Brexit - I Was There When Medusa Died

Thursday, June 23^rd,

The Lexington, Angel, London.

 This is the way the world ends, apparently.

There was, in fact, a bang; as Nigel Farage’s face loomed over the packed bar, the Devil Himself projected onto the wall as he retracted his concession of defeat and set about making a victory speech,  a glass soared through the air and caught him just below the right eye. I thought then and think now that the thrower’s aim was, for a drunkard, quite impressive. The glass hit the screen and dropped to the floor intact and un-shattered; a portent of the embattled UKIP leader’s career, perhaps?

There were, of course, plenty of whimpers as the night dragged on. The Lexington crowd was solidly pro-Remain, a fact of which I had to be aware for the sake of self-preservation.

Demographically, I fit the homogeneity of the Lexington lot. Ethnicity: white, British. Age: 24. Social status: middle-ish class, student, massive but ignorable debt, soon-to-be-graduate; the kind of person who was expected to vote Remain. The Lexington lot did; I did not. I was very firm in not doing it.

But Nigel Farage had taken a glass to the face, and those constituencies declaring themselves for Out were met with a torrent of curses and howls of derision. I thought it faintly ridiculous that those declaring themselves for Remain, predictable results like Islington (decidedly more in favour of the EU than Mr. Corbyn, the local MP), were met with loud whoops and cheers. As though they had ever been in doubt! These were not, I wanted to say, victories for Remain. These were not, I was tempted to point out, the places Remain needed to do well; these were not, I muttered below the jubilant cacophony, going to be enough. The pattern had emerged early on and it would not be broken by the cosmo-metropolitan vote.

But I would do no crowing of my own, for my own safety’s sake. Not until I had worked my way in; not until alcohol and defeat had made the crowd a little more pliant.

I earned my first audience by virtue of being a rare and endangered species. Always the darlings of the cameras, we pandas and polar bears; I found an eager if slightly perplexed set of listeners in the various media crews that were picking their way across a floor of dropped glasses and spilt pints.

“Have you found anyone here in favour of leave?” I asked a camera crew who turned out to be from the BBC’s Panorama program.

“No,” was the reply.

“Oh,” I said, something of a slut for this type of thing, “Well, I did.”

So it was that I gave the first of my interviews to the BBC. Others followed: French radio, a German freelancer, Danish and Dutch and Japanese TV; all seemed quite interested the reasons I voted to leave but very interested by my presence, dissent embodied, in a One-Party Pub.

I recited, three or four times, my list of grievances with the EU – its anti-democratic nature, its constitutional protection for its neoliberal and austerity-based economic policy at the expense of social protection (veering as quickly and concisely as possible between Maastricht, the SEA, the Fiscal Compact, Euro Plus, its foreign policy, its response to the migrant crisis) – and what I hoped a Brexit could accomplish.

But all, without fail, asked me what it felt like being alone amongst the Remainers. “Well,” I said, “I’m choosing my words with care. I’d rather not be lynched whilst still an EU citizen.” It was a joke. But I remembered the glass, still rolling under feet and beneath the big screen, crashing against Farage’s comically giant face. Whilst not a violent group, tolerance has its limits.

I was asked, too, for my thoughts on the nature and the character of the Leave campaign. And I remember thinking, only after the interviewers had moved on to corner one tear-stained Remainer after another, that I should have linked the two questions.

Doubtless, as I told the journalists, the Leave campaign had been characterised as one which played to peoples’ divisive nature, their prejudices and their base fears. That was all true, all of it, up to a point. But it was by no means ubiquitous. “We might,” as I made a point of saying to the BBC camera crew, “have benefitted had you taken more notice of us.” The us in that sentence is the group, sometimes called ‘Lexit’, which campaigned, for the most part, on the old Socialist case against the EU. “Slightly to the left of Tony Benn,” as I described my position to another interviewer.

What I didn’t say, and what I should have said, was that, whilst its rhetoric always affected the sentiment of unity, the truest and most real and ingrained ‘divisiveness’ was to be found in the Remain campaign.

It had been in evidence shortly before my first interview. (Or it could have been between interviews, on a brief foray upstairs.)

 “Sheep shaggers!” shouted an Irish lass as the results from one of the Welsh constituencies came in.

On referendum night, watching their own Decline and Fall, the young progressives and liberals of The Lexington had found their inner Waugh.

“From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.” 

