Scotland And Brexit

The shambles that is Brexit has silenced almost everything else in politics for the last two years. It's a mess. But it is a mess with lessons for Scotland.

Listen

First, we need to understand what is happening in areas with social disadvantage, and listen to the people who live there. As Misha Glenny showed in a recent article in the Financial Times, disadvantaged areas in England (defined as places where less than 20% of the population are graduates, and at least 35% of employees work in low-skilled jobs) voted overwhelmingly to Leave the EU. In contrast, areas in Scotland with the same social profile voted to stay. Mr Glenny compares Wigan (64% Leave) with Paisley (64% Remain). Why this difference? What is it about deprivation in England that translates into this vote? Are the people who live in disadvantaged areas opposed to the status quo, and is this a causal link? Are people in these areas anti-immigrant, or do they have a greater sense of having been abandoned by Westminster? We need to know a lot more about how people living in Scotland's worst-off communities think. "The poor are another world," but it is a world we must listen to if we are to avoid building the kind of debate we have seen in Westminster.

Everyone at Westminster is shouting, and almost no-one is listening. Had Mrs May (it is inconceivable, but let's day-dream) involved the four nations of the UK and had she reached out beyond the four governments, to talk to the people of Wigan, Paisley and other disadvantaged communities, had she done that, we would have a very different Brexit today (and quite conceivably, no Brexit at all.)

Power and the Media

Second, power and influence. My friend, who voted Leave, reads the Telegraph; gritting my teeth, I have occasionally read it too. The Telegraph's Brexit is one step forward and three steps back into a sunny British Empire with Cricket and the Ashes as the principal measure of the health of the nation, and Brexit dismissed as a lot less difficult than the First World War.

People do not own newspapers in order to make money. They own newspapers in order to influence, normally to influence the debate around Government policy. The Barclay twins, who live on the nearly feudal Channel Isle of Sark, want power and influence. and the Telegraph editors are happy to comply.

The Telegraph, the in-house journal of the Tory Party, helped to create the mass of Conservative voters who favoured leave, achieving something quite remarkable in that it even persuaded Britons living on the Costa del Sol and enjoying Spanish healthcare, sunshine and sangria to vote leave, apparently unaware of the bullet in their foot, and the mote in their eye.

So which are the media in Scotland with power and influence? Will The Press and Journal come out in favour of independence? No, I don't think so either. And what, oh what, are we to do with the BBC? Overwhelmingly, people in Scotland watch the telly, so getting the BBC onside would be a major coup. Again, highly unlikely. Which leaves us with social media. Set aside the ease with which people of power can buy influence in social media, we will have to hope that the Reverend Stu at Wings, the Wee Ginger Dug, and the erudite James at Scot Goes Pop, are the seeds of a million social media flowers. 

Where is the Backstop?

Third, and even more scary; what will be our "Northern Ireland Backstop"? By which I mean, which currently obscure, unthought of issue will leap up and bite us in the bum after we vote Yes? The most obvious possibilities are;

• The nuclear submarine base at Faslane
• North Sea oil and gas, and the territorial limits thereof
• And, conceivably, the Orkneys, which have consistently voted No

Any of these issues could trip up the negotiations to separate our conjoined nations. Money will be at the heart of a divorce agreement but that is something we all know and can anticipate (and was, indeed, anticipated in the detailed white Paper that preceded the last Referendum). But it's the Backstop, the last thing you'd think of, that I fear the most.

Decline and Fall

But Brexit has also shown us the opportunities. By shining a very bright light into the corridors of Westminster power it has shown us how easily an Empire can decline and fall.

The decline of Imperial Britain is obvious in its Parliament, whose benches are full of Oxbridge white, male, public-school educated chaps, people from privileged backgrounds, with far too little experience of difficulty, deprivation. Brexit has exposed them in all their shouty, tousle-haired egocentricity. These (very) privileged few will now steer this land through a series of crises, because they completely fail to understand that too much wealth, and thus too much poverty, destroys a county.

Brexit is horrible, and will do great damage to Scotland, and to democracy. We need to listen and learn, so that when at last it is our turn, we can win Indyref2.

It's Jeremy's Fault

He was reading a book, a thick book, probably one of those long, complicated novels about family sagas or multiple intrigues. Totally engrossed, he was about a third of the way through the book, his grey hair falling over his eyes and with one hand occasionally stroking his stubbly beard. He looked comfortable, cosy even, in his sleeping bag…

…which was on a cardboard ‘mattress’ on the edge of one of the narrow streets in Barcelona’s old Gothic Quarter, one of those streets that has no pavement. I spotted him and the delivery lorry swerving round him at the same moment, the driver swearing at the invisibility of a dark-blue sleeping bag on the side of the road. The reading man did not even look up from his book as the lorry swerved, such was his concentration.

