Return to normality

I've been travelling, returning to the UK, staying with family in London, and am back in Manchester doing useful things. That's why I have been quiet on here.

Yesterday was a soggy, chill day. Rain poured from leaden skies, and the Tory Party Conference came to town. The security arrangements around the venue were ridiculous. The Midland Hotel was fenced off with secure turnstiles for the guests installed. Still, conference delegates roamed freely and incongruously, showing that they were from a different tribe. And there were demonstrations. The biggest was the anti-Brexit one in the afternoon. It wasn't huge, unsurprising given the weather, but it was several thousand strong and attracted people from across the region. These people made me nostalgic for my Hull days.

The rest followed the usual pattern of chants and banners, subdued a little by the rain,

 and the marchers were cheered on from a fine traditional pub.

There was a counter demonstration of Brexit supporters. I counted no more than a dozen. There were a few choruses of "we love you Boris, we do" from disturbing looking thugs. (Johnson should worry about the people he is attracting.) A few were drunk and trying to pick a fight with the police, a couple of them shouted "scum" at the demonstrators, but long before the end of the march had passed, they had all gone home. I think that sums up the respective strengths of the pro and anti Brexit movements.

But the most striking thing about the day was the many more thousands who were in the city centre, doing their shopping, having a day out, eating and drinking, going to theatres and cinemas, etc. They weren't fussed. Most smiled warmly at the marchers, there were a couple of sarky comments, but that was it. It's best summed up by someone on the tram who asked me what was going on in town. He hadn't a clue. I told him it was the Tory Party conference. He said, "Oh bloody hell. Them." And that was it. The referendum was launched into a sea of indifference about the EU, and it's still there. The excitement about polarisation, such as in this good piece, is right about the committed. Neither diehard remainers or leavers are a majority, however. Both rely on the cognitive bias of the false consensus to comfort them. Because they believe in it, they think they must be in the majority.

The evidence does show that remain is the stronger. It can mobilise many, many more people than leave. You would be much happier to meet them in a dark alley too, even if they might get a bit boring in the pub. There hasn't been a single opinion poll without a remain lead for two years. The generational aspect is hugely important as well. The young are overwhelmingly pro-remain - 70-80% - leave doesn't have much of a future.

All this makes the talk of civil disorder even more ridiculous. Not only would this be the first time in history that people have rioted in favour of food shortages, it is always the young that riot and they don't want Brexit at all. But it's the great indifference that is the key point. The electorate didn't know much about the EU, never saw it as a problem, and didn't realise that it made their lives easier even though they talked about retiring to Spain and going on a "booze cruise" to bring back car loads of cheap drink. If we don't leave, a few hundred neo-fascists may be as unpleasant as always. Elderly Brexit Party members will mutter dark threats. But I reckon most people will either shrug or breathe a sigh of relief, because the only way that it will all be over is to remain.

"Getting Brexit done" (entering ten years of complex negotiations with the EU to try and work out a worse relationship while mitigating as much of the damage as possible, all of which will dominate the work of government) is not the magic formula for social peace. Brexit was sold as something that brings material benefits and an enhanced national status. Instead, it is bringing material costs and a diminution of national status. Voters will not forgive the politicians who took us out and many leave voters will forget that they once supported the idea. The younger generation, wanting to exploit the opportunities that the EU opens up, will be bitterest of all.

The language has been terrible, the threats shocking, and the atmosphere poisonous. There's a simple reason why - Brexit is dead and Brexiters are losing. No amount of shouting fictions at reality makes it any less real. They can't answer questions about trade, production, rights, prosperity, transport, and a myriad of other questions because the answers are either unknown or unpalatable. So, they scream abuse at the people who ask them. As they do, and as they try and excuse the actions of the lousy choice the Tories made for leader, they look worse and worse to those who don't share their passions.

I don't know how this will play out, but I think that there is a fair chance that we will end up not leaving. It's the easiest way out of a self-imposed mess. Anyway, my humble suggestion is that the next time we try and wreck the country, let's not do it over something most people never cared about in the first place.

In search of lost coherence

The problem with trying to understand Brexit is that it is impossible to pin it down to any one meaning. Critics try and assign the causes to nationalism, racism, 'little England' sentiment, nostalgia, anger, etc., and none of the accusations stick. The same goes with the possible outcomes – from keeping our place in the single market, which we were told by the leave campaign would not be threatened, to the no-deal unilateral abrogation of treaties, defaulting on debts, and isolating ourselves from our main economic partners. There's a reason for this. Brexit isn't a single ideology, it's a cluster of sentiments that have emerged from an oppositional political milieu.

The milieu is a useful concept. My book is about a part of the 19th century radical milieu - libertarian anti-statism. It spread from anarcho-communists to free market anti-capitalists and proto-ecologists. They recognised each other as fellow travellers, if not as allies. The same can be said of Brexit. The common theme of opposition to the European Union was adopted by ethnic nationalists, anti-immigration Powellites, far right racists, Conservative free-market ultras, neo-feudalists, Stalinists, authoritarians, climate change deniers, neo-imperialists, Putin's 'useful idiots,' fascists, Bennite left social democrats, revolutionary defeatists, disaster capitalists, and so on. There is no coherence in a milieu, only a swirl of ideas, each feeding off each other and making and unmaking unlikely alliances. Each strand on its own is negligible, together they produce a noisy minority to challenge the mainstream.

Beguiled by the simplification of the language of a political spectrum, we try and describe this in terms of left/right positioning. I've done the same. But it doesn't fit that well. The strange allies people make within a milieu is sometimes seen as the product of a horseshoe shaped spectrum where extreme left and right meet. But in an anti-establishment milieu, red/brown alliances are natural, they share common hatreds and, above all, view the world as a vast conspiracy and democracy as a sham.

There are several things milieus have in common. They incubate some interesting and creative ideas that can spin off into the mainstream and lose much of their dangerous baggage in the process. However, they also have links with some of the crazier elements of fringe beliefs – 9/11 conspiracy, anti-vaccination, rejection of some science (i.e. GMOs, pharmaceuticals, synthetic chemicals), cultic and esoteric religions, anti-Semitism, and many, many others. 

They share an indiscriminating hostility to all things deemed mainstream. They hero worship anyone, any regime or any movement, that they see as oppositional to the establishment. They maintain their own media to remain uncontaminated. And this leads to something else, they distance themselves from reality. Sometimes they treat facts, evidence, and truth as the enemy.

Finally, they are utopian and that utopianism tends towards the totalitarian style. They have a plan, a future society that will blossom the moment their plan is adopted and its opponents swept away. How many deaths have resulted from such overconfidence? Looked at closely, the ideas are always shallow and ill-informed. And for real lunacy delve into the depths of the Brexit Party.

We can see all this with Brexit. Once Brexiters are confronted with details and important questions like trade relations, service industries, or the Belfast Agreement, they lapse into utopian rhetoric or talk about the Second World War. It can all be solved, believe in Britain, we will become global Britain again. I want to know about my house in Greece, others about their businesses and just-in-time supply chains, yet more need information about the supply of food and medicines, but Brexiters give no details other than a vision of the rosy future that awaits if we leave. All they can say in reply is that 'people voted for it,' regardless of whether it was a good idea or not. They never give us solutions. They can't. That's because they are ignorant of the way the EU works, what it is, and our role in it. They have never tried to learn about it, but have invented a series of fictions to justify their ideological preferences. There is a rock, but there is no way through. The rock is reality. Our government is still trying to wish it away rather than deal with it.

Milieus are not necessarily benign. They are persistent. They can grow and flourish in a crisis, offering simple solutions to complex problems. But these populist groupings are always permanent minorities. There is only one thing that can make them dangerous – an invitation. The energy they provide can be a temptation, either to harness it or to finally quash the movement that produced it. 2015 was the year of the invitation.

