Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2020

Geography works against CANZUK ever happening

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell is a big fan of the CANZUK scheme (Canada-Australia-New Zealand-United Kingdom) to create an “anglosphere” power alongside the current economic big-hitters on the world stage like the United States, China and the European Union. I agree it has historical, nostalgic appeal, but as Aris Roussinos points out, geography is a big stumbling block to it ever being much more than an idea:

Since losing the empire, Britain has notoriously struggled to find a role on the world stage. Initial attempts to piggyback on the power of our successor as global hegemon, the United States, by acting as a guiding force — a Greece to America’s Rome, in Harold Macmillan’s phrase — faltered due to the total absence of interest ever shown in this arrangement by any American administration.

The subsequent attempt to remould Britain as a European power acting in concert with its continental neighbours through the European Union was an unhappy marriage, and has ended in a rancorous divorce whose final settlement is still to be determined. Adrift on the world stage, we are in need of good ideas.

Instead, we are offered CANZUK, a reheated Edwardian fantasy of a globe-spanning Anglosphere acting as a world power which excites the enthusiasm of a small coterie of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologues, if no one else.

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, the historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts argued that the CANZUK nations — Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK — ought to establish “some form of federation among them” as a “second Anglospheric superpower” combining “free trade, free movement of people, a mutual defense organization and combined military capabilities” , which would “create a new global superpower and ally of the U.S., the great anchor of the Anglosphere”.

One cannot fault Roberts for the grandeur of his vision, even if the details of how this would actually work are left to others to fill in. Instead, we are reassured, this would not be a centralising project like the hated EU; rather, “its program for a loose confederal state linking the Westminster democracies would be clearly enunciated right from the start.” Already, we see the harsh hand of reality ready to crush this initially appealing vision. On the one hand, CANZUK is a globe-spanning superpower ready to be born; on the other, it is merely a loose grouping of separate national governments, which would, like all national governments, act according to their own interests above all.

By totting up the different GDP figures of the various CANZUK nations, Roberts claims that his proposed Empire 2.0 “would have a combined GDP of more than $6 trillion, placing it behind only the U.S., China and the EU,” while “with a combined defense expenditure of over $100 billion, it would also be able to punch above its weight”.

Yet the flaws of this argument are obvious. As other critics have noted, only a minuscule proportion of the CANZUK nations’ trade is with each other, save New Zealand, an economic satellite of Australia. Australia is a great East Asian trading power, and will remain so. Canada is enmeshed in the greater North American trading sphere, as are we with Europe, whatever Brexiteers may wish. As always, the simple matter of geography trumps the affective bonds between far-flung kith and kin, whatever their emotional appeal.

August 15, 2020

French President Emmanuel Macron – “We are a country that for decades is divided and in doubt”

Filed under: France, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Individuals in France may be chauvinistic, says Joseph de Weck, but the French as a whole are less chauvinistic and more self-critical than the British or the Germans:

There is no doubt that the French are a self-sufficient bunch. After all, it was a Frenchman who once wrote, “Hell is other people.”

COVID-19 or not, the French rarely travel abroad for holidays. In terms of food, most French people think they have it best. And at housewarming parties in Paris, the music playlist is usually primarily made up of chansons and French rap classics.

And despite President Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to turn Europe into a global “balancing power,” what happens abroad doesn’t seem to spark much interest at home. The evening news on the public channel on average dedicates 16 percent of its coverage to European and foreign news. By comparison, that proportion rises to 50 percent in Germany. No surprise then that polls show the average French person knows little about the functioning of the EU.

But if this cliché about French aloofness is easily backed up with data points, another common trope about the Gauls doesn’t: that of French arrogance. At least when it comes to the present, the French are brutally self-critical.

In fact, France seem to be among the least chauvinistic countries in Europe. Asked whether they think their culture is superior to others, 36 percent of the French answered “yes” in a recent poll. This compares to 46 percent in the United Kingdom and 45 percent in Germany.

Or take the COVID-19 crisis: unlike other nations, the Republic’s citoyens won’t rally around the flag. Among Europeans, the French give their government the lowest grades for its handling of the pandemic. Never mind that four of France’s neighbors have significantly higher death-per-capita rates. Never mind either that France’s short-time work benefits are among the most generous, also explaining why consumption is almost back to pre-crisis levels.

