Brexit has worked

 Everyone who is saying Brexit hasn't worked is wrong. It has worked. It did exactly what it was supposed to do.

It didn't do what they said it would do - of course it didn't. They were lying.

The aim of Brexit, what they were working towards for forty years and more, was to turn the UK into a plutocrats' playground.

The only reason that we haven't actually become that yet is that governments led by May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak have proved too incompetent, or possibly too pusillanimous, to follow through on the initial breakthrough which was to get Britain out of the EU.

(In my view, the involvement of Russian influence could be seen as coincidental. The Russian regime undoubtedly did its bit to secure Brexit and was delighted when it happened, but its influence was limited in the context of forty years of dedicated work by plutocrats and their enablers. In another sense, Russian involvement was not a coincidence because Russia re-emerged from the collapse of the USSR as a plutocratic state, and was therefore completely in tune with the Brexit plot.)

Getting us out of the EU was only one step in the plan. Once out we could much more easily be turned into a low wage, low security, high risk, high profit and toxically filthy countrywide freeport.

While we haven't got there, we're well on the way, more by luck than judgement. Behind the terminal dithering of the May-Johnson-Truss-Sunak axis, the plutocrats' aims are still in sight - removing our human rights, removing our right to protest, making voting more difficult, etc, etc.

And the argument about whether Brexit has "worked", or making Brexit "work" is nothing more than a massive shell game, which the Tories know and Labour have fallen for. Brexit was never meant to work for ordinary people, but Brexiters have to keep pretending that it was meant to until it's too late for us to do anything about the destruction of our rights and our democracy.

Luckily the British public is proving to have some common sense, and Brexit regret is beginning to take hold. There is now only one constituency in the country where a majority of voters still think Brexit was a good choice.

But common sense has to be turned into action, and we are now in a race. Either we move decisively towards the defence of our democracy and our rights, or we will have reached a point where so many of our rights have been dismantled that it won't matter any more. We have to fight and to keep fighting, now and into the foreseeable future. The battle will be long because the plutocrats will not give up; our determination has to be at least as long as theirs.

Roe v Wade and Brexit

 A is for anti abortion. B is for Brexit. C is for chaos.

The anti abortion movement in the States and Brexit here in Britain are the same thing, wedge issues chosen by people with right wing authoritarian tendencies with a long term plan for asserting control over an entire body politic. They are on the surface utterly different issues, but they each performed the same function. In each case it took their proponents forty years starting in the 1970s to get their way. Each was chosen because of the characteristics of the country concerned. In the States anti abortion could be made to appeal to powerful and rich right wing fundamentalist churches. The churches’ views had to be nudged into shape, but that too was part of the long term project. In the UK Brexit / sovereignty was particularly powerful because of the gentle but tenacious grip imperial nostalgia had on large numbers of British people. The fact that Brexit became Russian policy is tangential to the main thrust of native and global right wing forces. Arguably Brexit only became Russian policy after twenty years of tabloid headlines convinced them that it was possible.

A key feature of a wedge issue is that it divides people. Abortion in the States and Brexit in the UK have divided the population so fundamentally that the kind of broad alliances that sweep megalomaniacs from power have become much more difficult.

In each case the headline issue itself was not the main point. Each in a way was a staging post, a symbol of what was wanted. The main issues were what was needed to achieve each and what was the overall purpose. The aim was for right wing policies to be embedded in the governance of the country concerned, and for the temper of that governance to be gradually altered so that policies which tend towards the fascist became acceptable. Some things were done differently and some similarly. In both countries right wing media were very important, and very compliant. Regulators, if not already powerless, needed to be rendered so in order to enable media to peddle lies. Gerrymandering and the capture of elected office were used in the States, in the UK the revolving door between government and business, and the favouring of donors.

Both strategies in the end hinged on the fortuitous* appearance of a maverick – Trump in the States, Johnson in the UK, both people for whom principle and the rule of law were meaningless. But the mavericks are just the icing on the subversive cake, they are by no means the whole story – they could only get to where they got with the support and nurturing of many other people, and they could only achieve their ends with the active involvement of others, eg Trump’s packing of the Supreme Court aided and abetted by the house republicans’ abuse of procedure. And in the UK, the number of people still willing to pay Johnson's bills is astonishing. Principle and the rule of law had already become meaningless for many; they were just not quite so egregious in their rule breaking.

*I'll stick to "fortuitous". Some would argue that the development of political and media culture in our two countries made the elevation of mavericks inevitable. I would say more likely, but not inevitable.

