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Brexit: What Next?

With at least 100 Tory rebels, the DUP, the SNP, collected others and most of Labour planning to reject ‘The Deal‘, it’s hard to see it getting through parliament on the 10th December.

What happens then?

Anyone who might know is keeping their options open. Bim Afolami, My local MP, held a town hall meeting last night to explain why he’s voting for it. Basically, he’s in favour of discharging the instruction of the people from the referendum, reinforced by manifesto commitments voted for in the last General Election by 87% of the vote, with as little damage to the UK and its economy as possible. This is a reasonable line to take, and I was impressed with his delivery. “The options are” he said “the deal, or no deal”. Put like that it’s hard to argue. If the deal passes, I will be satisfied Brexit can be delivered at acceptable cost. However, he’s wrong about the options. “No deal” is opposed by most of the Tory party, an overwhelming majority of the Labour party and most of the other opposition groups, it’s not realistically on the table, unless Parliament agrees nothing else, and behaves recklessly. Remaining in the EU, on the other hand, is back on the table, though few have admitted it publicly yet.

Brexiters make much of the need to strike “Free trade deals”, but these are worthless next to the single market. Why? The EU/EEA single market is the largest economy on earth, and it’s also the nearest to us, and we share our only land borders with it. To imagine that a deal, even with all of the USA, China, India, Australia and New Zealand could match the benefits of the single market is just delusional, as the Treasury and Bank of England made clear. Equally clear is the extent to which Brexiters deny that there are any costs at all to leaving. Any discussion at all of the myriad downsides is dismissed as “project fear”. The level of analysis, from the parliamentary European Research Group, to the local pub bore is the same: Brexiters have persuaded themselves, despite every expert on international trade, and more or less everyone who can spell in the UK telling them otherwise, there are no costs and vast opportunities on leaving the EU. Their only reasoning boils down hate of the EU, appeals to patriotism, confirmation-seeking and total dismissal of the entire subject of economics. No? Patrick Minford, the only “economist for brexit” assumes, for example, distance doesn’t matter in trade. One side of the debate is simply not amenable to reason.

Brexiters petty spite and cruelty is obvious to anyone who looks. Half a dozen people in the meeting spoke up about real, practical costs of Brexit – EU citizens who lose reciprocal rights, farmers who lose vital markets, businesses who will face higher costs throughout their supply chains, students who have lost opportunities for life-enriching travel and study. Lives are being disrupted and attenuated, and the old man sitting next to me simply shrugged. He actually laughed at the disabled woman and the Asian man who mentioned the climate of increased hate crime. The hurt they are causing is the point. By hurting those whom the brexiters blame for their deep personal inadequacy, immigrants, foreigners, people who paid attention in school, they feel better about themselves. That is where brexit is coming from. It’s a mood, not a policy.

‘No deal’ is overwhelmingly supported by people whose pensions will not be affected by the decision, but will be paid for by people whose incomes will be, for life.

So what is likely to happen when the deal is rejected by parliament? Afolami said he was working with Nick Boles on the EFTA/EEA plan as the next option, and I suspect that is what the Government will try to offer next. This will require an extension of Article 50 to draft an agreement. The problem is, I can’t see many problems solved by EEA/EFTA that isn’t solved by “the deal”, and I suspect it will fail for exactly the same reasons he laid out in his opening remarks about May’s deal: it’s neither fart nor shit, satisfying neither the atavistic hate of the people who wish to leave, nor the fears of most of the people who wish to remain in the EU. Indeed thanks to the Irish border, the EEA option would include the Customs union, leaving the UK closer to the EU than Norway. The only thing we’d have done is removed ourselves from the decision-making body, to literally no benefit to anyone except the French. And we’d still have Brexiters whining about being in the EEA, for life. Nevertheless, this option, rubbish though it is, is the Brexit that is most acceptable to me.

Predictably, the People’s vote people were there in force. And like lefties at every public meeting, at any point in history, their sanctimony and verbosity didn’t help their case. Nevertheless, this is, of the likely scenarios, my preferred outcome, as there is some hope of reversing the initial referendum result. (But what question do you ask… and what if ‘leave’ wins again?) But what I really want is parliament, the overwhelming majority of whose members back remaining in the EU, to observe there is no way to leave the EU that doesn’t catastrophically wreck hundreds of thousands of lives and careers, and no way to minimise the disruption in a way that satisfies the inchoate loathing of the EU. You can vote yourself a unicorn that shits gumdrops, it doesn’t mean the Government can deliver.