Of course, one could explain the French’s dim view of the state’s COVID-19 response as being due to Macron’s unpopularity. But by French standards, the president is actually polling relatively well. At 39 percent, Macron’s approval ratings surpass his predecessors François Hollande (23 percent) and Nicolas Sarkozy (35 percent) at the same point in their terms.

The negative view the French have of their country goes far beyond the complaint du jour. As Macron put it, “We are a country that for decades is divided and in doubt.”

February 21, 2020

British wages to be further impacted by Brexit

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As we were told for years, if Brexit happened there were going to be dire consequences to the British economy, and here’s the latest one:

Employers are complaining that without badly paid immigrant labour they’ll just not be able to get the staff. The answer to which is that they’d better start paying higher wages then, eh?

[…]

The analysis here stems from something Marx got right. It’s competition among capitalists for scarce labour which pushes wages up. If there’s a vast reserve army of the unemployed then anyone needing more straining backs just tosses a crust to those in that army and gets as many limbs and torsos to exploit as desired. But if all are already employed then any desire for extra labour requires tempting it away from current employer and occupation to the new. That means a better job offer. Some mixture of conditions, enjoyment of the job, cash and so on that makes up a more attractive package.

The combination of cheap flights and free movement of labour has meant that the reserve army lives in Wroclaw and Debrecen. It’s also been near unlimited – compared to the size of the UK economy – these past couple of decades.

The absence of free movement – what is being complained about here – will mean that to gain the desired labour those employers are going to have to offer higher wages, higher compensation rather, to those not ordinarily resident or stemming from central Europe.

[…]

But back to the basic complaint here. These employers are complaining that Brexit will mean they’ve got to raise the wages they pay. To which the correct response is “Ah, Diddums”.

February 18, 2020

“The real battle for the immortal soul of France is about something far more important — cheese”

Filed under: Europe, Food, France — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Lichfield on the plight of the cheesemakers (get your MPATHG jokes out of the way now):

French cheese seller, offering Villefranche de Rouergue and other artisanal cheeses.
Photo by Sybren via Wikimedia Commons.

In his small fromagerie at Saint Point Lac in the Jura, Fabrice Michelin produces authentic, hand-made, raw-milk Mont d’Or cheeses. He is the last person in France to do so — the last in a line of local cheese-makers which goes back for centuries.

“I get up at 5am. I collect the milk myself from the farms in the village. I warm the milk,” Mr Michelin told me. “I scoop it carefully into cylinders. I pay attention to the varying consistency and taste of the curd. It alters subtly with the seasons, depending on the qualities of the grass. I mold the cheeses by hand. Every cheese is a little different.”

Individual, artisanal cheeses? Wonderful.

Not any more, it seems.

“That’s what gets me into trouble these days,” M. Michelin said. “Brussels and Paris say that the cheeses must all be the same. There seem to be new rules every month. How can I carry on if all my cheeses have to be identical?”

Forget the yellow vests. Forget the strikes against pension reform. The real battle for the immortal soul of France is about something far more important — cheese.

The infinite variety of French cheeses — one of the finest achievements of French culture — is gradually being eroded and dumbed down. Only one in ten of the cheeses now consumed in France is made with raw milk or “lait cru” in the authentic manner.

Search where you like in the finest cheese shops in France, you will no longer find a Bleu de Termignon or a Galette des Monts-d’Or. They are among 50 species of French cheese that have vanished, like rare flowers or butterflies, in the last 40 years. Other varieties, like Vacherin d’Abondance and M. Michelin’s hand-made Mont d’Or have been reduced to a single producer.

Many of the best-known French cheeses — Brie or Pont L’Evêque or Camembert — thrive at home and abroad, but they are overwhelmingly made in large factories with pasteurised or sterilised milk. To purists, that is a betrayal of the French tradition of “living cheese”.

Major French AOC cheese designations: the size of the symbol indicates the relative production of that variety. Many smaller cheese varieties not shown.
Graphic by FrancoisFC – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3640022

February 10, 2020

The coup that toppled Margaret Thatcher

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Charles Moore published the third volume of his Thatcher biography last year (I’ve read the first two volumes, but not the final one). In Quillette, Johan Wennström reviews the book:

This November will mark 30 years since former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher left office. After she had narrowly failed to secure an outright win in a 1990 leadership contest triggered by a challenge from Michael Heseltine, her former defense secretary, the majority of Thatcher’s Conservative cabinet colleagues withdrew their support and forced her departure following what she described as “eleven-and-a-half wonderful years.”

