Aunty gets preachy after the Referendum

I took too long to find this. It sprang to prominence again after the case where Trump called out the BBC in a clear case of dubious editing of one of his speeches (although the BBC denied partisan intent).

I heard of individual items now and then on BBC bias but I finally tracked the whole thing. It is the excellent News Watch, a site that has been monitoring the BBC for years and applying various kinds of analyses of bias to its outputs.

Some measures of bias are pretty simple -- counting the number of time spent on reporting items, or time allocated to speakers defending particular positions (see below).

It also touches on classic themes, reminiscent of famous work in the past, like the Glasgow University Media Group (still going, and with a list of the classic stuff here) which analysed less obvious signs of preference --where spokespersons were interviewed, for example (in the studio when their opinions belonged to a cosy consensus or, literally, as outsiders in the street).

News Watch has had a number of tussles with the BBC over the years, trying to get them to take its work seriously. The BBC will not accept any 'quantitative' or 'academic' analysis of patterns, but focuses only on individual programmes and claims its staff depend on their indefinable professional judgement to decide matters like 'balance' (although the Government imposes simple constraints during elections or referenda, for example, on the number of minutes that can be devoted to spokespersons from each 'side').

News Watch says: 

Mr Hutt [ the Director of the BBC Complaints Unit], ... does not believe that academic techniques of content analysis of the type used by News-watch can be used to assess bias. It boils down to that, to him, that 9:4 imbalance was totally irrelevant because any attempt at ‘simple quantification’ of BBC content is not helpful. He argues that views about the EU/EEC are not generally ‘binary’ and that in any case, someone who might be classed as ‘pro-EU’ might actually have been making an impartial contribution.

The last one is quite a good point. But someone classed as pro-Brexit might also be capable of an impartial contribution too, of course --evidently not for the BBC. 

News Watch has pursued its complaints to Government regulating bodies and to the courts, without success. The BBC remains safe from NW's criticism, regulating itself, applying its own standards of 'due impartiality', an undefinable term, meaning, in effect, whatever BBC broadcasters define it as meaning. The BBC has advisers and regulators of course -- they are often BBC people too.

News Watch is struggling with current ideological campaigns running at the BBC, principally favouring the usual politics of climate change and gender diversity, but here, I am obliged to their earlier work on Brexit -- and embarrassed not to have summarised it before.There is a large dossier on Europe and Brexit.

Highlights include that in one radio programme in 2018:

18 of the 24 [speakers]  were pro-EU/anti-Brexit; only three were anti-EU/pro-Brexit; two contributors made points both for and against; and one was neutral.  The imbalance was startling. The 18 who made negative points on Brexit delivered 3,824 words (76 percent of words spoken by guests in this category), those speaking positively 352 words (seven per cent), and mixed/neutral speakers 838 words (17 per cent). The anti-Brexit to pro-Brexit word count ratio was thus almost 11 to one. The ratio of pro-EU to anti-EU speakers in this category was 6:1. 

A radio programme 2018 introduced a feature called a 'reality check',  a mechanism that [the BBC] say is ‘objective’checking the reality of Brexit:'. The BBC’s ‘reality check’ correspondent Chris Morris...[had earlier] ...presented a five-part series called Brexit: a Guide for the Perplexed. His lens was so distorted that 18 out his 24 main interviewees were anti-Brexit and only seven per cent of the words spoken were from the withdrawal perspective.

After a complaint was received about a radio programme in 2018 a standard BBC defence was offered: 

that the BBC was receiving complaints that its Brexit coverage was biased from both ‘sides’, those who supported Brexit and those who opposed it. Because of this, it was risibly suggested, complaints of editorial imbalance must be unfounded.... two BBC bigwigs – Gavin Allen, controller of daily news programmes, and Ric Bailey, chief political adviser – confirmed why, in their view, the BBC’s coverage was completely impartial and met Charter requirements.... Today presenter Nick Robinson – now seemingly firmly ensconced as the Corporation’s defender-in-chief – was wheeled out to defend the relentless tide of anti-Brexit negativity.

