Let's hear it for Larry again

The sainted L Elliott, sole Bexit voice in a swamp of  Remainer luvvies at the Gradinu, strikes a note of reason. In a piece tucked away on the website with yesterday's dateline, Elliott says that:

Britons seem relatively relaxed in the face of Brexit apocalypse 

Despite predictions of gloom from the Treasury and Bank, the public remains optimistic

Quoting some (debatable as ever) economic 'facts' of his own, Elliott argues that:

Last week’s survey of manufacturing and retail sales from the CBI were both solid, unemployment was last lower in early 1975, and the public finances smashed expectations last month with the biggest July surplus in almost two decades...While not exactly booming, the UK grew faster than the eurozone in the second quarter and is doing a lot better than the Treasury predicted before the EU referendum. There has been no collapse in house prices, no 500,000 increase in unemployment, no two-year recession...Inflation has started to come down because the impact of sterling’s fall has faded, and this has resulted in gently rising real incomes...Unemployment has continued to fall – it is now below 4% – and there are plenty of job vacancies. Most people who want a job can find one, even if it is not the sort of job they want, with the hours they want, at the pay rates they want...just as there have been companies threatening to leave the UK in the event of a no-deal Brexit there have been high-profile examples – such as Google and Apple – of companies announcing plans to expand in Britain...The assumption these multinational companies are making is that Britain is not going to crash out of the EU next March because eventually a deal will be done. Financial markets think the same, putting the chances of no deal at 10%.

Only the policy wonks are interested anyway. For example, we can suspect a pretty cool reaction to the latest scare in the Guradina's lead article quoting K Starmer on a 'legal vacuum' threatened by a hasty and ill-prepared no deal.

For Elliott:

Interest in, and awareness of, political developments is much less than imagined. People tune in just before elections, make up their minds based – to a considerable extent – on how well they and their families are faring, vote, and then tune out again...Clearly, it makes sense to be prepared for all Brexit outcomes, but the public has yet to take seriously the more lurid warnings of apocalypse to come...Expert forecasting is discredited. Life is a bit better than it was a year ago. There is still an expectation that London and Brussels will orchestrate a political fix.

The whole thing indicates the limits of activist ideological efforts in the face of mundane experience, which is both good and bad of course. Banging on and on does seem ineffective if not counterproductive. The piece also challenges the alleged rational kernel to Remainer fears, and emphasises the symbolic significance of it all for them. There was much derision for the symbolic aspects of Leave, its nostalgia for Merrie England and the like, but the real symbolic justice warriors are Remainers. 

The EU symbolises something real for them, but also something that has to be repressed and disguised as rational, with increasing desperation. My growing suspicion, having patiently persued a lot of Remainer stuff, is that it symbolises just an agreeable aspirational metropolitan 'Home Counties' lifestyle based on social distinction that Remainers do not want to see upset in the slightest way. Symbolic alliances are imagined with similar class fractions in European capitals.

 

 

What's wrong with the Welsh?

Today's Observer editorial extends the dire warnings of Scotnat revolt issued in the Van Rumpoy story ( below). We have a connection with the Irish Question too, that the EC has discovered so belatedly and which, as even N Farage knows, works with borders perfectly well pragmatically already, even though there might be no official EC bureaucracy to  regulate it:

the impossible conundrum [in terms of EC bureaucracy that is] of what to do about the Irish border remains unresolved [why not carry on and do what we do now?] And Herman Van Rompuy, former president of the European council, warns in the paper today that a no-deal Brexit could potentially risk the unity of the United Kingdom [The Observer cares about this issue? Only the EU can preserve the integrity of the UK and not further split the UK along a north/south axis?].

So rebellious Scots and an Irish conundrum. Obviously, threats to the UK is  the symbolic theme of the week, and the Observer proposes some weak moral panic covering both Scots and Irish, or at least the Remainers among them-- but what about the Welsh? Isn't the EC and the Remainer lobby interested in them?

The rest of the editorial offers rather second-hand finger-wagging.

For every business that exports, there will be layer upon layer of additional bureaucracy.[addtional that is because the existing layer upon layer will have to be scrapped and replaced, but one layer cancels out another?]...These are the just some of the gritty realities [the link goes to a piece by N Sturgeon] that will together produce the £80bn annual price tag of a no-deal Brexit estimated by the Treasury. [The Guardian, even, actually cites the Treasury paper as offering 'highlighted Whitehall forecasts from earlier this year, suggesting the hit to economic growth if Britain left without a trade deal would force the Treasury to borrow an extra £80bn over the next decade.' £80bn over a decade, not annually, making Observer calculations out by a factor of 10x even with its own preferred figures! But all figures are right if they help make the case?].