Remain shared in Waugh’s high-minded disdain for the poor, the working class, the proles. It has been a feature of their campaign. But where Waugh used it for vicious (but effective) humour, it has expressed itself through Remainers as a bitter, exasperated inability to grasp the truths of the lives of others. (This is one of the things which separates Waugh from Orwell. Both writers and thinkers on the subject of class, both social conservatives by instinct, but whilst Waugh lived nothing but his heritage and position, Orwell lived Down and Out in Paris and London.)

These people, who have not felt the effects of immigration and who have not seen their jobs, their wages, their industries and their very livelihoods torn from beneath their feet by an aggressive, corporatized and corporatizing EU, have defined themselves by their lack of empathy. It’s easy to laugh at the poor, as Waugh demonstrated; it is much, much harder to be one of them. It is not to their credit that the Remain campaign didn’t even try to understand.

Now, one of the advantaged of being a smoker (and maintaining what the late Christopher Hitchens called the master-servant relationship with alcohol) is that one is privy to the best conversation. Whilst out and about in pubs or clubs, it is invariably to be had in those little concentration camps known as smoking shelters. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the smoking shelters of Britain are the Anglosphere’s equivalent of the old coffee houses of Vienna.

So it was that, as the clock ticked and the moon sank and the sun ‘found a fresher morning’ (to borrow from that other sort-of revolutionary, William Blake), I took my post-referendum analysis away from the cameras and began to put it to the gathered masses that, actually, those of us who voted to leave are not all racists and xenophobes and blaggards.

It was there that the Medusa effect of the EU, which I had long suspected but for which I was short on evidence, made itself known.

The short-form version of the theory: it was the goal of the political establishment, in its British and American and EU and faux-internationalist incarnations, to paralyse us with fear; fear of the consequences of a decision to break with received opinion and the established norm. EU protectionism was a head with many snakes: if you vote to leave, we were told, it would undermine the cause of peace. It would undermine international co-operation. It would undermine trade. It would undermine the cause of social justice. It would undermine workers’ rights. It would undermine The Economy, Stupid. It would break with a long and multifaceted and noble ambition – European integration – that would negatively affect us in every conceivable way.  It led, with the internal logic of an illogical position, to claims about WW3, about war with Russia, about the collapse of the global economy, about the rise of racism and fascism and the far-right.

Outside the Lexington, in the smokers’ zone, I was met with all of these concerns.

But I was also met by a group of people who were genuinely surprised that an alternative was possible. I give myself some credit as a communicator – I think some of it is merited, given the minds I helped change before and the minds of my fellow smokers I helped change after the referendum – that I was able to put forward the case for Lexit without meeting the same unfortunate fate as Farage’s projected head.

The first, a fairly pretty long-haired lad who was quite obviously angry with the way the night was going, seemed never to have heard anything but a right-wing case for Brexit. He, like the rest, was parroting Medusa’s lines: what about this? What about that?

But, as anyone familiar with the tale – or at least one particular version of it - will know, Medusa’s weakness was herself. It was Ovid who, having popularised the story of Narcissus (from which we get narcissism), drew on narcissism in his tale of Medusa’s downfall.

So it is that, when faced with the truth of itself in the mirror, and when its advocates are faced with the same, the EU begins to fall. Presented not with the faux-progressive’s lie, and faced instead with the true nature of the EU – its neoliberalism, its lack of concern for migrants and workers and the poor, its prioritising of banks and capital and labour over livelihoods and wages and people – its one-time advocates become freed of the spell and the EU itself becomes paralysed by the fear it created. It’s why, I suspect, the British vote will be followed by referendums in France, in Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Hungary; it’s why Project Fear will, given the right conditions, hurt its creators.

As Perseus, having won, mounted Medusa’s head on his shield, so Britain may, if it is bold, do the same.

This was born out by my experience at The Lexington, by my talks with those, once fervent and feverish Remainers, with whom I shared a common purpose and set of goals. Once bathed in the light of its true nature, the EU will – if we play it right – collapse, its constituents leant anew to an ideal but one founded, where the current vision is not, on the people, on democracy, and on a vision of the future defined not by divisiveness and inequality but by social justice and progress from which no one is left behind.

By Brexit, we have at least opened that vision as a possibility. Had we voted Remain, that door would have been locked and double-bolted. We must, of course, fight for our new future; but we can at least say that it is possible.

Joe Cox - A Political Tragedy.

There is a rule, for troubled times, that I would see adopted en masse. I think I would formulate it as follows:

Be most wary, and most critical, of those who implore you not to politicise a tragedy.