Nigel Farage trying to get a refund on the Norwegian Blue Option

The referendum was advisory, the country is bitterly divided whether or not we leave or remain. Worse, it appears likely the leave campaign conspired with a hostile foreign power, breaking British electoral law by pumping dank memes and dark money, using stolen data, to win their wafer-thin mandate, and they did so with a grotesque smirk on its face. So why is the “mandate” taken so seriously? So let’s be divided, nothing but the relentless march of time can change that, but be a bit richer and remain in the EU. Eventually the mood will pass. And I expect, if the outcome is ‘no brexit’ the vast majority of Brexiters will sink into a sullen silence rather than kick off. Many I suspect will breathe a sigh of relief, in private, that they no longer have to own this feeble shit-show. They may protest, but they will be shouted down, derided, ignored and ridiculed, much like the Tory party was after 1997, and deservedly so. The Tory party will split, of course, as it should have done when “the Bastards”, Lilley, Portillo, Redwood and Howard, crippled John Major’s administration, and undermined every leader since. However, purged of the Brexiters, the Tory party will find itself electable again much quicker without the baggage of failure (does anyone seriously expect Brexit to stink of anything else?). Fear of blood on the streets, openly expressed by Brexiters, yet dismissed when raised by remainers,  is no reason to do as the quitlings demand. What did Thatcher do when confronted by people who believed political power lay at the point of production, or in the barrel of an armalite? We have defeated nativist hate and threats of violence before in the 1930s and 1980s. Brexiters are utterly unappeasable, and want nothing that can be delivered at reasonable cost. So meet them head on.

As Afolami pointed out, Parliament is sovereign, we live in a representative democracy, an MP is a representative charged with doing what is best for the country, not a delegate charged with delivering on constituents’ moods. It’s leadership the people need. Simply reject Brexit. It’s a stupid policy, utterly without upside, and vast potential costs. Parliament, and the people who kill this insanity, will be thanked, in time.

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Internal Party Democracy is Undemocratic.

The Labour left have had a peculiar mental tic since at least the days of Tony Benn (Man of the people and 2nd Viscount Stansgate, 1925-2014). They do not see Members of Parliament as representatives, who use their own judgement when legislating. They see the MP as a delegate of a party, to be selected or deselected according to the whims of the local party and beholden to vote according to their instructions. The problem is that the electorate, people who mostly pay little attention to politics, only get a say once every four years or so, and they aren’t keeping an eye on the local party’s committees. And the hard left LOVE committees. They’re worse than golfers. Other bits of the Labour party mostly can’t be bothered to attend, and so the hard left are able to pack committees, and then attempt to deselect MPs who disagree with them. This is justified by “democratic votes” of party members, which are far easier to gerrymander than an election. This means, in safe seats, the Party committees become more important than the electorate in deciding who’s in Parliament. (Proportional representation is little better – who controls where people are on the Party Lists…?)

A painting of an evil old man.

Neil Kinnock’s triumph was seeing off this threat, then called ‘Militant’. Tony Blair was alive to this, and resisted change to Labour’s rules, as was Brown. But Ed Miliband, soft and useless that he was, was either a Bennite himself, or was naive when he changed the leadership voting rules, removing time rules for new members, and allowing people to join and immediately vote for £2. All these things sound nice and kind and “democratic”, widening the mandate, and letting anyone vote. And no doubt, Miliband was swayed by siren voices from the hard left mouthing just this sort of guff. What harm could ‘more democracy’ do? However, ordinary people didn’t get excited about Andy Burnham or Liz Kendall. The hard left and not a few ‘Tories for Corbyn’, on the other hand, flooded into the Labour party at the first opportunity to vote for whichever obstinate madman of the ‘Campaign group‘ whose turn it was to stand. Corbyn, whose turn it was to “widen the debate” this time, won the election on the backs of this wave of new members, and almost immediately the calls for deselection of “red Tories” (ie anyone who wasn’t on the extreme left) began.

The Tories are not immune, UKIP is haemorrhaging members, some of whom are joining the Tory party with similar aims Labour’s hard left – to pack the party and select their leader, Mogg or Johnson, to deliver the “real brexit” they crave. The difference is the Tory right and UKIP have obsessed about EU, not the internal mechanisms of the Tory party, and frankly, they’re mostly a bit dim and lazy. Also, the Tories rules preclude an equivalent outcome, for now. Labour’s extremists have been thinking about “the Bennite project” for longer than the Tory nutters have been thinking about Europe. The hard left knows exactly what it is doing. The Brexiters don’t.

By packing committees in local labour parties, they aim to control their MPs. The party, not the MP’s consience, then becomes the sole arbiter, and the only route to power is through the party’s structures. Independent-minded MPs are not wanted. The party becomes the key to everything. Once, having thoroughly infected the party, they wait. Eventually the wheels of democracy turn, and the Tories lose power. The left will then have 5 years to do what they want, with pliant MPs doing their bidding. Democracy, the voices of people who didn’t vote for the party in power, or dissenting voices within it, are silenced.

