Losing needles in haystacks

Adorno once said something to the effect that the trouble with politically committed academic writing is that people come to doubt the academic bits, which undermines the whole point. We see this very clearly with Brexit coverage among the Remainers, where some quite good arguments, worthy of further investigation, get lost in all the blather of personal hatred and anxiety.

There have been a couple of examples lately, including a piece which contains some further economic analysis of likely scenarios after Brexit: all of them predict a decline in economic activity, and it would have been worth examining in more detail the assumptions, the definitions,the samples  and so on on which this is all based. However, even I found it hard to read with much enthusiasm because the Guardian itself is so blatantly Remainerish that it made you doubt whether any of the evidence was any more than just banging on and on.

Perhaps the best example turns on the interesting debate sparked by Polly Toynbee about the possibilities for the fishing industry after Brexit. In the middle of Polly's article is an argument that Brexit will not return the control of British waters to British fishermen, because many of the quotas awarded to British fishermen have already been sold to foreign fisheries. Idle and feckless British skippers are partly to blame — 'slipper skippers who found ' it was easier to put their feet up than to fish'. We would have to buy back these quotas, Polly thinks, and this would require substantial funds which makes the prospect as unlikely as Labour being able to renationalise the railways. It would also conflict with the Government's big business agenda.

An interesting debate then ensued in the letters page. One correspondent argued that when we leave the EU, there will be a new system of allocating control over fisheries, which relies upon the old idea of territorial waters, not EU quotas. Furthermore, it was the fault of the EU, not of lazy slipper skippers, that foreigners own British quotas: the EU forbids entirely national ownership of fishing quotas, no doubt part of its general privatisation policy. Subsequent discussion has taken up some of these points, and argued that Westminster also has a role, or that any new system of allocating control would simply reinforce EU quotas.

Overall, this seems quite an important debate and it would have been nice to have had it much earlier. The Guardian must be credited for raising it, but getting into the detail was terribly difficult because the actual argument appeared in the middle of the usual diatribe by P Toynbee which was almost enough to make me keep turning the page. The headline, for example, was

Propaganda delivered the Brexit vote but it can’t land more fish

Still banging on and on...

There is still some banging on and on, with few chances passed up to link anxieties about Brexit  to news items — perfectly normal example of journalistic news values of course,or the structuring effects of ideology, or how the two relate together. Thus a programme about the anniversary of a racist speech by Enoch Powell invites obvious comparisons with the racism that must underpin Brexit:

Yet Powellism found its purest expression in the 2016 EU referendum result, which enshrined the convergence of two of his greatest fixations: hostility to immigration and opposition to Britain’s membership of the EU. Nigel Farage’s disgusting “breaking point” poster was the clearest expression of this fusion.

The current scandal about the mistreatment of the children of immigrants of the 1960s, who were not given proper documentation at the time but now seem to require it, raises fears about the treatment of immigrants after Brexit. Apparently, it would have been better if we all carried ID cards like they do in Europe.

On a more positive note, excitement pervaded the Guardian on the announcement of a possible new Centrist Party, possibly a bit like the one in France, with pledges of support and the participation of Tony Blair's son, the kiss of death if ever I saw it. Itis not exactly anti-Brexit butenoughto excite the GUardian, who led with the story in my early-print edition

The movement, spearheaded by a former Labour benefactor, is understood to have been drawn up by a group frustrated by the tribal nature of politics, the polarisation caused by Brexit and the standard of political leadership on all sides. 

There is also a  report of a campaign for a People's Vote on Brexit, personned by the usual Remainer suspects,not at all like another referendum we are assured.

More generally, however, there seems to be a worrying lethargy about the desperate need to halt Brexit before next March. This could be because all except urban luvvies are probably resigned to Brexit if not entirely enthusiastic for it. It could be because Project Fear has failed after all. However, there could still be a hint of dodgy political practice and dreadful cultural conservatism, according to the Guardian: 

There is instead growing complacency and fatalism around Brexit. The question of whether it should be done is treated as taboo by May and Corbyn. But the question of how it should be done hasn’t produced a credible answer to beat the option of not doing it at all. So we creep in this petty pace towards the final act, as if it were all predestined. It isn’t. If the UK does end up leaving the EU, the referendum result will be only half the reason. The other half will be a parliament that knew Britain was going the wrong way, yet couldn’t be bothered to lead the way back.