Two things seem, to me at least, to be invariably true. First, people who make that request (or demand) are always quickest off the mark. Second, they always have a very political motive. That motive tends to be first conservative, the shielding of a view or alliance or policy from criticism. Once that is achieved, and the criticism forestalled, space is opened for something much more assertive.

“How dare Clinton use Sandy Hook to score political points,” began the NRA following the massacre of schoolchildren in 2012. “How dare she politicize this tragedy?!” Then it progresses: “Guns are not the issue. Gun control is not the issue. Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

This sort of thing is not limited to the political Right, of course. Liberals, and the Left, are guilty of the same. Donald Trump is a nasty narcissist and it’s quite possible that he’s clinically stupid, of that there can be little doubt. But the liberal Left’s reaction to his statements after the Paris attacks, and the recent assault on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, tended toward that depressingly familiar refrain: “Donald Trump should not politicize this tragedy!”

It continues: “Religion is not the issue. White people do bad things too. Hate has no religion,” and so on.

This has become the default response, the preferred recourse, to any statement made in the aftermath of tragedy. It’s incredibly popular; it’s also deeply cynical. It seeks not only to pre-empt criticism and close down debate but also to create a setting in which assertions can be made – “Guns don’t kill people,” “Hate has no religion,” – that are themselves explicitly political. How dare you politicize this issue; that’s my job.

So it has been particularly depressing to note the way in which the public, and some politicians, have responded to the brutal murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox.

Granted, the official Leave and Remain campaigns have declared a temporary cessation of hostilities. I am not sure that that is quite so proper and praiseworthy as has been claimed. In any case, that has not stopped observers and participants, especially on the side of Remain, making the most shameless political capital out of the murder, and of the murderer’s alleged political affiliations.

So here we are again. David Cameron, firmly of the opinion that we should not politicize the tragedy, begins to say all the right things about hope not hate, joy not fear, diversity not intolerance, et cetera, ad nauseam. Never mind that, when not banging on about The Economy, Stupid, in the course of the referendum campaign, he has made those same soundbytes and platitudes and niceties his rhetorical tools in service of the Remain faction. But no, not now. Times have changed. He is no longer a politician, he is a human being. He has no opinion on the referendum; how could he following such a tragic event? No, no, he is not politicizing the issue at all.

Others, lacking Mr. Cameron’s experience and gift in the art of trickery, have not been quite so subtle.

The character of the murderer, who it seems was both mentally ill and had links to far-right and neo-Nazi groups, must say something about the state of politics and of political rhetoric in this country. We must not politicize the issue, but surely the toxic atmosphere of the referendum debate is at least partly responsible for this tragedy?

Alex Massie, writing in The Spectator and presumably just as keen as everyone else to avoid politicizing the tragedy, wrote, apolitically of course, that the blame for this horrible crime lies at the feet of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and the casually racist Leave campaign. A political statement? Of course not. Heaven forfend that anyone might make one of those in the aftermath of tragedy.

Massie was not the only writer at The Spectator to offer their thoughts on the matter. Those familiar with Rod Liddle are, if they have any sense, disinclined to assume that anything he writes is meant to be considered sincere. One suspects that the sentiment of his piece, entitled ‘RIP Joe Cox. Let’s call the referendum off as a mark of respect.’ was meant in earnest but not the claim itself. I was surprised to hear Douglas Murray, on Newsnight, express ‘some sympathy’ with the idea.

But there are some – quite a few, judging by the number of signatories to the petition on Change.org – who do sincerely believe that the referendum should be called off.

Whilst put online before the murder of Jo Cox, there are a large number of people, supported by ‘news’ outlets like The Independent which has gleefully reported a surge in signatures since the event, who have been moved to support it precisely because of the killing. What is this if not a political statement? The petition’s argument is that “Britain is a parliamentary democracy and that parliament, rather than a national plebiscite, should determine whether Britain stays in the EU.” What is that if not a political statement? Asinine, to be sure. Fatuous. Nonsensical. Unintentionally ironic. But a political statement is certainly is.

This whole thing is an ugly mess. It is made especially ugly because capital is being made on lies and at the expense of democracy. Is this really the way we wish to mark Jo Cox’s legacy? With deceit?