The man in the Barcelona sleeping bag is homeless. One of the thousands of people in Barcelona who spend each night in doorways, on cardboard mattresses.

A few of these folk find their way into squats. We’ve just had three fires in and around Barcelona in buildings occupied by squatters. All of them linked to multiple causes, but principally to the fact that the squats either had no electricity (and the fires were caused by candles) or that they had an illegal and as it turns out dangerous connection to the electrical mains, in one case with equipment from the 1960s that blew up with the electrical load. I witnessed one of these fires on the way in to work on Monday, with three firefighters leading an injured man to an ambulance.

Poverty is Murderous

Poverty is murderous. It’s murderous in part simply by being poverty (as anyone who has read Pickett and Wilkinson's ‘The Spirit Level’ will know), but it’s also murderous because of what it forces people, desperate people, to do. To squat an old council building and to risk their lives hooking up wires to the nearest street light; or to leave a candle burning next to the mattress where mum and two kids are sleeping. It is the source of stress, of accepting poor working conditions and the ill-health that results from them, and it results in the distinct pattern of life expectancy that we can see in Catalonia or Scotlandwhen we compare poor districts with rich.

The solutions are complicated but not impossible. They include personal actions (what you give, where you shop, who you complain to) and public actions, to improve benefit systems, and to tax the wealthy.

This last point should be the aim of any government, but especially of a Labour government. So you would hope that there was some reasonable chance that, with poverty such a widespread disorder in Britain, the next Government would be Labour.

Corbyn, Confused

Today, there is almost no hope that that might happen. The extraordinarily confused leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and the indecision that seems to have rent the party into at least four quarters (combining pro- or anti-Brexit, and socialist or centrist), mean that Labour keeps falling in the polls. And yesterday’s YouGov poll seems to confirm that Labour voters will abandon the party if it colludes in a no-deal Brexit.

Like a lemming in the springtime, Jeremy seems to be heading straight for the cliff edge. His pre-Christmas Guardian interview was a classic, inventing a future full of fluffy unicorns and hairy fairies in which he would win an election, head over to Brussels, demand a whole new deal and come back triumphant by March 29^th. Utterly unbelievable, and fabulously fantastical.

He must know that. 

Which means just one thing: that Jezzer is, indeed, aiming for a no-deal Brexit so that he can then blame the Tories and force their resignation via votes of confidence.

He is massively misreading the situation. If Theresa May gets her Brexit she will, as she has promised, organise a huge Brexit celebration on the night of the 29^th March. She knows, and Jezzer does not, that this will inflate a Rule Britannia bubble over England, a re-ignition of right-wing patriotism, anti-foreigner patriotism, that will keep the Tories in power for a generation. (Until the "patriots’" sons and daughters realise that they have been swindled by their parents).

The fires and deaths amongst the poor in Barcelona are a powerful reminder that we need left-of-centre governments in power, that it is the job of left-of-centre politicians to get back into power. That means honesty, and pragmatism, with voters.   

It is Jeremy’s fault that Labour is dreaming of utopias when it should be on the doorsteps winning voters, and on the Commons floor winning votes.

Spanish Irony

Oh the irony! Spain blocks Theresa May's Brexit!

Remember the tales we were told about Spain blocking EU access for an independent Scotland? It was always load of toro-s&1t, designed as part of Project Fear. As Paul Kavanagh, the Wee Ginger Dug and the wonderful Pilar Aymara have repeatedly explained the 'Spanish Veto Myth' is exactly that - a myth created by the tabloids to scare swing voters to 'No' in the independence referendum.

But now the Spanish snake has turned to bite Theresa in the bum. Gibraltar, according to today's Financial Times, is the rock in the sandal of the Tory party's Brexit.

¡No passarán!

Letter to a Brexit-supporting Friend

Dear D

Thanks for your note. We have never really sat down and had a thorough debate about Brexit. So here is my case, in response to yours.

Migration: not the real argument

At her press conference to announce the draft agreement with the EU, and again at the CBI today, the Prime Minister focused on immigration and ‘control over our own borders.’ Immigrants have been at the heart of the Brexit argument. Immigrants, who ‘steal our jobs’.

This is a false argument, on four counts.

First, there is no evidence that immigrants steal ‘our’ jobs. In fact, the evidence from a wide variety of sources (here is a briefing paper from the OECD), is the reverse. Immigration creates a net benefit for the UK economy.

Second, we can’t escape our demographics. Like many countries in Europe, Scotland has an ageing population. We need young migrants to contribute to the economy, to pay the taxes that pay the pensions, and to fill the jobs, including the many caring professions, that our economy needs. You have seen the effect that the threat of Brexit has had on the recruitment of nurses in England; why on earth would we want that to happen in Scotland?

