Archive for the ‘Brexit’ Category
Book Review: Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
Filed under: Brexit, Environment | Tags: Elizabeth Kolbert, geoengineering, Jacques Cousteau, pupfish
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This is an extraordinary book. It is not quite what I was expecting. And like all good books, I completed it with lots of questions, dilemmas and fears. When the UK voted to leave the EU, the BBC commissioned a number of public thinkers to provide commentaries. John Gray wrote that the populism that we are now experiencing is the norm. The period of liberal democracy, he argued, was always a blip and would not be sustained.
The same, it seems, is true of climate change. Whilst I had read before that ice bores from Greenland reveal that the climate that we have traditionally regarded as normal, is not. The present era – which is soon to change dramatically – is also a blip. It has been long enough to create human civilisation which, ironically, has also been long enough for civilisation to destroy the equilibrium that gave rise to civilisation.
This book charts a particular human history. It is a technological history in which human beings have clever solutions to all the world’s problems. Clever, but not clever enough. For every clever “solution” there is an unintended consequence. Many of these solutions spring from human beings introducing alien species into local environments with the consequential loss of biodiversity.
Take silver carp, for example. The opening chapter describes the extraordinary measures taken to prevent these fish from entering the great lakes in the USA. There are huge electric barriers that repel the fish optimised to their size so that other fish are less electrocuted. Then there is the extraordinary case of the Devil’s Hole Pupfish, all 93 of them. The whole world population lives in this flooded hole in the Nevada Desert – the biggest hole on the planet. At first read, one thinks that the Devil’s Hole is some top secret geological site, but not so. It has a Wikipedia entry and a viewing platform. Humans managed to introduce a beetle into the water. The beetle took a fancy to the eggs of the fish. As these fish produce a single egg, reproduction was heading negative. All sorts of interventions have been made to protect what is left of the species, including hand removal of the beetles when the eggs are sat on an exposed ledge.
The book also explores the world of coral. This had an effect on me that I remembered in my childhood watching an Australian TV series called “Barrier Reef”. I went looking for it on youtube. Of course it was there. I watched the first episode and discovered that the whole plot of the show revolved around attempts to exploit the reef and its natural resources (minerals, oil, etc.). This, of course, passed me by as a child, I was just mesmerised by the reef and fish. Whilst this show is not cited in the book, “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” is. Another favourite of my childhood. Post-childhood I’d revised my view of Cousteau and viewed him almost as a Megalomaniac cod scientist given airtime. But actually, he was a polymath and had a significant impact on a generation of children sharing his extraordinary adventures onboard The Calypso. Though clearly not enough.
The early chapters in the book were simply taking us to an endpoint – geoengineering. The white sky relates to how the sky will look when – eventually – “powers” intervene to cool the planet by throwing into the stratosphere particles of some – as yet – undetermined mineral or compound (diamond is favoured). As one scientist tells the author:
People have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not, whether they think it it should be done or not. They have to understand that we don’t get to decide. The United States doesn’t get to decide. You’re a world leader and there’s a technology that could take the pain and suffering away. You’ve got to be really tempted. I’m not saying they’ll do it tomorrow. I feel like we might have 30 years. The highest priority for scientists is to figure out all of the different ways this could go wrong.
Quote from Dan Schrag, Director of Harvard University Center for the Environment
So, we have a perfect storm. Populism and climate catastrophe. My generation was far too worried about nuclear weapons and insufficiently so about geoengineering. It’s political.
Pictures – Jacques Cousteau: Peters, Hans / Anefo. – http://proxy.handle.net/10648/abe56934-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84
I walked out of a speech by George Monbiot
Filed under: Brexit, Environment | Tags: Chrs Grey, George Monbiot
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Many years ago when I first migrated to the South Coast, I joined the Green Party. It was, I thought not unreasonably, a quick and easy way to meet some like-minded people, one of whom became a close friend, now sadly deceased. I canvassed a number of local elections and proudly watched the party increase its support and eventually run the Council.
The party had few famous inspirational leaders, but I believed in localism and supported the local nominee for the parliamentary seat against the Party’s eventual decision to nominate its biggest name, the then MEP, Caroline Lucas. I’m still not reconciled to that. En route to the constituency being the first to elect a Green to the Westminster parliament, the local party organised many events and invited speakers, one of whom was George Monbiot. I regarded Monbiot as being a windbag with a platform in the Guardian newspaper. I helped set up the event on the day and then left immediately prior to his arrival on the stage.