You are well within your rights to be wrong. You are perfectly entitled to use this murder to support your argument. “The murderer was a Nazi, Farage is a racist, don’t vote Leave” is utterly contemptible, but you have the right to be stupid. But don’t you dare try to excuse yourself of the charge of politics. You are making a political point, you are politicizing a tragedy, and you should bloody well stand up and acknowledge it.

Hate Farage? Vote Leave.

"Vote leave and you'll get Boris, Gove and Farage," we're told. Here's why that might not happen.

I received some small amount of flak for the suggestion, made in writing elsewhere, that Donald Trump might serve an important and positive function in the progression of American Democracy.

I stand by that assertion, based as it is on a truism that I consider to be uncontroversial: anti-establishment populism, which arises from disenfranchisement and alienation from the political process, is defeated by its own success.

The Tea Party, to draw again on the American example, which spoke to and emboldened a large sect disaffected with a centrist and neo-liberalised Republican Party, earned modest (but overstated) success in the congressional and senate elections of 2010. Trump is the logical next step for Tea Party voters who saw the small fruits of their labours as evidence that so-called anti-establishmentism could be an effective, successful position.

Trump is now the black hole at the centre of their galaxy of contempt whilst the Tea Party itself has become all but irrelevant, and the senators and congressmen it supported (like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin) are having to live down, in their campaigns for re-election, that fact that they have been in office – and of the establishment – for the past six years.

What is being portrayed almost everywhere as a new phenomenon in democratic politics is, in fact, a return to a very old one. We have had more than two decades during which Left and Right politics and governance have been absent from the thrones of power. The last new phenomenon was the seemingly ultimate victory of centrism and neoliberalism – Clinton and Blair’s Third Way – in the early ‘90s, since when the old parties of the Left (Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US) and the Right (the Conservatives and the Republicans) have remained more loyal to The Third Way than they have to voters who, in reality and to a large but by no means total extent (many people are genuine liberals, of course), are not reliable, devoted centrists but partisans of the old ideologies.

Anti-establishment paragons and pariahs are not, then, anti-establishment so much as they are anti this establishment. What they want, whether they are of the Left or the Right, is an establishment that looks, sounds and thinks like them; one that shares their world view, which is (for all it may often sound a- or anti-political) explicitly ideological. In particular, they want to feel as though it is they who make the establishment.

The Tea Party’s success, which was to embolden a movement that has led to Trump securing the Republican nomination, has come at its own expense. It was the means; the presidency, and breaking that office from a decades-long status quo, is the goal.

On this side of the Atlantic: much has been written about support for UKIP from working class regions and communities that were once of the Labour tribe. And it is certainly true to say that UKIP, like Trump, has been and will be the beneficiary of votes from the Old Left.

But I fail to see how this continues to perplex so-called analysts and talking heads. The reason for it is very simple to understand; the Old Left is not liberal. Indeed, there used to be a healthy disdain for liberals amongst groups that considered themselves true Leftists. (The late Christopher Hitchens once described liberals as “dangerous compromisers.” Some of us maintain that view.)

The Old Left, particularly the working class Left, has not benefited from liberalism as it pertains to the interrelated issues of economics and immigration, and has been betrayed by a Parliamentary Labour Party still packed with the ghostly disciples of Blair.

Moreover, Eurosceptic and Europhobic members of both sides of the hidden divide feel betrayed, with some justification, by party élites who have sought to enshrine Third Way policies beyond the reach of sovereignty; to remove the ‘British’ prefix from domestic politics in favour of the diktats of a continental commission. This, politics under the EU, is a trickle-down philosophy that removes the people from the decision-making process; members of the demos become the subjects to whom decisions are applied rather than willing supporters offering affirmative consent at the ballot box.

The response to this disenfranchisement has been, as in America, the rise of reactionaries and populists on both sides of the hidden divide, but (again, as in America) particularly on the political Right. UKIP may take votes from Labour, but its founders, funders and most of its key members have come from the Conservative Party. Its charismatic, almost totemic leader, Nigel Farage, who trades in anti-politics and on an ‘everyman’ image, was himself a member of the Conservative Party until ’92, when he resigned his membership in protest against Maastricht and, along with other members of the Bruges Group, became a founding member of UKIP.

But the referendum ‘debate’ (though it is barely worthy of the title), as is so often the case in big political ‘moments’, has imprinted, on our collective consciousness, an impression of UKIP itself that is now wholly inaccurate: that it is a united political force.

Regardless of the result of the referendum, but especially in the event of a vote to leave the European Union, this will be exposed as one of the great lies of the campaign. The existing divisions between the leading members of UKIP are, for a party of its size, remarkable. It is only for want of space in the media narrative that they have not become fatal. Once that space opens up, I suspect they very much will be.