Citing another careful content analysis in 2018, Craig Byers of the website Is the BBC Biased?:

painstakingly tracked every mention on BBC programmes of the word ‘Brexit’ between Monday and Friday last week (April 16-20).

What he found was a deluge of Brexit negativity. Craig’s blog needs to be read in full to appreciate the sheer scale. It permeated every element of its news output and even percolated down to BBC1’s The One Show and EastEnders, which had a pointed reference to these ‘tough Brexit times’. In the BBC’s world, Brexit was a threat to EU immigrants (in the context of the Windrush developments), to farmers, to interest rates, to airlines, to personal privacy (via Cambridge Analytica), to house prices, to security in Northern Ireland, and more.

Perhaps the best single item is News-Watch's  summary of the BBC's output 'The Brexit Collection', its own collection of Brexit programmes (so presumably a collection that represents the BBC's unbiased policy), broadcast post-referendum, when there was all the turmoil of negotiation and threats to organise Parliamentary coups reported in this blog, and a big push for a second referendum  News-Watch.co says its analysis shows :

Brexit came under sustained negative attack... Analysis by News-watch shows that only 23% of contributors in the programmes as a whole spoke in favour of Brexit, against 58% in favour of Remain and 19% who gave a neutral or factual commentary...Nine programmes and six features, amounting to 5 hours 20 minutes of programming, were strongly anti-Brexit, contained unchallenged predictions that civil unrest and rioting were now on the horizon and cast the ‘out’ vote in negative terms, inferring that the result had been a consequence of racism and xenophobia
 

...Nine programmes and six features, amounting to 5 hours 20 minutes of programming, were strongly anti-Brexit, contained unchallenged predictions that civil unrest and rioting were now on the horizon and cast the ‘out’ vote in negative terms, inferring that the result had been a consequence of racism and xenophobia

A specific example was :

Brexit Street (occasional series PM [a BBC radio programme] , 20 July – 12 August, 2016). This was a totally flawed exercise in which an atypical street with atypical problems was depicted as representative of the Brexit vote.The series began on Radio 4’s PM programme in July, and its premise is that a regular stream of reports from this ‘ordinary street’ in Thornaby-on-Tees (between Middlesbrough and Stockton) will illuminate the underlying reasons for the referendum vote and its subsequent impact on residents and the locale. However, research by News-watch has identified it is not an ordinary street at all. House prices there are a third of the national average, and the local council has taken a very high number of asylum seekers, many of whom have been housed in ‘Brexit Street’ itself. The reporter, Emma Jane Kirby spoke of houses peppered with satellite dishes, low home ownership, high unemployment and daytime street drinkers. The focus of the early programmes has been on the problems of the asylum seekers and the apparent negative attitudes of locals towards them, including verbal and physical abuse and Swastika graffiti painted onto doors. The initial choice of interviewees has also included a high number of unemployed people who are very angry with the government that it has allowed Teesside to become rundown. To date, the interviewees have all been drawn from the DE social grades, and thus in a fundamental overall sense, the choice of material cannot at all representative of the national Brexit vote. Thus PM is being deeply misleading in its claims about the series. They have chosen a street where problems related to recent incomers are disproportionately high, and the intent seems to try show that the Brexit vote was based heavily on such tensions. Clearly, they may have been an element of voting choice, but not to this extent.

 

The analysis is focused on radio programmes which is a limitation, and there is a lack of methods to analyses specific images in TV programmes -- they need Glasgow Media Group for that. Even so, the 'serious' TV output from the BBC -- news and current affairs -- clearly falls within the scope of this analysis.

 

 

 

Long fight still on

I can't believe it has been so long! Thanks to you loyal readers who are still accessing this blog.

 

In the UK there is still a strong Remainer core in the media and in Parliament, probably given added energy by the rise of Reform in the polls and the need to pin 'lies' on Farage (Reform's leader) as well as on Boris Johnson.

 

The anti-Johnson material was given new legs by the publication of the Inquiry into the Covid emergency, which highlighted indecision (!) in Johnson's Government, but also tried to pin the issue down (so the press said) to the  refusal to believe 'the' science about lockdown and its effect in saving lives. This is really still contested of course, but not for Lady Hallett who chaired the Inquiry. She is a lawyer.

