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.

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.

Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror

Mirror mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?

InstaTwitter and teenagers are reality’s attempt to fill the void occupied in Disneyworld by the magic mirror of fairytales. As is its fashion, reality’s attempt at emulation hasn’t been entirely successful, causing self-esteem to soar to the top of the list of first world problems. And the move has led to a movement, with some online communities taking on the ambitious challenge of affixing the word ‘shaming’ to every noun and adjective in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The evil queen in Snow White didn’t have to deal with this. She occupied a sparsely populated world in which beauty was objectively objective. As such, her magic mirror could, when asked, give her a definitive answer. It could, and did, tell the truth.

Ed Miliband owns a mirror. Nick Robinson was on good form when he interviewed Mr Miliband earlier this week, closing with this very silly question: “When you look in a mirror in the morning, do you see a prime minister?”

Mr Miliband’s response was predictable. “Absolutely!”

This caused me to wonder aloud and to myself for a few minutes. Was he the victim of some fratricidal prank? Had his brother replaced the mirror with a picture of Tony Blair, or even of himself? But I’m prepared to take him at his word, and accept that his mirror is, quite probably, lying to him.

Mr Miliband can perhaps be forgiven for seeking solace by imaginatively augmenting his own reflection. But the mirror is not the polls, and the mirror is not the papers, and the mirror is not his party. Those are the things that matter whether we like it or not, and those are the areas in which Miliband is failing; falling with no style whatsoever.

Let’s proceed in order, and take the polls and papers first:

From the Evening Standard and reported in The Guardian: “The Ipsos Mori research for the Evening Standard found the Conservatives on 32%, Labour on 29%, the Liberal Democrats on 9% and Ukip on 14%. Asked about Miliband as leader, the poll found just 13% of the public think he is ready to be prime minister and his approval rating was lower than that of the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg.

Among Labour supporters, 58% said they were dissatisfied with his performance as leader... Miliband now has the highest level of dissatisfaction among leaders of his or her own party since records began 20 years ago.”

From The Telegraph: “Only one in 10 women believes that Mr Miliband would be “more respected around the world” than Mr Cameron... Mr Miliband is also failing to convince Labour voters that he is capable of being an effective global statesman.

Only 31 per cent of people who voted Labour in 2010 believe he would be more respected than Mr Cameron, with 20 per cent of Labour voters saying the Conservative leader would be better.

Mr Cameron also beats Mr Miliband by a ratio of two to one on perceptions of his ability to make the right decisions “when the going gets tough”.

The findings suggest that the Labour leader’s personal style is likely to be a drag on his party’s fortunes. By contrast, Mr Cameron still appears to be more popular as a leader than his party.”

And, from The New Statesman: “The picture for Labour in Scotland is looking bleak. Latest polling from Ipsos Mori has found that 52 per cent of Scots will be voting for the SNP in next year’s general election, with only 23% intending to back Labour.” What does this mean for Labour’s chances at the next election? “[In the last week of October] it was estimated that Labour would lose 15 seats to the SNP. Now it could be as many as 36 of their 41 seats – a historic moment of major catastrophe in British politics.”

Granted, most opinion polls are junk. But they do influence public perception, and that, in turn, influences a large number of journalists. Narrative is possibly the closest we are ever likely to get to perpetual motion.

Speaking of journalists – Look at the names of the papers reporting these polls! People who write for The Guardian, The Observer and The New Statesman tend to sympathise with Labour. One expects a good deal of gloating from the likes of the Mail, the Express and The Sun, but support for Mr Miliband in the left-leaning newspapers is lukewarm at best.

Miliband and his team have drawn criticism from the likes of Guardian contributor Roy Greenslade, who had this to say on the Labour leader’s flirtation with The Sun: “The electorate can see through his attempt to find some kind of accommodation with anti-Labour publishers and editors: it reeks of hypocrisy.

There is nothing to be gained from the exercise. Indeed, it's much worse than that. It could cost valuable votes by suggesting that Miliband wants to be all things to all people. It lacks principle.

He goes on to mention criticism of the party leadership from Labour MP Jon Cruddas, which was leaked to The Sunday Times: “[The article] does not, however, mention the crucial argument advanced by Cruddas: the failing of Labour's leadership has been to create "cynical nuggets of policy to chime with our focus groups and press strategy".

“That's a good point, is it not? Miliband's press strategy is informed by a desire to appease anti-Labour newspapers. It is a barren and ultimately flawed strategy.”