And in both cases, that is not the end. The right wing justices on the Supreme Court have made it clear that they will be moving on further rights, and in Britain the government have moved on to dismantling our very effective human rights apparatus. This was always intended; the aim is to concentrate power in the hands of a few, and to demoralise and disaggregate the rest.

As I see it, the way back may be easier in the UK than in the States. Movement away from fascism requires an alliance of the centre and the left groupings which are usually fragmented. Fortunately, British voters are on the whole more sensible than the parties that represent them. Anti Tory tactical voting is now well established when circumstances require it, and Johnson has become a liability. One election may change the temper of British politics, though there would still be a very long way to go to root out the corruption that has been seeping into the UK’s system for several decades. But I fear the road back for the USA is much longer and much thornier.

What to do with a repentant brexiter

 When somebody finally says they regret having voted for Brexit, we are confronted by the problem that there is on the face of it so little that we can do that's positive. Even if we have a repentant Brexiter in front of us, "I realise I was wrong", the automatic response is "It's too f****** late now, isn't it???" and to say so shoutily because there is no other relevant emotion to fit the moment.

So we need to construct something positive to move on with and get the Bregretter to engage more positively with whatever might happen next. As far as Brexit itself is concerned, it really is too late. That is a large part of the problem when confronting the future. The Remainer knows the battle is lost; the Bregretter is confronted by knowing that they can do nothing to undo the decision they made in 2016. The upshot is collective helplessness - a helplessness on which those who brought us Brexit feed.

Getting back into the EU on the terms we had is a chimaera. We're not going to get back in on those terms. If we do want to get back in, we will need to build a majority in favour of rejoining on third country terms, and the majority will need to be big enough and stable enough for the EU to take us seriously. That is going to take a very long time.

But Brexit was not the final goal for the Brexiters; it was always only a stage in the game for them. They are still here, they have nowhere near finished, and they are still prepared to lie, cheat and steal to get what they want.

Our Bregretter, usually, has to start by admitting to having been conned. That in itself is quite a hard thing to do, and especially hard if there is no apparent upside to the admission.

So, perhaps, stage one of the conversation is to say gently, "You were conned weren't you." If they're still a bit reluctant about it, you can say, "It's all right being conned. They've been lying for forty years. They've had half the media on their side, telling their lies for them for all that time. It's not surprising a lot of perfectly intelligent people were taken in."

(As an aside, when somebody complains about the effects of Brexit, it is perfectly legitimate to ask them if they voted for it. The trick is to do it in a gentle and friendly tone.)

They might say, "If only I could vote again". Even if they don't, you can say, you can't get that vote back, but you can be better prepared for next time.

"Because you have to realise there is going to be a next time. The next thing they're going to do is soften you up for trade deals that weaken our workers' protections, or maybe our environmental protections. They'll be working on softening you up to back selling off the NHS. And they'll do it exactly the same way - they'll lie to you, they'll plant stories in the papers, they'll tell the same lies over and over again, and they'll do it for years if they have to. They lied about the EU for forty years to get their way.

"So what are you going to do to stop yourself from falling for it again?"

You might debate around that for a while. (At this point a point of beer probably comes in handy.)

And at the right moment, you say to them. "It's going to take an effort. You can't just say to yourself, 'I won't let it happen again'. You've got to work at being prepared. You've got to start noticing how the right wing press works. Better still, stop reading the Mail / Express / Telegraph - they lie to you all the time. If you're not prepared to give them up, then what you're saying is you don't mind being lied to, and you're setting yourself up for being conned again next time. So you need to be prepared to do some hard work - and I can help you with that.

And then the conversation continues....

The TL;DR version of this is, every Bregretter can be a project. But the aim of the project is not first and foremost to get us back into the EU. The aim of the project is first to turn us back into a democracy.

Addendum

What about those who voted for Brexit and haven't changed their minds? Debating with them (not "arguing" with them, but "debating" with them) has both purpose and benefits too. Firstly, people do change their minds, but they don't change their minds over something like this as a result of one conversation. It happens most often over a period of years as a result of many, many conversations and experiences. Yours might be one in the chain that leads to a change of heart. You will never know, but, if you choose to do it, it's still worth doing. Secondly, when you debate with someone, particularly on social media, you are not just talking to them, you are talking to everyone who reads the conversation. Even if the person you are talking to is apparently a brick wall, others may not be. The first rule about talking to convinced Brexiters, though, is that is should never be compulsory, whatever the putative benefits. Do it if you choose to, but never feel that you have to.

