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The Last Few Days Of May

79 years ago, almost to the day, through the last few days of May and into June, a British Expeditionary Force, what was left of it anyway, were trapped on the French coast at Dunkirk, facing bombardment, capture or death. It looked like the end of “our Island story” as Germans closed in on our trapped and defeated armies. Then the Panzers stopped. They’d outrun their supply-lines, so the Luftwaffe took over. But sand dunes are pretty good defence against aerial bombardment. Thanks to the miracle of Dunkirk, the Army, broken and without its kit, was saved. The Battle of France was over, the battle of Britain was about to begin.

Dunkirk is, of course Nigel Farage’s favourite film because he thinks it’s about plucky little Britain standing alone against all those grotty foreigners on the continent. But he misses details. In the opening sequence, the British soldier running through the suburbs of the town, encounters French forces. What were they doing? Fighting the heroic, forlorn and hopeless rearguard action which allowed the British (and a lot of others) to escape. Those french boys fought bravely so that our boys could get home. The film is about the most catastrophic defeat the British Army has experienced in its entire history. “The Miracle of Dunkirk” was a captivating lie. A brilliant piece of propaganda. But because the defeat of the Army, and of the country wasn’t total, we fought on. Although many brexiters are keen students of military history, they often learn the wrong lessons because they pay attention to the people doing the shouting and killing, and not to those doing the planning and logistics.

Those of us who don’t want to leave the EU fought on after the catastrophic, humiliating defeat of 2016. Which brings us to dogged, diligent, dull Theresa May. She has the heroism of Hugh Dowding, who refused to sacrifice any more planes to the defence of France. Which was controversial at the time but with hindsight, probably saved Britain. He too was shuffled off after his victory, in his case to the Ministry of Aircraft Production after the Battle of Britain, and was bitter about it for the rest of his life.

It’s hard to see what Theresa May can realistically achieve by sticking around. Her majority, like her authority is non-existent. Her legacy lies in tatters. But equally, it’s hard to see what replacing her with another Tory, especially one of the Faragist tendency, will achieve. The problems besetting the government will still be there for the next Prime Minister. There will not be a parliamentary majority for any way forward on Brexit, or indeed on anything else. The way to resolve this is through a general election. However thanks to the Fixed term parliament act (a big part of this current malaise, thanks Liberal Democrats…), that requires a vote of no confidence, and that requires that Labour vote for it. Which many of them won’t, not while they’re led by Jeremy Corbyn whom many Labour MPs regard as unfit for office.

There’s a chance this hopeless parliament drags on and on having the same old arguments about Brexit as the rest of the country, with the EU wearily extending and extending until 5th May 2022.

Theresa May will limp on for a while longer yet. But whatever Mrs May’s personal merits, she has run out of road to kick the can down and the Tory party is restless. For those of us who’ve thought that politics today couldn’t get any more farcical, the 1922 Committee has already voted on whether the rules should change to allow Conservative MPs another vote of confidence in their leader, but kept the votes sealed. Sad to say, but I think Gordon Brown Day, when Theresa May takes over from the “clunking fist” as the 35th longest serving prime minister, is the likely target for the Tory machine. Even if they can’t agree on the way forward, Tories can agree to let a powerless prime minister limp on up her own via Dolarosa, in order to spite a former Labour prime minister. By such trivialities are we now being governed.

Clearly someone will have to act as caretaker Prime Minister during the Tory leadership squabble. That could be Mrs May, or it could be someone like Philip Hammond, which would be great because I have him as Next Prime Minister at 50-1. I think Boris will struggle to get to the final two. He’s just not trusted enough by the parliamentary party so I think laying the favourite is a good bet. (Stop sniggering at the back). But if he did get the top job, defections would likely take his majority to below zero. So I think someone from the broad mass of the Tory party – someone who voted remain, but supported the Government loyally will be the final choice. Sajid Javid has long had my money on him, as has Rory Stewart, who also has the advantage of not actually running yet. Tory leadership elections are famously hard to predict.

So what of Mrs May on the eve of her departure from the stage?

I think history will be kinder to her than was the news. Much kinder. When she was selected as Tory leader, I thought she, compared to the alternatives, represented the best hope for liberalism. And she was. She held the line against the onslaught of populist forces. She tried to deliver a Brexit, consistent with the sour, bigoted and miserable mood of the campaign, but failed because of the inherent contradictions within any possible route to leaving the EU. I think Brexit is now nearly over. May was too decent, too reasonable and too diligent to take us out without a deal. Perhaps another Tory leader will waste another couple of years trying to smash an agreement through. Perhaps he or she will be denied a deal, and try to crash the UK out without a deal. But parliament, this one anyway, will not let them.

Mrs May defeat in trying to deliver a reasonable brexit was an honest one, and right now, at the moment of her defeat, she’s probably won. Diligent planning and international co-operation win wars, not bigoted rhetoric and beery farts. That is why we’re still in the EU. Mrs May’s plan was a plan to actually leave the EU and seek our fortune outside, and if we do leave her deal, or something very like it will be the result. But that’s not what Brexiters wanted. Not really. They wanted the war, but without any of the logistics and planning. They wanted revolution. Brexiters gave the order, but without the resources to carry it out. It is the remainers who correctly judged the lesson of Dunkirk. You haven’t lost until the enemy has won.

I can’t see how we actually can leave now. The momentum has gone. Brexiters have no plan and no ideas beyond shouting “democracy” at people who disagree, as if one close, flawed poll three years ago somehow outweighs the fact the Brexiters failed completely and the country can’t really be bothered any more. There simply isn’t the appetite for “Blood, sweat, toil and tears” necessary to leave the EU because, and I really get bored of pointing this out to Brexiters, the EU isn’t Nazi Germany.

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A Worst Case Scenario

Let’s lay out some facts.

Russia has exercised hundreds of thousands of troops in the region near the Baltic states in the last few years. The Russian President is on record as saying the Baltic states, are “not real countries,” and Russian-speaking populations have been used several times recently as a causus belli by Russia in its invasions or annexations of Transnitria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, and the Donbass. The Russian President is a Russian imperialist, who regards the breakup of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th Century”, and regards NATO as “aggressively” surrounding Russia by extending the Security Guarantee to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 2004. Russia has been very quiet in that part of the world of late. Perhaps they are distracted by Ukraine, the most recent country to have been invaded by Russia in the last decade. Or is ‘Ivan’ planning something?

