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.