I am someone who spent his formative years on demos. Every weekend I was somewhere – outside a factory farm, animal experimentation laboratory, and most memorably a weekend at Porton Down in Wiltshire. The overnight demo (right) was outside the Reckitt factory in my hometown of Hull. At these events, particularly the mass gatherings in London and other cities around the country, I heard many – what I thought were – inspirational speeches. The late Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was a regular and particular favourite.
As I grew older, I began to get bored with speeches. If I attended a demo – whether it be against war in Iraq, the Pope’s visit, Fridays for the Future or more local industrial disputes – I have not stayed for the speeches.
In recent years, I started reading Monbiot’s Guardian columns again. My new-found environmental zeal directed at climate change extended my reading. Monbiot is an advocate of re-wilding, unloosening the shackles of the National Curriculum to enable flexibility in the classroom and an opportunity for children to experience the outdoors and flora and fauna. He’s also a Marxist, which brings me to the point of this blog entry.
I’m a regular reader of Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog. It is classic, longhand academic musings about the labyrinthine journey to Brexit. This week, Grey (left) takes on Monbiot using his highly effective academic spray that puts the targets to sleep before killing them painlessly. The article in question this week was Monbiot’s “follow the money” piece, published in the Guardian on 25 November 2020. Monbiot argues that there are two types of capitalists: warlords (disaster capitalists as well as the zealous free-marketeers/deregulators) and the housetrained (one-nation, post-war consensus Tories). Brexit is being defined by the Warlords and the campaign was funded by offshore, dirty money such as that supplied by Robert Mercer, Christopher Harborne and Jeremy Hoskin. The piece flows with allusions to “false consciousness” but, according to Grey, leads to a cul-de-sac. That is because the remain side also received money from the likes Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Sainsbury’s. With Sainsbury’s being exposed this week as contributing to deforestation in Brazil, this money is hardly clean, housetrained or otherwise.
What really caught my attention, however, was Grey’s reference to Stuart Hall, the hugely influential cultural sociologist writing in the 70s and 80s. Hall’s contribution is to point out that the follow the money approach, whilst not invalid, is not causal. Grey quotes Hall: “material interests … are not escalators which automatically deliver people to their appointed destinations, ‘in place’, within the political ideological spectrum”. It is the culture war, the tangibility of the intangible “sovereignty”. If Monbiot is right, Biden might have defeated Trump by something more than he did.
Grey concludes: “So whilst the debate about the relationship between economics and culture is a perennial one, and discussing…in general I think of them as inextricably bound threads, not base and superstructure. I prefer both/and explanations to either/or explanations, prefer contingency to determinism, and see as much cock-up as conspiracy.”
Monbiot is a journalist. His epistemology – through training and the graft of weekly newspaper column writing – is different from that of the academic. I cannot speak for Monbiot, but I doubt that he is in too much of a disagreement with Grey; but Grey’s argument would be subject to some editorial scrutiny. Monbiot does well to get “false consciousness” into an opinion column in a liberal newspaper, let alone trying to introduce Stuart Hall. Grey’s critique demonstrates two different epistemologies – those of journalism and academia.
There is no revolution coming. The housetrained capitalists are the best we have – and may be re-asserting themselves in the United States. We should focus on the Green economy, not the economic system. We need somehow to inspire youth. Get them interacting with nature and help them develop a desire to dig down, literally and metaphorically, into the knowledge of these complex systems, by whatever means. Taking on Chris Grey is a bit of a cul-de-sac.
Food security in the UK – time to worry
Filed under: Book reviews, Brexit, Co-operatives, education, Environment, Food | Tags: Tim Lang
Comments (4) Tim Lang (right), professor of Food Policy at City University’s Centre for Food Policy, is the go-to person by the media when fo
od policy and security make the headlines. He was a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme when it became clear that the UK faced food shortages in the event of a hard Brexit. Reading his latest book, Feeding Britain: our food problems and how to fix them, one can see the extent that he should host the show, not just contribute to it when the headlines demand. Food security in the UK is a big problem, and its fragility has much to do with British exceptionalism, a situation that, in the context of Brexit, is fast receding. This is the first book that I have read that actually makes a credible case for Brexit; it is not intended to do so and it is something that Lang stumbled upon rather than explicitly endorsed. More on that in a moment.
