingly, explains why when England line up against Italy tomorrow night, I will be there, beer in hand, perched nervously in front of the TV.
Friday 13 June 2014
Thursday 12 June 2014
Why I love . . . #11 Lonesome Dove
I can't remember what peculiar combination of circumstances led me to go into Waterstone's a couple of weeks ago and pick up a copy of Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel Lonesome Dove. Sometimes you'll read a reference to something in the paper or on the internet which sticks like a little burr; and then after a time someone else mentions it, and lo and behold you're in a bookshop and there it is.
I got more pleasure out of reading Lonesome Dove than from any novel I have read for ages. Set in the uncertain years of the mid 19th century, the Indians not quite beaten, the West not quite settled, it is on the face of it a simple story of two ageing Texas Rangers who decide to drive a herd of stolen cattle north to Montana, a journey of more than 2000 miles. And though it isn't what you might call highbrow fiction, it addresses eloquently many of the questions highbrow fiction often purports to address - the purpose of life, relations between men and women, the nature of fear and courage, good and evil. All in the context of an utterly gripping adventure story. It's also very funny.
McMurtry's prose style is simple without being self-consciously so, but gives a wonderful sense of the landscape, the people and the events, harrowing, comic and poignant, which befall the two Rangers, Call and McRae, their trail hands, Newt, Dish Boggett, Jake Spoon, Josh Deets and Pea Eye. McMurtry also writes wonderfully well about women. Although his style is laconic rather than flowery, on two or three occasions he inserts the novel's point of view into the mind of a dying man in a way that is almost hallucinatory. And all these shifts in tone without any obvious strain, a feat very few writers can accomplish - Dickens and Dostoevsky perhaps, but few others. Anthony Powell said he spent hours reading and re-reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done, and there are parts of A Dance To The Music of Time where he manages it magnificently.
In the U.S. Lonesome Dove is a celebrated novel - it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a TV mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. I get the sense that it's much less well known here. The Males from Hale, a book club which indulges me as a member, hadn't heard of it. I wonder whether this is because we categorise novels like this as genre fiction, in this case a western. Michael Chabon in his book Maps and Legends makes an eloquent plea for literary entertainment in general and genre fiction in particular. Chabon's own interest is superhero fiction, which leaves me cold, but his point is a good one. Genre fiction is looked down on. It's Not Serious.
As a child I loved westerns, ploughing through Shane, Riders of the Purple Sage, Jack London and many, many dozens of Louis L'Amour books (I remember going to a bookshop to buy another Louis L'Amour novel, and finishing it on the bus home with the ashamed sensation which accompanies a guzzled cake). Shane in particular is a very fine novel, though not I think up to McMurtry's standard. And incidentally McMurtry makes Cormac McCarthy, a novelist ploughing much the same furrow, seem like small and rather bitter beer.
As with all art, entertainment is surely the ultimate goal, construing the word in the broadest possible terms. And by God Lonesome Dove is entertaining. As I read the final chapter the world could have ended, the DFS sofa sale come to an end and England won the World Cup without my noticing.
It was over much, much too soon. All nine-hundred pages of it.
I got more pleasure out of reading Lonesome Dove than from any novel I have read for ages. Set in the uncertain years of the mid 19th century, the Indians not quite beaten, the West not quite settled, it is on the face of it a simple story of two ageing Texas Rangers who decide to drive a herd of stolen cattle north to Montana, a journey of more than 2000 miles. And though it isn't what you might call highbrow fiction, it addresses eloquently many of the questions highbrow fiction often purports to address - the purpose of life, relations between men and women, the nature of fear and courage, good and evil. All in the context of an utterly gripping adventure story. It's also very funny.