There is a model for this. Comrade Stalin wasn’t Premier of the Soviet Union, Lenin’s old job, until 1941. He was General Secretary of the Communist party. He understood that if you controlled the party machine, you controlled the state. Thus when Lenin died in 1924, he was replaced by Alexi Rykov (me neither), but it was Stalin who held all the power. Obviously this is a simplification of an enormously long and complicated process. And equally obviously, the British constitution retains a multi-party democracy, so there’s a limit to how much damage a party thus packed can do, because if they do enough damage, the other lot will get in. But with both main parties engaged in a battle for their souls with nutty extremists within, there is a risk. Imagine if Blair or Thatcher with their landslides, had seen fit to attempt control of their parties in this way.

This is how democracy ends. With the spurious legitimacy conferred by a Potemkin election of Party members.

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Nicola and Theresa. Phwooar.

The Daily Mail’s headline “Legs-it” about Scottish First Minister and British Prime Minister Theresa May’s shapely legs was pathetic. But remember, the Mail is written by women, for women, and women judge each other, all the time, harshly and vindictively. Judged especially harshly are women more accomplished or better looking than the average Daily Mail reader.

To call this “sexism” is to miss the point. This isn’t about women being held down by sexist male tittle tattle. Clearly, two of the most powerful people in the country haven’t been held down in any meaningful way. Any executive head of Government is fair game for any and all criticism. What these women have done is rise above the level at which society normally seeks to protect women from abuse.

Male politicians are made fun of for their appearance and clothing all the time. It’s the sea men swim in. Whether it’s Donald Trump’s expensive, but ill-fitting suits and too-long ties like he’s stepped out of a 1980s pop video caricature of a businessman, or Cameron’s forehead, or the fact that middle-aged men are always assumed to be repulsive, this abuse is normal.  The ridicule a male politician faces when he’s seen in public wearing anything other than a blue suit is extraordinary. From Tony Blair wearing a clean barbour, to William Hague’s baseball cap or Cameron’s beachwear, there’s a reason male politicians dress identically. When women’s clothing (far more interesting by the way, than the sober suits of most male politicians) is commented on, it enables a personal brand to be created that much easier. Theresa May’s shoes are like Margaret Thatcher’s handbag. True, women do have to think harder about their clothing – too much leg, cleavage etc… and you immediately invite scorn (of other women, mainly), but the fact the female wardrobe stands out against the endless blue/grey suits and red or blue ties of the male is as much an opportunity as it is a minefield.

Any comment about May’s shoes, for example is part of her deliberately curated brand, and shoe-designers are falling over themselves to get their products onto her feet. This isn’t sexist. Women like shoes, and there’s no reason why Theresa May shouldn’t have fun with them.

Lower down the pecking order there’s a taboo against men commenting negatively on a woman’s appearance, lest you hurt the poor dear’s feelings. Yes male ‘locker room’ banter will discuss who’s attractive, but it’s rude to do so in front of women and by and large, gentlemen don’t. Women don’t typically have these conversations about men in earshot of men either, but describing men as “revolting” or “creepy” is so normal as to be unworthy of comment, and completely unnoticed. May and Sturgeon have risen above this social protection, and are subject to the same rules of engagement as men are. i.e that if we have feelings, tough.

These women are grown-ups doing important jobs. If you think the Mail’s light-hearted front page is an insult to them, you’re an idiot. Of course Sarah Vine who wrote the thing, knows exactly the response it would get, howls of idiot outrage from the usual suspects on Twitter, and from Sturgeon herself. This allows the paper to swat the complaints aside with contempt. This signals to their readership that the Mail is on their side against the bien-pensant left with their idiotic & totalitarian outrage about human trivialities. May by rising above it, does the same. The Mail is one of the Best-selling papers in the UK, and one of the world’s most visited “news” (ish) websites. Who won that exchange?

The po-mo left, obsessed with identity politics, used to being able to bully dissenting opinion down STILL hasn’t got the new rules of the game. Someone’s pointed out the Emperor’s naked, but he’s still acting like he’s in charge and hasn’t noticed the mood’s changed. Yet.

Completely unrelated, but thank you to the Anonymous commenter who wrote this. It cheered me up.

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Sexism and the Loss Aversion Heuristic

Men are physically stronger than women, respond quicker to physical training, and suffer less injury under physical stress. Men are more robust, suffer less morbidity than women in almost all phases of life. Obviously these things exist in a normal distribution, but men’s distributions are typically platykurtic – there are more men in the tails of the distribution than women. Thus, even where the means are near identical, such as intelligence, you’d expect to see more male geniuses, and imbeciles among men than women, who’re more concentrated around the mean. Feel like taking issue with any of these statements? Then you might as well be a creationist.