Feeding Britain is published by Pelican Books (below left), an imprint of Penguin/Random House, The imprint publishes work on hugely topical issues in accessible styles. In reading Lang, one senses the haste with which it was written. It is in no way sloppy, far from it, but Lang knows every reference whether it be a long-published academic article, government report or personal interaction. It has inspired me to get moving on my own work. It demonstrates what is possible from a life of accrued knowledge. There are 470 pages of text. Each one is a gem. Each one leaves the reader out of breath.
Where to start? Actually, it is quite simple – some history basics. Britain’s imperial past is, to put it generously, chequered. It is, seemingly, the origin of the British thought, paraphrased here, that someone else will feed us, so we do not need to bother growing stuff ourselves. The growing is usually done by people in far-away lands, the rural poor, who receive a small fraction of the value of the product ascribed to it by end users, usually in the rich West. And even when fresh produce comes from near neighbours such as Spain, the back-breaking work is done by migrant labour often paid below minimum levels in the country, and affording them a lifestyle far short of that enjoyed by the beneficiaries of their labour. It also comes with a huge carbon footprint, a consequence of mono-culture and extensive transportation.
Coupled with the imperialism argument, the concentration of land ownership in the UK which started with the Enclosures of common land in the 17th and 18th Centuries; annexation of Church land under Henry VIII and more recently, enclosures arising from the privatisation of much of the public sector since 1980. Lang puts a figure on it – 189,000 families own 2/3 of UK land or one-half of England is owned by 25,000 people (p368). This is all made worse by the commodification of land – it is an investment, not a source of sustenance or habitat. 3,660 per cent is the figure by which land values have increased in the last 50 years. This means that, at the very least, it is difficult for small farmers to produce appropriately and sustainably. It forces tenants – and they usually are tenants – to use intensive methods to increase yield and further inflate the value. And on top of that, owners attract production subsidies from the EU – and post Brexit, presumably from UK taxpayers! (That mechanism is described in pages 370-7.)
Allied to the land ownership debate, Lang charts the changing percentage of income people spend on food vis-à-vis other things; notably, housing costs. The land owners, by this argument, not only enclose land and extract a high Gross Value Added from it (relative to the growers), they also own the properties in which the majority live. In extracting more from tenants, the margin has to be squeezed out of food prices (and by definition costs). Cheap food, argues Lang, is then equated with good food (not because it is nutritious, but because it seems to be good for someone else’s wealth). Moreover, the price of food rarely incorporates the externalised costs of production – environmental damage, health and society more generally such as life expectancy (which bad food shortens).
More positively, shortening supply chains would be a positive example of taking back control! And this is the Brexit argument. Though we know only too well, that Brexiters see the extension of food chains as being a Brexit benefit, and with it a reduction in quality, safety and increased insecurity, the UK no longer has the capability to defend those supply chains against hostile state actors or have the global influence to guarantee supply in time of scarcity, unlike in the imperial past. Security is also threatened by cyber attack on those supply chains, something that Lang believes is under appreciated within Government (and society more generally).
Lang argues that the National Minimum Wage or the National Living Wage needs to be re-calibrated to pay for, what he calls, sustainable diets. The factors above have been made worse – and particularly in the UK – by the population moving on to super-processed foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar (HFSS). Again, the costs of this are externalised (the National Health Service costs obesity alone as £6.5bn and a wider societal cost of £27bn – p207). Lang is adamant that an escalator tax on HFSS foods needs to be introduced. Pension funds, too, should divest from firms that manufacture HFSSs. Ad-spend (marketing is also disproportionate relative to health promotion, and it is targeted at children through social media. Lang also argues that the large supermarkets – singling out Tesco with its 30 per cent share of UK grocery market should be broken up.