Some thoughts on Maria Caulfield’s letter of resignation

Maria Caulfield, MP for Lewes, has resigned her position as Conservative Party Vice Chairman for Women in protest at the PM's position on Brexit. (I love the irony of a woman being called "Vice Chairman for Women".)


Here are some comments on her letter of resignation.

Dear Prime Minister

It is with regret that I am writing to inform you of my decision to resign as a Vice Chairman of the Conservative Party following the collective agreement by Cabinet on the Chequers Brexit deal.

Having attended the briefings provided for members of Parliament, I cannot support the direction of travel in the Brexit negotiations which, in my view, do not fully embrace the opportunities that Brexit can provide.

It is noticeable that in all the resignations we have had, nobody has been specific about what these alleged benefits are. Much has been made, for instance, of a trade deal with the USA. But the detail is missing. And the detail is important, when the President of the USA is clearly intent on starting trade wars at the drop of a hat. And also when he has said specifically that his intention is to make the NHS pay more for their drugs. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/15/trump-threatens-use-us-trade-talks-force-nhs-pay-drugs/ In trade negotiations with the USA, we will be at their mercy. The logic that we gain in trade negotiations by being part of a large bloc escapes Ms Caulfield.

It is also noticeable that she, like the others, makes no proposals of what alternative scheme is better than the Chequers deal. We suspect that that is because she knows there is none.

For me the backstop agreement for Northern Ireland was neither necessary or constructive for the future prosperity of the UK. Having strong links to the Republic of Ireland I feel the backstop position is not appropriate and should have been rejected. It has been used by the EU as a way of blocking a mutually beneficial deal.

Ms Caulfield’s strong links to the Republic of Ireland should make her aware that the commentary from the Republic is almost uniformly about what a disastrous piece of stupidity Brexit is. (https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-britain-has-gone-to-huge-trouble-to-humiliate-itself-1.3558995)

And again Ms Caulfield fails with the details. Theresa May has promised there will not be a hard border. This is integral to the Good Friday agreement. How does Ms Caulfield propose to ensure this? (She should, please, not mention technological solutions – if the technology existed to secure free movement for businesses across a hard border, it would be in use at hard borders all over the world. It is not, because the technology to do this does not exist.)

It is also disappointing that in connection with Ireland she only mentions prosperity. If she really has strong connections to the Republic of Ireland, she must be aware that peace is at least as important to them as prosperity. There is still too much violence in the island of Ireland, but it is incomparably lower than it was before the peace agreement. The absence of border controls forms an integral part of the peace agreement. Ms Caulfield’s hard Brexit risks bodies and lives in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. How does she justify this?

The policy may assuage vested interests but the voters will find out and their representatives will be found out. This policy will be bad for our country and bad for the Party. The direct consequence of this will be Prime Minister Corbyn.

Well, obviously some of us rather hope that the result will be bad for the Conservative Party. But who is finding out what here, and who is being found out? Most of the finding out lately has been about the lies, malpractice and illegal actions of the Leave campaign. Very significant overspending by Vote Leave; collusion with other organisations, like BeLeave, to cover up the overspending; the murky source of the massive amounts of cash donated by Arron Banks; his connections with the Russians – his initial confession to one boozy lunch, which rapidly magnified to four meetings, and now to eleven. Illegality and foreign influence leave Brexit with nothing but a fig leaf over its naked opportunism. If Ms Caulfield really respects democracy, she will agree that the British public, knowing what they know now, deserve, and democratically need a vote on the final deal.

Since the announcement on Friday my constituents, whether they voted leave or remain, have contacted me in large numbers to say they do not support the deal and it would therefore be more appropriate to have a Vice Chairman who can confidently defend the proposal.

That is very interesting, given that many of her constituents have considerable difficulty reaching Ms Caulfield at all. How many open access surgeries has she conducted herself this year? And the remain voters will have been contacting her to say they do not agree with this deal because they do not agree with any deal to leave the European Union.

None of those who have resigned, including Ms Caulfield, have said what they would actually do. They do not have any alternative proposal that solves any of the issues facing us. While they promise unicorns, the government is preparing to stockpile food, and plonk generators in the Irish Sea – that is how bad reality has become.

Ms Caulfield owes it to us all now not just to say that she disagrees with the Prime Minister, but to give clear and detailed proposals as to how she would solve the issues about our relations with the EU, the position of businesses, specifics about control of immigration, very detailed specifics about how she proposes to solve the problem of the Irish border while respecting the Good Friday agreement, and many other issues.

I want to thank you for the opportunity of being the Vice chairman for Women, especially during the centenary year of suffrage.

We should be grateful for one thing. At least Ms Caulfield has not told an outright lie in her resignation letter as Boris Johnson did.