Men are more accepting of risk, and will prioritise pay over flexibility. So you’d expect men to make up the majority of soldiers and miners and race car drivers. It also means you’d expect to see more men make up corporate boards, everything being equal. More men are more drawn to the cut and thrust of business, and are more likely to prioritise work over other commitments. Women value stability and flexibility more highly than men. This means women, on average don’t choose to make the effort necessary to climb the greasy pole. Women (sensibly, in my view as I have done the same) are more likely to think other things more important.
Thus, the brute fanny-counting of media analysis of sexism and the “gender pay gap” ignores female choices and attributes, thus denigrating both women and men for the choices they make. Women for their part see their contribution to society in caring professions such as medicine (more doctors are now women, as well as nurses) and teaching denigrated because these women aren’t seeking to be at the top of BAE systems, or whatever. Likewise men, when they see women are going to hired so they form 50% of the workforce of a mining company feel devalued for their skills and attributes because the only way BHP Billiton could make 50% of its employees women is by discriminating against the larger number of men who will apply to drive a bloody great truck miles from nowhere in a bloody great hole in the ground in the middle of a bloody great desert surrounded by nothingness, and live in towns whose bars serve tinnies through wire grilles, and where kicking each others’ heads in represents the primary saturday night entertainment.
But worse, by forcing women into traditionally working class men’s jobs, you further alienate and disorientate a bit of society which already feels put upon, neglected, belittled and scorned. This is why they voted for Brexit in the UK, and in the USA, will vote for Trump. Working class men are lashing out, because their raison d’etre, to provide for their offspring, has been nationalised, and no other opportunity for them has been provided and they as individuals have too often been thrown on the scrap heap, derided as workshy deadbeats. The working class used to have pride in providing for their family and often doing dangerous, dirty jobs to do so. Opportunity isn’t “equal access to university”, for which working class men is a middle-class rite of passage, but decent jobs that will allow them to support their family, but which is blocked by the petty credentialism that values paper qualifications over experience and dumb diligence over inspiration.
That loss of pride is agonising. And people mourn loss far more than they celebrate gain. The aim of this post-modern obsession with equality of outcome therefore might as well be to make men despise themselves and women feel inadequate for the inclinations their biology and society has fitted them. Men become 2nd rate women, and women become 2nd rate men. By all means allow everyone to seek their own path, but to imagine men and women will sort 50/50 everywhere is totalitarian in its foolishness and cruelty.
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The Madness Stalking Democracy will Pass.

“Has there been a general election, Mr Blackadder” asked Mrs Miggins, unaware, until Edmund points it out, as neither she nor Baldrick have a vote. “Hardly seems fair to me” she says.
“Of course it’s not fair — and a damn good thing too. Give the like of Baldrick the vote and we’ll be back to cavorting druids, death by stoning, and dung for dinner”

And that, in a nutshell is the problem with democracy. You simply cannot allow the enthusiasms of the noisier, politically enthused bit of the population to be indulged. The young prats currently cavorting after Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders seem blissfully unaware of the misery that socialism wrought even within their parents’ lifetimes. Nativist chauvinism, a yearning for the “strong leader”, the admiration of Vladimir Putin by the likes of Nigel Farage, Donald Trump or Marianne Le Pen: we’ve seen this before too.

This is why “elites”, in most of the world limit the choice available to electors to people within the bounds of reasonable discourse. It is possible to expand the bounds of reasonable discourse over time, to move the centre of politics around which that “overton window” opens. Clement Atlee did, Margaret Thatcher did. But what is happening right now, in response to a decade of stagnating living standards, is different.

One way of looking at it is a revolt of the left behind. That is behind the rise of UKIP, Le Front National and Donald Trump. After a hollowing out of the traditional working class, as the most able have moved on and up, and after generations of assortative mating, the shallow end of the British gene pool face competition from far more able and energetic immigrants and they don’t like it one bit. If you listen to a ‘KIPper, you’ll hear that they’re “fed up” about “not being listened to” by the “metropolitan elite”. Cameron offered these bloody people their referendum. They now hate him even more. This mood cannot be pandered to, because the policy solutions they demand don’t work. If your response to a few years of stagnant wages and a Polish couple moving in next door is to try to elect Nigel Farage, then you don’t deserve to be listened to. You deserve to be told to shut up and do your homework again. These people have captured the Republican party in the USA, and the party will not elect a president until the “elites” get control back.