Lang is not making an argument for growing out-of-seasonal foods in the UK in the middle of winter under lights and heat (even if
Source: Billy Hathorn
they had taste, which he clearly thinks such produce does not); that does not help the carbon footprint much. Rather, he is saying, that we have to grow more food in he UK (the country produces only 53 per cent of its own food) that is consumable directly and not, as seems to be true of much of arable farm produce in the UK, fed to animals, some of which like ruminants are hugely inefficient converters of plants into meat as well as huge greenhouse gas manufacturers. They fart. A lot. Land use is dominated by rearing and feeding animals. That very process, too, has an external cost that could be fatal in the future, antibiotic resistance as such valuable medicines are routinely fed to animals to retain “yields”.
There are also things about imported foods that I had not thought about. For example, we should not take water for granted, even though the UK is temperate and generally wet. If we import food from countries that are short of water, but whose products are full of it (fruit, vegetables, etc.), there is a net imbalance and a cost to the growing country and its people, nothwithstanding their foreign earning from the produce (often imported by air). Huge volumes of water are in foodstuffs that we do not anticipate, such as rice. Lang’s section on water imperialism is a must-read, pp225-44.
Cornish Aromatic apples (source: Brogdale)
Lang highlights that the UK produces so little of its own fruit. Whilst many exotic soft fruits are not viable in the UK, apples, pears and berries are eminently feasible and desirable. The population does not get anywhere near 5-a-day fruit and vegetable consumption (which seems truly bizarre and frightening at the same time). On horticulture, in 1950, there were 3000 apple growers in the UK, by the mid-1990s there were 800. Government grubbing regulations facilitated the destruction of orchards through subsidy! (p91). Lang contrasts the UK case with France where small growers and cooperatives are significant suppliers (the cooperatives provide the scale). Scale in the UK is provided by very large and concentrated growers and importers.
Finally, there is an important role for education, not only in terms of teaching children about food, its origins, how to grow it (sustainably), and how to cook primary ingredients, but also in what children are fed at school. Diet regulations for school meals, argues Lang, need to be universal, not just in the poorest, most regulated schools.
OK, I’ve done some hard work on the reading; it is time for us all to do some hard work in changing the way food is understood, used as a political tool, traded and prepared.
UK General Election, 2019
Back in 1983 I recall the disappointment of seeing the Labour Party under the (then) EC-sceptic, Michael Foot, heavily defeated in the polls. I admired Foot’s intellectualism, but his programme – once billed as the “longest suicide note in history” – was too backward looking. The past it referred to was never going to cut it. My early 20s, then, were haunted by Thatcher “reforms”. It seemed like every evening I came home from work and listened to the radio some new regressive policy was being announced by some ugly minister. In particular, Nicholas Ridley and Norman Tebbit. But there were more ugly ministers than them.
Finally, in 1997, the egregious Tory Governments imploded and the fresh Tony Blair led Labour to victory. Many of us had hoped to see John Smith as a Labour Prime Minister; but his sudden death on 24 May 1994 – I shed a rare tear on hearing the news – paved the way for Blairism. Blair was elected on a platform to accept the early Thatcher neo-liberal “consensus”; for example, not rolling back anti-trade union law. Indeed, the Labour Government furthered the project. In not putting a check on many of the Thatcher excesses, it made it very easy for Cameron to take over in 2010 where Thatcher and Major left off. Even worse, in deregulating financial services, a Labour Government enabled the financial crisis of 2008 and the wicked austerity that followed, the Brexit referendum, and now, with the election of a majority Conservative Government packed with characters that would make Thatcher’s Cabinets blush, an assault on all public services, institutions and the fragile constitution that so outmaneuvered May and Johnson as they attempted to get dodgy legislation through the Parliament in the face of far smarter people than themselves – here I think of Dominic Grieve and Hilary Benn, but again, there were others.
I’m not going to reflect further at this point. At a personal level, where we are now is quite the most frightful and positively scary place we could be. A demagogue now sits on a very large majority who can – and will – do what he wants. In the face of a climate emergency where every month counts, I am particularly concerned. But as I have written before, democracy is a process, not an event. I am part of the process. Come with me.