Let’s assume that Putin is serious when he talks like this about NATO and his aims. It’s also increasingly safe to assume that Russia put enormous effort behind  Scots independence, Brexit, the election of Trump and Le Pen. Why now? Let’s also assume that Trump is indeed what he appears, a Russian asset who has been bankrolled by Putin for a decade. It’s probable Putin has some serious dirt on the American President, and could easily procure Trump’s impeachment, at will.

So, Next spring with the decision-making apparatus of the USA crippled by impeachment, and that of the UK crippled by Brexit, if you were minded to take back the Baltic states, and thereby break NATO’s ‘article V’ guarantee, when would you go?

The NATO deployment to the Baltic states numbers in the 1000’s. The UK has 800 men in theatre at the moment, the core of a battle-group in Estonia, with similar sized formations from many NATO countries. Moscow, by way of comparison could send a quarter of a million men, and overrun all three countries in a matter of days, and present the world with a fait accompli. NATO then faces a dilemma. Do you go to war with a nuclear-armed bear to get these small nations back? Does America have the stomach for the fight? Europe probably has the stomach, but not yet the arms for it.

Do I think war in the Baltic is likely? No. I think the presence of Core NATO “tripwire” troops in theatre will mean Russians will be shooting at, and killing Yanks, Limeys, Krauts, Poles, Cloggies, Cannucks and Danes from day one, making it much more likely the USA and its allies will respond with overwhelming force, against which there’s not a lot Russia could do (apart from going nuclear, but I don’t think Putin is mad: NATO enjoys overwhelming superiority in this regard too). I suspect Putin’s motives are about mainly reaching 2024, and standing down to enjoy his loot, without being dragged through the streets of Moscow and hanged from a lamppost with cheese wire. Invading Ukraine is one thing. But taking on an Article V NATO country is quite another. This is why Georgia and Ukraine want NATO membership so badly. However, intelligence agencies in the west have no eyes in the Kremlin, and we don’t, unlike during the cold war, know.

Something to think about. Merry Christmas.

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Brexit is based on a mood, not a policy. From this emptiness flows the chaos.

If you’re not following it closely, it’s easy to ask, as an American correspondent did recently, “why doesn’t the United Kingdom just leave the European Union, and get on with it?”. Well, it’s more complicated than that. The referendum vote mandated the government to get out of the EU. I don’t think the people who voted for it voted for a complete disruption of the European trading system and in doing so, make themselves much poorer. “But that’s just project fear, isn’t it?” Well, yes and no. At the time of writing, 25 months after the vote, and 16 months after the UK invoked article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, to set a 2-year withdrawal clock ticking, the British Government has finally worked out its opening negotiating position to put to the EU. The “Chequers agreement” as it is known wasn’t “the deal”, it was a deal between members of the UK government on their opening negotiating position, and which almost everyone thinks unworkable, not least the two senior Brexiters who resigned from the Government over it. Why has getting to this stage taken so long? Let’s face it, Brexit is not a policy, it’s a fantasy. It’s a mood, not something we need to do, it’s an attitude. Most people who voted for it, did so because they believed slogans deliberately constructed to allow people to project their own fantasies and frustrations onto the project to leave the European Union. From these slogans, no actual policies fall. From this emptiness, flows the chaos that is currently engulfing British politics.

 

“Take back control”? by whom, of what? Still not clear.

“Freedom”? For whom, to do what? Still not clear.

“Sovereignty”? Over what? This is meaningless when it’s at the expense of influence over trade rules we’ll end up obeying anyway.   The Jurisdiction of the European court of Justice mainly covers competition law, state aid to companies, agriculture and trade marks which is hardly something a bloke in a pub would normally care about. It is not supreme in the way the UK’s supreme court is. It is confused in the public mind with the European court of Human Rights, which isn’t an EU institution, but is what prevents the UK being beastly to terrorists, much to the chagrin of the British tabloids. We are not leaving the Council of Europe, and so the UK will remain bound by the European court of Human Rights. All the UK has done, by leaving the EU is storm out of the room in which the decisions are being made.

“Democracy”? It’s hard to see how being a member of a club of democracies, which itself is overseen by a parliament is anti-democratic. It’s true, I won’t miss voting in the European parliament elections, because I’ve always seen it as a risible little potempkin talking shop, but the idea “democracy” was improved by voting Leave, is risible. Just as no parliament can bind its successors, no electorate can either. If you think holding a second referendum on the deal “an attempt to overturn democracy”, then you don’t understand democracy, which isn’t “one man, one vote, once.” Indeed the referendum has poisoned British democracy by introducing a set of mutually exclusive demands, that cannot be met at reasonable cost for which millions will think they have voted.

“Our own trade deals”? Again, it’s hard to see any benefit of leaving the most comprehensive trade deal on earth, with the earth’s largest market, which is also the nearest to the UK, plus deals with dozens of other countries farther afield, in order to secure a trade deal with Australia. At best this is wishful thinking, but most of it is just Imperial nostalgia. The choice the UK faces between”Europe and the Deep Blue Sea” is, with respect to Churchill, a false dichotomy. Far from being “shackled to a corpse”, the EU facilitated trade with China and the Pacific rim and made the UK an attractive place to do business, a Gateway to Europe for the world. Imagining the EU is in some way “holding us back” because mature, stable economies are growing slower than vast, poor ones, is another category error.

Immigration? The largest body of immigrants to the UK come from the Indian subcontinent, none of whose countries is a member of the EU. There is no “deal” with the EU that would stop an EU citizen coming to the UK, and let’s face it, it’s not the Polish plumbers who bother the anti-immigrant crowd, is it?