Jason Cowley, writing in The New Statesman, is perhaps a little generous when he says that Miliband’s problems are not a result of policy (they are, at least in part) but does acknowledge that the Labour leader has problems with “tone” and that “increasingly he seems trapped.” George Eaton, of the same paper, tows a similar line: Miliband “needs to work on his personal brand.” And Dan Hodges, who professes to be a lifelong Labour supporter, writes in the Telegraph under a headline that includes the sentence “Labour has left itself on the wrong side of every debate.”

It’s not just a handful of disgruntled journalists, either. (The Left has good reason to be disgruntled, but more on that later.) The amount of dirty laundry flying around Victoria Street should come as a surprise to those who remember the hyper-efficient spin machine created and employed to good effect by New Labour.

Miliband has been criticised in public by Lord Prescott of the Working Class for his “timid” strategy and “underwhelming” conference performance. Ed Balls – the shadow chancellor, no less – expressed his “surprise” when Miliband forgot to mention the deficit in that same speech. Margaret Hodge, Tessa Jowell and Diane Abbott have all voiced doubts about Miliband’s proposed mansion tax. (All three are considering running for Mayor of London, but the issue, as far as leadership is concerned, is not that these people are being disingenuous but that they are doing it in public.) As if that weren’t enough, an article in the Observer on November 9^th claimed that the magazine had been approached by three “senior Labour MPs.” They spoke under condition of anonymity, and their claims should be treated with scepticism, but the article states that “at least 20” shadow ministers are “on the brink of calling for him to stand down.”

“There is a significant number of frontbenchers who are concerned about Ed’s leadership – or lack of leadership – and would be ready to support someone who is a viable candidate.” Their preferred candidate is the lovable Alan Johnson, though he has attempted to distance himself from the rebel alliance.

Those attempting to defend Miliband have contributed to his troubles. The likes of Neil Kinnock seem to think that the most effective strategy is to tell the dissenters to “shut up and deal with it.” Hardly a ringing endorsement, and the attention it has drawn seems to have hindered the loyalists’ case.

Meanwhile, the award for the most incompetent defense goes to Tristram Hunt for this remarkable effort: “I never believed the answer to Labour’s problems was to show people more of Ed Miliband. It was a ridiculous idea dreamed up by his advisers who have served him badly... It has been a complete failure. It is making things worse, not better. Ed has excellent qualities but that is not the way to show them. It is absurd.” (He then took to Twitter to claim that he’d been misrepresented. He wasn’t misrepresented, he was careless. Either he wants Miliband to be an invisible leader or he does not.)

Politics should be about substance, not image or personality. I know. It’s a well-worn phrase. Miliband has said it himself. "David Cameron is a very sophisticated and successful exponent of a politics based purely on image... I am not going to be able to compete with that and I don't intend to... I am not from central casting. You can find people who are more square-jawed, more chiselled. Look less like Wallace.”

Nothing to disagree with there.

I also know that it is far too easy to make cheap jokes at his expense. We can all do it. He has the smile of a serial killer, or the distant relative you’ve heard all those stories about. His face wouldn’t look out of place in a Dali exhibition, and so on.

But this is a man who still insists on making a mess of the very thing he claims to be against. This is the man who flirts with the Sun, who is physically incapable of eating a sandwich, who can give the same answer to four different questions in one interview, who makes giving money to the homeless look bad, and who is so obsessed with style that he thinks a good speech is one given without notes. (That particular stunt drew criticism from Len McCluskey, of all people.) This is a man who can’t even demonstrate hypocrisy properly!

He cannot lead his own party. He has alienated his supporters. He cannot handle the press. He will not challenge austerity. He will not debate Europe. He will not challenge the TTIP. He cannot challenge an unpopular Tory party. He offers nothing to the working class. He offers no Left alternative. He offers no alternative.

His magic mirror may lie to him, but it seems reality will not. If Labour win the next election, it will be in spite of their leader, not because of him. Some people warrant their ‘shaming’.

On the Consequences of the Election, and A Brief List of Our Ills.

When considering this supposed earthquake, we should be mindful of the fact that nobody can confidently predict its order of magnitude. George Eaton, at The New Statesman, reminds us that the European contest should not be seen as a reliable forecast of the general election. We will see, in the intervening period, no small amount of fanciful conjecture offered up by analysts in the media, but it is only after the general election that the true force of this earthquake, and any subsequent aftershocks, will be known. 