Brexit – playing chicken
So, whilst on her flight to Sharm El Sheikh to attend an EU summit that also incorporates Arab countries and leaders, the Prime Minister, Theresa May, confirms that she is not ready to put her deal back to the Parliament for a “meaningful vote” – and maybe not until 12 March. Her “team”, she says, is off back to Brussels on Tuesday to resume “negotiations” with the Commission. This is a game of chicken, and one would not bet against her holding her nerve, even if she loses the vote again. Matthew Parris recently wrote the following extraordinary capitulation to what for many had already been clear, she is not like the rest of us confronted with serious reality:
Then there is Giles Fraser. To be fair, one of the few leavers trying to offer positives to Brexit (though not very well or convincingly). His line of argument, inferred by some as being fluent, is that Freedom of Movement has caused family breakdown and taken away the sense of responsibility that offspring should have towards looking after elderly parents, particularly female offspring. If we did not have freedom of movement, we’d likely stay close to where our parents live (even though they may have retired to the coast, or indeed Spain) and keeping a sense of community. I trust the Honda employees in Swindon will bear this in mind when the factory closes in 2021. The most cogent critique comes from Frances coppola. Worth a read.
Interestingly, the Brexit debate has only recently turned to the negative aspects of freedom of movement. For the government, this is an inherently good thing. It is perhaps the sole reason for all of May’s red lines that so restricts the country to one option, hers. But of course, the implications are that it gets more difficult – by which I mean bureaucratic – to travel across Europe. Visas are probably going to be necessary, and additions to driving licences. Petty, but tangible restrictions on movement. The irrepressible Julia Hartley-Brewer recently celebrated her arrival in Switzerland where new signs welcome EU citizens and British passport holders to the same channel. However, the Swiss know that British passport holders are important tourists. One wonders whether the same will be true of travel to Slovenia after Britain’s top diplomat, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, described the country as a former vassal state of the Soviet Union? He’s got form at the moment. He upset the Japanese by writing to them to tell them to get a move on over a Free Trade Agreement. And as we know, the nationality of his own wife is a bit of a mystery to him.
Has political leadership ever been so incompetent and the discourse so facile?
The Terrestrialists – Bruno Latour’s new-materialists
Filed under: Brexit, Environment, History, International, Race, Trump |
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Regular readers will know that I have taken a little time out away from my regular work to read a few books to try to get an understanding of where we are, how we got here and how we might get out of here. Alive. Some discomforting answers are supplied in the reading of Eatwell and Goodwin’s book on nationalist populism; the latter, I think, can be extracted from Bruno Latour and his new book (left). I am sure there are many others, however (for example, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and Diane Coyle’s (2014) unpackaging of GDP as a measure of national wellbeing).
Both Eatwell and Goodwin and Latour are pretty clear that liberal democracy is a cause. Moreover, we must keep reminding ourselves, for example, that liberal democracy is relatively new in human history. Baby boomers and their offspring (myself included here), however, have no experience of other forms of democracy, illiberal or otherwise (illiberal democracies are now to be found in Hungary, Poland and increasingly in Italy). It has been the underpinning of economic growth and – what seemed until recently to be – inexorable globalisation. I am grateful to a single essay by John Gray to help me with this also.
I have not really had much reason to consider Latour’s work; I have probably been more scared of it than I should have been. I was nudged towards it after reading an article in the NYT magazine about him, his methodological perspective (actor network theory) and its applications. Often seen as post-modern French philosophy – now conveniently rebranded by others as a philosophy of post-truth – it can be inaccessible.
Bruno Latour, 2017
There are four major events that Latour uses in constructing what he deems to be a hypothesis. Hypothesis because he does not try to prove anything. He recognises that he comes from a landed bourgeois family and is, himself, a boomer. But dismiss him – or his reasoning – at our peril, I sense. So, the events are: the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Trump in the USA; the resumption of mass migrations caused by wars, failed attempts at economic development and climate change. The fourth event, however, is the most significant for Latour and it, itself, comes in two parts. First, the signing in Paris on 12 December 2015 of the Climate Change Accord; second, Trump’s policy to withdraw from the Accord.
On the former Latour says: “…on that December day, all the signatory countries, even as they were applauding the success of the improbable agreement, realized with alarm that, if they all went ahead according to the terms of their respective modernization plans, there would be no planet compatible with their hopes for development. They would need several planets; they have only one.” (p. 5). On the second, “By pulling out of the Paris Accord, Trump explicitly triggered, if not a world war, at least a war over what constitutes the theater of operations. “We Americans don’t belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be threatened; ours won’t be!”” (p. 3).