There are many examples of mistaken invitations, but the classic one is Hitler. In the second election of 1932, the Nazi vote declined from its high point earlier in the year. If the pattern had been maintained, it is likely that it would have declined further and the Nazis would have become an historical footnote. Hysteria and enthusiasm are hard to sustain. Instead, he was offered the Chancellorship in a coalition government. Fifty million died as a consequence.

Brexit is not analogous, it is not the equivalent of the Nazis. But the invitation into the mainstream was the same process. In this case it was the referendum. They accepted and have now colonised the body politic. At the same time, Labour opened up its leadership election to thousands from outside the party, while MPs implacably opposed to Corbyn nominated him on to the shortlist in order to have a debate. The fringe anti-imperialist milieu seized the opportunity and organised round him. These couldn't have happened without complacency – few expected either Leave or Corbyn to win.

The irony of Brexit is that it is reaching its crisis at the very moment that it is dying. Polls show that it is slipping back into being a minority obsession. Reality refuses to shift. The supposed benefits are non-existent. Empty rhetoric is confronting damaged businesses, lost jobs, impossible situations, and ruined lives. If it is pushed through, dead and impractical though it is, it would be a national calamity. We are entering the endgame which will decide.

Slippage

Little by little the language is shifting. The crisis is becoming no deal, always unlikely, rather than exit. Johnson is winning. No deal panic will undermine opposition to a deal. A deal, rather than remaining, will become a success. I find it alarming. Tom Peck is superb here, comparing the whole mess to Shackelton's failed Antarctic expedition.

Should any kind of deal be forthcoming, Remainers will cling to it as a semi-salvation. There will be no fuel shortages, no food shortages, no medicine shortages. The pound will plummet slower than it otherwise would have done. A week in Spain for the family will remain, just about, a realistic possibility. 

We will, like Shackleton’s men, have made it to South Georgia Island. There will be a celebration of sorts. But it will still have been an expedition of profound pointlessness. We will, all of us, be worse off.

This is madness. The task is to remain. If the polls are right, this is what the majority of the country wants. Leaving with a deal is a slow-moving disaster, even if no-deal would be an immediate catastrophe.

Brexit shorts

There are three million or so EU 27 citizens living in the UK. Since the referendum their lives have been made increasingly difficult by uncertainty. This good piece is an example. These observations are acute:

The language you learned and lovingly perfected over the years and now speak every day became deafening in its attacks on the scheme that inspired you to pack up your bags and start a new, hopefully better life here...

The problem with internalising this need to remain quiet and out of the conversation is that unacknowledged melancholy only grows stronger ...

The UK has not been a pleasant place to live for European immigrants since the referendum, and phases of brief panic followed by months of denial do not make for the most stable of mindsets...

Read it all. It echoes with the submerged anxiety and stress that is the experience of the million plus Brits living in the EU and the millions more like me living part-time in EU countries. The past three years have been difficult. I suppose the reason why I keep blogging about Brexit is because it's the only way to manage the constant companion of my deep, deep anger and distress at the damage to my country and the threat to my life here in Greece, a life I love so much. It's personal. Every time I see a Brexiter argument I wonder why they want to hurt me.

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There are reasons why people join unions. Ireland shows us why it is the same in international affairs. If Ireland was standing alone in a conflict with Britain, it would be weak and vulnerable. As part of the EU it is by far the stronger party. The UK is like a right-wing worker who refuses to join a trade union and is surprised to end up being shafted rather than rewarded. The UK will be shafted in all its trade deals and international relations through inherent weakness caused by its isolation. EU membership enhances, rather than diminishes, British power and sovereignty.

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Why are we not talking about Gibraltar?

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I don't just hope that the government starts telling the truth, I wish it would face it, or even admit that it exists. It's a juvenile mind that responds to reality by pointing at others and saying, "It's all their fault!"

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When Priti Patel talks of ending freedom of movement immediately, she thinks she will be popular. Yet it's a reciprocal right, and is the one thing that young people, in particular, don't want to lose.

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Brexiter nationalism and Johnson's evocation of patriotism are crass. This isn't because they are English rather than British. It's because they are kitsch.

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Back in the 1980s, I went to a lecture by Field Marshall Lord Carver. He was briefly popular on the lecture circuit because he opposed the British nuclear deterrent, thinking that resources would be better spent on conventional forces. He described Britain's eternal strategic interest as ensuring that the continent of Europe was not dominated by a single hostile power. From the Hundred Years War to the Cold War this has been true. There have been many attempts to achieve it - the Westphalian nation state, the balance of powers, national self-determination - all broke down leading to war and conflict. The most successful has been the device advocated since the 18th Century, a form of voluntary federation of independent and democratic states. This is what the EU is. We are threatening to leave something that secures our most important interests.

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If we do leave the EU, this will not mean that we will stop talking about Brexit. Even at the height of the Empire, the bulk of our trade was with Europe. There will be decades of negotiations to reset our relationship, to find forms of integration without membership, or even to start the long process of applying to rejoin. There is no way out of the Europe that we are an integral part of. If we give up a powerful and privileged position in the closest of the three economic superpowers, then we will have to find a way of mitigating the damage caused by our folly. The only way to stop 'banging on about Europe' is to revoke and remain.

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The referendum was called because of a problem in the Conservative Party. After the referendum, implementing the result was delegated solely to the Conservative government. No-deal rhetoric is
also about a crisis in the Conservative Party. Isn't it about time that major constitutional change was seen as cross-party issue for deliberation, negotiation, recommendation, and implementation? Shouldn't it be decided through representation rather than plebiscitary populism?

Springtime for Johnson

In 2016 Boris Johnson famously wrote two alternative articles for the Telegraph, one backing remain and the other leave. He finally plumped for leave and reportedly told David Cameron that he expected to be defeated. It was a ploy to win a support base so that he could be next in line as Cameron's replacement. Echoing the plot of Mel Brook's 'The Producers,' he won a referendum that he intended to lose.

The consequences of winning are often more troublesome than those of losing. Losing allows rhetoric to continue unexamined. Winning brings the burden of implementing victory. That is far more difficult. In the case of Brexit, probably the most complex task any government has ever undertaken since the Second World War. The winning rhetoric was all about immediacy, simplicity, and huge benefits. The reality was that it would take many years of untangling our economy from Europe, be immensely complex with unpredictable consequences, and prove costly and yield no benefits. In the wake of the referendum, Johnson's leadership bid failed. That would have been the end of it if it hadn't been for the government making a complete mess of the process. Never a good idea, Brexit is now a comprehensive failure. The consequences are very clear. Any form of Brexit will:

a) Make the country relatively poorer.
b) Damage the country's international standing and strategic interests.
c) Reduce its power and control.

No-deal Brexit will do this in spades and adds immediate and unpredictable chaos. For what?

For the ultimate symbolism of blue passports, designed in France and printed in Poland?

Unlike 'The Producers,' Johnson profited from the mess. He got a second chance and is Prime Minister. But he arrived at No.10 in a crisis and only got there by using wild and irresponsible rhetoric to play to unrepresentative party members.

He is now demanding that the EU renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement to remove the Northern Ireland Backstop. They will not. He will fail. He says he is determined to default to a no-deal and is ratcheting up the noise. If he is trying to bluff the EU, that too will fail. He must know this. So, does he intend to carry through with no-deal against the wishes of Parliament, business, all major institutions, and public opinion? It would destroy his premiership. Is he a secret ideologue, longing to fulfil his Churchill fantasies by leading his country in an existential struggle against its … er … allies? Or perhaps he is bluffing us and his party, not the EU?

Johnson's tactic may be to defuse the ability of the Brexit Party to split the Tory vote in an early election and win a secure majority against a divided opposition, possible on as little as 30% of the vote. But even if this works, for all the sound and fury there will still be only three Brexit options for the UK: leave through the existing withdrawal agreement; leave without an agreement (no-deal); revoke and remain in the EU. One of these must be chosen.