For Thatcher, the “coup,” as she referred to the events of 1990, had been unexpected. But as journalist Charles Moore explains in the third and final volume of his authorized Thatcher biography, Herself Alone (2019), the writing had been on the wall for some time. Thatcher’s style, which some considered abrasive, had turned senior figures against her. And many younger party members believed that if the party were to win a fourth consecutive election victory, in 1991 or 1992, it should be under a new standard-bearer (who turned out to be John Major).

An important underlying factor was the long-standing policy conflict regarding the European Community (or the EC as the European Union was then known), which pitted Thatcher against many in her own government, as well as against continental European leaders and George H. W. Bush’s White House. She was perceived as a “Cold Warrior” who was overly cautious in regard to the future of Europe, especially the project of European political and economic integration.

To some modern observers, that criticism of Thatcher remains apt. In a recently published book on international relations authored by former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, The Age of Disorder (Den nya oredans tid, 2019), Thatcher’s reluctance to endorse a speedy German reunification is attributed to her obsolete anxieties regarding “the dangers of a strong Germany.”

Moore’s latest volume, which focuses extensively on Thatcher’s views about Europe, shows her in a more nuanced light. In some ways, in fact, she was actually ahead of her time. And some of the current problems facing Europe, and the West more generally, might have been mitigated had her opinions been given a more generous audience.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the money for new hardcover books these days so I’ll have to wait until this volume gets a paperback edition or [shudder] get a library card and wait for it to show up at the local library.

February 3, 2020

“The people could not be given what they had asked for. It would set a precedent.”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reacts to the changes (or lack of changes) on Brexit Day:

London on the morning after Brexit Day, according to the BBC and other mainstream media.

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday evening — that is, the 31st January 2020 — at 11pm GMT, my country left the European Union. We did so after four years of heated and often hysterical argument. Nothing much seemed to have changed this morning. I went out shopping, to see the same people buying the same things at the same prices. Since we are now in a transition period, lasting till the end of this year, in which we remain within the Single Market and subject to the rules of the European Union, it would have been odd if anything visible had changed. Yet, if nothing visible had changed, one very important thing has changed.

The ruling class has suffered its first serious defeat in living memory. The coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, educators, media people and associated business interests who draw wealth and power from an extended state was committed to European Union membership. This coalition was never uniformly committed to membership. Some elements were strongly committed, others only mildly. But all were agreed that membership was good for them, so far as it blurred the lines of accountability and gave the exercise of power a supranational appearance. This was the position before the 2016 Referendum, which was not expected to go as it did. When the result was to leave, ruling class support for membership strengthened. Long before it ended, the referendum campaign had become a vote of confidence in the ruling class. Losing this vote was a shock. The people could not be given what they had asked for. It would set a precedent. Give them that, and they would start believing they lived in a democracy where votes counted for something. If this happened, the people might be inclined to start asking for other things – all things variously unwelcome within the ruling class.

The ruling class response to losing fell under two headings. One was to deny the validity of the vote and to demand another, and to make sure that this one was rigged in favour of remaining. The other was to deliver an exit so partial that it amounted to continued membership, and that could be upgraded to full membership after a few years of propaganda. These responses eventually merged into a single project of dragging things out so long that the people would get bored and stop demanding that their voice should be heard.

These responses failed. The people had spoken, and they continued speaking — eventually giving the Conservatives their biggest majority in a generation. Because of this, our departure yesterday was more definite than had previously been imagined. Immediately after the Referendum, I think most of us would have accepted a slow disengagement — perhaps including ten or twenty years of remaining within the Single Market, though out of the customs and political union. The next three years of bad faith killed any taste for gradualism.

Emphasis added.

February 2, 2020

“The European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn shares some thoughts on the now-diminished European Union from his 2006 book America Alone as the United Kingdom exits the European Union:

The construction of a pan-continental Eutopia was meant to ensure that Europe would never again succumb to militant nationalism of one form or another. Instead, the European Union’s governing class has become as obnoxiously post-nationalist as it was once nationalist: its post-nationalism has become merely the latest and most militant form of militant nationalism — which, aside from anything else, makes America, as the leading “nation state” in the traditional sense, the prime target of European ire.