And on the left, the highly educated marxists who once would have been guaranteed solid middle-class status as teachers, lecturers and officials, are now competing with self-employed tradesmen who often earn far more, for housing and schools. People, once solidly middle-class find themselves outcompeted by people they regard as inferior, and they don’t like it. The erosion of the status of the Nomenklatura vs. “trade” offends their sensibilities, and panders to an old snobbery against grubby money-making. The old socialism espoused by Corbyn plays to these prejudices, offering status at public expense. Thankfully most people going to University ignore the student politics of the hard-left, and seek a qualification to enable them to compete. And in competing they make themselves, and society richer. These student trots who never grew up are creatures of ridicule. They have however completely captured the Labour party, which is finished as an electoral force for at least a decade.

Morons, it seems favour either full socialism, or some form of fascism, because these ideas simple, easy to understand and wrong. It’s time for those of us who understand the world to stop imagining the grunting ignoramuses or starry-eyed ideologues have a point at all. They deserve ridicule. Point at the Corbynista or the ‘KIPper and laugh for having been taken in by nonsense.

Meanwhile, in the middle you have the broad mass of people doing OK. Unemployment is low. Most people are getting small annual pay rises. Price rises are low, and for capital goods, prices are falling. However people like nominal rises more than they like real rises. And the low-inflation, low interest rate reality means even as people’s real wages, even after housing costs (outside London and the south east anyway) are rising strongly. A lack of nominal increases makes people grumpier than they should be. There is sympathy for Farage and Corbyn shaking things up. Thankfully, the broad mass of the basically OK middle are sensible, and when push comes to shove, see the status-quo is far from intolerable. And those doing basically OK are far greater in number than the UKIPish left-behind and the Socialist-minded Corbynista class.Traditional politicians such as Cameron, who can reach out to this broad middle while keeping the coalitions of which their party is made together, will still win elections.

Assuming the Tory Party holds together after the referendum, and doesn’t go EuroBonkers, they will need to find another politician who can reach out to the broad centre. If they can, Labour, entirely captured by voter-repellent lunatics, will offer no resistance to another decade in power. Over the pond, Trump will attract a little more than a third of the vote. Everyone else will hold their nose and vote for Hilary Clinton however crap a candidate she may be. And in the rest of the Democratic world, people will flirt with lunatic populists along these lines, but will mostly vote for a steady-as-she-goes mainstream candidates.

Democracy – keeps testing these bad ideas, but mostly seems to work. This madness will pass.

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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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Prime Minister’s Questions: Whither the Bear-Pit?

Jeremy Corbyn’s first outing in the bear pit of Prime Minister’s questions went better than either man could have hoped for. Corbyn, a lousy speaker and poor debater got off lightly, and the Prime Minister avoided the obvious banana-skin of publicly beating-up a careworn old geography teacher who accidentally found himself at the dispatch box while looking for some sandwiches.

There are few more tiresome tropes in politics that PMQs are a “national embarrassment”, with all the jeering and petty tribal point-scoring. But it is just about the only debate people can be bothered to watch. If you’re interested in an earnest debate about the issues, you can see everything live on the parliament channel, where the members who’ve taken the trouble to learn about a given issue turn up to craft and fine tune legislation. There are select committees where members scrutinise the business of Government, calling ministers and civil servants to account. Few bother.

PMQs however isn’t about the business of Government. It’s party-political. It’s designed to test the mettle of the Prime Minister under fire – tough forensic questions, not about the issue, but to play the man. Put the man under pressure, in public and see how he fares. It means the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition learns to handle pressure, and crucially the voters can see how he fares in the bear-pit, often weekly, for years before a general election. He’s out there in the manner of a Medieval king in front of his troops, meeting his opponent with the armies arrayed behind them. You find out which tribe is stronger, which is more unified and where the cracks might be. It tests the man as a leader, as a debater. Good at PMQs? Better able to stand up to Vladimir Putin in the great councils of the world.

The idea this is where you can forensically examine the Government’s record earnestly is like complaining Rugby’s too rough as England play Australia in a world cup final, declaring chess a better sport in world where physical prowess is no longer needed. You’ll have missed the point. And get de-bagged by the Exeter Agrics 3rd 15 and have a pint poured down your crevice into the bargain. And quite right too.

Every politician comes to the dispatch-box for the first time promising “a new politics”. I’ve little doubt that Demosthenes promised a new style of politics in the Ecclesia two and a half thousand years ago. But what Corbyn will find is instead of testing Cameron’s mettle, and demonstrating his own, this Consensual PMQs will allow Cameron to calmly state the Government position in front of the largest political audience in the country; and neither man is tested. Far from being more democratic, the public have less information about the vital character of the people they are auditioning to lead the country. Corbyn is not doing his job either as a party political warrior, or leader of the opposition testing the Prime minister.