The whole business is so strange, I can't help wondering if, whether by accident or design, this is another Producers tactic. It may be wishful thinking on my part, but, once he has glimpsed the abyss, will he refuse to jump like Tsipras before him? To be even more Machiavellian (or Mel Brooksian), his personal interest lies in failure as long as it is clear that he has tried hard and that it's someone else's fault. He may be eyeing the gathering Parliamentary opposition with glee, rather than fear. This could be the only time a Cavalier is delighted to see a Roundhead army assembling to oppose him.

Anxiety in paradise

I love it here. This is one of the most beautiful corners of the world. I have some good friends. I will never get tired of the sunsets ...

 ... and I will always be made tired trying to keep control of  my large garden and deal with all its produce.

We bought it nearly seventeen years ago. We couldn't afford it, but knew if we left it until later, we never would be able to buy. It was in a bad condition and most of my earnings have been ploughed into improving it, as have most of my hopes. It was a retirement dream to be able to live as much of my life here as possible.

However much I loved the place, I would never, ever have bought a house if Greece hadn't been in the European Union. My rights as an EU citizen gave me the security to be able to buy and to know that I would always be entitled to live here - either full or part-time. For a while I was anxious about the effect of the Greek financial crisis, but nobody could have thought that the UK would do something as stupid as leave. After all, Brexit was just an obsession of a few ideologues that led the Conservative Party to commit electoral suicide for thirteen years.*

The decline in the value of sterling has cost me a lot of money, but that is only one effect. A soft Brexit, where we retain our membership of the single market and keep freedom of movement, would cause the fewest problems. There would be some headaches, but they could be surmounted. A hard Brexit, leaving the single market and thereby ending freedom of movement, would effectively destroy my plans for my final years. I would be able to visit, but my time here would be legally limited and there would be many other complications and expenses. Who knows what a no-deal Brexit would do? My guess is that it would ruin my life.

Now the rhetoric is becoming alarming. It may be a bluff, but sometimes they can go awfully wrong. Chris Grey puts it succinctly:

No bogus statistic, half-truth, misunderstanding, naivety or downright lie is left unuttered. The world looks on, bemused and amused, at the spectacle of a once-respected country now simultaneously belligerent and absurd, daily trashing its global reputation even as it proclaims and romantically remembers itself as a global power.

Old nonsenses, such as the pivotal role the German car industry will play in securing a great deal, are dusted down and joined by new ones, such as Dominic Raab’s assertion that only by not having a deal will getting that great deal be assured. Every report of the resulting damage is dismissed as not being caused by Brexit, or discounted as being worth it because of Brexit.

The signs of that damage are all around us, from the latest collapse of the pound in anticipation of no-deal Brexit, to the latest news of the collapse of investment in the car industry, the latest desperate plea and warning from that industry, and the latest warning from the Bank of England. But no evidence or rational argument is allowed to intrude on the cult, putting civil servants, in particular, in an impossible position. True belief is all.

All the lessons learnt in three years of negotiations and internal wrangling have been cast aside in favour of long disproved bollocks and aggressive posturing. We're back to 2016 as if nothing has happened in between. It's not doing the cumulative consequences of my three years of stress, anxiety, and constant anger any good.

OK, I'm just a highly privileged former academic with a reasonable pension and a second home having a moan. But I am never going to be the worst affected. Let's think about what this will mean to the employment and life chances of so many people, especially the young and the poor. There is no credible study that says that Brexit can be anything other than economically damaging. The only debate is over the extent of the immediate impact, whether it will start a long slow decline or whether it will produce a severe shock. Millions of people will be hurt, many lives ruined, thousands of small businesses will close, big industries will leave or scale down. We will all be poorer than we would have been if we had remained.

Amidst this mess, there's a question that haunts and is seldom asked. Just what was so intolerable about the previous forty-six years? How much did people suffer from EU membership to make them want to inflict this on so many people? What hurt made it so imperative to tear up the basis of our economy and international relations? Why did it seem such a good idea to take this formidable risk with the future of our nation? And on a personal level, I can't understand why spoiling the last years of my life is so important. But then, this is what always happens when ideology detaches itself from material reality and politics becomes about chasing a delusion


* There is an irony here as well. A short drive up the coast the Johnson family have a holiday home. Our new Prime Minister is a frequent visitor - almost a part-time neighbour. I have never met him, but I know people who do know the family and have plenty of stories to tell, as do local small traders who have dealt with him. Few of them are complimentary.

Historical fiction and political fact

From Hilary Mantel's final Reith lecture, Adaptation, last broadcast on July 15th 2017.

I have written a novel called The Giant O’Brien, loosely based on the true story of a real-life giant who came to London in the 1780s, to exhibit himself for money. In my version, the giant is more than a freakishly tall man: he is the embodiment and carrier of myth, and he has a fund of stories about love and war and talking animals and saints. His followers join in, shouting up with jokes and plot twists of their own. He tries to incorporate them and keep everybody happy. 

So his stories are interactive, democratic and popular –the only trouble is, they are corrupt. They get further and further from the story as he knows it to be. In the end, he realizes the folly of telling people what they want to hear. He says, ‘Stories cannot save us...Unless we plead on our knees with history we are done for, we are lost.’

This is Johnson's candidature for leader of the Conservative Party - precisely. And amidst the interminable journalistic noise, amongst the panic, hyperbole, speculation, and dark fantasies, something more banal looms. It's inescapable. It cannot be avoided. Reality. And as Mantel said earlier in her lecture:

Reality has a coercive force.

Sacred facts

I have just read the late Hans Rosling's final book, Factfulness. It's one of those wonderful books that make me wish that I was still teaching, because I would be incorporating it into everything. It's about data, statistics and their misuse, cognitive biases, and the most important thing of all - the fact that we are wrong most of the time about global development. And that is everybody. For instance, he gives one example of a group of Nobel laureates who performed far worse than random when they took his test of their knowledge.* Hence his play on the word 'mindfulness' in his title.

All the way through I was thinking about how these insights relate to the EU referendum. They are very relevant.

1. One of his main points is about big numbers. When they are presented on their own without anything to compare them with, they can seem much bigger than they really are. The real sin of the £350 million per week on the side of the bus was not that the amount was wrong, which is what all the arguments have been about, but that it was presented without anything to give people a way of judging its relative size. It sounds huge. In the context of government spending, it's small. If they had written, 'just under 1% of government spending goes to the EU,' then people would have understood the cost much better. But that was the point. They weren't supposed to.

It's the same with the tedious mantra, '17.4 million people voted to leave.' This is also misleading because it has no context. It's used in this way to make it sound bigger than it is. If they say 52% voted to leave, then they are showing that it was a small majority. My favourite rejoinder is to point out that 29 million people didn't vote to leave, and that fabled 17.4 million is, in fact, a minority.

The full figures were 17,410,742 voted leave, 16,141,242 voted to remain, and 12,949,258 didn't vote. That's a lot of non-voters. Nearly 28% of the total and more than ten times the size of the leave majority. Taken in context, the numbers show a very fragile majority on the day, an overall minority, and no national consensus behind leaving at all.

Now, if we take the British Social Attitudes Survey, though it records a growth in scepticism about the EU, it has never shown a majority for leaving it. The highest recorded opinion in favour of exit was 41% (see page 5, table 1) in the year of the referendum, and it has been dropping since. So how did we end up with a majority to leave in the referendum? It was a quirk of turnout. Nothing else. Those non-voters decided it. That doesn't give a strong mandate. Opinion surveys have been showing a remain majority of 8-10% for more than a year. Yet we are pursuing Brexit purely on the basis that a majority want it. As well as the obvious point that if a majority support a bad idea it is still a bad idea, it's clear that they don't, and never have.

We don't think of abstainers very often. We should do more. Are they disengaged, disaffected, idle, uninformed, baffled, feel unwilling to judge or unable to take sides, or are they simply ill or away on the day? It's difficult to know why people don't participate and we put little effort into researching non-voting. That's a mistake. For instance, the slump in turnout and the drop in Labour's vote in 2001 should have set alarm bells ringing in New Labour instead of them reassuring themselves with the complacency engendered by their large majority of seats.