 

The Remain Holy Cause was given legs by a long rumour of a 'reset' (I mentioned it in the February blog entry) which was to let us 'cooperate' with the EU and remove barriers to English sausages entering Northern Ireland in exchange for...well, there was the problem. It seemed two stumbling blocs were the French demand for extra fishing permits, and the likely cost of contributing to some sort of European defence fund. These now seem pretty unsellable to an increasingly disillusioned electorate, and/or likely to increase support for Reform, so the Cause is hibernating again.

 

The blessed Briefings for Britain is tirelessly arguing about the flimsy evidence for economic harm caused by Brexit, despite that being pretty well taken for granted in the media. Their latest blog article is exemplary and I recommend it --here. The headline says it all:

 

There is no evidence that Brexit has damaged UK productivity growth

 

 

The Trump has sounded...

I am glad to say that Briefings for Britain is a lot more assiduous than I am in continually monitoring Remainer stuff. Remainers never give up it seems.

 Probably encourgaed by Starmer's and Labour's talk of a need to 'reset' relation with  the EU, especially over trade and defnece, and Starmer's actual attendance at an EU leaders' meeting, there has been another surge in campaigning to 'rejoin' in some form. Usually, this amounts to some form of trade agreement, rarely specified: when it has come to details, it seems to turn on the usual demands for French fishing rights in exchange for cuts in 'red tape'.

There is talk of reviving the old defence arrangements too.

Trump's eruptions have thrown everything into the air ,of course, with threats of tariffs on EU exports, and possible exemptions for the UK, and a refusal to fund European defence to anywhere near the same extent. Starmer says he will not choose between the US and the EU but he would be crazy to choose the EU if it came to it, as everyone now realizes.

It was interesting to see Trump spokespersons like Vance praising Brexit, and the egregious Sebastian Gorka also winding up the BBC by sneering at  Remoaners in a recent interview, while congratulating the independence-minded folk who voted for Brexit. Poor BBC interviewer V Derbyshire nearly choked!

Anyway, for the moment it has left Starmer replaying and updating the plot of old James Bond movies. Britain is now some valued independent third party between not Russia and the US, but the EU and the US. Despite Labour ranting about Trump for a decade and supporting the Democrats at every turn, Starmer still thinks there is a special relationship!

What of popular pressure to rejoin that we heard a lot about? Over to R Tombs of Briefing for Britain:

There was an interesting article in last week’s Sunday Times....centred on presenting a report carried out for the wealthy pro-EU lobby group Best for Britain by a company called Frontier Economics, a consultancy chaired by Dame Sharon White.  She was, readers may recall, a former senior civil servant in the Treasury (a notoriously anti-Brexit department)...

All these reports have to try to perform the ingenious trick of showing that aligning more closely with the EU would somehow make us more economically successful than its actual members.   ..

Caroline Wheeler presented the results of the poll like this:

… in every seat in Great Britain bar Clacton, the most popular option was for the UK to improve trade access with the EU even if it required the UK to follow some specific rules, standards and regulations. In Farage’s seat, Clacton, the results were extremely close, with 42 per cent opposing and 39 per cent supporting....[BUT] ...The questions asked had the effect of splitting the number who did not want realignment with the EU into two groups, those who wanted no change (19 percent), and those who actually wanted fewer links with the EU (22 percent).  The remaining 18 percent were understandably unsure.  By this simple method, the minority in favour of closer alignment (41 percent) could be presented as ‘the most popular option’.  Had the poll simply asked ‘Are you in favour of closer ties with the EU?’ the result of this sample would have been 41 percent each.

[More, an accompanying] map gives the percentages opposing or favouring realignment with the EU for every constituency in the country. [i.e. with  'realignment' and consequences for actual voting, not just an opinion poll]  It shows that only Scotland forms a block of support for closer ties with the EU, especially northern Scotland (areas held presently by the Lib Dems), parts of central Scotland (held by Labour) and to a lesser extent areas held by the SNP.  Of course, only close alignment with the EU gives any hope at all to Scottish nationalists.  Yet even in these relatively pro-EU areas, only 50-51 percent favour closer EU ties...[There are islands of support for the EU like Cambridge] yet ...In most of central England, the percentage eager for closer ties with Brussels is in the low 30s....[and]...Who could fail to notice that the proportion of people in favour of realignment with the EU today is far lower than the proportion who voted ‘Remain’ in 2016 – despite years of anti-Brexit propaganda?