McMurtry's prose style is simple without being self-consciously so, but gives a wonderful sense of the landscape, the people and the events, harrowing, comic and poignant, which befall the two Rangers, Call and McRae, their trail hands, Newt, Dish Boggett, Jake Spoon, Josh Deets and Pea Eye. McMurtry also writes wonderfully well about women. Although his style is laconic rather than flowery, on two or three occasions he inserts the novel's point of view into the mind of a dying man in a way that is almost hallucinatory. And all these shifts in tone without any obvious strain, a feat very few writers can accomplish - Dickens and Dostoevsky perhaps, but few others. Anthony Powell said he spent hours reading and re-reading Dickens to try and work out how it was done, and there are parts of A Dance To The Music of Time where he manages it magnificently.
In the U.S. Lonesome Dove is a celebrated novel - it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a TV mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. I get the sense that it's much less well known here. The Males from Hale, a book club which indulges me as a member, hadn't heard of it. I wonder whether this is because we categorise novels like this as genre fiction, in this case a western. Michael Chabon in his book Maps and Legends makes an eloquent plea for literary entertainment in general and genre fiction in particular. Chabon's own interest is superhero fiction, which leaves me cold, but his point is a good one. Genre fiction is looked down on. It's Not Serious.
As a child I loved westerns, ploughing through Shane, Riders of the Purple Sage, Jack London and many, many dozens of Louis L'Amour books (I remember going to a bookshop to buy another Louis L'Amour novel, and finishing it on the bus home with the ashamed sensation which accompanies a guzzled cake). Shane in particular is a very fine novel, though not I think up to McMurtry's standard. And incidentally McMurtry makes Cormac McCarthy, a novelist ploughing much the same furrow, seem like small and rather bitter beer.
As with all art, entertainment is surely the ultimate goal, construing the word in the broadest possible terms. And by God Lonesome Dove is entertaining. As I read the final chapter the world could have ended, the DFS sofa sale come to an end and England won the World Cup without my noticing.
It was over much, much too soon. All nine-hundred pages of it.
Tuesday 10 June 2014
Starting with The Young Ones - Ofsted and Islam
Amidst the sadness of yesterday, there was some amusement to be had. No, I'm not referring to the untimely death of Rik Mayall, a man who made a very funny TV programme thirty years ago, and some progressively less funny ones thereafter. I'm talking about the Ofsted report into conditions in Birmingham state schools which has reported a series of attempts to Islamify education, together with a culture of fear, intimdation and bullying of staff.
Despite the seriousness of the Ofsted revelations there are laughs to be had, for as with so many of the most enjoyable political events the Trojan Horse row is embarrassing for all sides.
It's embarrassing for Ofsted because it beggars belief that schools which only a year ago they said were outstanding could have plummeted so rapidly in standard. Recent inspections have been made in the light of the - perhaps fake - Trojan Horse letter detailing an Islamic plot, and it looks suspiciously as it Ofsted haven't been looking for Islamification until now. In other words Ofsted, failing previously to do its job properly, has moved the goalposts. Sir Michael Wilshaw declined to take questions about his report yesterday, no doubt fearing that some of them might be awkward.
It's embarrassing for the Tories too, because the culture of autonomy, started under the Blair governments and enthusiastically taken up by Michael Gove, assumed that all the people running schools outside of local authority control would be fit to do so. Ofsted's report shows that it ain't necessarily so. Whither Academies and Free Schools now?
But most of all it's embarrassing for Labour and its supporters. Why? Well the most obvious thing about the Wilshaw report is that, apart from a few instances of anti-Christian assemblies being given by Al Qaeda sympathisers, it appears to have uncovered very little in the way of Islamic extremism. What's so particularly worrying about the situation Wilshaw details is that it appears to have arisen from from the application of basic run-of-the-mill Islamic principles - girls marginalised in learning, segregated classrooms, evolution dismissed, arts classes cancelled, a performance of Much Ado About Nothing abandoned. Whatever else this is, extremism it's not. It's just consistent with the way Islam thinks.