Latour’s method is systematic, if a little post-modern and hence, non-linear. Liberal democracy is capable of delivering the Climate Accord, but not implementation. Even if all signatories tried to implement the Accord, liberal democracy with its growth, modernisation, globalisation and universal wealth (measured in material terms) philosophy is incompatible with delivery. At some point, leaders – obscurantists, in Latour’s parlance – have to tell electorates that under the current economic and political models, “climatic catastrophe” is unavoidable. Latour, however, interprets Trump in an interesting way. I have often thought that climate change deniers actually believe that climate change is not caused by human activity out of ignorance and failure to look at the evidence. For them, it is merely a natural phenomenon that governments need to prepare for. Depriving people of the benefits of capitalist modes of production, trade and consumption would, therefore, not help the environment. However, my naïvety, as is often the case, is clear. The actuality is that the climate change deniers are of two kinds – literally for Latour – the “Out-of-this-World” types who care little for evidence (p. 34, and maybe Trump is the cheerleader here?) and those who know only too well that human activity is the cause not only of climate change, but also of the increased rate of change and the cause of the 6th Great Extinction.
Let us add more to this; socialism is no better at dealing with climate change than is economic liberalism. The left, just like the right, is bi-directional. There are those deep internationalists who believe that modernisation, which usually incorporates economic and political globalisation, is equally important for the socialist realisation of equality (just like the economic liberals). There are also those who think about the local – tradition, the familiar, predictable, local production, etc. Increasingly this perspective captures the so-called “left behind” or “abandoned” on the left who seek controls on immigration, protection for strategic industries and sovereignty (whatever that is). As Latour puts it, “those who value ethnic homogeneity, a focus on patrimony, historicism, nostalgia, inauthentic authenticism” (p. 53). The UK Labour Party is trying to reconcile these two perspectives against the backdrop of Brexit and goes some way towards explaining the Labour leadership’s support for withdrawal. Many modern social democratic parties in Europe are trying to do the same but losing out to overtly populist parties and Greens alike. For Latour, they are un-reconcilable in one party.
So far there have been three “Attractors” – global and local (both with plus and minus elements, winners and losers) and “Out-of-this-world” those for whom reality triangulated by science and presented by educated elites, scientists, publishers and seemingly opaque institutes has no meaning. There is one more Attractor; namely the Terrestrial (p. 40). This is neither left nor right. In Actor Network terms, Latour’s thing, the Terrestrial is an actor itself. The other attractors are all about human history, human geography, human advancement, the modernisation of the human condition. The Terrestrial, argues Latour, puts human beings back into nature. That nature includes living things as well as the biosphere. It is the critical zone on the planet that makes life – human, animal and plant – possible. The Terrestrial, therefore, is an actor because, in Latour’s terms, it has agency and fights back (p. 41) – or at least responds to stimuli, largely human induced. Civilisation (human of course) is the product of the last 10 millennia of human (often brutal) interaction.
Terrestrialism is, essentially, a third-way. We’ve seen third-ways before. New Labour in the UK was packaged as such back in the late 1990s informed by the work of Anthony Giddens. But that was perhaps a third way in name only. It was an old consensus, a neo-liberal one at that. Latour’s Terrestrialism is a third way not between left and right, but between global and local, plus and minus and climatic catastrophe. Nice theory, but as Latour honestly notes, this is an essay written from the comfort of a Paris residence with no empirical underpinning. There are a few suggestions for how “we” might become Terrestrialists. That is the subject of another – later – blog entry.
References:
Diane Coyle. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014
Anthony Giddens. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge, England, UK: Polity Press, 1998
Bruno Latour. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge, England, UK: Polity Press, 2018
Picture: Latour KOKUYO
Some final thoughts before the end of the year
I spen
t New Year’s Eve last year in Seville. At the stroke of midnight we drank wine and ate grapes – twelve are required to do it properly. Not sure we quite managed that. Maybe that is why the year has struggled to live up to its potential. I’ve always been a shade reticent with “celebrating” the new year; not only is time – as Douglas Adams would say – “an illusion” (in particular with reference to lunchtime) and hence not particularly meaningful, but also it was clear that 2018 was going to be a disappointment. I certainly had no expectation relating to the competence of the British Government to deal with Brexit, and so it proved. Celebrations for 2019, therefore, are likely to be strained as, once again, the expectations are low. Even lower.
