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.