Nigel Farage, still the face of the party, has been sidelined over much of this referendum period by the official Vote Leave campaign, which he does not support but which his party’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, does. Farage and Carswell are enemies not only in private but also, given the time and space, in public. Another high-profile Tory defector, the appropriately named Mark Reckless (who was an MP before his defection and is not an MP anymore), was publically opposed by Nigel Farage over comments the former had made about immigration. Reckless accused Farage of arbitrarily changing party policy without consultation and without consent.

Reckless is now a Member of the National Assembly for Wales, serving under UKIP’s  Assembly leader, the unscrupulous serial litigator and generally dodgy Neil Hamilton, who is yet another high-profile UKIP figure happy to publically denounce his nominal leader. The same is true of Susanne Evans. Once Farage’s dauphine, one of UKIP’s most successful spokespeople and the author of its well-liked manifesto, Evans was purged from the party after Farage’s decision to rescind his resignation. She, along with Reckless, Carswell, Patrick O’Flynn (former Farage spin doctor and UKIP’s most prominent MEP), Godfrey Bloom and UKIP founder Alan Sked, form at least one – and probably more – faction within UKIP which is opposed to the party’s leader and barely leashed to the idea of unity by a common purpose.

Now, I have written elsewhere (and will write again) on what I consider to be the right reasons to vote in favour of leaving the EU. This does not quite number amongst them, but the idea which underpins it is not so far removed as to be entirely unrelated.

Consider what I have written already: the Conservative Party has been wedded to a centralist, neoliberal philosophy since at least the days of John Major. During that time, and in service of the EU which protects that philosophy, the party’s Eurosceptic faction (and much of its base) has been very deliberately restrained, ignored as often as possible. Consider that disenfranchisement, as I have argued, creates dissent and leads to reactionary and populist resistance. Consider that UKIP, defined by its resistance to the EU and receiver of defectors resisting the Tory mainstream, is the embodied response to that disenfranchisement.

Now consider what may happen should we vote to leave the EU. The Conservative Party will be split; gone will be the days in which centrism was its guaranteed approach. The voice of the party’s right wing will have been freed; the leader of the party, in a bid to hold it together, will have to make concessions to that faction. That faction will believe it has a chance to shape the party’s future; its voice, its arguments will be important. Freed from the certainty of centrism, those pushed to UKIP, whether they be grassroots activists or party members and perhaps even elected officials with close and recent ties to the party (O’Flynn, Carswell), would at least be tempted to return. The deep division within the party remains, and its internal squabbles (coupled with the heightened influence of its more illiberal constituents) will harm its chances in local, regional and general elections.

Farage, meanwhile, is still popular amongst those UKIP voters who have remained loyal but is deeply unpopular amongst its high-profile members. Some have left, others see him attempting to reposition the party for a post-Brexit future and mount a leadership challenge on the grounds that its future should not be defined by a man from its past.

Most of its supporters, united only in their rejection of the EU’s anti-democratic, neoliberal attitude towards economics and immigration now find that their differences are far more potent than their similarities. Many begin to drift back toward their old allegiances, whether on the Right or the Left. A decline in party membership advances the cause of those looking to oust Farage, who, in his customary fashion, refuses to go quietly. Bitter and protracted disputes, played out largely in the media, give the impression of a party utterly divided. UKIP begins to slide in the polls.

Farage may emerge victorious, but one man does not a party make and any personal success is likely to be short-lived. George Galloway and the slightly more serious Robert Kilroy Silk provide unhappy evidence that popularity, like relevance, is fleeting and fickle.

Alternatively, he might lose. Embittered, largely friendless and demonstrably angry, he might mount an ill-fated challenge as an independent candidate but the result is likely to be little different to that of the scenario in which he wins. Still, he’s a media darling; we’ll see him again in one form or another.

But the point is this: there is, as I think I have shown, at least a plausible case to say that a vote to leave the EU, far from legitimising UKIP, may be its undoing. Without a party (or at least with one bitterly divided) and shorn of the support of previously disaffected Tory and Labour voters, Farage’s personal stock might rise but his political chances will not, and the aftermath will be a gruelling period of factional disputes, infighting, and declining support.

Leaving the EU pops the centrist bubble, the mainstream parties diversify, voters return to their old ideological factions having been emboldened by the new political possibilities, and UKIP – and eventually Farage – are confined to that unpleasant period of our history under Europe.