2. Another of Rosling's points is that we love binary explanations. The human brain is very comfortable with the simplicity of either/or. We tend to fall for it the whole time - the many and the few, people from somewhere and people from anywhere, with us or against us, the metropolitan elite or real people, etc. The list goes on and on. It is almost always wrong as most people cluster around a whole range of median positions rather than the poles.

Look at those abstentions again. Then add in the evidence that many of the people who did vote were unsure and undecided until the last minute. Suddenly, the picture that we are constantly being given of a violently polarised society, even one on the brink of civil war, looks crazy. However, the idea has taken such a hold that even some Labour MPs are saying they will support no-deal so fearful are they of the anger of leavers. They also feel a duty towards the left behind, working class voters who are supposed to want to leave, even though the data shows that not to be true.

We do have strongly committed organisations backing both leave and remain. The larger ones, judging by membership and the size of demonstrations and rallies, are for remain. They are against change. They tend to be on the liberal/left because they want to defend the internationalist, social democratic, post-war settlement. The smaller groups are mainly on the right, with a few left hangers-on, and they want to smash the settlement, regardless of the consequences. They want a nationalist revolution, strangely being fomented in the Conservative Party. But the mass of people are not involved. Some identify with the two polarities to various degrees, though they are often semi-detached. But many others are bored, confused, uninterested, and bewildered. They just want it to stop. Britain has not changed that much. Politicians and journalists need to remember that Twitter is not the real world.

There is another consequence of this false polarisation. The referendum was presented as a binary choice when the options were non-binary. There are several ways to leave the EU, each with different consequences. This produced a Condorcet Paradox. Remain, a single option, is more popular than each of the individual leave options, even if the combined leave vote was higher. Leaving cannot be done other than by going against popular opinion.

3. There are other things to take from the book. Three stand out. Urgency produces panic and bad decision making. This is why Tusk was right and Macron wrong about the length of the extension to Article 50. We needed more time to take stock and resolve our own constitutional crisis. Macron has put us under the sort of destructive pressure we imposed on ourselves by invoking Article 50 without a clue about what we wanted to get from it.

Secondly, the whole theme of the book about our wholesale ignorance of basic facts could not have been better illustrated by the bizarre sight of our prospective Prime Minister waving a kipper around, decrying EU smoked fish packaging regulations that were not EU regulations, but UK ones. All the while the audience cheered on the increased risk of getting listeria. Neither remainers nor leavers had much idea about the workings of the EU. Gathering by the abysmal quality of the debate and the coverage in the national media, they still don't. The few who do know - the experts in trade and international law for example - are holding their heads in their hands.

Finally, Rosling makes the point that we should resist blaming individuals and look at the system. Given the cast of Brexit this is hard, so hard, but he has a point. If there is one thing that this mess shows us, it is that the use of referendums on their own as a way of deciding complex issues is ridiculous. 'Respect the result of the referendum,' may trip smoothly off the tongue, but it raises four questions. Is respecting the same as implementing? Should we treat a tiny majority as an overwhelmingly decisive one? Should we deliver the result regardless of the consequences? And, why should we respect a process as manifestly unfit for purpose as this one was?


*You can take the test and find out more on Rosling's Gapminder foundation's website. And you really should read the book.

No deal please, we're British

No deal doesn't exist. It's a fantasy politics in which we sail off into the blue having cut all ties with the EU. Even if we flounce off, the crisis will be so bad we will be back asking for a deal within months. The terms will be tougher and we will be weaker than we already are. It will be the start of decades of negotiation with the EU and others, with our reputation shredded, all trust destroyed, and our economy and currency severely damaged. Other nations will not be queueing up to offer us lucrative trade deals, but to pick the carcass. International trade is hard-nosed and we will be desperate.

Why this stupidity then? Why even consider it? Panic is one reason. There is nothing like it for clouding judgement. But the main two reasons seem to be a) to win the Tory leadership contest where the minuscule electorate is similarly deranged, and b) as a negotiating strategy for a negotiation that is over.

As for the strategy, let's call it the Varoufakis strategy. Because it's his. He is an expert on game theory after all. This is where the weakest party to a negotiation spends a few months insulting its partners, then, bolstered by a referendum on whether to accept the terms of a deal that has expired and no longer exists, calls the bluff of people who aren't bluffing by threatening them with an act of self-harm. It didn't work. Are you surprised?

Now read this excellent piece by Viktoria Dendrinou and Eleni Varvitsioti. It's about the end game of the 2015 negotiations.

...“If Greece left the euro zone, clearly the first thing that would happen would be that the new currency would have no credibility,” an official involved in the discussions says. “No one would want to hold that currency, so you would soon enter into a spiral of devaluation.” This meant the currency would keep losing its value against the euro, a fall that would feed inflation and in turn further currency weakness, making imports more expensive. This would have major implications for Greek debt, as it still would be denominated in euros. A likely immediate depreciation of 50% against the euro would instantly boost the debt-to-GDP ratio, which in June 2015 stood at 180%. The ratio would immediately double to 360% and very soon to 500%, given the impact on the economy. This meant a “very significant debt restructuring would be necessary,” the plan said.

The paradox was that the only sure thing about a Grexit would be that the country would immediately need another bailout. It felt almost absurd, going through all this trouble to avoid a bailout, only to enter a situation where another one would be needed.

Given this situation, Tsipras had little option other than negotiate a new bailout. This describes no-deal Brexit precisely. We would need a deal to counter the consequences of not having a deal. The conditions of getting a deal would be the conditions that we walked away from a deal to avoid.

There is a big difference between us and Greece in 2015. We are the masters of our own destiny. We don't have to do this. We are in an insane trap. At one end is danger, at the other a safe exit. We can revoke, remain, and start to repair the damage we have already done. We continue to walk towards danger and a potential disaster. Why?

Labouring the point

Here's an organisation that will sound familiar to many. The management have survived an overwhelming vote of no confidence from key workers. They have given themselves large pay rises while staff are threatening to go on strike over both pay and management style. The management is so upper class it has been profiled in The Tatler. Recruitment is nepotistic, with sons, daughters and friends of senior managers taking up important and lucrative posts. The management has been accused of covering up sexual harassment by one of its number. Now it is employing one of the most expensive firm of lawyers to send threatening letters to whistle-blowing staff who have signed non-disclosure agreements as part of their severance. Yep, it's the Labour Party.

Labour are polling at historic low levels. This is in the face of an appalling government hell-bent on delivering a national catastrophe. Canvassers report that Corbyn is toxic on the doorstep and his approval ratings are derisory. At a time of national crisis, all that is visible are the scandals. Now we know that Labour will always face a hostile press, but managing that is part of the job that Labour has to do. Its handling of press relations have been awful. The leader is nowhere to be seen. Their spokespeople talk in meaningless, pre-rehearsed clichés and platitudes. On-line forums in social media are cesspits. There is no 'straight talking' or 'honest politics.'

My original objections to Corbyn's leadership were three fold.

1. I didn't think that he or the group around him had the ability to lead. There was a fundamental issue of competence.

2. Even taking them on their own terms, I didn't think that Corbyn and the group round him were left wing in any meaningful sense of the word. They could mouth the slogans, but they had no coherent philosophy or programme. They were not like Militant. They were not Marxists. They were not anything, other than being keen on re-fighting some of the old battles of the 80s. Corbyn became a cypher on to which hopeful radicals could project their desires. Brexit is killing those illusions as we are seeing his leadership sink into a vague mix of incompetent Stalinist-lite nationalism.

3. Finally, he was part of a pseudo-left circle that had long been a target. I remember how the old DSTPFW blog, which I contributed to, used to slaughter them - "Mad Dog Milne" et al. And it is this 'anti-imperialist' alliance with its crass foreign policy and obsessive hatred of Israel that has brought anti-Semitism from the fringes to the centre.