It’s true that there are many European populations reluctant to go happily into the long Eurabian night. But, alas for them, modern Europe is constructed so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures. As the computer types say, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature: the European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem, and one of the problems it was designed to solve is that fellows like Hitler and Mussolini were way too popular with the masses. Just as the House of Saud, Mubarak, and the other Arab autocracies sell themselves to the West as necessary brakes on the baser urges of their peoples, so the European leadership deludes itself on the same basis: why, without the EU, we’d be back to Auschwitz. Thus, on the eve of the 2005 referendum on the European “constitution,” the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, warned his people where things would be headed if they were reactionary enough to vote no. “I’ve been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem,” he said. “The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe.”

Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot was apparently: yes to the European Constitution or yes to a new Holocaust. If there was a neither-of-the-above box, the EU’s rulers were keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent’s peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal wackos champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I’m not unsympathetic to. But it’s a curious rationale to pitch to one’s electorate: vote for us; we’re the straitjacket on your own worst instincts. In the end, the French and Dutch electorates voted no to the new constitution. One recalls the T-shirt slogan popular among American feminists: “What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?” In the chancelleries of Europe, pretty much every part. At the time of the constitution referenda, the rotating European “presidency” was held by Luxembourg, a country slightly larger than your rec room. Jean-Claude Juncker, its rhetorically deranged prime minister and European “president,” staggered around like a collegiate date-rape defendant, insisting that all reasonable persons understand that “Non” really means “Oui.” As he put it before the big vote: “If it’s a yes, we will say ‘on we go,’ and if it’s a no we will say ‘we continue.'”

And if it’s a neither of the above, he will say “we move forward.” You get the idea. Confronted by the voice of the people, “President” Juncker covers his ears and says, “Nya, nya, nya, can’t hear you!”

Only in totalitarian dictatorships does the ballot come with a pre-ordained correct answer. Yet President Juncker distilled the great flaw at the heart of the EU constitution into one disarmingly straightforward expression of contempt for the will of the people. For his part, the architect of the constitution — the former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing — was happy to pile on: why, even if the French and the Dutch had been boorish enough to want to vote no to the constitution, they would have been incapable of so doing, as the whole thing was designed to be way above their pretty little heads. “It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text,” declared M. Giscard. During his labors on the constitution, he’d told me he saw himself as “Europe’s Jefferson.” By referendum night he’d apparently become Europe’s Jefferson Airplane, boasting about the impenetrability of his hallucinogenic lyrics. The point is that his ingrate subjects had no need to read beyond the opening sentence: “We the people agree to leave it to you the people who know better than the people.”

After that, the rest doesn’t matter: you can’t do trickle-down nation-building. The British, who’ve written more constitutions for more real nations than anybody in history and therefore can’t plead the same ignorance as President Juncker, should be especially ashamed of going along with this farrago of a travesty of a charade.

February 1, 2020

Brexit Day

Filed under: Britain, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Late Friday night, the United Kingdom left the European Union. Within minutes, the power failed all across the nation, people began to starve due to the lack of food, and the shattered remnants of civilization were hurled on the rubbish heap. London is now nothing but a smoking hole in the ground along the banks of the Thames occupied by filthy machete-wielding twitchy-eyed savages. Now that nobody in the UK can read or write, nobody knows how the machines used to work, and all the disgusting medieval diseases are back in full strength, the sun will literally never rise again over those once green and pleasant lands.

Yet, despite the ongoing disasters, a few brave souls still cling to their dim and pathetic hopes of a better world outside the European Union. Here, for example, someone claiming to be Brendan O’Neill smuggled out a story on the last helicopter to take off from the roof of the embassy building (at least, that’s how I assume it got posted to the web…):

Remainers, for their part, are furious about all the talk of parties. We’re rubbing their noses in it, they say. Everything from the Brexit Day gathering in Parliament Square this evening to Sajid Javid’s issuing of a commemorative 50p coin is being cited by the establishment’s bruised, Remoaning anti-democrats as proof of the vile populist streak in the Brexit movement. London mayor Sadiq Khan is even fretting that tonight’s Brexit bashes could give rise to xenophobic hate crimes.

Of course he is. That’s how they see us: as a pogrom-in-waiting. As a racist blob. As an unthinking mass driven almost entirely by hatred of the Other. They’ve been hurling these insults at us, at the millions of men and women who voted for Brexit, for three-and-a-half years now.

But all sides in the Brexit Day discussion are wrong. Baker and other timid Brexiteers are wrong to suggest we should play down the significance of this day lest we offend Remainers, and the Brexitphobic wing of the elite is wrong to say these celebrations are a screech of populist arrogance against the defeated side in the referendum. No, the reason this day must be marked — loudly, firmly and colourfully — is because it represents a glorious victory for democracy. What is being celebrated today is the defence of democracy against one of the greatest threats it has faced in modern times.