Think about it. It’s not impossible.

Friends Don't Threaten Each Other, Barack.

Friends Don’t Threaten Each Other, Barack.

Not in a healthy relationship, anyway.

Time and memory are precious commodities in politics, made so by the fact that they are in short supply. But I invite you back to 2013 and the occasion of the G20 summit in St Petersburg.

Britain had been branded “just a small island” by Vladmir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “No one pays any attention to them.”

David Cameron saw this as the perfect time to emulate the best, most foppish and lecherous Prime Minister Britain never had. This was his Hugh Grant moment. Britain, he said, was great. Sorry, is great. We beat fascism and slavery with Dick Francis and One Direction.

Absent from his sterling riposte (aside from any retort to the comments also reportedly made by Mr. Peskov about Russia owning Kensington and Chelsea) was a very important qualification.

The qualification is an inconsistency (I do not say paradox); one that never seems to be caught in the open but is detectable by its scent and the vague sense that something is happening just out of eye-line and ear-shot. It is a dog doggedly dogging in the dark; that unsettling thing that you seldom see as you stroll through the woods but that you are quite sure exists.  

And it is unique to the Better Together tribute act. The Brexit campaign has an alternative which is at least rhetorically cogent: Britain is great and therefore capable; it is great enough to, so-to-speak, stand alone. Moreover its greatness is served best by standing alone; it is only being held down by the burdens of a failing foreign power.

Cameron’s omission of this inconsistency is also one of Remain’s biggest flaws. It seems, at best superficially and at worst seriously, incongruous to speak of the boldness, patriotism, bravery and greatness of Britain if your argument tacitly acknowledges that we are reliant upon others for our status.

I make no secret of my own partisanship. Though I could hardly be accused of patriotism, I do not think that Britain is necessarily reliant upon Europe for its status.

But David Cameron undoubtedly is. George Osborne is, too. (Not for nothing does one cultivate a cosy relationship with Christine Lagarde.) The belated concession to those clamouring for a referendum forced them to gamble on that most important of currencies in politics: legacy.

So, whilst Mr. Peskov elicited such a quaint but firm response, Barack Obama was met not only with what we are obliged to call the red carpet treatment but also the personal and absolutely slavish devotion and indebtedness of the leader of a supposedly proud nation.

We should not kid ourselves on this: Barack Obama, speaking in the nauseatingly ‘candid’ tones of a dear ‘friend’, has left us with no room to doubt the depths of esteem in which he holds the junior partner in the special relationship; a real and valuable relationship disgraced by the monarchical attitude of the President and by a Prime Minister with an expression befitting only a sufferer from Stockholm Syndrome.

The conclusion we should draw from Obama’s speech is that Britain serves American interests by acting as its 51^st state lobbying within the borders of Europe; both a prostitute and a pimp. Out of Europe, Britain ceases to perform that useful function and is then, as Mr. Peskov stated, “just a small island.” No one will pay any attention to us, not least the United States, who will happily push us to “the back of the queue.”

A friendly reminder, apparently. Well, as the old saying goes: with friends like these, who needs enemies?

We are fortunate that the political scene in the United States suggests Mr. Obama was speaking not for any future administration and barely even for his own. Even Anne Applebaum, normally as astute as a tactical nuclear weapon, has noticed the almost perfectly bipartisan move away from exactly the type of trade deal (TPP and TTIP) that Obama has chosen to weaponize.

Whether Trump or Cruz, Clinton or Sanders, the next president is not likely to accelerate any free trade deal of the type for which he is an increasingly lonely advocate. And I know for a fact that I speak for many, on both sides of the Atlantic and of the supposed political divide, when I say that I would not be sorry to see daddy confiscate those particular toys. Let us continue to be the largest single foreign investor into the United States and still register a trade surplus without signing away the future of the NHS in a bid to appease any desire for ‘harmonization’.

But seldom is it that monarchs are concerned with reality, and Barack Obama is the most monarchical President of my living memory. He seems to have given no consideration whatever to the necessary trade-offs required by our continued membership of the European Union; democracy, accountability and sovereignty were not factored into his speech.