If you think this new style of politics, a consensual, nice, quiet PMQs is an improvement on the old one, you’re a po-faced, sanctimonious bore, who’s simply ignorant of what PMQs is for. The reason Corbyn sought to change the rules, is because he’d be demolished under the “old politics”. He’s going to get demolished anyway, but he’s just spiked his own guns too. As for a “national embarrassment”: nonsense. The commons bear pit is held up as an example of proper scrutiny not of legislation, but the man too. Our top politicians are held to account by the legislature in a way few outside the westminster system are, and many envy us that.

 


(Not PMQs, Not “England” either, but the point remains. The Bear Pit has its uses).

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Jeremy Corbyn.

What fun!

First, I am not a neutral observer. I am a £3 Labour supporter and Voted for Corbyn. I have a £10 bet with betfair at 23:1 (and a few quid on the others to ensure I come out ahead, whoever wins). But it looks like the Labour party is going to do it. A man who’s barely spoken to most of the PLP in decades, preferring the company of like-minded trots.

And this is where it’s going to get interesting. The hard-left is clannish. They do not tend to mix much. They may have apolitical friends who share some interests, but no-one actively from the other viewpoint. They’d no more be friends with a Tory than with a botulinum bacillus. These people congregate in certain professions: academia (social science faculties), local government and trandes-unionism. And given their concentration, and total unwillingness to befriend people with heterodox views, they’re liable to underestimate the support for their opponents, and imagine themselves a majority.

Amongst these people, Corbynmania has taken hold. They flock to hear their man speak, repeating lefty shibboleths in the manner of a Strawbs tribute band. The tunes are the same ones the older ones in the crowd remember, but there’s something lost in the delivery. “You can’t get me, I’m part of the Union” somehow no longer fits the zeitgeist of this individualist age.



The problem the Corbynistas face is they are few in number, and strikingly poor at arguing. Jezbollah himself is rather thin-skinned, becoming angry when questioned forensically about supporting this terrorist group, or sharing platforms with that despicable anti-semite.

Now I am sure Corbynladen is a decent guy. It’s just he’s spent decades in politics agreeing with those around him about what must be done. Meanwhile his solutions were tried, not just in the UK, and were everywhere found to be disastrous. The world moved on. Politics in successful countries is about the management of liberal, free-market democracy. How much do you tax? what is the most efficient way to administer benefits? Who manages what? It’s clear that the state is not very good at managing stuff, even if it’s an excellent financer of services. But those who yearn for the state to reclaim the commanding heights of the economy are going to be disappointed, whether or not they get their way.

Tories are currently at 42%, Labour at 28% in the polls, for what they’re worth.

The electorate, when he’s elected, will look at him, give him the benefit of the doubt for a bit. I dare say Labour may enjoy a Corbyn bounce, as people remember what great tunes were played in the 1970s and 1980s. Then the reality- the months-long wait for a telephone or washing machine from state-run stores, British rail as a by-word for inefficiency and delay, waiting lists for cars, the rubbish piled in the street, the dead going unburied and an attempt by hard-core marxists to assert that a country should be run not from the ballot box, but at the point of production.

Corbyn will spend his time as leader answering questions about his relationship with, and comments about organisations most people in the country regard as our enemies. He will be torn to shreds. If you think the “Tory smear machine” is working him over now, they’ve barely started. As for the Tory party itself – it’s a studied example of masterful inactivity. Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.

So what will Labour do? That depends whether Working Class Eyebrows, Mrs Balls, Liz Magnolia-Paint et al. can regain control of the party. But I suspect the rot has gone too deep. The influence of the unions in the constituency parties is too all-pervasive. The whole party has been attracting hard-leftists since Miliband won his leadership battle. These people are going to try to retain their grip the party. As the hard left see Labour as THEIR party, and they’re not going to give it up.

There’s going to be a battle, not for the soul of the Labour party, that’s always belonged to people who still describe themselves as “socialist”, but for the brand. Will the next electable centre-left politician to be put before the British people be under the Red Rose of Labour, or will Labour’s grown-ups split to form a Social Democratic party, perhaps a take-over of the Vacant Liberal Democrats? The question is who gets the Labour brand: the hard-left or the modernisers? Labour’s problem is the Germ of socialism in the party’s DNA leaves them vulnerable to exactly what has happened: a takeover by socialists who’ve kept the faith.

My guess is that this time, the Labour party will not be able to kick out the loonies. Parties are weaker, smaller and so more beholden to people with *ahem* excitable views. So there will probably be a split. The next non-Tory prime minister in about 2030 will likely not be from Labour.