This needs a bit more explanation - and some history. In my book on 19th century anarchist ideas, I wrote about anti-Semitism and conspiracy thinking rife in the period:

[These] are not merely quaint nineteenth-century beliefs; they are persistent flaws. For example, in the twenty-first century conspiracy theories abound. Climate change denial is a near-universal belief amongst right libertarians, the 9/11 ‘Truth’ Movement has attracted even mainstream figures to its fringes, whilst much contemporary, obsessive anti-Zionism bears the distinctive stamp of older anti-Semitic discourses. These ideas may not be central, but they are a distasteful and dangerous intellectual baggage that needs jettisoning. Open discussion and historical exploration is a necessity if ever we are to banish this poisonous legacy from radical thought.

If I was writing the book today, I would be far stronger. Many of the ideas have become central. Conspiracy thinking and related populist ideas have taken the place of proper theoretical analysis. It is a dangerous failure.

Now, if I could write this about 19th century anarchism, you can see that modern left anti-Semitism has deep roots. This is why Corbyn had problems with Hobson's Imperialism (I have taught about it without mentioning Hobson's anti-Semitism as well, so I am not innocent either). Read this fine piece from History Workshop for some perspective and the argument. It makes it clear that both Corbyn and I were wrong not to mention it, and that the defensive reaction from Corbynistas shows a lack of understanding of the historic role of anti-Semitism in the left. And it's still there. It's there in the union movement. It's there in its classic conspiratorial form. But, most of all, it finds its expression in a form of anti-Zionism that is now an orthodoxy throughout the left.

Anti-Semitism is the shape-shifting hatred, which adapts to each new generation. So it is perfectly possible for anyone to condemn older forms, while not recognising, and even adopting, new forms. This results in all efforts being poured into a defence against accusations, rather than facing the reality. For example, Jewish Voice for Labour was established a couple of years ago to confront the long-established Jewish Labour Movement, who were raising the alarm of Jewish people at the growth of anti-Semitism, and to deny the existence of the problem in the Labour Party. At least Jon Lansman, founder of Momentum, has seen through it.

Denial uses two main arguments:

1.  Bad faith. The issue is only raised by Corbyn's opponents to 'smear' him. It's a lousy argument. It ignores the actual issue and focuses on the supposed motivation of the accuser. It's a standard logical fallacy and leads to depressing ad hominems instead of reasoned debate.

2. It's only a criticism of the Israeli government. Of course, the main tropes long pre-date the existence of Israel or even of Zionism itself, they are merely being used in the context of the modern conflict. There are some pretty ancient ones in there, such as the blood libel. But most of the modern labels thrown on Israel - colonial settler state, racism, etc - come from Stalinism. They were promulgated in the anti-Semitic purges that Stalin ordered throughout the Eastern Bloc in the late 40s. Zionism became an excuse for the persecution of the Jews. They have been lifted wholesale into the far left and elaborated on beyond that.

There is a real conflict of course. I have been there and seen the impact of the occupation. It's just that much of the anti-Zionist rhetoric is based on fiction rather than reality. They have recast a complex conflict as a Manichean struggle between good and an ultimate evil. That evil is, of course, Jewish. The struggle, rather than being seen as a protracted regional conflict, is portrayed as central to the fight for a righteous world - as has always been the case with opposition to Judaism in which ever guise it manifested itself (David Nirenberg's magnificent intellectual history, Anti-Judaism, is essential reading on this). The real conflict is intrinsically linked to Jewish history, including the European genocide, but also that of the indigenous Jewish communities of the Middle East, which pre-date Arab colonisation in the seventh century and whose descendants form the majority of the modern Israeli population. The modern conflict is also part of the nationalist response to the break up of the Ottoman Empire and the nature of the Middle East as a diverse patchwork of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities. Some of the stuff I see bears as much relation to reality as Widdicombe's ravings about membership of the EU being a form of slavery. It does the Palestinians no favours either, often romanticising their oppressors.

Once this conflict, real or fictitious, is described through anti-Semitic tropes and using anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, then it crosses the boundary into anti-Semitism. It doesn't matter whether the rhetorical target is Israel or Zionism if the means are anti-Jewish. What's more, if those attitudes become embedded in an organisation, they become invisible and unconscious, falling under the Macpherson definition of institutional racism.

This isn't just a problem for Labour. This is a Europe-wide crisis. There will be a TV programme on it this week, and already people who haven't seen it are piling on with their rebuttals. Let's take it seriously instead. Let's admit the reality. Let's analyse it. There are good tools for doing so.

How I would love to see the Labour Party respond openly and effectively. I would love it to adress its multiple failings of leadership. I can't remember a time in my life when an effective Labour Party was more essential. I can't remember a time when it was so weak. Recovery means mental honesty and grappling with reality, rather than abusive factionalism. This isn't a game. Real people's lives are at stake.

Oh bollocks

This is saner that the Tory leadership contest

Stench

Back in the bad old days of the 1980s, when incidents like the one involving Johnson were dismissed as 'domestics,' two female friends of mine were murdered by their partners. If you hear something frightening coming from a neighbouring flat or house, call the police. Please call the police. It could save lives or stop violent behaviour.

But the response of the Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph, and the rest of the right wing press is to respond to Johnson's neighbours actions by destroying their lives. In doing so, they have entered the sewer.

It's an old trick to deflect attention from wrong doing by defaming and discrediting the people who have drawn attention to the offence. Everyone then ends up either defending or denigrating them, rather than talking about the original action. However, in this case there is more. Because Johnson is poised to become Prime Minister as the candidate of the right, the press are not just protecting their man, they are sending out a warning. Attack him and we will wreck your lives.

This is the contempt that the powerful have for ordinary people. Their lives are disposable. These are the depths that the press will sink to. It stinks. They disgust me.

UPDATE

Listen to this clip. A more temperate and expert response.

UPDATE 2

Simon Wren-Lewis agrees, pointing out something that should surprise nobody:

Mr. Penn and his partner have left their flat after receiving a large number of death threats as a result of this newspaper coverage.

Ah yes, "power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages." (Stanley Baldwin quoting Rudyard Kipling)

La-la land

What can you say about British politics? It's completely dominated by Brexit of course. At least there's some data for us to look at. The local and Euro elections, together with the Peterborough by-election, all fell in line with the trend in national opinion polling. They show that there is around a ten-point lead for remain over leave. The core leave vote is no more than 35%. There is no demand for an ill-defined new centrist party, especially one called something as vacuous as change without specifying the change they advocate. Labour's vote is far more vulnerable to the loss of remain voters than it is to leave voters. And surveys keep coming in to show that the dominant narrative of leave as a predominantly northern working-class phenomena is either overstated or downright false and persists mainly as justificatory cover for a pre-determined ideological preference. See here, here, and here.

The trouble is that British politics has abandoned reality for the land of make-believe.

How else can you explain the Tory Party leadership contest? If Cameron's political and constitutional abomination of a referendum was an epoch defining error, the determination of his terrible successor to make it worse was ineptitude of the highest order.

Never ones to shirk a challenge, the candidates to replace her as Prime Minister are displaying levels of mendacity and mediocrity that should exclude them from being anywhere near power. Could they be any worse than May? Yes, without doubt.

This video has gone viral, understandably so. Behr nails it.



But there is something else. Why are politicians failing to face reality and rehashing the 2016 arguments all over again? The answer lies with the mental dishonesty of Brexit. Although it's being done in the name of democracy, nobody wants it. They don't want real Brexit anyway. Some still want the one that they were sold. It's true that there were warnings about the consequences, but they were dismissed as "project fear." It is perfectly possible to leave the European Union. But, once you get into the practical details, the process would be lengthy, costly, and of little benefit. The democratic mandate was flimsy enough, but the vote to leave was sold on a fictitious view of the European Union, a fictitious account of what leaving entails, and a fictitious vision of the consequences. The trouble is, they sold it rather too well, especially in the Conservative Party. It is now impossible to win the leadership without pandering to a fantasy.