Then again, this is a President more at home in the company of our own queen than he would ever be in the House of Commons. His rhetoric is smooth and polished, his presentation superb, but this is a man whose tenure in high office only flourished after the Democrats lost both the House and the Senate. This is a man whose astonishing hubris (he claimed of his own election that it marked the moment the oceans ceased to rise) was only ever constrained by democracy and fit only to be enacted by decree. The leader of the free world has always preferred to act by executive order, often imposing policies less extreme than those he presented to his political opponents in the certain knowledge that they would be rejected. His lasting democratic achievement is the making of democracy redundant: rendering Republican speaker John Boehner’s position all but untenable and creating the very divide he has since used to justify his royal prerogative.

And this is a President whose promised “Change We Need” and “Change We Can Believe In” has been so remarkable by its absence that huge swathes of voters are now, apparently without self-critique, flocking to the candidate, Hillary Clinton, he once (and rightly) portrayed as the antithesis of that change. Millions more are so fed up with business as usual that they are helping to create the biggest protest movement since the Dixicrats walked out of the Democrats’ convention in ’48.

Barack Obama is popular. And, if popularity is a measure of success, then he is successful. His words and his warnings will probably resonate in the halls of the debate over Europe. But he will leave office with his legacy that of a commander by diktat; one whose actions demonstrate an absolute failure to work within the confines of democracy and to whom the notion of accountability and due process is seemingly alien. Little wonder, then, that he has many friends in the pro-EU establishment.

But, stripped (as he is soon to be) of the regalia of his esteemed office, his arguments for our continued membership are less convincing than those of even the least competent junior minister. That he used the privilege of his power to threaten the people of the United Kingdom is a repugnant abuse of his position, evidence of the vacuity of his cause, and an abuse of the friendship he affects to laud.           

Germany: Europe's Alpha & Omega, Beginning & End.

Germany: Europe’s Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.

Sunday, March 13^th – Chancellor Angela Merkel faces three regional elections in the German states of Saxony-Anhalt, Baden-Weurttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate that are being described, by various observers, commentators and news outlets, as a ‘test of support’ for the Chancellor’s stance on the refugee crisis.

‘Test’ is one way to describe the process, I suppose. Whilst frau Merkel might wish it to be otherwise, the sudden rise of the anti-establishment and populist AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which is presenting its regional campaigns as a national referendum on Germany’s open-door response to the crisis and which is polling well above the 7.1% of the vote it achieved in the European elections of 2014, is pulling the narrative away from regional affairs and on to questions of national policy.

International policy, as well. AfD, which is the political wing of the Pegida movement in all but name, is but the closest to home of the myriad of anti-immigration, anti-EU parties that are now in bloom across Europe, resplendant in colours of both the Left and the Right. Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the Jobbiks in Hungary, the FPO and the Freedom Party of Austria, National Front in France, UKIP and roughly half the Tory cabinet at home – the political allegiances, goals and methods of each may differ drastically; what they all seem to have in common, and what those that tend toward anti-immigration sentiments certainly have in common, is their opposition to Angela Merkel and the policies of the CDU-led coalition government in Germany.

Angela Merkel is the public face of Germany’s official response to the migrant (or refugee) crisis. Given the unity of the opposition to that response across the right and the far-right, anti-Merkelism seems a fitting and necessary addition to their labels.

There is an essential qualifier to what I am about to say and I beg that you withhold your judgement until you have seen it: they are right to be opposed to Merkel and the German response.

This is not to say that any position defined by xenophobia is correct. This is not to give credence to any argument that is by its nature anti-migrant. But it is to acknowledge that migration policy should be open to discussion (and the argument that the encouraging of mass-immigration is itself an anti-migrant position), and it is to acknowledge that the imposition of policy without an elected mandate, nationally or Europe-wide, is anti-democratic. They are right, then, in that this issue sheds light on the cracks in the foundations of the European Union; cracks that are becoming fissures as the weight of Germany’s influence continues to grow.

You might, as I do, feel by instinct that we should help the poor and the desperate and the destitute. You might, as I do, feel a profound anger at an international community that has shown itself to be powerless to stop the savagery and the barbarism of the conflict in Syria, to which we have contributed bombs and planes and very little else. You might feel, as I do, that the promise by our own government to take in 20,000 refugees over five years is at best a negligible one.

We would, then, share the conviction that these refugees deserve far better than their lot.

But to take that conviction and hide behind it, to throw in the faces of those opposed to mass-migration the accusation that they are unfeeling and uncaring, is to be uncritical. To praise Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders is to give her credit that she does not deserve, based on the presumption that it is something that it’s not.