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Immigration: Some is good, More isn’t Necessarily Better

The reason the UK is attracting migrants from all over the world is, thanks to our Empires, our Language is the word language. Migrants are more likely to speak English than French (which is why Algerians and Senegalese tend to stay in France). There are a huge number of people from all over the world already living here, so migrants can plug into existing communities.

Thanks to the invention of free-market, liberal democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, and especially since the rejection of Socialism in 1979, the UK has a vibrant and diverse economy, that can absorb near-enough everyone who wants to come and play. The UK is richer than Poland, and despite Labour’s best efforts, remains a better place to live than Eritrea. We have secure property rights, which means foreign oligarchs can stow their looted wealth in the form of London property, where the likes of Putin cannot confiscate it.

The UK is a prosperous country, with an open economy, secure property rights and a relatively liberal society. British people are tolerant of immigrants and the UK enjoys good community relations.

We do not have ID cards, and the police cannot stop you on a whim. Thus “illegal” immigrants find it easy to find work in the grey economy. Because we have a relatively generous welfare state, there are a lot of jobs – fruit picking, cleaning, domestic labour, care etc out of which the UK-born have priced themselves. The prize – indefinite leave to remain – is within reach of almost anyone who can get here, and work undetected for long enough.

That is why people cling to the axles of lorries to leave France, and it is mostly something of which we can be proud.

People, self organising in Calais, for the right to cling to the axle of a Britain-bound Lorry.

Immigration is good. It does not follow that more is better. That tolerant and open society requires that the majority in it are born, and steeped in it from birth. The main fear the native population has from immigration is communities – the Bradford Pakistanis for example who come to dominate an area, and then cease to integrate. Integration into mainstream British life is vital, if that open society is to be maintained. The Ugandan asians and the Afro-Caribbeans who came over in the 50s and 60s have integrated. Sikhs and Hindus do. Arabs and Eastern Europeans do. Nigerians do.

Despite our success in integration, we cannot take the millions waiting to cross the mediterranean, though in practice we do end up taking most of those camped at Calais. In making it hard to come (sales of wetsuits, and the discovery of corpses in Holland and Norway are indicative of the risks people are willing to take) we limit the number prepared to try.

We cannot allow too many people brutalised by war, ignorant of how to survive in a liberal society to come, lest they are tempted create their own ghettos like Bradford. Too many people, and the incentive to learn English properly, and the imperative to integrate that comes with it, is lost. And it is the Ghettos that people object to, not immigration. It’s not race, it’s the compatibility of culture and the rate of change of a society; a rate of change that many of the people neither asked for, nor want. When a majority of children in the local school are not British, people question the change: Is this for the best?

So. Net migration to the UK is running at 1-200,000 a year. We add two million people every decade or so. This is why the UK is climbing the charts of National GDP, not falling. We’ve even got Germany in our sights. UK to be the 4th Largest economy (US$ Nominal terms) on earth in the not too distant future. Immigration is at such a level that the UK has halted its relative decline. Whatever the economic benefits, there are limits to immigration consistent with a liberal, tolerant and free society, especially from countries without a tolerant, liberal and free culture.

Labour, in office openly sought to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”, hoping immigrants would vote labour in perpetuity. The risk comes when the electorate never bought into the plan. When it was suggested there were limits to migration, people were told they were “racist”. The idiot poujadism of UKIP was the result: leading to the return of openly Nativist politics to the mainstream of British politics. The contempt Labour have shown for the electorate on this issue, is one of the main reasons they are facing oblivion now. The mixing up of Migrants with refugees and asylum seekers to suggest “we” have a moral duty to take people, is just continuing this ignoble tradition of contempt.

People want to stem migration of illiterate spouses from Pakistan, but these people are coming to join relatives already here. People want to limit Lithuanian bricklayers, or Polish plumbers but these people are covered by EU free movement of people (and in any case are vital to dealing with the shortage of housing…). We and the EU need to do much more to stem the flow, humanely, of very poor people from Africa, Afghanistan and Syria, and this includes aid and intervention to put their countries back together. So this leaves skilled migrants from outside the EU such as Nigerian doctors, Malawian nurses or Chinese people coming here to study, all of whom are particularly helpful to the UK economy, if there is to be any reduction in the number of Net Migrants.

It’s all counter-productive. Cameron deserves blame for setting a silly target on a whim, and Labour deserves blame for encouraging the boil to fester for a decade and creating the problem of legitimacy immigration now faces. Any attempts to control immigration mean putting bureaucrats in control of whom a Bradford Pakistani can marry, or whether a Somali can work as a Taxi driver. It’s going to throw up hard cases and inhumanity, as any bureaucratic system inevitably must. This sticks in my libertarian craw. There are going to be Canadians and Australians not granted leave to remain despite holding down decent jobs and living with British people. And all this because of silly targets, and the failure of some communities to integrate. We cannot stem the immigration people do have a problem with, so we’re abusing immigrants who’re going to accept our norms and be accepted.