Friends, colleagues, and comrades (such as Joshua White, whose excellent blog can be found here), are wont to point out that, for all the flashing purple on Jeremy Vine's grandiose re-imagining of Risk, UKIP failed to gain overall control of a single council. They also point out that turnout in the UK fell slightly, resting at a measly 33.8%. (To put this in context, turnout for the 2010 general election was  65.1%.)

They are right to do so. But I caution against the desire to read too much into either statistic, and, more generally, against the desire to downplay the performance of Nigel Farage and his lackeys. It will have far reaching effects. (I speak in terms of domestic politics, but the rise of UKIP must be put into an international context, too. These elections have seen notable victories for Marine le Pen's Front National, the Danish People's Party, and Hungary's vile Jobbik movement. We have reason to be thankful for the presence of Alexis Tsipras and Syriza from Greece, but any Leftist jubilation should be tempered by the knowledge that Golden Dawn will be sending at least two MEPs to Brussels.)

The all but total annihilation of the Liberal Democrats hints at widespread public disaffection with the traditional third wheel of British politics. Whilst Nick Clegg (the skirting board of the establishment which so riles UKIP's supporters) performed abysmally in his ill-advised debates with Nigel Farage, I find it hard to accept the suggestion that the Liberal Democrat stance on Europe is the sole cause of their demise. Local council elections appear to support this thesis. There is a groundswell of anger and bitterness, directed at the Liberal Democrats, and, with only a year until the general election, they will be hard-pressed to win back those whose trust they betrayed when last they were given it. 

Clegg still has the support of Mr Ashdown, but there is a faction, somewhat nebulous in nature, which would gladly see him resign. (What better demonstration of his fall from grace than the suggestion that he may now be more popular with the Conservatives than with members of his own party!) Already we have seen John Pugh, Liberal Democrat MP for Southport, advocate a "Cable succession" during a BBC interview.  

I do not intend to make a habit of citing opinion polls. Fraudulent pseudo-science rarely makes for a decent source (and you can often guess at the findings of the poll by the name of the think tank or newspaper that commissioned it). But, for the sake of argument, let us take as gospel, or as at least a vision of truth, the figures from UK Polling Report. 

Further, let us assume that, in the absence of any defining, opinion shifting events between this moment and the day polls close next year, Labour will go into the election with a projected lead of no more than three or four points. The BBC published the findings of its own poll on the 24th of this month, predicting a Labour victory on 31%, with the Conservatives trailing on 29%, UKIP in third place and with a 17% share of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats in fourth with 13%. 

Based on these (admittedly ambitious) assumptions, or assuming that the figures are very close to the eventual truth, we can predict (and here I have used the 'swing calculator' from the UK Polling Report) the number of seats won and lost by each party. In this case, we that find Labour (with 320 seats to the Conservative's 246) are 6 seats short of the number required to form a majority government. 

I should mention another disruptive variable: we have no way of knowing how many people who have voted UKIP in the European elections will stand by the party in a general election. I know of many, some in my own family, who have voted UKIP in these elections but do not plan on repeating that act next year. Tom Clark, in The Guardian, claims to have collated evidence which suggests that 50% of UKIP voters intend to make that description of themselves a lasting one. If we accept that figure (and we have reason to doubt it, as we have reason to doubt every figure I have quoted in this section), we assume that UKIP maintains a share of the vote amounting to around 14%; still enough, Mr Clark suggests, for another 'earthquake'.

Now, allowing that all of this transpires to be true, we enter into the complicated business of negotiations, with the aim of forming a coalition government. And this is one of the two principal reasons for which I have warned against downplaying or understating UKIP's performance thus far. They might well replace the Liberal Democrats as the third largest Westminster party. In that event, it is they who will hold the most valuable cards; it is they who may make or break a prospective coalition government. 

Already we see some amongst the Conservative back benches who are advocating if not a coalition than an electoral pact with UKIP, to be drawn up in advance of the election in 2015. Now, a decent argument is presented in The Times, in the dubiously named column UKIPWatch, which suggests that such a pact is unlikely. As is so typical of reactionaries, those who advocate this pact operate under a false and naive assumption: that UKIP is a breakaway wing of the Conservative Party. In fact, if we look at those who have voted for UKIP, and those who are likely to do so again, we find that UKIP is as appealing to the 'grassroots' of the Labour party as it is to the same tier of the Conservatives. (This fact was picked up and reported in the press some time ago, but appears to have escaped the attention of some concerned Tories.) The column claims that almost as many UKIP voters are in favour of a pact or coalition with Labour as are in favour of a pact or coalition with the Conservatives. (The bipolar nature of its support base may well do more damage to UKIP's future prospects than the weighty and mostly justified political and social media campaigns did in the run-up to the European elections.)