That does not stop me from trying to understand what is going on. We are being assaulted in so many directions and not dealing with it. As I write, drones are disrupting the operation of Gatwick Airport. It is an attack and the “authorities” are finding it very difficult to deal with it, despite the resources at their disposal. Moreover, last evening I read that a senior, well published and prize-winning journalist, Claas Relotius, working for Der Spiegel amongst other mainstream news outlets, has been faking his stories for 8 years without editors noticing. These stories and investigations have been covering important issues, but it turns out to be fake news. These are supposed to be the people that we rely on to inform us. Undermining to say the least.
But how do I understand Brexit and the rise of the Right? I have turned to the work of Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin (above left) in my ongoing book reading – which is one of the positives of 2018 after I committed to buying books from a local independent bookshop rather than buying from the destructive behemoth, Amazon.
It is not easy reading, despite being written in the classic, accessible style of Pelican Books. It is not easy reading because there are some truths that are demonstrated empirically that prick the bubble that I live in, working in a university as I do. First of all, populism and fascism are not the same thing. However much I want to label Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, a fascist, he’s not (currently). He is a national populist, the distinctions are real and important.
Equally disturbing is the realisation that liberal democracy is not the norm and not necessarily desirable (certainly not for the majority who are not particularly well-served by it). I recall after the Brexit referendum a series of short talks by intellectuals on BBC radio reflecting on the causes of the result. I remember John Gray providing a particularly troubling insight making this very point. Human history is not defined by liberal democracy and is not humanity’s end point.
Eatwell and Goodwin also provide a useful history lesson of the 20th Century. In particular, they trace the development of the EU
from its initial foundations, expansion (for example, the UK in 1973) as the EEC, the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties and further deepening with proposals for shared foreign policy and possibly armed forces. What is clear from this history is that the people, the citizens, did not get much of a say in the key decisions and treaties. In just six cases were referendums held, and even then, they provided only tepid endorsement. Elites have indeed run the EU. The European Parliament, we must remember, does not initiate legislation. Not surprising then that it has been held in contempt by national electorates when its members are chosen every five years.
Hence the backlash from the disenfranchised, goes the argument, was inevitable. Aided and abetted by some rather opaque finance being spent by avowed racist populists using social media platforms, the outcome is lose-lose apart for the very few who specialise in disaster capitalism and bigotry. Moreover, the calibre of politicians that we have in a time of crisis such as the British in particular are in, is risible. Liberal democracy is culpable here. On the one hand it is the democratic form that underpins capitalism. It is – possibly counter-intuitively – captured by elites and perpetuates the inequalities that are currently tearing societies apart.
I read on. No grapes this year, as I will not be in Seville. The weather is looking good, though. Happy new year!
Even my football team is at the bottom of the league
My home team, Hull City, have twice competed in the English Premier League, and twice through incompetence been relegated. The
team is now working hard to get relegated to the third league. Conceding a 93rd minute goal against a relegation challenger on Saturday sums it up.
As Douglas Adams might have said, “but that’s as nothing compared to Brexit” (he actually likened the dimensions of space with a walk down the road to the chemist/pharmacy). Talking of which, if the incompetence of the government and the paralysis of the UK Parliament persists, there will be no point in walking to the pharmacy because there will be no drugs. Or the supermarket, for that matter, as there will not be any food. It is coming a bit of a cliche on Twitter to say things like, “I cannot believe I am saying this in 2018” in the context of food and drug shortages.
But of course, we are.
Not in my lifetime have I experienced the British political system so dysfunctional. I was well aware – if not of voting age – when the IMF bailed out the UK economy in the 1970s. I remember the limited excitement of the 3-Day week and power cuts. We had a gas fire with an electrical timer without which the fire would not work. How nuts was that? I lived through Thatcher, the miners’ strike. I was there with the million others trying to prevent war in Iraq. But I never felt that the polity was in crisis, only that I was on the wrong side. This time is different.
Why would you do that?
I have not written about Brexit for some time. I have watched incredulously as the UK’s chief negotiator, David Davis, has failed to understand that the EU is a rule-based organisation that works linearly, meets 4 times per year and delegates work to qualified people such as EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier. I have also “enjoyed” reading in the Guardian John Crace’s sketches – yesterday being a case in point.