We cannot take them all. The right-on left should stop the sanctimonious moral preening of pretending we can. We cannot stop them all coming. The idiot right should stop demonising people who’re mostly just trying desperately for a better life for themselves and their families.

We are lucky to have been born here. Part of our duty is to protect the legacy of good governance and social harmony we’re bequeathed. This legacy needs protecting from immigrants who won’t ever share our values, if too many come at once as well as from idiotic populists on the right, dog-whistling to racists and from left-wing extremists who hate our society and way of life, and who wish to see it swamped to spite an falsely concious electorate which repeatedly failed to vote socialism. Net migration is running at 1-200,000 a year. We can cope with that, just. Especially if they come from a variety of places, both terrible and less terrible. But not much more than that, really.

There you have it: An unsatisfying fudge, like so much of the democratic politics that have created the society immigrants are prepared to risk so much to join. Much more fun to read a moral absolute – a Guardian editorial telling you how brave and noble the immigrants are, or the Daily Mail’s dehumanising sub-fascist rhetoric. But the extreme position is almost always wrong, and the unsatisfying fudge of democracy works, despite appearances.

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The Calais Migrant Crisis

Thousands of people are camped at Calais, and are trying to board lorries as they cross the English channel on the Eurostar or Ferries. Most of these people are from Somalia, Eritrea, Syria and Afghanistan. The tone of the debate is ghastly. On the one hand you have UKIP and the Tabloids suggesting “sending in the Army”, describing the people pouring into Europe over the mediterranean hoping to reach Northern Europe “cockroaches“. This is just grotesque lack of concern for a dehumanised outgroup of desperate people. On the other, you have people saying “let them all in”, which is just vapid moral posturing.

They aren’t coming because our benefits system is a soft-touch. They’d probably find the French system easier. They’re trying to cross the Channel because of the Language – they’re more likely to have some English than French, and they believe (rightly) it will be easier to find work in the UK than in France.

We cannot let the millions (yes, millions) who’d come, were the UK to open its borders, settle at will. Why not? Because to let such a huge number in would be disruptive to the society the migrants want to join. Liberal, free-market democracy is a fragile thing, and if you let millions, with a limited grasp of English, brutalised by war, and completely unprepared to cope in a sophisticated market economy, you risk destroying the thing that brought them here in the first place. Government has a duty to the people who’re born here, to manage the flow of people so that it minimises the disruption to society and culture. People feel “swamped” by the flow in certain parts of the country as it is, by people who are pretty similar. The country can absorb lots of people, and doing so will be good for the country, but it cannot be a free-for-all. The differentials in wealth between the UK and Somalia (for example) are just too great, and travel too easy for people to move at will. Lovely though the thought of a world without borders is, borders remain an unfortunate necessity.
Free movement for Poles and Czechs isn’t a problem because they share most of our cultural assumptions, come from up-and-coming countries limiting the ‘push’, and are sufficiently educated to find work in the UK. Yet even the few hundred thousand Central and Eastern Europeans who’ve moved here are vastly controversial. The number of potential migrants from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia and North Africa is an order of magnitude greater. Poles are pretty well educated, and find work easily. This is not true of most Somalis and Eritreans. There isn’t enough low-skilled work for our own British-born morons, without importing desperate africans to compete with them for what little there is. Poles haven’t been brutalised by decades of war, and so don’t tend to form violent Criminal gangs. Somalis do. And so forth. If you pretend to not see a difference between a Polish graduate, and a Somali goatherd because it troubles your left-wing, right-on moral bubble then you need to grow up. Immigration is a good thing. It doesn’t follow that more is always better.
But then we cannot let people die of hunger and cold in “jungle camps” outside calais. Nor can we let them drown in the Mediterranean. So what are the destination countries to do? First admit the problem around Calais, whilst acute, is as nothing to that on Lesbos or Lampedusa. The Greek and Italian authorities are swamped by the tide of humanity moving north over the sea. This is a whole-Europe issue, and it requires a European solution. Unfortunately that means confining and processing migrants, and repatriating those who fail to gain the right to enter. It means shouldering our share of the burden. This needs to be robust, but humane and if there’s to be anything like a solution, rather than booting the problem into the long grass, it will probably involve a vast migrant camp or camps, built and administered by the EU, on a mediterranean island, or somewhere on the North African coast.
This is an issue with no easy answers. But if your solution involves shooting migrants, or, on the other hand, letting them all in, you’re not part of a serious attempt to solve the problem.
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