Fine. We can dismiss the prospect of a pre-election pact as being unlikely. However, it hints at something which is potentially more troubling, and which is certainly more realistic: a reaction, expressed through unwelcome policy changes. It may well be the case that, if they are able to complete the apparently difficult task of getting their act together, Labour will not need or seek to depart drastically from its centrist position. A simple but effective step toward winning back disaffected Labour voters might be to signal an end to the party's absence from the debate over Europe and, at the very least, mimic David Cameron's pledge to push for reform. (That said, the promise of a referendum would carry more weight.)

However, for the Conservatives, the instinctive reaction is likely to be a slip to the right. It is, after all, a common criticism of David Cameron's version of the party (put with trademark wit and uncomfortable accuracy by Peter Hitchens in his blog for the Mail Online); they are too centrist. Too Blairite. 

A fear of this sort of reaction is my second argument in favour of caution. It does not require a pact or a coalition, and it does not require UKIP to maintain or increase its support between now and the general election. All it requires is fear, on the part of the Tories, that UKIP will scupper their chances at reelection, and sufficient pressure from within the party to prompt David Cameron to do what critics on his right believe him to be incapable of: to try and look like a Conservative prime minister. 

Except, of course, that he quite obviously is a Conservative prime minister. And this leads me to the conclusion of this post. Originally from a conversation held over Facebook, I have repurposed my reply, and given it a title of its own.

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A Brief List of Our Ills.

The current government is overseeing the clandestine privatisation of the NHS.

 It has orchestrated the selling off of Royal Mail under the advice and to the benefit of certain select investors (including the sovereign wealth funds of Kuwait and Singapore), none of whom could be described as standing for or representing the people.

 It has pumped billions into bank subsidies and bailouts with one hand, and pushed working people to take jobs on exploitative contracts with the other, whilst refusing to levy any meaningful tax or place any meaningful limit on the bonuses and salaries paid at the top of those institutions; paid to those whose reckless gambling with the money we earn (in an attempt to generate substantially more with which to polish their own accounts) is largely responsible for the collapse of the economy that they, and their allies in government, would have us worship.

The government has been reluctant to take any step toward the closure of the tax loopholes, through which £35 billion disappears every year.

 It is scrapping hardware and cutting jobs in the military in order to finance a renewal of a nuclear deterrent which may well cost us up to £130 billion over its lifespan.

It is also presiding over a simmering housing crisis, with homes now costing upwards of 5.5 times average earnings, to the benefit of wealthy landlords and at the expense of working and lower-middle class individuals and families.

 It prefers to award bloated contracts to companies who overcharge for awful service on the railways than to nationalise them, and it prefers the prestige of HS2 to investment in our otherwise ancient and deficient rail systems. 

It has done nothing to break up the monopoly of the energy companies, or to prevent them profiting from the fraudulent practice of raising energy bills when the price of oil and gas rises, fixing the price even when the price of oil and gas falls, and raising it again when the price of oil and gas increases. It would rather listen to lobbyists from those same companies than the people crippled, by the hand of the monopolies, by the prices of basic commodities. It would rather, at the behest of these companies, wreck the environment and peoples' quality of life by pummelling more gas out of the ground than by making any meaningful investment in renewable energy.

If these are the actions of a Left Wing Conservative, I shudder to think what will happen if the Right get the prime minister they wish for.

I could go on. But this is all made particularly relevant to the question of Europe because the government's own rhetoric has fuelled the rise of UKIP.

To the people suffering under the combined weight of these (and innumerable other) injustices, they say: Yes, isn't it terrible, and by the way, it's someone else's fault. Blame the homeless, blame the disadvantaged, blame those unable to work because they have been failed by the education system, and those left to rot with the refuse of modernity, and modernisation. But, most of all, blame Them. The Foreigners. Blame the rest of the world; it's their fault, after all.

And the funny thing is: this seems to be the message coming from all across Europe. The problems in France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Denmark: it's all somebody else's fault. It begs the question: how can it be the fault of foreigners when the foreigners think it's the fault of foreigners. Who exactly are these foreigners?

So, you see, whilst I hope you're right, that this will be a one-off (though I fear you might be wrong), it doesn't make any difference. This one vote demonstrates how effective the politics of blame can be. The true cause of our problems continues to be ignored.