It had been a long time coming as Andy Beckett described in his long read about conservative thought.

Yet during the 90s, instead of pondering Thatcherism’s unintended consequences, many British conservatives, like their American counterparts, had switched their attention to a scapegoat. The European Union, like Clinton, was pro-business, hardly a fundamental threat to free-market conservatism, and the European single market had been partly Thatcher’s creation. But like the Clinton presidency, the EU was a rival power centre, and also provocative to conservatives in other ways: it saw politics as about compromise rather than conviction, and was relatively liberal in its social and cultural values. As a new enemy for conservatives, it proved irresistible.

Euroscepticism gave British conservatism a dark new energy. There was a malicious glee in the distorted accounts of EU activities produced by the Telegraph’s early-90s Brussels correspondent, Boris Johnson. But there was also a cost.

With some justification, conservatives had long prided themselves on their attention to facts, to how people actually lived, or wanted to live – rather than trying to build utopias, as they accused the left of doing. Even the most dogmatic Thatcherites had been keenly aware of social trends such as the rise of individualism, and how they might be politically exploited. But, starting in the 90s, on both sides of the Atlantic, much of the movement “ceased to be empirical”, Gray says. And without an interest in facts, it is hard to govern well for long.

The problem with facts is that they are facts. They don't change. The new Prime Minister will have promised the utterly impossible to win the leadership, and will have to confront their guaranteed failure instantly. The future of the nation depends on how they respond – yes, the response of one of this dismal crowd of inept nonentities. Yikes.

In the meantime, the sole justification for carrying on has disappeared. The fictitious "will of the people" is not even the preference of a slim majority any more. And those who still want it, don't want the reality, they want the Brexit they were sold. But it doesn't exist, never has and never will. Their cognitive dissonance makes them perfect recipients for the myth of betrayal. Brexit has returned to being a minority obsession that the right want to impose on the rest of us.

Brexit is dead, even if a zombie Brexit may happen. It will fail. It will ruin peoples' lives. But who will get the blame? And even if sanity prevails and it is laid to rest through the revocation of Article 50, despite the stake through its heart, its ghost will haunt us for some time yet.

Terminology

This Guardian piece is headlined "Corbyn backs a soft Brexit." He is quoted as saying,

I would go back to the EU, explain that we had fought an election campaign in order to make sure there was a good relationship with Europe in the future, that we weren’t afraid of public opinion on this, and ask them to seriously consider what we are suggesting, which is a customs union with a British say and trade relationship with Europe, and a dynamic relationship on rights would not be undermining Europe on workers rights, on consumer rights, on environmental protections.

Obviously, this ignores that the EU considers negotiations closed, that there cannot be a customs union with a say (whatever that is), and that a vague trade relationship with Europe is inadequate to resolve the issue of the Irish border. So far, so unrealistic - to the point of wishful thinking or fantasy politics. But this isn't my real point.

This is not a 'soft Brexit.' This is a hard Brexit. This is a harder Brexit than the one put forward by most of the Leave campaign during the referendum. It means leaving the single market with all that implies. It prioritises restricting immigration from the EU. It takes away our rights to free movement and says nothing about the existing rights of those who have exercised it. It would be economically destructive.

Let's get this clear. The vague modifier about workers' rights aside, this is a policy of the hard right. This is a Tory Brexit. Corbyn, along with his posh Stalinist apparatchiks, is opposing the bulk of Labour's MPs, Labour members, and the overwhelming majority of Labour's voters, in order to impose a Conservative Party fantasy on the party.

The vast majority of Labour members and voters want to remain in the EU. Poll after poll shows that to be the case. Nationally, there has not been a single poll for over a year without a strong Remain lead. And in case you think opinion polls are unreliable, look at a real election. Look at the elections to the European Parliament. Fourteen percent. Fourteen bloody percent. More than forty percent of members voting for another party. This is what it comes to, a betrayal of the opinions and interests of those the party is supposed to represent.

This is a left-wing leadership? Are you sure? Well whatever it is, it is a dismal failure.

Happiness

Yesterday was good. It started with the news that a Polish friend had been given her British citizenship. She is incredibly proud to be British as well as Polish. And I was proud for her too. She came over with little English, worked hard, learnt the language, took courses, and ended up doing a degree in her second language. She got a first and now works in animal care.

My day was routine. I'm in Greece. I spent the morning digging up the bamboo that invades from the plot next to the garden. Then I treated myself to fresh fish for lunch with a tsipouro, overlooking a beautiful calm sea. After I fed the cats, I settled down to watch the Rugby League Magic Weekend, which I can here because of new EU regulations.

Two instances of simple happiness. Both the product of our right, as European citizens, of freedom of movement.

Yet people are now insisting that they will take that right away from us. Without it, my Polish friend would not have become a proud British citizen. She wouldn't have been able to follow her dreams. And for me, I have two citizenships too. I am British and a citizen of the European Union. I value my European citizenship. Three years ago, people voted to strip me of it against my will. I am upset about that, but nothing like as distressed as I am about the possible loss of my freedom of movement. It will stop me coming and going to Greece as I please, and I will lose the automatic right to live here. I will have legal limits on the time I can spend in my own house. I will face many extra costs, bureaucratic obstacles and restrictions. Also, depending on agreements, it may even be illegal for me to bring back my homemade marmalade. And for what? There are no benefits for anybody. If Brexit happens, I will be distraught.

In the great sum of things, these are small issues, just a couple of individuals, pretty lucky ones at that. And I know that when people voted leave, they didn't think that they were voting against brilliant people becoming new British citizens or to spoil the last years of my life, but that's what they were doing. It's part of the problem with the debate. We heard the word 'immigration' in the abstract, not the phrase, 'people we know.'

The really big confusion between abstraction and reality comes from the rhetorical use of the term 'sovereignty.' That the UK is a sovereign nation state is a simple fact. It is beyond debate. What Brexiters are doing is conflating sovereignty with power. We are sovereign but our power is necessarily constrained. It is limited by our voluntary decisions taken as a sovereign state to enter into agreements, treaties, and international organisations. It is restricted by the power of others to enforce their interests. Power is always constrained. Sovereignty gives us the ability to choose how. We have chosen to limit our power in some areas by becoming members of the EU. We did it because it was in our interest to join. One of the reasons that we haven't left, despite moving Article 50, is because we can't handle the consequences of doing so. That is why Leavers insist that there are none, when there are plenty, and they are profoundly damaging.

Now let's look at realities. Do you really want the British state to have unconstrained power? Do you want it to 'take back control' without restriction? The people who don't want their power to be restricted are dictators, imperialists, fascists, and the like. Human progress has been based on restraining the powerful. The EU was conceived as an institutional framework for constraining German power, democracy puts a check on the power of ruling groups, and rights protect individuals and minority groups from oppression. Brexiters have sold the idea that taking rights away from us, thereby increasing the power of our rulers, is to our benefit. This is a bizarre confidence trick that any snake oil salesman would be proud of.

The other paradox is that if we leave the EU, the only power that would increase is the power of the government over the people. The government's external power will diminish as much of it – both strategically and economically – is dependent on the greater strength EU membership brings. We will be weaker as well as poorer.

I have another suggestion, self-serving though it is. How about not doing it? Maybe we should keep our rights, rights that make people happy, rights that I rely on. Because once we start giving rights away, it turns the clock of progress backwards. Let's stay in the EU. Revoke Article 50. Let's choose to be happy.

A fable

‘He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount’

The Brexit tiger has a broad back. Let's look at some of those who have decided to hitch a ride. The first passengers are those ambitious opportunists who think that it will lead to their heart's desire. Travelling with them are libertarian ideologues who mistake the beast as a harbinger of pure economic freedom. 'Disaster capitalists' have jumped on too, hoping to profit from the disruption Brexit will bring. Then there are the unhinged nationalists, English exceptionalists, and enthusiastic believers whose ideological preferences trump evidence. They are joined by cowards who think that as long as the tiger is given some of what it wants it will leave them alone. Sitting astride the haunches are those leftists who think that their chance will come once the tiger is exhausted after satiating itself, forgetting that they are the beast's favourite appetiser. Given the strength and the cunning of the tiger, the riders are completely out of their depth. They are Brexit's 'useful idiots' and are trapped.