All of this, I have been arguing for years. Because the arguments for Brexit are based in moods, not facts, they raise as many questions as they answer, and such is the dislocation the referendum has caused in UK politics, The Netherlands has more comprehensive planning for a no-deal Brexit than does the UK. I suspect in practice, this means leaving the EU without a deal is mostly off the table. However Brexiters are trying to cut the Gordian knot, by going full-on for the hardest, most catastrophic break they can engineer. This explains the ‘red lines’ Theresa May offered the brexiters straight after the referendum when she took over from David Cameron. Out of the Single Market, out of the Customs Union, no Jurisdiction of the EU courts, no free movement, no payments to the EU budget, no border in the Irish sea. These red lines effectively make doing a deal with the EU, which regards the four freedoms of the single market indivisible, impossible. They are also mutually exclusive. You see, Brexit is a fantasy, and in chasing it, Brexiters have insisted on wrecking clauses in legislation designed to tie the Governments hands to positions the EU will find unacceptable.

This ‘No-Deal’ plan at least settles it, Brexiters argue. We must leave, and we can deal with the consequences when they arrive. However leaving the EU is a policy which should require decades of carefully unpicking the legal and constitutional ties built up over half a century. Brexit, however has already caused a sharp slowdown in investment. A no-deal scenario would see the UK wave goodbye to much of its automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical and high tech industries. The social and economic consequences could be severe. It isn’t hyperbole to suggest a hard, no-deal brexit will lead to shortages of food and medicines as a result of severe disruption to modern ‘just in time’ supply chains: Great Britain hasn’t been able to feed its population since the 17th century, and is dependent upon trade to feed the nation, every day. Hence the recent headlines about stockpiling food and medicines, and hence the public mood, perhaps, barely perceptibly, beginning to change.

So the Government has to do a deal of some sort.

It is the Irish border which remains the biggest obstacle to a deal. Brexit cuts across a number of previous agreements the UK made with the Republic of Ireland, an EU state that many brexiters are surprised hasn’t been thrown under the bus by the EU yet. The problem is that if the UK leaves the Customs union, in order to forge its own deals elsewhere, then it must check goods on its borders. However, part of the settlement to ‘The Troubles’, decades of violence not quite reaching the level of a civil war over the status of the province as Irish or British, was that there should be no obvious border infrastructure between the two bits of Ireland. The all citizens of the island of Ireland can choose more or less at will, which passport they use. The border barely exists on the ground. It can be crossed, and the only sign that you’ve moved from one sovereign country to another is that Ireland displays speed limits in kilometers per hour, not miles. That would change if the UK leaves the Customs union, as border posts or fences would be needed on the 208 crossing places on the border to check goods and people. Farmers would need to maintain two flocks of sheep, and other nonsenses as a result of the border being reimposed. There are solutions that would avoid a hard border in Ireland. You could leave Northern Ireland in the Customs union,  but that would require a ‘border in the Irish sea’ effectively splitting the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Many Brexiters don’t care, they’re effectively English nationalists, and aren’t bothered by the question of Scottish independence either. If I’m losing American readers with the intricacies of the United Kingdom’s constitutional settlement, I apologise, but the EU was until 2016 part of the glue that held the four nations of the UK together. Brexit threatens not just Northern Ireland’s status, but that of Scotland too. That is a question for another post, but Theresa May’s government is dependent upon the Democratic Unionist party for her majority in parliament. The DUP is a kind of Orange Ulster Tea Party which is, to put it lightly, not in favour of a United Ireland. A ‘Border in the Irish sea’ between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK would be an anathema to most of the Conservative Party, as well as the DUP. There are other solutions being suggested from complex tariff collection arrangements, to turning a blind eye, but they’re all nonsense too.

You can’t just rip up a constitutional settlement,break up a great country and risk restarting a war to satisfy a grumpy national mood.

Ultimately, the problem stems from the paucity of research. There was no workable plan, despite the Tory Brexiters having obsessed over the EU for 30 years. They never considered what happens the day after the Referendum, as most of the Tory brexiters are frankly a bit dim. The obvious solution, as most Brexiters who thought at all about it in any detail agree, is “the Norway option” or similar. This means rejoining the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which is supposed to be a halfway house to joining the EU, but in which Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein have resided for decades. This solves all the short term problems of Brexit, but leaves the UK a rule-taker without much influence. It doesn’t offer any of the “upsides” (which are mainly fantasy, but that’s by-the-by…) of leaving the EU, and simply removes the UK’s voice in the councils of European Union. The UK, unable to influence the laws it will have to obey, will probably suffer in the long run. So too will the EU, freed from the UK’s generally sane brake on the European Union’s wilder flights of integrationist fancy. Brexiters hate the Norway option describing it as vassalage, as do Remainers to whom it’s a distant second best to full membership. It cannot therefore be a sustainable solution, but for the fact Norway which faces exactly the same arguments, seems quite happy there.

Brexiters will cry “Betrayal”, but I can’t help thinking the EFTA or something very close to it will suddenly become a serious organisation rather than a mere EU antechamber, once the UK, the fifth  largest economy on earth, joins it. It is towards this option Theresa May is moving the Brexiters, away from ‘no deal’, slice by slice, abandoned red line by abandoned red line, as the clock ticks away. How far can the Tory party be walked down this road? Far enough and quick enough for a deal to satisfy the Irish Border question? The ‘Norway option’ means Brexit will continue to be the defining question of British politics for a decade and solves nothing from the point of view of politicians, even as the public whose lives will not be disrupted, will be fine with it. I’ve been clear, this is an outcome I’ve been drawn to all along (from 2015) but now isn’t the time.

The final option is to delay (perhaps permanently somehow) the whole Brexit process, but this would probably cause the collapse of the Government, leading to elections and/or a second referendum. The EU has indicated that were the UK to seek such a constitutional solution, an extension to Article 50 would be granted. I’ve tried to sum this up in a paragraph or two, but the complexity of this outcome would render any attempt gobbledegook. This is full-on constitutional crisis territory, and it’s getting more likely by the day. How could this happen? Well, all it takes is for 326 members of parliament to say so, and the overwhelming majority of the 650 MPs know remaining in the EU to be the best outcome for the country. However, most feel for now they must discharge the instructions of the people and leave the EU somehow. I do not know what these people will do if and when public opinion changes, and anyone who claims to is lying.

So what’s going to happen?