 

Still a few puzzles to resolve here when the day job permits but the usual sound advice -- check the small print!

 

 

Trahison des clercs -- academics for Remain

 Well, not so much trahison really...entirely predictable if you are as cynical about academics as I am. I found them open-minded, fair,even 'objective' in their own subject areas, but naive mouthpieces of (petty) bourgeois ideology for anything outside. 

So it was for Brexit. Prof R. Tombs is the exception ('Robert Paul Tombs is a British historian of France. He is professor emeritus of French history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge'). He has bravely stuck to his pro-Brexit guns, produced various articles and broadcasts, at least one book (This Sovereign Isle), and founded and contributed to Briefings for Brexit/Britain

He has a post in the lates Briefings.. summarising some of the extraordinary reactions of most British intellectuals and academics. I have noted some of them in this blog too (see Europe in the Imaginary 2017). Tombs's earlier work,including his book, takes on the view of English exceptionalism, arguing that the proportions of voters not supporting the EU in the UK was pretty constant, and was about the same as those in France, Italy, Spain, Holland and even Germany (it might be even higher now). However, '"Europhiles" seem oblivious of attitudes and developments in Europe'

[There was after the Referendum]  consternation, grief, anger, alarm....[with Brexit as ] ‘among the worst of the current worldwide horde of nationalist populisms’[according to Prof Garton Ash]...The intelligentsia, from actors to academics, participated volubly in the national quarrel.  They were overwhelmingly Remain (nearly 90 percent of academics, for example).  Over-representation in the media, especially the BBC, gave them ample opportunity to stoke controversy.

The issue was too complex for the electorate.  It was too difficult, some declared, for democracy itself: when the wrong people formed the majority it was mere ‘populism’.  Leave voters were dismissed as ignorant (‘low-information’), poor (‘left behind’), bigoted, and gullible dupes of the tabloid press, the Russians, and ‘silver-tongued demagogues such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’ (Garton Ash again).^[5]  Leavers were anyway old: depriving the young of their promised land, ‘driven by nostalgia’–this became a key Remainer theme—’for a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’, in the words of the Liberal Democrat party leader Sir Vince Cable.^[6]  It became common to describe Brexit supporters as ‘gammon’.  Many would soon die, so their vote was invalid, and should be cancelled or re-run.  If both sides sometimes used inflammatory language, only that attacking Leave voters was biological.

This overwhelmingly hostile reaction to the vote was not based on a positive case for EU membership...they were ‘anti-Brexit’ rather than ‘pro-EU’, and had little to say about the EU itself....The many publications that have appeared since 2016—several by established academics, prominent novelists or well-known media commentators—nearly all share the assumption of English exceptionalism: that England is different from all the other ‘Europeans’.  This is the main unifying thread of what I would call ‘anti-Brexitism’....Voting Leave, they thought, must be an English psychological aberration, not a rational political choice...Fintan O’Toole, saw ‘the Brexit psychodrama’ as a product of ‘the English reactionary imagination’.^[13]  He proposed as evidence the success of the sado-masochistic novel Fifty Shades of Grey

...nostalgia became the favoured explanation of Brexit: especially nostalgia for empire and/or for the Second World War....Bernard Porter, emeritus professor of Modern History at Newcastle (for whom Brexit supporters, when not moved by ‘plain stupidity’, are fascists) takes a similar view in Britain’s Contested History.  His fundamental assertion is that Britain is uniquely obsessed with its past  

Vice-chancellors collectively spoke of their corporate interests.  Much emphasis was given to EU research funding, although the UK in fact contributed more that it received.  When historian Sir Noel Malcolm worked this out from the rather opaque official statistics, the University of Cambridge repeatedly declined to publish his findings.^[ 

Not all British intellectuals were anti-Brexit. ...The leading Left-wing political philosopher Perry Anderson wrote a series of long and excoriating attacks on the EU...He summed it up as ‘dilute sovereignty without meaningful democracy, compulsory unanimity without participant equality, cult of free markets without care of free trade.’  