To be clear, I've written previously here that I don't blame the school governors for trying to Islamify their schools. If you have a democratic system of governor oversight, Muslims have as much right as anyone else to do the overseeing. Our outrage that these people should have the temerity to try and run schools their way is fake, and our surprise is jejeune. Who knew this could possibly happen? Who could possibly have thought that if you invited hundreds of thousands adherents of one of the world's great religions into a country whose culture still substantially derives from an earlier loyalty to a substantially different one, conflict might ensue?
A lot of people on the Left certainly didn't see it coming. All governments have presided over lax immigration rules (and lax enforcement of them), but the Labour party has long been immigration's champion. Britain's liberal ruling classes, cheered on by their friends in the media (and, it must be said, in the CBI), have for decades made reservations about immigration a taboo subject. Moreover, as David Goodhart's book The British Dream details, Labour governments and Labour local authorities have devoted much money, resources and intellectual capital to the idea that immigrants should retain their own identities rather than subsuming themselves in British culture. No doubt it seemed a good and respectful idea at the time. But as events in Birmingham demonstrate, there's a downside. That flapping sound you can hear emanating from the Midlands is the sound of chickens coming home to roost.
I've written a lot here about racism and racist language. Although I'm a devotee of free speech in almost all circumstances, I concede that a country which has taken on a lot of people who look different needs to make a titanic effort to absorb them successfully. A curtailment of the right to be offensive is a price worth paying. You only have to look at the latte-shaded England football team to see the success of that assimilation project. But if it was worth criminalising white people resentful at seeing their towns transformed in a way they didn't like for the cause of long term unity, it surely must also be worth applying similarly draconian solutions to what is a much bigger problem.
Absorbing Afro-Caribbean immigrants was relatively easy. They came from a Christian or post-Christian culture which fitted pretty well with Britain in the late 20th century. Integrating people with a different culture altogether, with radically different views on the family, relations between men and women, the role of women in society, the right of girls to be educated (I could go on here), is going to be much harder. The place to start would seem to be in schools. With the young ones in fact.
Despite the seriousness of the Ofsted revelations there are laughs to be had, for as with so many of the most enjoyable political events the Trojan Horse row is embarrassing for all sides.
It's embarrassing for Ofsted because it beggars belief that schools which only a year ago they said were outstanding could have plummeted so rapidly in standard. Recent inspections have been made in the light of the - perhaps fake - Trojan Horse letter detailing an Islamic plot, and it looks suspiciously as it Ofsted haven't been looking for Islamification until now. In other words Ofsted, failing previously to do its job properly, has moved the goalposts. Sir Michael Wilshaw declined to take questions about his report yesterday, no doubt fearing that some of them might be awkward.
It's embarrassing for the Tories too, because the culture of autonomy, started under the Blair governments and enthusiastically taken up by Michael Gove, assumed that all the people running schools outside of local authority control would be fit to do so. Ofsted's report shows that it ain't necessarily so. Whither Academies and Free Schools now?
But most of all it's embarrassing for Labour and its supporters. Why? Well the most obvious thing about the Wilshaw report is that, apart from a few instances of anti-Christian assemblies being given by Al Qaeda sympathisers, it appears to have uncovered very little in the way of Islamic extremism. What's so particularly worrying about the situation Wilshaw details is that it appears to have arisen from from the application of basic run-of-the-mill Islamic principles - girls marginalised in learning, segregated classrooms, evolution dismissed, arts classes cancelled, a performance of Much Ado About Nothing abandoned. Whatever else this is, extremism it's not. It's just consistent with the way Islam thinks.
To be clear, I've written previously here that I don't blame the school governors for trying to Islamify their schools. If you have a democratic system of governor oversight, Muslims have as much right as anyone else to do the overseeing. Our outrage that these people should have the temerity to try and run schools their way is fake, and our surprise is jejeune. Who knew this could possibly happen? Who could possibly have thought that if you invited hundreds of thousands adherents of one of the world's great religions into a country whose culture still substantially derives from an earlier loyalty to a substantially different one, conflict might ensue?