I put the chances of a catastrophic ‘no deal’ at 10%. There are only 60 or so MPs in the so-called European research group (they didn’t actually do any research…) who favour this insane outcome. But it could happen by accident, as the law as it currently stands, if nothing else is agreed, leads to no-deal by the natural action of Law. Theresa May’s deal, whatever it eventually is, will probably be a dispiriting fudge, BINO (Brexit in Name Only). However a deal of just this miserable sort remains the most likely outcome, probably around 55%. Which leaves the liklihood of a collapse of the Government, an extension to article 50, and a second referendum, an outcome now firmly in the overton window, at about 35%. All of this is a long winded way to say “I don’t know what’s going to happen”. But I have several ideas as to what might, and the most likely scenario is that Theresa May secures a deal very similar to Norway’s with some fig-leaf measures and linguistic fudges. I just can’t see the point, to be honest. I still don’t understand how this is supposed to improve anyone’s life. Which is why we shouldn’t do it at all. That 1/3rd chance of remain is rising as the idiocy of leaving the EU becomes apparent.

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Whales are more Important to Climate Change than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has pulled the USA out of the Paris Climate accord. And I don’t think this matters all that much. For a start, the USA’s emissions are falling. Mostly this is because coal is being replaced by Natural Gas, but also because people are driving less, in smaller vehicles with ever more efficient engines. The motors driving the west’s steady fall in carbon emissions are economic and technological, not political.
Next to the steady decline in carbon emissions from the west, is set a vast increase in emissions from Asia. This represents a shift from billions of people using no net carbon energy, tending crops using animal muscle and burning biomass (and occasionally starving to death) Just a few decades ago, to meeting an Indian chap who was on holiday in Stockholm with his family, and chatting about cricket while we tried to decipher the train times. The rise of a middle class in India and China is a huge flowering of human potential, even if it comes with soluble environmental problems.
As a result of worldwide economic development, the level of Co2 in the atmosphere is rising, and this is changing the climate. Reducing carbon emissions is a noble aim, but it must not get in the way of developing economies’ economic growth. Fortunately, the solution is already with us. Renewable technology is improving. Cars are getting more efficient, and perhaps moving away from fossil fuel (at least directly). And this process will happen in India and China more quickly than it did in the west because adopting what will be soon proven and cheap technology will enable them to miss whole generations of polluting technologies.


Which brings us to the great cetaceans. The southern ocean is the world’s biggest habitat, with the world’s shortest food chain, at the top of which sits the largest animal that has ever existed on earth. The food chain runs like this: Phytoplankton bloom, and are eaten by zooplankton, which are eaten by fish larvae and krill, which are eaten buy just about everything else. The biggest eaters of krill are the baleen whales the biggest of which turn five tons of Krill into iron-rich turds every day. Sperm whales meanwhile are diving to the abyssal deep, turning several tons of squid (including another of my favourite species, Architeuthis dux)  into iron-rich scat and in doing so, moving nutrients from the deep to the surface.

The limiting nutrient at the bottom of the food-chain is iron, so whale faeces fertilise the ocean, and enable more phytoplankton to grow which absorb Co2 from  the air, much of which falls to the bottom of the ocean as marine snow, and eventually become rock. But we killed the whales, and when we stopped doing so, they didn’t recover as quickly as we hoped. We didn’t just kill the apex predators, in doing so, humanity reduced the Southern ocean’s ecosystem’s capacity to create life, and absorb Carbon. The southern ocean may have settled at a lower equilibrium of Iron circulation. The Atlantic on the other hand, which gets tons of Iron from the African deserts every time the wind blows, has seen whale stocks recover better.

Which is why I want to see more research into Iron seeding the ocean, which may give a leg up to Balaenoptera musculus, as well as possibly solving climate change. Climate change is a problem. But while Trump’s petulant gesture doesn’t help us solve it, nor does it make the problem all that much harder. Politicians simply matter less than a whale taking a dump.

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Why the Blue Passport Matters.

People have spent the day on Twitter saying “why does the colour of a passport matter”? While the Daily Express is cheering the return of the Blue Passport to the rafters. For most people capable of abstract thought, this is a mystifying detail, the importance of which to their opponents is utterly baffling. Of course, I am a remain “ultra”. But I did swim in the same intellectual Milieu as the Brexity-Trumpkins for decades and know many serious Brexiters personally. Having spend decades rationalising the EU-obsessed madness of the Tory right as a harmless eccentricity that they don’t really mean, I do have, with hindsight, some understanding what these creatures think.

Why does the passport matter?

For the Tory Brexiter, the underlying issue is Sovereignty. They object violently, strenuously and on principle to ANYTHING that comes “above” the Crown in Parliament. The jurisdiction of the ECJ is for them, an insult to the courts and other institutions of the UK. The idea is offensive that any law-making organisation, especially one that Jacques Delors told the trades unions is basically for stopping the Tories Torying, could be “supreme” over parliament.

Of course the ECJ mainly deals in trade disputes and represents an international court to settle international issues and ensure consistent interpretation of EU law. It isn’t “making the law of the land” and nor is it a “supreme” court in a meaningful way as far as the average citizen is concerned because it doesn’t deal with those issues. If you’re up in front of the Magistrate for punching a rotter, you’re not going to be able to appeal all the way to the ECJ. Criminal law stops with the nation. Appeals of bad people going up to the European court of Human Rights on seemingly spurious grounds get funnelled into this narrative (shhh, I know), so the impression is obtained that “Crazy Euro-Judges” are “over-ruling parliament”, and demanding prisoners can vote or should be allowed hacksaws to avoid trampling on “Human Rights” or whatever the tabloid outrage du jour may be. This then reinforces the narrative that the EU is “anti-democratic” and “makes all our laws”. And once you have this narrative, flawed as it is, it’s jolly easy to amass an awful lot of corroborating “evidence” because the Tabloids spent 30 years deliberately feeding it.