...writers of fiction were certainly no better at understanding what was going on around them.  Not all admittedly were as blindly angry as the novelist Ian McEwen...A gang of angry old men … are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth....Jonathan Coe (a winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Prix Médicis and the Costa Book Award) wrote Middle England, a novel in which nice people were Remainers and Brexiteers were old, bigoted and manipulated by sinister forces

There is no strong connection between the EU and anti-racism, ‘decolonization’, trans-genderism, ‘green’ radicalism, and now pro-Palestinian activism.  But this set of issues has in common with anti-Brexitism the rejection of traditional identities and sentiments....The anti-Brexit intelligentsia rejects what it thinks Brexit stands for: namely, a popular revival of the nation state, condemned as archaic, absurd, xenophobic, racist, and ‘White’.  John Gray comments that ‘the progressive mind detests national identity with passionate intensity'

 Tombs ends this well-argued piece with this:

There is a final irony.  Anti-Brexitism has become itself a form of Left-wing populism: it is, as the journalist Tom McTague puts it, ‘an easy and ultimately populist explanation for Britain’s current woes.’[45]  This reflects the failure of most intellectuals to understand the Brexit vote, or more precisely their refusal to do so.  In consequence, as the EU turns increasingly to the populist Right, as the disadvantages of EU membership become clearer, the British Isles are turning to the populist Left, in the belief that Brexit has failed. 

Do read the original piece!

 

Myths and the Enlightenment

 An excellent issue of Briefings for Britain this week with two excellent articles. The tireless C McBride discusses a series of 'myths' about Brexit, often originating in the Office for Budget Responsiblity (OBR) who seem dedicated to releasing statistics showing that Brexit has produced serious costs.

McBride had already produced a post questioning the common view, initiated by the OBR that Brexit had cost the UK economy 4% of growth. This is a very commonly repeated statement.The BBC faithfully reproduced it a few days ago, during their Election coverage, after saying that no-one is talking about Brexit during the Election They want us to blame Farage and not vote Reform, of course. They reproduced in large scale font the OBR forecast that Brexit would lead to a 4% diminution of growth (and the presenter just about added the caveat 'in the long term' in the original statement). As we all know, we are all dead in the long term.

There is a revised statement by the OBR says McBride: Brexit ‘will reduce long-run productivity by 4% relative to remaining in the EU’.As she points out this actually depends on who we compare the UK with in the EU. As this blog notes, previous comparisons have involved comparisons with the economy of the USA!   Otherwise, we are involved in the tricky business of projecting from past trends.

 Mcbride supplies a plausible (not perfect) concrete comparator -- France -- with a similar GDP: 'France remained in the EU and their GDP is [still] little different from the UK’s.' Both France and the UK have fallen behind their growth rates before the Referendum -- so something else might be better able to explain the relative decline in growth (and we have candidates ranging from Covid to the effects of the 2008 Bank crash, of course).

That post also takes on several other assumptions made in OBR predictions. One prediction in particular is the subject of a separate post.  In this one, the OBR produces scary graphs showing an apparent fall in 'trade intensity' for the UK compared to other G7 countries.

The first weasel is to make this a graph of trade intensity, not actual volumes of trade. Intensity is a technical measure of the proportion of GDP made up by trade. As McBride says:

if a country’s trade remained unchanged, its trade intensity could increase if its GDP fell and decrease if its GDP rose. In this case, Trade Intensity would be a contrary indicator of economic performance and tell you nothing about changes in a country’s trade.

Actual trade intensity not indexed shows the UK in the middle of the G7 countries.

The OBR measured not even actual trade intensity but indexed trade intensity, indexed to 2019. Then the other G7 countries are not rendered as individual lines on a graph but collected together as a curious shaded shape. McBride says this does not show volatility -- that Japan was at the bottom of the shape in 2019 and at the top in 2022

It is not clear what the OBR measured as 'trade' anyway -- just goods? Their revised graph for 2023 shows a different picture -- different measurement?