That decision, which I suspect was intended solely (or mostly) to win popular support for the CDU in Germany, represents the impossibility of unilateral action in the context of a continental political union. What it amounted to was the creation of a policy in Germany, for German party-political interests, which has now been imposed upon every other member state in the European Union, especially those in what has become known as the Balkans Route, without any form of democratic debate, without their consent, and without any consideration for their ability to deal with its consequences.

It shows the arrogance of a continental power, on whose industry and economy the European Union has been built, deeming either that its own interests trump all other concerns or that what is in its own interests must, by definiton, be in everyone else’s interests, too.

This arrogant assumption of power is, in fact, no assumption at all. Power in both the Eurozone and the European Union has never been properly codified to rest in any one elected body; it has its own freedom of movement and, like money, like people, it is drawn to the one place power is known to coalesce of its own volition: power itself. Germany, by virtue of the strength of its economy, is the power in Europe. As such, it has become not only the economic hub but also the political centre of the continent. Dealings between EU member states, and between the EU and other nations, happen through Germany with the official apparatus serving as nothing but a seldom-used fig-leaf.

Greece, which harbours the firsts ports to which migrants and refugees arrive from Turkey on their way to Germany, provided just one of a series of examples of Germany’s monopoly on power. When Syriza swept to electoral victory on the promise of rejecting and then reversing the economic doctrine imposed upon them by the Troika, it was Germany which led the counterrevolution. It demanded control of the Greek economy. When it failed, it demanded the imposition of its own austerity doctrine on the Greek state, effectively using different words to make the same demand.

The charismatic Yanis Varoufakis, during his brief stint as Syriza’s finance minister, primarily dealt not with members of the Eurogroup (comprised of the finance ministers of those countries within the Eurozone) but with Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister and architect of the ‘deals‘ imposed upon Greece that Syriza had been committed to reversing. When Varoufakis attempted to discuss the changes proposed by Syriza, he was met with a steadfast refusal to compromise. Shauble’s view was, according to Varoufakis, that “‘I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything.”

Varoufakis was subsequently removed from the negotiating team, resigning from his post in the Syriza government shortly afterwards, and Schauble got his way.

Greece now has unemployment standing at 25% and it remains to be seen whether it will be able even to service the debt on the last round of bailout funds. Its economic policy, created in and imposed by Germany, leaves it in an untenable position. And now it is expected to shoulder the burden of Germany’s immigration policy, even as that same policy has led to countries along the Balkans route invalidating the Schengen agreement by unilaterally closing their borders. That move has been condemned by frau Merkel, but yet again it is a display of arrogance. Germany is allowed to unilaterally set the immigration policy of the European Union (and beyond – Macedonia has been a candidate for accession since 2005, is not yet a full member, but is amongst those with new fences along its borders) but others, like Hungary, are not allowed to do the same.

Germany is, meanwhile, leading the team negotiating with Turkey on the issue of migration. The vast majority of boats arriving on the borders of the now-dead Schengen zone leave port in Turkey for an often treacherous journey across the Aegean. Given the nature of the Erdogan government, it would be very difficult to imagine the Turkish negotiating team doing anything other than exploiting the migration crisis to suit their own ends: visa-free travel for Turkish citizens within the EU in advance of fasttracked admission to the Union proper. And, given the nature of the Erdogan government, it is tempting to ask quite how committed Turkey is to stopping the boats given that each one serves their political purposes quite nicely.

Any deal struck between Germany and Turkey with provisions for faster Turkish integration with the EU will be yet another example of EU policy set and pursued by Germany without even the pretense at democratic negotiation with its supposed equals.

This is the state of things as they are and there is no hint of any improvement to come. The migration crisis, the nature of which warrants an article of its own, is playing into a crisis in Europe; a political union in which the only demos with any power are the German people. It is they alone whose votes, under the current system, have any real influence on European policy. We have our own referendum to focus on, but should we vote to stay, there will be another referendum soon afterwards; a referendum on the nature of the European Union under the guise of a German general election.

The domestic debate in Germany, a debate of domestic policy, is then not domestic at all. Pegida and the AfD, along with parties like the Greens, represent a continent’s worth of dissatisfaction with a deaf establishment. And it is a damning indictment of the structure of the European Union, a provocateur of the extremes to which the disenfranchised will become suseptible, as well as the complete and final proof of its lack of anything even resembling a democratic process, that burden of responsibility now rests almost entirely on the shoulders of German voters.

You may interpret it as you like when I say that it is a burden we should do our part to alleviate them of.