Sovereignty vs Influence; there is a trade-off. The UK, broadly, wrote the Financial services legislation for the entire continent. In return, the Continent got access to the only truly global city in Europe. The French did this for farming and got the CAP, while the Germans got the Eurozone’s interest rates and got to destroy Southern Europe. The EU which contains (rather like the UK and trade negotiators) no-one who CAN write decent financial services legislation legislation, because most of those people are British. Thanks to Brexit, the quality of the legislation on financial services will go down, both in the UK which will be compelled to have regulatory equivalence to keep banks’ access to the single market and the EU. The UK will have become a rule-taker rather than a rule maker. I fail to see how this reclaims “Sovereignty”. The organisational source of the legislation will remain unchanged, but we loose any ability to influence, let alone write it. Multiply this catastrophe across an economy and you see why the “sovereignty” argument against EU law is, on any rational basis, stupid.

The parliament, the very existence of which takes on the aspect of a supranational government in waiting, rather than a simple means to have democratic oversight of an organisation which employs fewer people than Manchester city council, distributes about 1% of GDP and writes trade law. This unwarranted grandiosity once again suits both the Brussels apparatchiks, and the simian oiks of UKIP whom the British public sent to Brussels as a mark of the National contempt for the institution. The parliament is, to my mind is a risible little potempkin affair, barely worth considering,

So there’s the error. Back to the passport.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation sets the dimensions, so the writing was on the wall for the old British hardback passport, fabulous though it was, it didn’t really fit in the back pocket of your trousers.  However once you believe that the EU tentacles are slowly creeping into institutions to turn you into a province of the “EUSSR”, then you start to see this everywhere. The EU is foolish to seek the trappings of a national Government before they had built a demos, and absent any desire for it from the people. Symbols matter. The UK doesn’t have an ID card. So when Brits talk about nationality they might say “Australian passport-holder” rather than “Australian citizen”. I am not sure if any other nationalities use this formulation. The passport is slightly more than a document. No? Try losing one abroad.

The EU resolution on Passports is here. For anyone who thinks the EU “made” the UK have a Maroon passport, here’s EU Croatia’s. .

The EU suggested the Colour be harmonised and the words “European Union” be put First. At the top. Above the crown, First. Symbolising, perhaps inadvertently that the EU was more important than the nations. And there you have it. And no-one working on it thought to object. Changing the colour of the passport was a key symbolic gesture that irritated many people, and reinforced an utterly false narrative, to no end or benefit to anyone. There is simply no need for European Union passports to be uniformly coloured. It merely satisfies the bureaucrats’ desire for order. And it is my belief that it is this symbolic bureaucratic exercise in territory marking by the EU that revealed, and still reveals, a fundamental disconnect between the Brussels Panjandrums, the people of the EU and the British in particular. The Eurocrats want a Federal Europe with the EU as a Government. The Nations, broadly supported by their governments don’t, and have resisted any attempt.

The EU hasn’t made Britain less “sovereign”. All EU law, necessary to trade with as little friction as possible, is of the type that by whom it is written doesn’t matter. With trading standards does it really matter WHAT they are, just that they’re as universal and consistently applied? I don’t need to tell you that it was never illegal to display prices of potatoes in Lbs and Oz, just that you HAD to display the price in KG and g too, in case any Frenchmen walking through the market didn’t know how many Lbs are in a KG. I don’t care who writes the regulations for the import of Duck eggs, just that it’s done.

But there it is. The Brexiters shooting with the accuracy of a semi-trained recruit who’s just dropped LSD at every figment of their fevered imagination, egged on by equally deluded fantasists who still think they’re creating a Federal United States of Europe. These two groups of lunatics needed each other. And so, the passport, with ‘European Union’ at the top was barely noticed on the continent, but seemed to some Brits as evidence the EU was after their democracy, their identity and their Freedom. However stupid this belief is, a Blue passport could’ve been delivered cheaply as a quick Tabloid-Friendly win for Cameron and such was the narrow margin, it would have probably been enough.

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The End of A ‘Belle Époque’. 1991-2016.

The interlocking webs of policy which ‘politics’ seeks to knit are complicated. Whole books can be written on how two individual policies interact. PhDs in Economics are awarded for small snapshots of the whole cloth. Most people don’t have the time to keep abreast of developments or read sufficient history to understand why some policies are bad. Thus, people use heuristics – rules of thumb – to make decisions  about that which they aren’t expert. “Is this person trustworthy” is a key issue, and we tend to overweight the opinion of those near us. “He is my brother, and I say he’s ok” says a friend, you are more likely to believe a mutual friend, than the opinion of a stranger on the same issue.

In the evolutionary past, such a question was a matter of life and death. People only really had to trust those with whom they shared a close genetic relationship. Since the development of agriculture, we’ve been steadily widening that circle of trust. The wider you spread that circle of trust, the richer your society will be. Even before it had a name, Free market economics allowed people to become blacksmiths, knowing others have water, food, shelter and so forth covered in return. More specialisation, greater productivity, means greater wealth.

Eventually, this requires trust in people we’ve not met. Towns’ food supplies require that farmers unknown and distant supply the basics of existence. Nowadays, It’s unlikely the west could quickly supply all available plenty currently manufactured in China. Nor could China supply quickly the complex components and tools shipped from Japan, Europe and USA. Both China, and “the west” are richer from the exchange. And yet, we still don’t trust “globalisation”.

Most persistent fallacies in political economics are the result of simple policies that appeal to some base heuristics, but which when applied to the larger and wider society, fail catastrophically. Thus egalitarianism in one form or another pops up every 3 generations or so and succeeds in making everyone equal, but some more equal than others, and even more, dead. Then nationalism comes along, and says it’s all [another, arbitrarily defined group of humans with slightly different modes of speech] fault, leading to more waste and piles of corpses. And even when the results aren’t catastrophic, we seek out the views of those who agree with us on say, Nationalism to inform our opinion on, say, whether or not people are responsible for climate change.

Which political tribes stumble into being right or wrong on any given issue appears arbitrary, because no-one’s asking for the evidence before they decide on the policy. Instead of asking “what’s right”, we’re asking what’s popular (amongst the coalition of tribes that voted for me) right now. That an opponent comes out with an identical policy, for different reasons is reason enough to oppose something, forgetting completely prior support for it. After all, whatever [another political tribe] thinks must be wrong, right.