The BBC faithfully reproduced one of the more egregious sleights of hand in its discussion of the Election coverage,saying that no-one is talking about Brexit. They want us to blame Farage and not vote Reform, of course. They reproduced in large font the OBR forecast that Brexit would lead to a 4% diminution of growth (and the persenter just about added the caveat 'in the long term' while the graphic dominated in the background

The same item also sagely reminded us that Brexit was still an issue because all the plans announced by the parties for growth still depended on our relationship with the EU. This is a taken-for granted reference for the argument that trade with the EU has been damaged by Brexit?

Briefings for Britain is on that case too. The invaluable C McBride has a post denying the myth that Britain has 'walked away' from its 'largest trading partner', pointing out that we have a very favourable tariff-free trade deal with the EU: 'the only EU trade deal that does this.'. Her data shows no relative decline in exports or imports: 'UK goods exports to both EU and non-EU countries have moved in tandem...Nor have UK goods imports from the EU fallen due to Brexit.'.

There is an earlier apparent change because of definitional changes, however:

clothing and footwear must be wholly manufactured in the UK or the EU, to be counted as UK or EU goods although the materials can be imported. This caused UK exports of clothing to the EU to fall by 60% and footwear to fall by 70% after Brexit, as many of the UK’s high-street fashion brands manufacture their goods in Asia. At the same time, UK imports of clothing and footwear from the EU both dropped by about 25%....This doesn’t mean UK or EU consumers no longer purchase these items, just that they are no longer counted in UK or EU trade statistics as UK or EU exports, but are now recorded as an import from the country of their manufacture: China, Vietnam, Turkey, Bangladesh, Morocco etc. The UK clothing and footwear companies still make money from these sales and the bulk of the revenue in this business is still earned in the UK 

This misattribution of trade to the EU port where goods were landed was known as the Rotterdam effect. It massively distorts EU trade statistics

 While she is there:

UK companies that export to or import from the EU must now fill in customs forms and this will have some cost to them, but previously those costs were borne by UK and EU taxpayers. Being a member of the EU was never free....UK consumers have not only been paying for these companies’ EU trading costs for years but they were also forced to buy more expensive EU products because cheaper non-EU goods were made uncompetitive by the addition of EU tariffs or restricted completely by tiny EU tariff-free quotas.

 The reasons for an initial fall in exports were:

the Transition Period when the UK continued to trade with the EU as an EU member, so Brexit was not the cause of this fall.[well--the uncertainty produced by it might have been? Project Fear didn't help]

the Covid lockdowns of non-essential production in the UK and in many of our component suppliers. The UK’s largest goods export sector – Machinery and Transport equipment – suffered key component shortages in 2020, 2021 and 2022  due to Covid supply chain disruption....the international travel bans during Covid meant most airlines could not afford to order new planes.

 Finally:

The UK’s largest individual export market for both goods and services is the US but the UK doesn’t have a trade agreement with the US, instead, we trade on WTO terms and this seems to suit both countries.

Hope springs eternal in the Remainer soul

The UK General Election is a pretty dull affair with no criminal cases, porn stars, guns or senility. Instead we have the same old, same old --promises that no-one believes will be kept with sinister agendas lurking hidden behind the bland PR. 

Remainers/rejoiners have not given up hope even now, however, hoping that one of the sinister agendas lurks within Starmer's discussion of developing 'closer ties with Europe'.Not rejoining as such, of course. 

One Trojan horse might be proposals to allow the free movement of young people, for example. Who could possibly object to the idea that the young should be free to live, love, and above all work wherever they want in 'Europe'. We will have forgotten, surely, that this will mostly mean a one-way flow, of course, and could be the thin end of a wedge, but won't it be lovely to have bright young French, German and Spanish people serving our coffee in London again?

A Rawnsley in the Observer is one of several recently saying the whole issue must be revisited anyway:

In all this noisy election debate, why is there a conspiracy of silence about Brexit?

When the histories are written, every other failure of this Tory era will be a footnote compared with that epic folly.