A lot of people on the Left certainly didn't see it coming. All governments have presided over lax immigration rules (and lax enforcement of them), but the Labour party has long been immigration's champion. Britain's liberal ruling classes, cheered on by their friends in the media (and, it must be said, in the CBI), have for decades made reservations about immigration a taboo subject. Moreover, as David Goodhart's book The British Dream details, Labour governments and Labour local authorities have devoted much money, resources and intellectual capital to the idea that immigrants should retain their own identities rather than subsuming themselves in British culture. No doubt it seemed a good and respectful idea at the time. But as events in Birmingham demonstrate, there's a downside. That flapping sound you can hear emanating from the Midlands is the sound of chickens coming home to roost.
I've written a lot here about racism and racist language. Although I'm a devotee of free speech in almost all circumstances, I concede that a country which has taken on a lot of people who look different needs to make a titanic effort to absorb them successfully. A curtailment of the right to be offensive is a price worth paying. You only have to look at the latte-shaded England football team to see the success of that assimilation project. But if it was worth criminalising white people resentful at seeing their towns transformed in a way they didn't like for the cause of long term unity, it surely must also be worth applying similarly draconian solutions to what is a much bigger problem.
Absorbing Afro-Caribbean immigrants was relatively easy. They came from a Christian or post-Christian culture which fitted pretty well with Britain in the late 20th century. Integrating people with a different culture altogether, with radically different views on the family, relations between men and women, the role of women in society, the right of girls to be educated (I could go on here), is going to be much harder. The place to start would seem to be in schools. With the young ones in fact.
Friday 6 June 2014
Jake Newsome - trolling Ann Maguire
A man has been jailed for six weeks for posting messages on Facebook about the Leeds teacher Ann Maguire, tragically murdered by a pupil.
The man, one Jake Newsome, wrote that he was "glad" Ms Maguire had been stabbed and "felt sorry" for the perpetrator, who should have "p****d on her too".
In my view people like Newsome are loathsome creeps. But should being a loathsome creep be a crime? If Newsome had made his unpleasant remarks to a friend in private, would this have been an offence? No. Neither would it have been if he had made them at, say, a debate about educational reform. If it isn't a crime to say these things, however unpleasant, why should it be a crime to write them on Facebook (or anywhere else)? Facebook is just a public conversation writ large. If Newsome had written them to a newspaper and the newspaper had been daft enough to publish them, would that have been a crime? No. Should it have been? I don't think so.
It's not clear from the news reports under which legislation Newsome was charged. An interesting criminal law blog suggests (here) that it could have been either the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003, but that in both cases the outcome would have been the same (it's worth reading the analysis and critique of the law on this site, which is one of the only places I've been able to find where the writers seem at all bothered about the way the CPS is applying these laws).
But the relevant provisions of both these Acts were set up essentially to make life difficult for stalkers and emissaries of abusive letters. The 2003 Act was legislated (and the 1988 Act amended in 2001) by the last Labour government to recognise that the advent of the internet required that the wording of the existing hate mail legislation be reworded. Did Labour intend that people like Mr Newsome should clog up the courts and be criminalised for saying things that lots of us find offensive? Probably not, but in a way it doesn't matter because that's what's actually happening. And I find it very disquieting, because what's offensive is a matter of opinion. Who is to say that my opinion matters more than yours, or the other way round?
These laws fail one of the most basic tests of legislation, which is that we know what it means. I have no idea what sort of conduct will and won't attract the attention of the CPS, and I don't think anyone else does either. I don't think anyone knows what is the definition of offensive. Being prosecuted (or not being prosecuted) depends essentially on the CPS's whim. If you read the blog on the link above you'll see that there's some discussion about whether the CPS obeyed its own guidelines on whether to prosecute. The writers conclude that it probably didn't, but in a way that's not the most important thing. Of much more significance is the idea that the CPS can prosecute you, if it feels like it, for a crime no-one can properly define. What would Orwell have thought of this? Not much, one feels.