The tiger is a dangerous beast. It's cunning and has no wish to give up its prey. Brexit is not a happenstance, but a purposeful policy. The people driving it are sinister. The tiger is not just Brexit, it's more than that. The tiger is fascism. I'm using the term loosely, in a way that makes me uncomfortable. I am not talking of the precise definition coined in the mid twentieth century – dressed in uniforms, complete with militarism and totalitarian dreams – but a more recent version for our era. Twentieth century fascism was only one form of a persistent authoritarian polity that morphs to suit its times. Today we have a squalid, authoritarian, nationalist populism that loathes democracy even as it steals its language. It's aim is an intolerant state devoted to enriching a kleptocratic elite while preaching anti-elitism. Its language is hatred of the other, contempt for the dissident, deep, deep misogyny, and racism. Its logic is conspiracy theory.

Sometimes the fascist tiger appears as the deceptively friendly face in the pub talking 'common sense' and dishing out simplistic solutions to non-existent problems. But lately it has let us glimpse its claws and teeth. A UKIP candidate talks sneeringly about whether he would rape a Labour MP. The Brexit party fields a candidate who supported the IRA bombing of a shopping street in Warrington that murdered two children – standing in a constituency that includes Warrington. Then, listen closely and some familiar names emerge – Rothschild, Soros – and you realise that this tiger carries one of the oldest and most infectious diseases of all.

Brexit is a tasty morsel for the tiger. Its origins lie in the weird ideological fantasies of a group of plutocrats. But once the dream had been sold, the tiger licked its lips. Brexit obviously meant leaving the EU, but how or why was undefined or clouded in untruths. So, it became whatever the Brexiteers wanted it to be at any moment in time. And, of course, what they wanted it to be was always impossible. That meant that their Brexit, whatever it is, cannot be delivered – by anyone. And this is where a trick comes into play, it is not the tiger who has to make it happen. That's the job of the riders. They will fail, obviously, and so the tiger can roar 'you have been betrayed' at all who will listen.

How do you dismount the tiger? The riders convince themselves that they don't want to. This isn't surprising. The tiger is fierce and immortal. Its back feels safe, though it is exceedingly dangerous. It can never be killed or tamed. Getting off can only be done by wounding the tiger, giving time for escape. Abandoning Brexit would make it step back and lick its wounds. The riders could descend, run, and breathe a sigh of relief.

Yet that is only temporary. The tiger has to be caged and starved. We once had a magnificent cage with formidable bars – representative democracy, the European Union, human rights, social democracy, secularism, and the welfare state. It's a little rusty now. Bits have worn away, some parts have been neglected, and others have been vandalised. The tiger has pushed at the weakest points. It needs repairs, and some sections need replacing with something better.

The cage isn't a place of confinement. It isn't a zoo where we go to look at the tiger. It's a method of building a better world that pushes the tiger away so that we forget that it exists. Its importance isn't what it protects us from, it's what it gives to us. It's the cage that sets us free. It's built from democracy, internationalism, equality, liberty, and security. All can be improved, some can be bettered, negligence and vandalism can be put right. But we need to celebrate it, campaign for it, and speak out against the miserable resentment that the tiger's friends want us to embrace.

Rebuild and the riders can dismount and join the rest of us who are no longer wary about our status as vulnerable prey. And, out of the corner of one eye, we might catch a glimpse of the emaciated tiger, slinking back into the shadows, hoping in vain for escape.

Healing

This is a fine piece by Lyra McKee from 2016. It is a reminder of the importance of the voice we have lost. She wrote about suicides amongst …

… the generation nicknamed the Ceasefire Babies—those of us too young to remember the worst of the terror. We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, spared from the horrors of war. But still, the after effects of those horrors seemed to follow us.

It’s a theme picked up by Sinéad O’Shea in her tribute to McKee and in writing on her own film about dissident paramilitaries.

A post-conflict society is messy. There are no winners. Everyone has lost. It’s nuanced and precarious and doesn’t work well for news headlines or political soundbites. However, this is exactly where Northern Ireland has found itself in recent times, in a row between politicians, the stumbling block to Theresa May’s Brexit deal, and the UK’s departure from the EU. As local councillor and another of the film’s participants, Darren O’Reilly, told me: “Nobody is paying attention until it suits them.”

It seems also as if the increased scrutiny over the backstop has energised the dissident Republican community and served as a recruitment tool. Since the start of February, dissident Republicans have shot four men “by appointment”. They claimed responsibility last month for three “suspicious” devices sent to UK addresses. Now the tragedy of McKee’s killing.

Wars don’t just end. There are long and lingering effects. The utter complacency of Brexiters on the few occasions that they thought about Northern Ireland was based on an assumption that peace was a permanent fixed state, brought about by the Belfast Agreement, not that it was a fragile settlement, the beginning of a long process of de-escalation and reconciliation.

***

It was my generation that voted for Brexit. And Leave voters keep harping on about the Second World War. They are mocked. They never knew war, so they must have got their information from the movies. This is unfair and untrue. The effects of war were all around us when we grew up. We were surrounded by those who had fought, who had lost people they loved, who had seen things that people shouldn’t have done. The war was there in the stories and the silences. It was in the bravado, the hatreds, and the memories. It was there in the moments of distress, when something triggered a loss of control. And we, the post-war baby boomers, saw it all.

It was worse still for Germans, who had to come to terms with the Nazi past of their country. Their revulsion turned a small section of West Germans to terrorism, their own generation’s attempt to resist Nazism in the way their parents hadn’t. But then, their violence was based on as an absurd misreading of their own society as the Brexiters’ misunderstanding of the European Union.

Think too of the countries emerging from the collapse of Communism. Our war ended in 1945, their nightmare only ended in 1989. We shouldn’t be surprised by the revival of authoritarianism in the East. Thirty years is no time at all for a society to recover.

***

I’m in Greece now. On the bus from Thessaloniki airport through the city centre, I sat and listened to an excited young Greek woman speaking in English to her Spanish boyfriend, pointing out all the landmarks of her home city. A young Dutch family got on, and then as we passed the University, students of many different nationalities piled on. This is Europe. Europe as it should be. Diverse and shared.

Yet Greeks too have only recently emerged from their own national catastrophe – Nazi occupation, a bloody fratricidal civil war, and a military dictatorship that only ended in 1974. It still echoes through Greek society and politics, especially in the wake of the Euro crisis. Still, this is a pro-European country. Most think that we are mad to leave.

***

It takes time. I am one of those of my generation who responded by becoming ardently pro-European and never ever questioned our place in the European Union. Others did not. Nationalism and isolationism offered an escape from the recent past into a fantasy world of nostalgic heroism. After all, it was the world that surrounded us when we were children.

Young people don’t think like this. They are two generations removed from the war. They are overwhelmingly in favour of keeping our EU membership – some 70-80% wanting to remain if the polls are right. They are comfortable travelling on a multi-national bus. Europe is their natural environment, their hope, their birthright, and their future. They feel that my generation has stolen it from them. They hate us for it.

It’s the young who give me hope. They are the ones who will lead us back into the EU if we make the mistake of leaving. And they are the ones on the frontline against the new European authoritarianism.

***

It isn’t all about time and generational change. Peace is not therapy. Instead, we cannot recover unless we build institutions that allow that recovery to take place. This is the underlying importance of the European Union. It established a democratic framework for post-war renewal and development. It is the settlement that allows nations emerging from their Stalinist or fascist pasts to establish their democracies. It is what was built to overcome the trauma of Europe’s terrible twentieth century. It matters and it has worked.

Brexit is a terrible mistake. Revoke article fifty and remain. Do it now.