One of the peculiarities of the Brexit era, and of the contemporary era more broadly, is that very small and very unrepresentative sections of society are in control of the political and moral narrative. So even as 17.4million people, the largest electoral bloc in our history, voted for Brexit, and stood by their vote for Brexit in the face of the most extraordinary campaign of demonisation that I can remember, still the Remainer elites got to write the story of Brexit.

The powers-that-be — from the business elites to more than 70 per cent of MPs to virtually the entire academy and cultural sphere — were pro-Remain. And they used their influence in the worlds of commentary, letters and culture to paint a picture of Brexit as disastrous. As toxic. As fascistic. Or, at best, as very, very difficult to enact. The disjoint between public enthusiasm for Brexit and elite disgust with it was, at times, staggering.

As a consequence, it became incredibly difficult to draw out the historic significance, the magnificence, of Brexit. Even those in public life who supported Brexit, no doubt feeling the pressure of the often deranged establishment narrative around Brexit, became defensive. Brexit was manageable, they insisted. It would be okay. “Get Brexit Done”, as the Boris Johnson campaign said in December — a tellingly apologetic slogan which, thankfully, was enough to win the support of vast numbers of Leave voters, but which implicitly played into the denigration of Brexit, the reduction of it to a difficult, pesky task. Hardly anywhere was there an assertion of the historic, epoch-defining nature of Brexit.

January 23, 2020

The EU apparently fears a “Singapore on the Thames”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why the EU negotiators are reportedly offering a much worse trade deal to the United Kingdom than they’ve already agreed with Canada, Japan, and other trading partners:

Take, for example, this idea of Singapore on Thames. It’s trivially easy to rally the peeps against one or other relaxation of regulation. Chlorine washed chicken for example. But what about lifting the entire burden? Singapore is, after all, about 50% richer than Britain on a per capita basis. The correct question therefore is would you like a 50% pay raise at the price of shooting all the bureaucrats? Given the manner in which the bureaucrats don’t want the question even asked we have a reasonable enough guide that the answer would be yes.

Which is why the terms on offer to a Britain which could do the SonT thing are so terrible. Because of SonT succeeded it would be a death blow to the entire idea of how Europe is regulated. Lille, Leipzig and Livorno will all put up with interfering bureaucracy because that’s just the way the world is. But if Les Rosbifs become richer by half again simply by that bonfire of the regulations then the auto da fes will light up all over Europe.

So, yes, of course the EU is offering shit trade terms. They can’t allow an independent and free Britain to succeed. That we will anyway is what will bring that freedom and liberty to the continent – once again. For as so often it will be us that saves Europe from itself.

January 9, 2020

Addressing overblown fears of “regulatory divergence” after Brexit

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains why worries about “regulatory divergence” are not very sensible:

So now we get to – having agreed that Brexit is going to happen – having to decide what the new trade deal is going to be. At which point there are all sorts of people insisting that we shouldn’t have regulatory divergence. Yet gaining that regulatory divergence is the very point of our having Brexit. We want to be able to do things differently than the European Union.

Thus this sort of worry is thinking about it the wrong way around:

    Brexit is nearly done, but don’t expect an easy ride on trade. The EU is terrified of regulatory divergence

    We are still very much in the early honeymoon period of the new Government, when flush with a stunning election victory all things seem possible. Even the traditionally hostile Financial Times seems to have been partially won over by the infectious optimism that for now flows through the nation’s veins, warming to some of the opportunities for positive change that Brexit may allow.

    Yet at some stage, with the feelgood mood colliding with harsh realities, there is going to be a comedown. The first of these awakenings is likely to centre on trade.

    In reaching a trade deal with the EU by the end of the year as promised, the Government will either have to compromise on scope for regulatory divergence, …

The point being that since the divergence is the very thing we want it’s not the thing to compromise upon.

Start from the very basics. There is no version of voluntary trade that is worse than autarky. There are versions of trade that are better than simple unilateral free trade. Like, for example, the other people adopting unilateral free trade too.

So, our baseline starting point for any negotiation on trade is that any trade is better than none, but we must measure any specific proposal against the effects of unilateral free trade. If it would be better to have this extra thing then all well and good, let’s have it. But if the conditions attached to that make the overall deal worse than the unilateral position then we should not have it.