The final deal: what would we say?

First published in LibDemVoice on 12th February.

If there is a referendum on the final deal about leaving the European Union, what would we say? Here is my starter:

Background

We recognise that the vote to leave the EU was fuelled (in part) by dissatisfaction with growing levels of inequality, and felt pressure on cultural values and identity. So we need to address a) the reasons why staying in the EU is better than leaving, as well as b) how we are going to address inequality in the UK and the identity issues tied up with some of our suspicion of foreigners. I think it is also important to make the point that staying in the EU is not the goal. It is a step towards our goal of ensuring that this country works for everyone, and not just the élite.

---

This is not just about the EU, it is about how we run this country, and about the fact that we can run this country better for the benefit of everybody in the EU rather than out of the EU.

1) The EU is not perfect, but neither is the UK. Leaving the EU would not take back control for us, it would take back control for the elites who want to rule us unfettered by considerations like human rights. An example is discussions within the EU about measures to combat tax avoidance by multinationals and the super rich, measures which have consistently been resisted by the UK government. Staying in the EU is actually more likely to help us make our own country work for everyone.

2) As the EU is not perfect, we need to work with other countries on securing reforms which are in the interests not just of British people, but of ordinary people all over the EU. These would include rules on tax avoidance, which we should embrace rather than resist; making rules of agricultural production and fishing more sustainable and fairer throughout the EU; ensuring that the single market works better for everyone.

3) While we work more closely with the EU, we will not allow that to be a distraction from solving the problems caused by selfishness within this country, for many of which the EU has been wrongly held to blame:

• We will rebalance funding to reduce regional inequalities throughout the UK.
• We will build more houses where they are needed, including a significant expansion of genuinely affordable housing
• We will reverse policies that have plunged millions into poverty or misery, and particularly the punitive policies being directed at unemployed, sick and disabled people
• We will end the deliberate underfunding and the creeping privatisation of the NHS
• We will change educational policy so that teachers can teach rather than constantly attending to targets
• We will work with the EU and with every other country in the world to reduce tax avoidance
• We will amend employment law to bring security and minimum standards to the gig economy
• We will attend to the pressures caused by immigration, including organising a fairer and more responsive system for funding local services put under strain by population growth

These policies reflect the standards and the approach we have always brought to our policies, as exemplified in our constitution:

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.

Our relations with the other members of the EU and our commitment to work for the people of this country are not in opposition to each other.

They are part and parcel of the same thing.

Theresa May

Published in LibDemVoice 1st Nov 2017

I have been struggling for a while to work out Theresa May’s mentality. I have read, as we all have, something of her origins – the vicar’s daughter who ran through a field of wheat. I am aware of her time at the Home Office where she adopted regressive policies in a pusillanimously oppressive way. I am aware of her stance on the referendum – I find it interesting now that people describe her as a remainer, when it seems to me that the most important thing about her stance at the time was its invisibility.

Then a single word popped into my head which seemed to have a great deal of traction, the word “provincial”. It comes straight from the pages of Trollope, and describes the mindset, which he sometimes satirised to great effect, of the solidly conservative yeoman class which ran the shires of England in the mid nineteenth century. There is much in common between then and now, times of turbulence when the world is changing, power can move with quicksilver speed, the very ground under our feet seems to be shifting, and those determined to hold what they have must work very hard to ensure that things stay the same. There is a concern about standards, loyalty, patriotism (though never stridently stated). There is a feeling that everything will be better if people know their place and stick to it. And there is a feeling that one must never question too closely or demand an account of the people who claim to rule on our behalf. The refusal to publish the Brexit impact papers comes to mind.

Above all these, the key component is a lack of imagination. Or, rather, more than that, there is a refusal to have an imagination. If you have an imagination, then you can imagine things being different, and then you can imagine the status quo being different, and, in the mind of the provincial, who knows what might happen then???

Theresa May is probably the best, though inadequate, answer the Tory party has to its current woes. And she is the worst answer the country could possibly have to its woes. To lead this country requires an imagination, and not just any imagination, but a global imagination, one that is capable of surveying the global horizon, comprehending the feelings and wishes of people in manifold other cultures and places, understanding what mighty and complex storms are coming, and envisaging how the British boat can be navigated through them. (As Brexit proponents try to bend the word “global” to their discourse, I need to point out that a global imagination encompasses the EU rather than discounting it.) But, instead of the global imagination we have a woman whose imagination cannot stretch to anything worse than running through a field of wheat, while she steers the entire country blindly but unerringly towards the rocks.