Lest we forget, it is all down to the smooth-tongued liars and misleaders:

With Partygate and all the other scandals on his watch, Boris Johnson recklessly tested Britain’s tolerance for being governed by a prime minster who flagrantly debased standards in public life. With the maxi-disaster of her mini-budget, Liz Truss conducted a deranged experiment that exploded not just in her face, but blew the doors off the country....Rishi Sunak, who advocated Brexit, doesn’t want to talk about it for the obvious reason that none of the promises which accompanied that enterprise – “a new golden age” anyone? – has come true. He will also be aware that most voters have concluded it has been such a calamity for the UK that we ought never to have torn ourselves apart from the EU....Labour seeks the support of people who backed “out”, especially in working-class areas of the Midlands and northern England, and the party’s pollsters have cautioned the Labour leader that these voters really don’t want to be made to think about Brexit.

Of course there are one or two other things to discuss.I can't see quite how these are tied to Brexit for Rawnsley -- they would be solved if we were still in?:

there’s a climate crisis that is increasing in severity...decayed public services when the national finances are fragile. Although the creaking state of the NHS, schools, courts, prisons and other key elements of the public realm are supposed to be central to this election, we are not going to have a full and frank conversation about how to revive them because this would entail having an adult discourse about taxation....The voters are right to treat everyone’s claims with deep suspicion. Read my lips, no one is being candid about tax...council tax is long overdue reform. Did you know that Buckingham Palace pays less in the property tax than a family in the average three-bedroom semi in Blackpool?...a tiny group of the UK’s wealthiest estates were able to shelter nearly £2bn of assets from inheritance tax in the 2020-21 tax year. That would buy you a lot of hospital scanners, operating theatres and A&E suites.

There is also a bit of a slience about other expensive causes too, of course, not only Covid and the recession but the Ukraine war. Reckless old Boris was quite keen on that too.

Then there is the ever-lovable P Toynbee. The background is a recent noticeable swing to the 'right' in elections to the paper tiger European Parliament, which has alarmed liberals in Europe. Not Toynbee though:

Europe is lurching right on immigration. Despite Farage and Sunak’s best efforts, Britain will not follow

These [European and British] demagogues are good at their art. A snap poll anointed Farage the “winner” in last week’s TV debate on Britain’s Got Talent criteria, his booming oratory shamelessly free of factchecking. Only one sulphurous issue propels him, the same immigration fears and factoids that power the far right across Europe.

And the voters, presumably

That political elixir blends nationalism with disappointment and justified grievance, so easily blaming migrants for a lack of housing or NHS appointments, low wages, bad jobs. Those raw emotions have too often felt too visceral for conventional politicians to dare confront, leaving them mumbling awkwardly and promising the impossible. Borders do matter, determining nationhood and who shares in taxing and spending. Porous borders signal a state malfunction, as images of arrivals – mainly men – packed in perilous inflatables allow this small proportion of immigrants to be gleefully misrepresented as the bulk of big numbers here by invitation.

[Farage] and Boris Johnson, outstanding rogues of the era, are gifted performers licensed to say whatever pleases: theatricality, quick wit and a dose of sociopathy is all it takes (other EU populists share those traits).

All it takes is a calm lecture to these ignorant peasants who voted for these charlatans, and voters will soon give up their prejudiced ideas:

Instead of explaining the need for foreign workers, governments took the coward’s way and promised what they can’t and shouldn’t deliver.... Dishonesty about immigration has bred the deepest distrust of politics. Delivering an honest explanation is easier now than ever before, as public opinion has swung markedly towards understanding migration. Most people can see the need: more than 150,000 vacancies for care workers leave 1.6 million frail people left in neglect. Cafes and restaurants close for lack of chefs. Britain’s nuclear projects are short of the 138,000 workers they need by 2030. Who will fix the National Grid, water pipes and sewage outflows, let alone build Labour’s 1.5m homes, with the number of construction workers in the UK falling by 14% since 2019? Few think it reasonable to count valuable foreign students in immigration numbers, as they go home. But leaving all this unargued too often lets Faragism win the day....