Thus

The Labour party opposes ID cards. The Labour party has always opposed ID cards. The Tory party is for the Free market and was never in favour of the Corn Laws. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Perhaps if we could think for ourselves rather than just accepting tribal dogma, we’d get better governance. But none of us have the time. So “Democracy” is merely a means to give temporary permission to one coalition of tribes to push through dogmas over many issues, until either the population notices, or the coalition of tribes breaks up, and the electorate takes a punt on the other tribe’s prejudices for a bit, and then gets on with whatever they were doing before.

Society ultimately advances by eliminating prejudices it’s acceptable to hold thus widening the circle of trust, and increasing riches. By falling back on ancient heuristics to answer the wrong question (“who’s fault?” is the wrong question) 2016 democracy has delivered the worst political outcomes on a broad front, as a result of which, we are poorer, and more likely to start fighting as a result of the collapse in political trust we have seen over this year. The post Cold-War ‘Belle Époque’, which saw half of humanity, 3 billion people, lifted out of poverty, is over.

Idiots cheer.

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Fidel Castro is Dead. (Some of) his Legacy will Live on

Let’s be clear, Castro was a murderous bastard who impoverished his country, and whose views on homosexuality and on the importance of brevity in speeches were nothing short of horrifying. It’s true, Cubans do have access to better healthcare than many countries of equivalent GDP per capita, and if I had to choose a Communist hell-hole to live in, it’d probably be Castro’s Cuba. But the Cuban healthcare system is not the fantasy of western dewey-eyed left-wingers, and Cubans often are excluded from what excellence there is, as it’s one of the few means the country has of generating hard currency earnings. Rich foreigners get the best doctors, and more are exported to other successful “progressive” regimes like Venezuela.
“But he was an anti-imperialist”. So why were cuban troops in Africa in support of the USSR, which was by any measure or definition an Empire? Anti-Imperialsim is just the justification leftists give for knee-jerk anti-Americanism. And the flood of people risking death to reach the USA should tell you all you need to know about the relative merits of America’s and Cuba’s system.
Contrasting the attitudes of the USA to Castro, to their attitude to equally murderous bastards like Pinochet misses the point. The US embargo on Cuba is one of the legacies of the Cold war, kept bubbling by the politics of Florida, home to so many Cuban-Americans. There is no Doubt that the US blocade has impoverished Cubans, and that with the fall in the Berlin wall and the collapse of the USSR, such an embargo was no longer justified. However politics are what they are. Fidel Castro’s death provides an opportunity for further thawing in relations.
The USA supported “our son of a bitch” all over the world, turning a blind-eye to horrific human rights abuses, though often (albeit less often than we should) working behind the scenes to try and mitigate the worst behaviour. Thatcher is rarely credited with preventing the execution of Nelson Mandela, but she consistently urged Mandela’s release, even as she argued against sanctions and branding the ANC “Terrorists”. This is one reason why the cold-war piles of dead of Nasty fascist bastards are usually lower than those of nasty communist bastards. I also think the point made by CS Lewis holds. Right wing dictators rarely pretend to be GOOD, making their appeal more on effectiveness.
“The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
And one by one, following the collapse of Communism, the support from the USA and its allies for these disgusting regimes was withdrawn. Apartheid South Africa, much of South and Central America saw right authoritarian regimes fall. Genuine democracies were often created in the rubble. The USA didn’t support dictators because the USA is an imperialist power, but because it IS a power, and with that comes responsibility. They judged at the time the alternative, Communism, was worse, and represented a genuine existential threat to the USA and its core allies.
This is why for example the USA and its allies mostly support the Regime in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime is repellent, but given the probable alternatives wouldn’t be nice, liberal, democratic-minded progressives, they’d be salafist nutcases who’d have access to billions of dollars of oil revenues and the legitimacy of being the Guardians of the Two Mosques. The House of Saud is all that stands between the West and a plausible salafist caliphate with sufficient legitimacy and money to one day threaten the west. We’d rather do business with nice, stable democracies under the rule of law. But seeing as we cannot do to every country on earth what we did to Germany in the late 40s and 50s, we make the best of the options given.
Castro appeared to be a true beleiver in Socialism, so he refused to recognise his philosophy had failed, and his island limped on, a socialist throwback in the age of globalisation. The current poverty of Cuba is partly America’s doing, but mostly due to decisions made by Castro himself, policies which set him and the Cuban people at odds with the regional hegemon, in persuit of an evil idealogy. Fidel Castro was on the wrong side of history, and his people suffered because of his stubborness. Now he’s dead, it’s Cubans turn to make the most of the positive legacy – Cubans are the best-educated poor people on earth, and the mighty economy of the USA is right on their doorstep. There is going to be a lot of money to be made there, and this time, for the first time, Cubans will share in it.

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Labour and Tory are Electoral Coalitions Which Have Been Broken