For example, UK farm goods gaining tariff and quota free access to the EU would be a nice thing to have. But a likely cost of that is that British consumers would not be allowed tariff and quota free access to the farm goods of the rest of the world. The cost of that second is greater than the benefits of the first – we don’t do it therefore.

On regulation much the same becomes true. The negotiating stance at least. What would be the paradisical effect of a system of perfect regulation? Not that one exists nor ever will but that’s what we need to imagine. Then, anything we’re asked to accept which is worse than this has to be tested for whether what we lose from the restriction is worth what we then gain elsewhere.

Given EU regulation this is always going to lead to the answer “No”.

December 29, 2019

2010-2019 was “The People’s Decade” in Britain

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says the departing decade was really “The People’s Decade”:

Prime minister Gordon Brown talks with resident Gillian Duffy on 28 April 2010, in Rochdale, England.
Photo from Spiked.

So the 2010s have come to an end. And what a curious and enlivening decade it has been. Decades are rarely neat political categories. The Sixties, as a phenomenon, didn’t really start until 1963. The Eighties are misremembered as an era of free-market triumphalism, overlooking that PC, cultural relativism, post-colonial guilt and the end of the Cold War that had provided the West with a sliver of moral purpose all took place in that tumultuous decade, giving rise to years of Western self-doubt, even self-hatred, rather than the Thatcherite cockiness that historical illiterates see as the Eighties’ ongoing political ripple.

But the 2010s — this decade does feel neat. It feels like it has a story, an arc, in the British context at least. For this is the decade that begins with Gordon Brown insulting a northern working-class Labour voter as a “bigot” and ends with the northern working classes revolting against Labour in their hundreds of thousands. It begins with the Gillian Duffy crisis, when Brown unwittingly exposed his increasingly middle-class party’s contempt for the lower orders by being overheard referring to this 65-year-old lady from Rochdale as a “bigoted woman”, and it ends with the mass switching of traditional “red wall” Labour voters to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party — and, by extension, to Labour’s worst drubbing at the polls since 1935.

From Gillian Duffy to the Brexit / Boris votes: if the 2010s tell a story, it is one of a peaceful, understated working-class revolt. Of ordinary people pushing back against elites that had come to view them as bigots. Of the long sneered-at and interfered-with and re-educated sections of the public rising up against their so-called betters and restating the case for national sovereignty and community values. Of the people reprimanding the powers-that-be and forcing them, via the ballot box, to respect the people’s will and the people themselves.

This has been a thoroughly democratic decade. The People’s Decade, in fact, in which democracy has done what democracy is meant to do: marshalled the wisdom of the crowd to correct the jaundiced, elitist, anti-democratic drift of the governing classes.

The People’s Decade really begins in April 2010. It was 28 April and Gordon Brown, gearing up for the General Election, was on a walkabout in Rochdale. This was Brown’s first General Election as prime minister, his having received the crown of PM from Tony Blair in 2007, in a stitched-up, court-like manner befitting of the New Labour machine. Gillian Duffy, a lifelong Labour voter and former council worker, was also out in Rochdale that day. She was buying a loaf of bread. Her path crossed with Brown’s, in front of TV-news cameras, and in that very moment Brown’s fate, his destiny as a shortlived and unpopular PM, was sealed.

Duffy asked Brown about various things. She asked him about the public debt and how he proposed to fix it. She asked about the decline of university grants and how her grandkids were expected to be able to go to Uni. She asked him about health and welfare. And she asked him about immigration. “You can’t say anything about the immigrants”, she said, wisely sensing that even raising this issue could see you branded a bigot. “These Eastern Europeans”, she said, “where are they flocking from?”. Brown smiled and said something jovial and even patted Mrs Duffy on the back, but really he was horrified by what she had said. As the nation would discover just moments later.

Unbeknownst to Brown, a Sky News mic attached to his lapel was still on. When he got back to his car he berated one of his aides. He demanded to know why they had put him on air with “that woman”, as he referred to Mrs Duffy. Asked by the aide what the woman had said, Brown replied: “Oh everything. She was just a sort of bigoted woman. She said she used to be Labour. I mean it’s just ridiculous.” That woman. That bigoted woman. Words heard by everyone. Words replayed endlessly in the run-up to the election. The fallout was enormous.