Project reality

The Irish Taoiseach warned about this before the referendum, only to be routinely dismissed as another exponent of "project fear" - a supposedly hysterical over-reaction to scare the voters. Well this is how it ends, with a young, talented woman shot dead.

The threat to the peace process in Northern Ireland has been scoffed at by Brexiters, called 'artificially manufactured,' while they have suggested a range of fictitious 'solutions' to the border question, using technology that hasn't been invented yet or throwing responsibility back on to the Irish government or the EU. 'Nothing to do with us - if you don't want a border don't have one.' The idiocy of it is beyond belief. Only it isn't.

Farage, Johnson, Galloway, Rees-Mogg, and all the rest of the wankers, are either ignorant of Irish history or treat Ireland with imperial disdain. They wish away all and any realities that have the temerity to get in the way of their stupid obsessions. The single market made leaving the EU economically damaging if not impossible. The Good Friday agreement made it politically imposible. This was ignored, despite the voices shouting as loud as they could.

The peace process was in difficulties anyway, with Stormont deadlocked, but throwing in the decision to allow English voters to pull Northern Ireland out of the EU, despite it voting by a large majority to remain, was hardly going to help. To then turn to the only Northern Irish political party to oppose the Good Friday Agreement to prop up a minority government implementing Brexit was utterly crass.

All the talk has been about a frictionless border, but this is not the only issue. The genius of the EU as a peace project is that it has blurred nationalism. It left national identity untouched, but added a secondary one - EU citizenship - to unite people as European. Brexit will strip that citizenship away and the two countries will revert to separate identities, once again polarising communal divisions.

And now people are dying. I just hope and pray that this isn't the start of another outbreak of a long, cruel civil war. Fuck Brexit and its reckless cheerleaders, fuck the charlatans and liars who have brought us to this, fuck the vandals and vultures waiting to pick the profits from the carcass of our lives. Stop it. Revoke article fifty. End this idiocy. Let's take our place in the European Union in peace and solidarity with the people of Ireland, both North and South, and share the larger European peace that populist nationalists are doing their best to destroy.

Fail

Whatever occurs this week, Brexit has failed. It might still happen, but it will be an exercise in failure. It has failed because it is completely unable to deliver what its supporters claimed it would. Sovereignty will be diminished as we will be weakened and subject to the demands of the three economic superpowers, the most important being the one that we have left. Our global influence will be reduced as most of it sprang from our membership of the EU. Our economy will decline, there is no model of Brexit which will not hurt. And even the fantasy of the disintegration of the EU is shown to be just that as the EU unites to defend one of its smaller members, Ireland, against the threat that Brexit poses to it. The EU has shown itself to be coherent and far more powerful than the UK in protecting the core interests of all its members. The damage that has already been done is considerable.

The worst consequence has been the emergence of an English nationalist movement on the left and right. Lexiters should remember that the attempt to combine nationalism and socialism does not have a happy history. Bob from Brockley gives them a splendid put-down here. The right combine delusional thinking with atavistic hatred and have licensed people to express the sort of views that had been buried for a decade or more.

There are two possible Brexiter responses to this tragedy. They can double down on the fantasies, cry 'democracy' (while seeing it as a single event, never to be repeated), accuse others of treason for disagreeing with them, or develop ever more arcane theories as to why everything will be fine, all the while indulging in their fantasies about the imperial or neo-liberal oppression those pesky Europeans are subjecting us to. The second is to face reality. This is far rarer. One example is the dismal Peter Oborne accepting that one strand of his thirty years of bollocks (including vile and conspiracist Assad apologias) is in fact bollocks. Or like this Twitter lament supporting an EFTA Brexit and denouncing the hard-liners. While from the government, Geoffrey Cox realised something that was obvious from the beginning, but was dismissed as "project fear" whenever it was raised.

I just feel we have under-estimated its complexity. We are unpicking 45 years of in-depth integration. This needed to be done with very great care, in a phased and graduated way. It needs a hard-headed understanding of realities.

A brief glimpse of sanity amongst an ocean of deranged, hyperbolic failure.

Most reports see May's obsession with immigration at the heart of her continual denial of reality. Yet Labour shares it. They have repeated their commitment to ending freedom of movement. This is sold as an anti-immigration stance. It's completely misleading. There are two implications to it. The first is that this means leaving the single market and all its benefits, despite the weasel words about full access. A customs union is inadequate. It does not secure frictionless trade. It does not solve the Irish border issue. And it ignores services, some 80% of our trade. At the time of the referendum, leaving the single market was described as a 'hard Brexit.' I think that's a fair description. Labour is now advocating a hard Brexit while pretending that it's soft.

Secondly, Labour now proudly declares that it stands for stripping a fundamental right from all UK citizens. It takes away our freedom of movement, though they only talk about doing it to others. It shrinks our life chances. And it does so while talking about 'traditional voters' and the 'white working class.' That isn't a socialist class analysis. It's identity politics, not class politics. Socialism is about the interests that unite, not the identities that divide.

Nobody is critical of the effects of migration of northerners to London, Londoners to the north, the English to Scottish universities or Scots to English jobs. Few talk about the effects of young people leaving for a better life elsewhere or of the elderly retiring to small rural communities. No, what they want to stop are foreigners. Except they won't. Instead they want to stop Europeans coming, while frantically searching for people from other countries to replace them.

Cox's "45 years of in-depth integration" is about more than economics. It's about people. People who have worked and studied abroad. People who have retired and escaped the British climate. People who have made friends and built new, multi-national families. It's about their children and their birthright. It's even a staple of British popular culture, from Auf Wiedersehen Pet to Benidorm. Labour and the Conservatives are proudly announcing that they are going to take all that away from us and expect us to be grateful. It's mean-minded stupidity.

People's lives are going to be damaged, jobs will be lost, families faced with impossible choices, and xenophobia legitimised - for what? For something that will fail. The only way a policy that flawed could be adopted is if the normal processes of scrutiny, deliberation, and representation are by-passed. That's why the Brexiters demanded a referendum. It was their only chance because, as Otto English puts it,

Requiring the British public to vote in a binary referendum on a matter as complex as EU membership, was akin to asking a three year old to perform brain surgery with a stick of novelty cheese.

Don't blame the voters. Neither remainers or leavers knew much about it. None of us were qualified or understood the functioning of EU institutions, nor did we know about the effectiveness of the single market. That meant we were open to persuasion and unable to judge lies from facts. The only ones who knew were the experts who we were told to distrust. Otto English again:

As the Brexit fuse burns to its cinder, what the UK needs more than ever, is a little more acceptance that many Britons are simply bewildered as to what the hell is going on. That doesn’t make them stupid – it makes them normal.

Like us, the political class is out of its depth in this self-inflicted crisis. There is only one thing to do - revoke, breathe a sigh of relief, and become normal again.

Another fine mess

Everyone is sharing this, so why not me as well. Since June 2016 I have been bashing out stuff on here as a catharsis. I needn't have bothered, this says it all. A cabinet minister quoted on Newsnight the night before the withdrawal agreement gets defeated for the third time, despite offering the ultimate bribe, a crack at the leadership to Boris Moses Johnson. Never can failure be more deserved.



If we do leave, I think the traditional UK motto, honi soit qui mal y pense, should be replaced on our new blue passports. After all, it is in Norman French. This Anglo-Saxon would fit nicely. Fuck knows? I'm past caring. It's like the living dead in here. The new symbol of our nation.

And in case you are in doubt about the meaning of Brexit, look at the demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament. A knot of several hundred people being addressed by Tommy Robinson. Serious Eurosceptics of left and right, together with elderly right wing nostalgics yearning for imperial measures, are propping up an explicitly fascist movement. All the while the sharks of the ERG swim around, scenting blood, waiting to dismantle the post-war welfare state. It is against everything that Labour has achieved and everything it stands for. It has to be defeated, not just in numbers, but intellectually through a progressive, democratic Europeanism. We are winning, but clinging on by our fingernails at the same time.