The referendum last week as a fundamental break in British politics. While article 50 remains uninvoked, I remain hopeful it won’t be. There is now a pro-European backlash representing nearly half the country. Maybe more, given the buyer’s remorse from leave voters who didn’t expect to win and now realise the consequences are potentially vast.
Whatever, the die is cast. There were 2 leave campaigns. One, an open-society, free-trade vision with which I have some sympathy. Already, the USA, Canada, Australia and Ghana have reached out for free trade with us. New Zealand, those dear, distant friends (except during the 80 minutes of a Rugby match) have gone further and offered their trade negotiators to boost the UK’s corps of 12.
This is welcome, and it’s a start. But it won’t go close to replacing the benefits of the single market. Not least because many of the benefits of free trade with these Nations we effectively enjoyed or will have enjoyed anyway one day within the EU.
This free trade vision of post-brexit Britain was not the loudest voice, and the main effect of the brexit referendum was to draw the battle lines between those who desire and open Society, and those who desire a closed Society.
If the Tory Labour split was mainly about economics, taxation and redistribution, a battle the free market privatising Tories comprehensively won. the new culture war is about what sort of society we want to be. Imagine this split looking something like spectrum between the Liberal Democrats, and UKIP. The current electoral coalition is no longer fit for purpose.
It looks like the party that has brought this catastrophe upon us, will end up being the chief beneficiary in electoral terms, at least in the short term. If the Tories manage a coronation of Theresa May and not go to the party in the country with a final shortlist of two, they will have achieved a vision of competence that perhaps they no longer deserve.
Assuming no major disaster beyond that expected, labour being in complete disarray will be unable to capitalise on the chaos of the brexit negotiations. Furthermore labour have been abandoned by large swathes of the electorate in the Heartlands of the North, adding to their wipeout in Scotland.
John Major’s “Bastards” however, are working hard. Having won the first battle in the culture War they are looking to press home their advantage and install one of their social conservative candidates as prime minister. UKIP candidates already rejoining the Conservative Party.
However it is premature to write off the Conservative Party to the morlocks just yet. UKIP will become an electoral Force across large swathes of England. Corbyn will have achieved his function and destroyed the Labour Party reducing it to a few hold out in a few cities.
If UKIP does indeed become electrically successful, expect to see the right of the Conservative Party move that way. This leaves a space within the Conservative Party for the sensible elements of the Labour Party who have come to terms with the twentieth century’s economic settlement to make common cause with their fellow open Society advocates across the floor of the commons.
Just as the Labour leadership election going on at present is about the ownership of the Labour brand, (does it belong to hard left socialist, or the social Democrats of the centre?) so is the Tories’. If Leadsom wins the leadership election, then the Tories will move right and absorb UKIP. May, supported almost exclusively by the Tory MPs who favoured remain, Leads the liberals, but whichever way The Tory Party will dominate politics for the foreseeable future (about 3 days at present…)
The Be.Leavers may think this choice of Prime Minister is about Europe, but actually it’s about an open vs a closed society.
The European Union was a hard institution to love. I was certainly a harsh critic of it. It’s hubris in assuming the trappings of a state, are a large cause of the resentment. Unbecoming arrogance from the panjandrums of Brussels didn’t help.They revelled in the myths of their omnipotent Power, myths which fed the Paranoid delusions of the people who want to leave.
However I never felt compelled to make destroying it my life’s purpose. I suspect the EU is an institution who’s value only becomes apparent when it’s gone. It seems that the Scots viewed Europe as something of a counterweight to the hegemon to their South. As such the European Union had become one of the ties that bound the Union together. The the European Union was Central to the Anglo Irish settlement.
Above all above all the European Union was a crucial part of the Post cold war security architecture of Europe. It seems likely that Russia under Putin will get a much easier ride from a European Union that does not contain the United Kingdom. We are weakened. And Putin is emboldened. As are the idiot populists of the democratic world, who seek to thow up borders, pull up the drawbridge and sulk at the modern world.
I’ve seen this flick before, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.
This also comes down to identity. We have seen a rise of English and Scottish identity, and a fall of British identity. Britain is the loser. British is an identity into which it is much easier to assimilate  new  citizens. And as for me, I am not English. I am British. I am not European, I am a man of the West. Brexit has divided Britain. It’s risks dividing to West. And it almost certainly will makeus  poorer weaker, and less able to confront the new threats of the world. It is, for most people who voted for it, a vision of little England, not caring about the Scots, or the Irish, or our friends and allies accross the continent. This isn’t the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland I have served most of my adult life.
I Lament the loss of the world European Union was trying imperfectly to create: one of trade openness and political stability. A Unified West Staring Down our enemies and keeping the world free. If there is one lesson of history it is that revolutions eat their children, and nothing good comes from smashing functioning institutions.
Pour your bile into the comments. I have chosen my side. It’s whoever stands for an open Society, free trade, low taxes, constitutional conservatism and economic competence. That half of the Conservative Party still exists.
Just.
My Great Britain still exists.
Just.

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An Open Letter to Jean-Claude Juncker

If, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland votes as expected to remain in the European Union, you should not take it as an endorsement.

Britain is a great nation, once the hub of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen, a victor at the centre of alliances, in three centuries of conflict, and the mother of Parliaments. To imagine we would ever subsume our identity into the European Union was the height of hubris, a hubris equalled only by our own imperial project. 

When we on these islands realised that 

“…in seeking to make conquest of others, we have made a shameful conquest of ourself“

we used the last of our global power to defeat a grotesque continental tyranny, and retreated from empire leaving Cricket, democracy and railroads for the friends who willingly helped us defeat Hitler to use.

We expect the European Union to realise that we on these islands will not ever be part of some ‘United States of Europe’, and we don’t think France, Poland, Italy or Germany, or any other great nation of Europe should be expected to either. 

The European Union exists to facilitate trade between free peoples, and to solve problems best dealt with at an international level. Trade, environment and security. And it is the Last of these in which our voice must be heard clearest.  For it is British soldiers who have poured blood into European soil over centuries, for all our freedom, and stand ready to do so again. Without the UK in the EU, Germany would have blinked in confrontation with Mr. Putin in the Kremlin. And it is our unbreakable alliance with the United States that ultimately guarantees European freedom to this day. When Churchill said 

“If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.”

he was asking De Gaulle in 1944 to not make him choose an alliance with Europe over the USA. We, if forced to choose, will never choose Europe. An acknowledgement of these facts, ahead of the vote, publicly and with humility would go a long way to keeping the European and broader western alliance together.
The European Union has achieved much to be proud of. Chief amongst these is the cementing of Democratic norms in the former fascist south and former communist East. The carrot of joining the club has brought countries with no tradition of freedom to respect human rights and the rule of law.
Freedom brings great wealth and power, but that power must be used lightly. Britain learned that lesson the hard way. There is no need for the nations of Europe to learn it again.

No more ‘Ever closer Union’. Not for the UK as you have already accepted, nor anyone else.
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The Annual Prediction Game: the world is STILL getting better. Mostly.

Electorates across the rich world are losing the plot, and increasingly backing utter numpties all over the place. Mostly, the likes of Trump, Le Pen and Corbyn will not win elections, and sanity will prevail. The last 6 years have seen middle-class wages stagnate in the rich world and voting for these populist goons is a way express dissatisfaction with this fact. Meanwhile, the global poor continue to get better off. 