December 15, 2019

Every time the “wrong” side wins an election…

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

… we get all the media talking about how the winner needs to tack to the left:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Every single time. Whenever the left is slapped by voters like a bony Antifa moll at a street riot, “expert” analysts rush to the scene of democracy, cordon it off with police tape and announce through a bullhorn that there’s nothing to see here. Move along. They then propose that the winner is morally obliged to sideline the constituency that just elected him and heed the boutique preoccupations of the vanquished instead. Successful right-of-centre candidates must govern for All of Us. Successful leftists, on the other hand, are encouraged to give leftism to the enemy good and hard for the next few-to-several years. Possibly the first man to pull out his ‘horn following Boris Johnson’s emphatic victory is Philip Williams.

The sullen acceptance that Brexit will happen but will unleash crises that – alas – must be solved by a buffoon: check. Schools and hospitals: check. The problem of “an economy excised from Europe”: check. Williams’ piece is the Tate of tropes. But no: Johnson won’t faulter by being true to the shy nationalists who elected him but he might antagonise them by pivoting left to usher Hugh Grant’s coterie into a broader Boris marquee. Given his track record, that is very likely. Let’s not get carried away: Johnson did his Conservative duty regarding Brexit, nothing more. The question is whether or not he has the panache to hold on to his base while trying to expand it. The media will be a huge asset. They are certain to make daily sport of Johnson’s “gaffes,” eccentricities and less than squared away private life. This will endear him to everyman even more.

On the other hand, when the “correct” side wins an election, we’re assured that “elections have consequences”, the’ve been “keeping score”, and that the losers must strap in tight and hold on for dear life because we’re going further left than we ever were promised during the campaign.

Update: Related.

December 14, 2019

Livingstone announced Labour’s defeat was at least partially down to “the Jewish vote”

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Barbara Kay on the British general election results:

Boris Johnson’s Conservatives racked up a stunning victory in the U.K. elections, with numbers so decisive — 365 of 650 seats — we will hear no more rumblings about a “second referendum” on Brexit. You can love Boris or hate him, or struggle with mixed feelings (as I confess I do), but he now has a mandate to get Brexit done.

But I have no mixed feelings about the Labour Party’s humiliating loss, at 203 seats their lowest ebb since pre-World War Two. If ever a party leader deserved a definitive smackdown, it was Jeremy Corbyn, and a victory lap is in order for democracy doing what it does best.

On seeing the results, I said to myself, “Yay!” The second thing I said to myself was, “Who will be the first to pull a Jacques Parizeau and how long will it take?” As it turned out, not long at all, and it was former London mayor Ken Livingstone who reprised Parizeau’s infamous “money and the ethnic vote” blame-shift after the Yes side’s narrow loss in the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum.

As soon as it was clear the U.K. Conservatives had crossed the threshold majority number of 326 seats, Livingstone announced Labour’s defeat was at least partially down to “the Jewish vote.” In fact, a Jewish population of 260,000 could not by itself have greatly influenced the result, but it is a mark of the anti-Semitic mindset to constantly exaggerate Jewish power.

Livingstone, who has called allegations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party “lies and smears,” was himself suspended from Labour in 2016 over an assertion that Hitler supported Zionism. It was by no means Livingstone’s only egregiously insensitive remark. In April, he reportedly told the group Labour Against the Witchhunt that “It is not anti-Semitic to hate the Jews of Israel.”

Disappointed progressives, of course, are handling the Labour defeat with calm resignation, patience, and a spot of rioting.

November 21, 2019

There’s nothing “confusing” about Labour’s Brexit policy

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As Brendan O’Neill explains, the Labour Party knows exactly what it wants as far as Brexit is concerned:

I wish people would stop saying Labour’s Brexit policy is confusing. It is actually incredibly straightforward. Labour will kill Brexit. It will block the enactment of the largest democratic vote in UK history and ensure that we do not leave the EU in any meaningful way. It could not be clearer: Labour will betray millions of its working-class voters, its own history of Euroscepticism, and the values of Jeremy Corbyn’s own hero Tony Benn, by subverting British democracy and keeping us in the EU against the people’s will.

Anyone who doubts this – or anyone who is still, inexplicably, confused about Labour Brexit’s policy – only needed to listen to Crobyn’s comments at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) on Monday. Corbyn first assured the assembled capitalists that he is not anti-business. Then he assured them that if he were prime minister, no harm would come to their beloved neoliberal institution, the European Union. Corbyn essentially promised the gathered bosses that he would override the stupid plebs’ democratic wishes and keep Britain entangled in the EU.