[Labour] Policy to get those more than 2.5 million sick people cured and into work, as well as investing in missing skills, apprenticeships and further education, should [!] lead to more home recruitment. Raising pay and improving career paths start with a fair pay agreement for care workers. 

We shall see if a fissiparous European far right bound by anti-immigration sentiments can hold together. Back here, the sight of countries across the channel turning rightwards leaves distressed Spectator writers protesting that Britain’s left turn is “a wild anachronism”. But in Britain, it’s they who are now the left-behind dying breed. I note their language changing to describing Europe as “our continent”: do they yearn to return?

Very well, alone then! Very suitable for the 80th anniversay of D-Day. A nationalist dog-whistle, one might say.

Toynbee does quote a very good source for her views: 'Prof Rob Ford shows more than half of voters think immigration levels should stay the same or need to rise'. Her reference leads to an absurd tweet, but the actual podcast by Ford is much more subtle and complex. 

To be very brief, the issue of immigration became more of a symbolic one than a 'rational' debate about labour supply for BOTH sides during the Referendum. Taking back conrol meant an abstract issue of restoring national government rather than EC government and Brexit was enough to reassure people that control had been reasserted whatever the numbers,so the issue lost its sting. For Remainers, immigration became the symbolic issue that represented all their key values of tolerance and civility that they saw embodied in the EU and challenged by nasty Brexiteers, again irrespective of the economic case --they are still fighting this symbolic struggle. Ford also notes that 'immigration' is also entwined with racism, with Black and Asian immigrants before European ones, and that Britain is a tolerant society there, especially  among the young -- so questions about 'immigrants' might not distinguish the issues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brexit not 'a disaster' shock

 The Graun clings to credibility (and readability, although I wouldn't pay for it) by continuing to employ the blessed L Elliott who defies them with pieces like this:

I’ve got news for those who say Brexit is a disaster: it isn’t. That’s why rejoining is just a pipe dream

 any successful [rejoining] campaign would need to do two things: convince voters that the UK economy had become a basket case since the Brexit vote and that life for those still in the club was so much better.

Neither criterion has been met. Britain’s economic performance in the seven years since 2016 has been mediocre but not the full-on horror show that was prophesied by the remain camp during the weeks leading up to the referendum. The doomsday scenario – crashing house prices (falls of up to 18% could result, warned then chancellor George Osborne) and mass unemployment – never happened.

there have been signs of the economy adjusting. Nissan’s decision to invest more than £1bn in its Sunderland plant with the intention of building three new electric car models is an example of that. Microsoft’s £2.5bn investment in the growing UK AI sector is another.

That’s not to say that the process is complete. Brexit provided opportunities to do things differently but those opportunities have so far not been exploited

Covid-19 scarred the economy deeply and the long-term costs of ill health and children missing out on school will grow over time. Even so, Brexit Britain has recovered more strongly than either France or Germany from the pandemic. Relative performance matters. The rejoin camp tends not to focus on what is happening on the other side of the Channel, and it is not hard to see why.... Over a prolonged period, not just since the arrival of Covid-19, the EU’s economic performance has been woeful.

A number of factors are to blame for the EU’s economic woes. The one-size-fits-all nature of the single currency is one; the lack of a federal budget to match in size that of the US is another; the adherence to neoliberal economic ideas– such as tough controls on the size of budget deficits – a third. The problems go right to the heart of the EU.

at the same time as its economy has struggled, the number of migrants has increased. One result has been the rise of aggressively rightwing politics...Something has gone seriously awry when politics in four of the founding members of the European project have turned so ugly....Sweden and Finland have both seen the emergence of ultranationalist rightwing parties....Britain is one of the relatively few European countries to buck this trend.

Throughout the whole campaign, a major silence was maintained on what  the EU could offer exactly, at least once the original Great Lie was nailed -- that the EU made a net contribution to the UK, generously funding community renewal projects all over the country. The myth remained that the EU was the source of economic prosperity, but even the Europeans doubted that could continue. 

 

That left only the romantic myth of 'Europe' as some blessed community based on British cultural cringe and memories of nice holidays.That might still energise apparent 'support' among the UK young for rejoining, although even el Graun is sceptical that it will lead to any actual politics.