2015 saw a continued decline in the number of people in absolute poverty, who struggle to get adequate calories to survive. Fewer than 10% now live on less than a $1.90 a day, down from 36% in 1990. 1990, by the way is the year the world started to abandon the idiotic economic shibboleths of socialism and embraced markets. It’s not even clear in-country inequality is rising in the west. Anyone who says “the rich get richer, while the poor get poorer” under capitalism, is simply wrong. 

Even the rise of populist politics in the west can be seen as a symptom of success. In previous generations, semi-educated morons would be too busy surviving to have opinions, and nor would they have any means to express them. Should morons express themselves, educated people would have had the confidence to ignore them. Now morons not only have opinions, and a means to express them, but they expect to be taken seriously! Worse, educated people, who are usually achingly tolerant, have internalised the idea that all opinions are equally valid, while being ashamed of their status. The morons’ great yawp of disatisfaction mouthed by the likes of Farage and Trump will, however, pass as successful economies resume stuffing their fat mouths with bread and circuses, and the Morons stop listening to politicians again, even ones that stroke their prejudices. 

Corbyn is a slightly different phenomenon: here an antediluvian trot has taken advantage of a disorientating defeat, and been swept on a wave of unusual unity from the hard-left to capture Labour. Young, ignorant pillocks, who don’t remember the piles of corpses and devastated economies left behind by Socialism, have flocked to his banner. Moral certainty, and so the nice-sounding homilies of socialism poison a new generation. 

Democracy means playing whack-a-mole with bad ideas, and this dispiriting process has sucked the confidence out of the West. Without an enemy with which to contrast ourselves, we’ve rightly turned to solving problems within. But this focussing on our problems has given many the impression there are fundamental flaws in our society, and created a yearning for certainties. Hence the support, on both the idiot left of Corbyn and the Trump/Farage moron right, for the likes of Putin. 

The return of real wage growth will see off the populists in a way rational argument won’t. If they’re getting richer, people will stick with the status quo.

War has taken more lives in 2015 globally  than in the previous few years. We have spent the peace dividend following the defeat of the Soviet Union. But Russia is re-arming, China is starting to throw its weight around, and the Middle-East is in flames, and so the West must pull together and re-arm too. Although Fukuyama’s “end of history” was widely derided, we have acted for 25 years as if he was right. The free west needs to rediscover its confidence, and start asserting itself again. Democracy’s march has slowed. Dictators have learned to manage the process. Idiot socialism is coming back. Whatever the faults of our society, the free-market liberal democracy remains the best, freest society yet devised, and we should be confident in our moral righteousness, when facing down our enemies, domestic or foreign.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Last year’s predictions were as follows:

  • I think 2015 will be the year the FTSE breaks 7000. One day it will, one day I will be right.
  • Oil will fall to $40, and maybe below and stabilise in the $40-60 range. USA becomes the world’s swing producer
  • The Conservatives will win a thin majority in GE2015. There maybe 2 elections. Don’t ask me how. no polling backs this up. But the country doesn’t want Miliband, and Cameron’s actually done a pretty good job under difficult conditions and doesn’t deserve to be sacked. UKIP to win 3-5 seats, Farage to fail in Thanet, the party’s national vote share in the 10-12% range.
  • China’s growth over the past few years will prove to have been overstated. China’s slowdown to get worse. India to continue to develop rapidly. Modi proving his critics wrong: He may be the man to get India working and taking its rightful place as a major economic power.
  • Russia will try to save whatever face it can for Putin, as it withdraws from Ukraine in response to the falling oil price and continued sanctions. Russia will be set up to rejoin the world financial system in 2016.
  • IS will be reduced to a rump by the end of the year, as having been stopped in their tracks on a number of fronts, they will find the supply of jihadis will dry up.
  • Darfur will be the international flash-point to watch
How did I do?
  • The FTSE did break 7,000 and then collapsed. 1
  • Bang on the money about Oil 1
  • Bang on the money about the election, though I overstated UKIP’s seats. 1
  • Bang on the money about China and India 1
  • I under-estimated Putin’s willingness to make his people suffer for his grandiose designs, though the Ukraine ceasefire is mostly holding 1
  • Perhaps over-optimistic about ISIL’s defeat, but they are certainly in retreat. 1/2
  • Not sure a great deal happened in Darfur, indeed it seems to be quietly solving its problems. 0
5.5/7 ain’t bad! And looking forward:
  • The FTSE 100 will recover lost ground, and make a new high in 2016. Oil will remain below $60 for the foreseeable future.
  • Inflation will remain low, and there will not be an interest rate rise in the UK until at least the 2nd half of 2016, and probably not until 2017.
  • The UK will vote to stay in the EU, and do so relatively comfortably.
  • Trump will not be the Republican nominee, but it doesn’t matter. Hillary Clinton will be the Next president. However ghastly she is, the GOP is going through the same existential madness that is currently gripping the Labour party in the UK. Hell, given the current bunch of twat-o-matic onanists vying for the Republican nomination, I’d probably have to vote for her.
  • Corbyn will remain leader of Labour through 2016, and will poll in the mid 20s by the end of the year. 
  • Labour will start losing MPs to defections and a small chance of a formal split in the party.
  • We’ve seen peak UKIP: I estimate a 25% chance of Douglas Carswell resigning the whip in protest at ‘KIPpers being mostly ghastly pillocks with horrific views.
  • ISIL will continue to be degraded, and continue to lose ground to various forces. Putin will continue to prop up Assad, and Syria will become increasingly binary, as Russian and Regime forces grind down all (non-ISIL) opposition to the regime. 
  • It is likely the west will grudgingly accept Assad’s part in the post war Syria.
  • It is possible 2016 could be the year of the QSD, a Arab League and US-backed coalition of (mostly) non-jihadi, democratic (ish) Syrian groups.
  • The conflict in Ukraine will remain frozen, Putin’s aim being a nation with an open sore, which cannot therefore join NATO or the EU.
  • If the last decade was China’s, the coming one looks like it may be India’s. India is just too corrupt and chaotic to manage ‘big bang’ development by government fiat, but China’s getting old before it got rich, and there is *a lot* of mal-investment to purge. China’s economy will weaken sharply in 2016.
  • India’s rise may be more sustainable, as it will have to be driven from the bottom up. India’s growth rate will be higher than China’s (largely fictitious numbers) again in 2016.
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