This morning the British Government – though I am being generous by describing it thus after a week when the now redundant Overseas Development Minister, Priti Patel, has been making her own foreign policy whilst on holiday, wheeled out another former minister, Theresa Villiers (left), to argue that the EU – Barnier – is being unreasonable in putting a two-week deadline on the UK sorting out the divorce bill as the final EU leaders’ meeting of the year is fast-approaching and he will have to make recommendations to them regarding exit progress. I’ve heard the arguments again – the EU is not negotiating. Trade policy is important for the British and Europeans. How can you negotiate the border between The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland before knowing what the trade agreement will be? etc. I do recall that Davis – and presumably what constitutes the UK Government – agreed to this on the first day of negotiation back in June 2017. Why agree to something that negotiators cannot honour?
But then this week, the UK’s illustrious and creative Prime Minister, Theresa May, decides that the leaving date, 29 March 2019 will be enshrined in law. Oh and the time will be 2300 (a recognition that the European Continent is on the whole, one hour ahead of the UK). My question is, when there is so much uncertainty about outcomes, why would a so-called leader commit herself – or successors – to such an absolute date and time? Politics was always the art of the possible. When negotiating with 27 countries whom the UK has alienated and distracted from more important global matters, this is unhelpful? Surely?
Picture Theresa Villiers: Chris McAndrew
The Economist and the UK General Election – what a squirm
Filed under: Brexit, education, Environment, Housing, Politics, Privatisation |
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Two years ago I critiqued the Economist’s advocacy of the Conservative Party to form the next UK Government under David Cameron. The magazine, in my opinion, disingenuously dismissed Ed Miliband’s programme in favour of the “stability” offered by more economic-liberal austerity by the Conservatives. The magazine overlooked the commitment to an in-out referendum on Europe despite its avowed support for the European Union, at least in the context of a single market and customs union.
Fast-forward 2 years and here we are with another General Election having been called – we are told by Theresa May – to protect the will of the people translated as her vision of Brexit from those who would oppose it (saboteurs according to the Daily Mail), like parliamentary oppositions are supposed to do under the Country’s usefully unwritten constitution. May, not being a democrat, or not one that I recognise, duly called her General Election after having been on a walking holiday. Though I am minded that she first had a word with the architect of the Conservatives’ last election victory, the benighted Lynton Crosby.
I was waiting to see what stance The Economist would take this time. Let me have a look. First of all, the leader of the opposition is called “ineffectual”. However, that is not the real story. May looks to achieve a landslide victory and increase her majority from the current 17 to something approaching 100. “For the 48% of voters who, like this newspaper, opposed Brexit, this may look ominous” says the Economist, un-reassuringly. However, we have mis-read this. Indeed, argues the newspaper, “[i]nfact, it offers an opportunity for those who believe in a more open, Liberal Britain”. Really? We need to know more.
If I read it correct, if May gets her increased majority, she will fear the Commons less when it comes to the final deal. The House of Commons fought hard to have a say on the final deal and would, if the “deal” was not as good as what the country has at the moment with EU membership, tell her to go back and try harder. One assumes she is particularly fearful of her “hard Brexit” backbenchers. If she has a bigger majority, goes the argument, she can accommodate their wrath as well as that coming from the depleted opposition benches. This means, continues the argument, that she is more likely to be able to make compromises with the EU with this safety net. And that means a softer Brexit. Brilliant!
Dear Economist, that is nonsense. May wants to close the borders. Only a hard version of Brexit will enable that. Plus Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s Brexit coordinator, has himself described it as a “power grab”. Moreover, she also does not want to be bound by the current manifesto of her party written by her predecessor. So, her Finance Minister, Philip Hammond, who suffered ignominy when his budget tax increase was rejected, can now make this a manifesto commitment. Also, May herself is obsessed with selective education and already has in train a return to grammar schools at the expense of children from less privileged backgrounds. The Economist thinks that Theresa May with a majority can fix the housing shortage and make good the “funding crisis in social care”. Bearing in mind that her party is the cause of these two problems and policies so far pursued seek to make it worse, not better (for example, right-to-buy housing association dwellings).
We should not be surprised by this spin and support for the Conservative Party; but we are where we are because of the Conservative Party (austerity policies and THAT referendum). The solutions and future must lie elsewhere.
Be informed 