Third, the EU has strong borders, and border controls. It’s not a free-for-all for immigration, as the thousands of young men and women who die each year in the Mediterranean demonstrate. These migrants, escaping wars and economic misery, die trying to get through the many barriers that the EU has erected.

And finally, on what moral or ethical grounds can a person in Scotland say that there should be stiffer controls on migration? Who were the great migrants of the British Isles a century ago? Who, proportionally, provided more men and women for the Colonial Service than any other country in the British Isles? We are all immigrants in Scotland, and we are all related to emigrants. Do we really believe that the Scots who went to the USA did not contribute to the economy there? On what basis can one argue that the Scot who went to the USA and Canada helped build those nations, while the Senegalese or Syrian who comes to Scotland is nothing but a drain on our resources?

And if we were morally or ethically consistent in these arguments then we would follow them through. We would insist that the 300,000 UK citizens in Spain should return immediately to the UK because ‘they are a drain on the economy’. But we don’t. We call them ‘expats’ not ‘immigrants’, and we hint at their slightly glamorous life in the sun. Now put yourself in Aleppo, or Ouagadougou and imagine that your daughter lives in Glasgow and works as a nurse; wouldn’t you feel the same, that she was contributing to her host country?

There is a moral inconsistency in the pro-Brexit argument. Because it’s based on the false premise that ‘immigration’ is bad.

Faceless Bureaucrats

It’s the phrase favoured by the Daily Mail; the ‘faceless bureaucrats’ of Brussels have told us we can’t have bendy bananas or straight cucumbers or whatever.

This part of the Brexit debate is posited as though the UK can simply escape the clutches of Brussels. It is even posited as ‘escape from Brussels…so that we can enjoy the freedom of World Trade Organisation rules’. Gosh! Are the WTO bureaucrats so much better? So much less ‘faceless’?

But neither of these points is valid. Because this part of the debate is not about the bureaucrats. It's about governance. 

Proposing that the UK will be ‘free’ after Brexit is false.  Britain, like most countries, is linked into a huge, complex, web of governance. At the top of the tree is the UN: the UK is signatory to a wide range of UN treaties on topics ranging from human rights to the complexities of the International Telecommunications Union. Next are the INGOs; so the UK is a signatory to the conventions of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, meaning for example that we treat prisoners of war with respect. Then we are (until March 29th, unless the Tory Party comes to its senses) members of the EU so we have a layer of governance there. Then we have Westminster, the, er, mother of parliaments. Then you have the Scottish Parliament which, until Brexit showed that the Sewell convention has no legal force, appeared to govern us. And then Fife Council and then your local Community Council.
 

These are all layers of governance. They all perform different, sometimes overlapping, functions, and they all have rules, regulations and bureaucrats, faceless or otherwise. Many are essential; I’m sure that you would not want us to pull out of the ICRC Convention on the treatment of POWs, and equally sure that you would not want us to withdraw from the UN treaties on the use of child labour. Equally, I’m sure that you need your local council to sweep the streets and provide subsidised transport for older people.


So the Brexit debate is not a choice between ‘freedom’ and ‘Brussels’. It's about the mixture of layers of governance that the voters want.  The effect of Brexit will not be to remove the EU rules, in the same way as it will not remove the UN treaties. Even if Brexit occurs, we will still have to abide by the rules of the EU because the EU is our largest trading partner. So if the EU insists that widgets made in Scotland are 14mm long then that is how we will have to make them. This is a debate about governance, about a specific layer of the many layers of governance that control what we do.


Now you have to convince me that the EU layer is worse than, say, the UN layer, or worse than the Fife Council layer. In all of those cases we (a) contribute cash to make that layer of governance work and (b) have a corresponding say in that body’s decisions. My view is that the EU layer provides far more positives than negatives; it encourages us to limit pollution and the damage of climate change, it helps build roads and bridges in Scotland, it allows us to be part of a 500m-consumer group that can face down Google and Facebook, it is dramatically positive for education and especially higher education, it is a significant funder of research in areas such as biochemistry, where the US and the Chinese would otherwise streak ahead of us, and it is one of the funders of one of your favourite engineering projects, the Falkirk Wheel …


At a more personal level, I have benefitted hugely from the UK’s membership of the EU, and, as a migrant have – I hope – contributed to the country that took me in. Above all, I have not had to send my children to another war in Europe but instead have been able to watch them benefit from the education systems of three EU member states. 

That's why - had I been given a vote - I would have voted to Remain. And why I'm doing whatever I can to get the mess of a mother of Parliaments at Westminster to reconsider Brexit and to opt instead for continuing membership of the European Union.