What Newsome wrote was horrible. But not as horrible as prosecuting him for it. One is a transgression of manners and taste. The other is a transgression of freedom of speech.
The man, one Jake Newsome, wrote that he was "glad" Ms Maguire had been stabbed and "felt sorry" for the perpetrator, who should have "p****d on her too".
In my view people like Newsome are loathsome creeps. But should being a loathsome creep be a crime? If Newsome had made his unpleasant remarks to a friend in private, would this have been an offence? No. Neither would it have been if he had made them at, say, a debate about educational reform. If it isn't a crime to say these things, however unpleasant, why should it be a crime to write them on Facebook (or anywhere else)? Facebook is just a public conversation writ large. If Newsome had written them to a newspaper and the newspaper had been daft enough to publish them, would that have been a crime? No. Should it have been? I don't think so.
It's not clear from the news reports under which legislation Newsome was charged. An interesting criminal law blog suggests (here) that it could have been either the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003, but that in both cases the outcome would have been the same (it's worth reading the analysis and critique of the law on this site, which is one of the only places I've been able to find where the writers seem at all bothered about the way the CPS is applying these laws).
But the relevant provisions of both these Acts were set up essentially to make life difficult for stalkers and emissaries of abusive letters. The 2003 Act was legislated (and the 1988 Act amended in 2001) by the last Labour government to recognise that the advent of the internet required that the wording of the existing hate mail legislation be reworded. Did Labour intend that people like Mr Newsome should clog up the courts and be criminalised for saying things that lots of us find offensive? Probably not, but in a way it doesn't matter because that's what's actually happening. And I find it very disquieting, because what's offensive is a matter of opinion. Who is to say that my opinion matters more than yours, or the other way round?
These laws fail one of the most basic tests of legislation, which is that we know what it means. I have no idea what sort of conduct will and won't attract the attention of the CPS, and I don't think anyone else does either. I don't think anyone knows what is the definition of offensive. Being prosecuted (or not being prosecuted) depends essentially on the CPS's whim. If you read the blog on the link above you'll see that there's some discussion about whether the CPS obeyed its own guidelines on whether to prosecute. The writers conclude that it probably didn't, but in a way that's not the most important thing. Of much more significance is the idea that the CPS can prosecute you, if it feels like it, for a crime no-one can properly define. What would Orwell have thought of this? Not much, one feels.
What Newsome wrote was horrible. But not as horrible as prosecuting him for it. One is a transgression of manners and taste. The other is a transgression of freedom of speech.
Thursday 5 June 2014
Borrowing from the future
"What happened to the world my generation built?", asks the dramatic headline in today's Graun. The article, by one Harry Leslie Smith aged 91, recounts in harrowing detail the privations of poor people before the advent of the welfare state. Mr Smith fears that we are returning to the era of his childhood.
Nowhere in his article however does he consider the economic and demographic pressures the welfare state now faces. When it was set up the life expectancy of an average working man was 48. It is now well into the 80s. People are living longer for all sorts of reasons, one of which is the staggering improvement in healthcare. Only this morning I looked at an MRI scan of my dodgy knee with an NHS consultant. These miracles are expensive. And the longer people live the more medical care they need.
My answer to Mr Smith's question sounds harsh, but it might just be true.
"It became unaffordable, and the debts we incurred to run it in our lifetimes will be still be being paid off by our great-great grandchildren".
Nowhere in his article however does he consider the economic and demographic pressures the welfare state now faces. When it was set up the life expectancy of an average working man was 48. It is now well into the 80s. People are living longer for all sorts of reasons, one of which is the staggering improvement in healthcare. Only this morning I looked at an MRI scan of my dodgy knee with an NHS consultant. These miracles are expensive. And the longer people live the more medical care they need.
My answer to Mr Smith's question sounds harsh, but it might just be true.
"It became unaffordable, and the debts we incurred to run it in our lifetimes will be still be being paid off by our great-great grandchildren".