He said Labour’s policy is to get a good Brexit deal with the EU and then put it to the people in a confirmatory vote – otherwise known as a second referendum. This referendum would, in his words, be a choice between the “sensible deal” struck by Labour and fully remaining in the EU. That “sensible deal”, by the way, would include “a customs union, close Single Market relationship, and guarantees of rights, standards and protections”. So we’d have a choice between remaining and … remaining. A customs union, Single Market links, and EU-guaranteed rights and standards – that is, immovable EU regulations – do not not add up to Leave. By any stretch of the imagination. With complete contempt for the democratic will, and the basic principle of democratic choice, a Labour government would say to us: “You can stay in the EU or you can stay in the EU. It’s your choice.”

This is not confusing. Labour would pursue a backroom coup against Brexit. It would not only renege on the democratic vote to leave – it would then remove the option of leaving entirely from the ballot paper in a second referendum. It would deprive the British people of the thing that the largest number of us in the democratic history of this country called for: a break from the EU. Labour MPs, activists and bureaucrats would engage in a bloodless coup against the people’s will.

October 29, 2019

Parallels between the current Brexit mess and the 1906 general election

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Sean Gabb writes in the Libertarian Enterprise on the clusterfail in Parliament and an interesting historical parallel from the beginning of the 20th century:

… the Brexit debate that only began with the counting of the Referendum votes has been a valuable education. So far as it blurs the lines of accountability, membership of the European Union has been a useful entrenchment of our ruling class. It has also helped provide a mildly liberal and cosmopolitan gloss to a domestic project that has been anything but liberal. Its refusal to honour the Referendum has torn aside what remained of the democratic veil behind which power is exercised. These people are not our servants. They are a hostile elite. Their interests are not ours. They despise us. They fear us. They are determined not to give us even the shadow of what we were – perhaps unwisely – promised.

I have given a quotation from Chesterton. I am increasingly minded of parallels between his day and ours. In 1906, the Liberals won a large and unexpected majority in the House of Commons. They set about transforming the country on the lines they had been discussing since the end of their last majority government in 1885. In doing this, they faced a wall of resistance from the old ruling class. The Conservatives controlled the Law and education and most of the administration. They possessed the greatest mass of the national wealth. Above all, they dominated the House of Lords. They used their majority here to block the Liberal Government until such time as the people could be persuaded at the next election to bring back a Conservative Government.

Now, in that contest, I would have sided with the ruling class. I think England had a better future under the Conservatives than under the Liberals. I think most of the Liberal changes were bad. Moreover, the Conservative strategy showed some evidence of working. The Liberals lost a steady stream of by-elections — most notably Peckham in 1908. Then the Conservatives went too far. In 1909, the Liberals brought in a deliberately populist budget. The Conservatives broke more than two centuries of convention by voting this down in the Lords. This gave the Liberals their excuse. With the cry of “The People against the Peers,” they attacked the Conservatives in their most powerful stronghold. After two general elections in 1910, the Lords were stripped of their blocking veto. Of course, the Great War then changed everything. But it is reasonable to suppose that, had the Liberals won another election in 1915, most of the domestic changes that we blame on the War would have come about, if more slowly.

The lesson is that ruling classes often make strategic mistakes. Had the Conservatives before the Great War taken a more selective approach in their opposition, they might have won an election in 1911, and carried on with their own vision of the national future. As it is, they only lost the 1910 elections because the Liberals were able to rely on Labour and Irish support in the Commons. Because they overreached themselves, they eventually lost everything.

It may be the same now. Had our own ruling class pulled sad faces in 2016 and delivered a minimal Brexit — something like continued EEA membership and a Norwegian relationship — they might have put the issue to bed and continued riding us all to certain ruin. Instead, they went into a three-year filibuster, every so often drawing breath to suggest another referendum. The strategy appears to have failed. We may now have a more substantial Brexit than was intended. More to the point, the democratic veil has been torn aside. The continuing argument over Mr Johnson’s new Withdrawal Agreement is largely now unfinished business. The Agreement needs to be passed — but so we can go into a general election where the main issues will not be a new relationship with the European Union. These issues will be the nature and personnel of the country’s domestic government. I do not imagine that we shall become more “democratic.” But I can imagine that we shall find ourselves with a new ruling class that holds the mass of ordinary people in less vicious contempt.

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