This is how to respect the referendum result

Originally posted 7th January 2017 on Liberal Democrat Voice.

I am frequently told that, as a “Remoaner” I must “respect” the result of the referendum. It seems to me that I am not being asked to respect it so much as to fetishise it.

Actually, I do respect it. I respect it for what it was – an advisory vote won by a wafer thin majority based on a mountain of lies.

Then, because I say that, I am criticised (virulently quite often) for being undemocratic and for not respecting the will of the people. And many people who did not vote Leave, and do not want to leave, seem to have accepted the line that the vote has happened and they must “respect” it.

But democracy is so much more than a single vote.

Generally speaking electoral votes stand, even if the majority is unsatisfactory. But that is premised on two conditions.  The first is that the voters get a chance regularly to change their minds. The second is that the voters were – at least relatively – well informed about the subject of their vote. All sides make their offers clear, and the media do a proper job of examining their claims.

Neither of these conditions applies to the referendum vote. There will not be a chance to change our minds about this one. Once we leave the EU, we will not be in a position to get back in for a considerable time. And if we do decide that rejoining might be nice, the conditions to rejoin will be the same as a new joiner, including having to join the Euro, which I do not see happening. So effectively, leaving the EU sets Britain’s course for at least a couple of generations. This vote is not sufficient basis for such a momentous and long term decision.

And the voters were seriously misinformed about what leaving meant. I blame both campaigns and the media for this. The Remain campaign was feeble, the most disorganised and ineffective campaign I have seen in British politics. Even Labour’s 1983 election campaign did not plumb the depths of this one. The Leave campaign was based on deliberate and sustained mendacity from start to finish.

The media failed completely to do the job they are required to do in a democracy. We do not have a free press in this country. We have a commercial press, which conforms to the requirements of its overseas owners, not the needs of the British public. Half the press amplified the Leave campaign’s lies; the other half failed to hold them up to scrutiny. In addition to that half the press has spent around the last twenty years softening the public up for this vote with an even longer sustained campaign of lies about the EU (in which Boris Johnson was a prime, and utterly dishonest, mover).

That is why I claim to be completely democratic in regarding this vote as inconclusive and this fight as unfinished (just as Nigel Farage was going to). To do anything differently would be undemocratic.

I want to stay in the EU

This post first appeared in Liberal Democrat Voice.

There has been a bit of a sea change in British politics in the last couple of weeks.

Since June 23rd Remainers have had to put up with their lot, accept the referendum result as if it were a binding expression of democratic will and start preparing for a post Brexit world, or face howls of outrage. I guess that is still the likely outcome, despite today’s court ruling.

But it has become more possible than it has at any time since the referendum to say publicly that I want to stay in the EU, and I hope very much that we find a way to get out of the fix that the vote for Brexit has put us in. Partly it is a matter of courage. Any expression of dismay with the result has been met with a explosive mixture of nastiness, aggression, scorn and abuse ever since. The level has not abated but I have begun to summon up the courage to take it on. Partly that comes from having worked out more firmly the reasons why I stand where I stand:

• The referendum was not an instruction to Parliament. It was a snapshot of opinion. Opinion was different before, and it has again become different since. (Current polls are around 52-48 for staying in – the margin Farage said he would not accept.)
• The majority was wafer thin, and it is quite right that our sovereign body – Parliament – should decide “whether” to pursue monumental, damaging and long lasting changes to Britain’s political and economic structures on the basis of such a tiny majority.
• The vote was won on the basis of a mountain of lies from the Leave campaign and therefore has no moral standing. I do not buy the subsequent lie that both sides lied. The Remain campaign indulged in what I regard as the normal level of exaggeration and selectivity of a political campaign. It never approached the industrial scale of the Leave campaign’s lies.

What has happened since has also stiffened my resolve. Every Leave voter I have spoken to knows exactly what the vote meant for them and everybody else. The trouble is they can’t agree. I have read a number of accounts applying the alleged stages of change to the result. I read one today. It said there are four stages: denial, anger, chaos, renewal. Brexit has not been going through these stages. Brexit has been chaos ever since June 23rd. Nobody, least of all the government, has a clue what is going to happen. It is not wise to plan our long term future on the basis of chaos.

So I want to stay in the EU. I want to be part of reforming it so that it works for its citizens, not its elites. And I want to be part of reforming Britain as well so that it works for its citizens, not for its elites. I want the people who voted to leave because they feel ignored to have a government that is interested in ensuring that they have jobs, houses, a health system and a future that works for them. That means massive change in our political priorities. It does not mean leaving the EU.