Wednesday 21 May 2014
Race relations at the car wash
The other day I had an illuminating experience of racial and cultural relations in Britain. This is what happened.
I went to fill up the car at a garage on the A34 in Burnage. The people that run it seem quite nice. Outside as I pulled up a gang of swarthy looking lads were washing cars in the rain. It was a foul day, chucking it down, and when I went in to pay I said to the cashier, by way of making conversation (it's what we do up north), "I bet you're glad you're in here and not washing cars with that lot".
"To be honest", he said, "I wouldn't want to be out with that lot even if the sun was shining".
"Oh yes?" I said.
"Yeah. They're Romanians", he said.
Here it comes, I thought.
"We've lost so many customers through that lot. They just don't know how to behave. A woman comes in. Fine, we all have a look don't we? But this lot. They're calling out. Making remarks. Taking pictures. They're a total disaster."
I made a vague middle-class noise which could have meant anything. Assent. Dissent. Embarrassment.
"I mean. This is the UK. They've got to learn how to behave. Show some respect towards women".
I paid and left.
In case you're wondering, the cashier was a young Muslim.
I went to fill up the car at a garage on the A34 in Burnage. The people that run it seem quite nice. Outside as I pulled up a gang of swarthy looking lads were washing cars in the rain. It was a foul day, chucking it down, and when I went in to pay I said to the cashier, by way of making conversation (it's what we do up north), "I bet you're glad you're in here and not washing cars with that lot".
"To be honest", he said, "I wouldn't want to be out with that lot even if the sun was shining".
"Oh yes?" I said.
"Yeah. They're Romanians", he said.
Here it comes, I thought.
"We've lost so many customers through that lot. They just don't know how to behave. A woman comes in. Fine, we all have a look don't we? But this lot. They're calling out. Making remarks. Taking pictures. They're a total disaster."
I made a vague middle-class noise which could have meant anything. Assent. Dissent. Embarrassment.
"I mean. This is the UK. They've got to learn how to behave. Show some respect towards women".
I paid and left.
In case you're wondering, the cashier was a young Muslim.
National sovereignty and the EU - a boon to extremists
It's rare that I find something I agree with in the Guardian, and when I do it generally it isn't something written by someone the paper employs. But one must not let the best be the enemy of the good. The following leapt out of a report on 20th May by Ian Traynor on the forthcoming European elections:
"A senior Spanish politician points out how difficult it was to campaign for office and be taken seriously when budget, spending and fiscal policies were being decided elsewhere by a troika of anonymous men in suits from the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. "'The voters are not stupid. They know you cannot deliver on what you're telling them. They don't believe you. You lose legitimacy', he said."
Hallelujah.
If you give up your right to decide economic policy to people you didn't elect who live and work in another country and whose sense of engagement with your own is modest at best, the consequences are not just that you tend to end up with an economic policy that doesn't suit you, but that because your domestic politicians are powerless to do anything on the economic front domestic politics are marginalised and emasculated. This is what happens when you concede sovereignty.
In the UK we had the great good fortune that Gordon Brown (credit where due to the miserable old bubble-blower) applied a healthy dose of Scottish Presbyterian scepticism to Tony Blair's hello-clouds-hello-sky approach to the prospect of Eurozone membership. Pity the poor Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greeks. Not only have their countries been comprehensively stuffed by a decade of the wrong interest rate and the wrong exchange rate, there is nothing (and this is the killer) their own politicians can do (or can promise their electorates to do) to make anything better. Is there a better recipe for loss of faith in politics? A more fertile seed-bed for extremism anywhere?
Of course we have our own version of this problem, which is that long, long ago we conceded control over European immigration to the EU, with the consequence that when Labour allowed the populations of new EU members the unrestricted right to work here in 2004, immigration soared. The young people of older but financially crippled EU countries have since followed.
Is there anything a British political party can do?
No. Because any British politician who promised reform of border controls or immigration policy would also have to promise to leave the EU. And this points up the sheer madness of ceding control over any policy (not just immigration) to an outside body. You can't get it back without leaving.
The need to make EU exit noises has helped UKIP and hindered the Tories, making them look like a party of Euro haters (which undoubtedly some of them are). But is that any surprise? For me the astonishing thing lies in the proposition that at one point in time you sign up to something which must then remain fixed for all eternity.
Are people serious about this? We signed up to open borders when the EU had half a dozen or so members, all prosperous, none of whose citizens had much incentive to move, whereas the EU now has nearly thirty members, countries with a wide disparity of living standard amongst many of which adoption of the Euro has wreaked havoc. The world is very different to the one we envisaged at the time of signature.
If David Cameron is wrong to threaten withdrawal from the EU in the absence of fundamental reform (and wrong in principle rather than just on this specific issue), how long would we have to wait before the changing world or changing domestic political opinion would make it OK? Twenty years? Fifty years? A century? And in the meantime what should domestic politicians say to their electorates? Sorry, but on the issues which poll after poll show you feel most strongly about, we can do absolutely nothing?
I am no visceral hater of the EU, but the present arrangements are not working. In fact they are a boon to the extremists.
"A senior Spanish politician points out how difficult it was to campaign for office and be taken seriously when budget, spending and fiscal policies were being decided elsewhere by a troika of anonymous men in suits from the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. "'The voters are not stupid. They know you cannot deliver on what you're telling them. They don't believe you. You lose legitimacy', he said."
Hallelujah.
If you give up your right to decide economic policy to people you didn't elect who live and work in another country and whose sense of engagement with your own is modest at best, the consequences are not just that you tend to end up with an economic policy that doesn't suit you, but that because your domestic politicians are powerless to do anything on the economic front domestic politics are marginalised and emasculated. This is what happens when you concede sovereignty.
In the UK we had the great good fortune that Gordon Brown (credit where due to the miserable old bubble-blower) applied a healthy dose of Scottish Presbyterian scepticism to Tony Blair's hello-clouds-hello-sky approach to the prospect of Eurozone membership. Pity the poor Italians, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Greeks. Not only have their countries been comprehensively stuffed by a decade of the wrong interest rate and the wrong exchange rate, there is nothing (and this is the killer) their own politicians can do (or can promise their electorates to do) to make anything better. Is there a better recipe for loss of faith in politics? A more fertile seed-bed for extremism anywhere?
Of course we have our own version of this problem, which is that long, long ago we conceded control over European immigration to the EU, with the consequence that when Labour allowed the populations of new EU members the unrestricted right to work here in 2004, immigration soared. The young people of older but financially crippled EU countries have since followed.
Is there anything a British political party can do?
No. Because any British politician who promised reform of border controls or immigration policy would also have to promise to leave the EU. And this points up the sheer madness of ceding control over any policy (not just immigration) to an outside body. You can't get it back without leaving.
The need to make EU exit noises has helped UKIP and hindered the Tories, making them look like a party of Euro haters (which undoubtedly some of them are). But is that any surprise? For me the astonishing thing lies in the proposition that at one point in time you sign up to something which must then remain fixed for all eternity.
Are people serious about this? We signed up to open borders when the EU had half a dozen or so members, all prosperous, none of whose citizens had much incentive to move, whereas the EU now has nearly thirty members, countries with a wide disparity of living standard amongst many of which adoption of the Euro has wreaked havoc. The world is very different to the one we envisaged at the time of signature.
If David Cameron is wrong to threaten withdrawal from the EU in the absence of fundamental reform (and wrong in principle rather than just on this specific issue), how long would we have to wait before the changing world or changing domestic political opinion would make it OK? Twenty years? Fifty years? A century? And in the meantime what should domestic politicians say to their electorates? Sorry, but on the issues which poll after poll show you feel most strongly about, we can do absolutely nothing?
I am no visceral hater of the EU, but the present arrangements are not working. In fact they are a boon to the extremists.
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