Then there this:

In order to maintain supplies of food, energy and medicines, the government says it will have to shadow EU regulations. This is the first admission that – whether we leave without a deal or remain part of the single market – Britain will shift from rule-maker to rule-taker as a result of Brexit. And that’s before we try and independently forge trade deals with giants such as the US, which will insist on imposing its laxer regulations in areas such as food on British consumers.

So we have to take EC rules [exactly as before, it could be argued, but perhaps not for ever as before], but we will also have the power to make new rules -- but, of course, that is bad as well!

Then:

But a no-deal Brexit will create a huge increase in bureaucracy, [not net it won't?] and not just for businesses. Raab has said it would require up to 16,000 extra civil servants – half the number of staff employed by the European commission. [So we will no longer contribute to the pay of EC salaries but have to pay our own civil servants -- sounds like an ideal bit of job creation to me. It's only a dreadful problem if we are going to persist with Government austerity and job cutting.]

Politically:

the reality is that the EU is in a stronger position and can dictate the terms on which it would [accept a deal] .[So do we want to stay in an organization that just dictates terms to us?]...Raab implied the blame for any no-deal Brexit would lie with the EU. But the public won’t buy this: most voters say they’d blame the government for a bad deal...Populists such as Nigel Farage will be standing by to capitalise on it. [so the public might buy it after all?]'

So again, we seem to be in a nasty impasse. 'The EU' will dictate terms to May so she won't get Chequers accepted. But no deal will be disastrous. The public can be relied upon to blame May, but evil populists might persuuade them otherwise.

This seems to be another of those fascinating phases in which ideology seems to be unestablished, where there is much dithering and wringing of hands, where blame and revenge seem to be the main issues and solidifying the right and the good into a bloc is the main aim, rather than hectoring opponents into actually supporting something. All we can do is accept EU terms it seems -- and they don't want us to leave at all, nor could a Government just overturn the referendum.

My own  prediction is that the Guaridan/ Observer will be proposing more and more authoritarian solutions as we near the deadline. To recall an old phrase --scratch a liberal and find a fascist.

Another day another straw

Strange piece to lead the Absurder today with a solemn warning that a no-deal Brexit risks the integrity of the UK because it will piss of the Scots who will then demand -- and get-- independence.

The solemn warner is one Herman Van Rompuy, a former President of the EC, famous for being mocked by N Farage when he became appointed as a nonentity no-one had ever heard of (although he was once Prime Minister of Belgium)

the threat of a no-deal Brexit was a new “operation fear” tactic being used by the government. But he said it would not work with the EU and warned that such an outcome would end up creating new pressures over Scottish independence...He added: “We could end up with a situation in which the EU27 becomes more united and a United Kingdom less united. This talk about a ‘no deal’ is the kind of nationalist rhetoric that belongs to another era.”

Pausing for a moment, as we must, and resisting debating the likelihood that the UK public will not give a toss for what Van Rumpoy thinks, the whole argument depends on a very convenient kind of 'nationalist rhetoric' where Scottish nationalism is OK but not British nationalism, or, to reverse it, one alliance of nation states is bad (UK) but another wholly good (EU). 

Now Van Rompuy is not the originator of this strange argument of course. The Scot Nats are already there and indeed we have heard it endlessly from them. The latest polls add to the confusion:

Scotland voted for the UK staying in the EU by 62% to 38% and Sturgeon has pledged to outline her thinking on independence in October. But polling experts say there has been little sign of an increase in support for independence as a result of Brexit.

Sturgeon is a politician of high principle who has said she will not demand another referendum until she is sure of winning it, of course, and she might have shot her bolt, at least with voters in the rest of the UK,  with all the threats of Scotsnattery in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. The stakes might be rather higher for a new independent Scotland after Brexit -- they would probably have to join the Eurozone, for example.

Van Rumpoy has another argument:

a no-deal Brexit might lead to another election in Britain. “If there is no House of Commons support for no deal, then you are very close to new elections,” he said. “If you have new elections, then article 50 [the legal process for Britain’s EU exit] will have to be postponed, because it will not be clear that you will have a government – or a government with a programme.” 

The EC decides whether the UK has a government with a programme? Even if we all rally around the Chequers agreement, though:

Theresa May’s hopes of Britain in effect remaining in a single market for goods but not services might not be accepted by the EU. “It is rather difficult to make a distinction between goods and services. We are living in a new economy where there is a mix of goods and services for the same kinds of products. Saying that we will have a customs union, or even going further with a single market for goods, and completely separate it from a single market in services – this is what [chief EU negotiator Michel] Barnier called unworkable.”

So what remains for Observer readers? No-deal is out, Chequers is out. Only a Remain verdict in a new referendum will please the Belgian. No doubt a delay in exiting will play to the Remainer hopes. I imagine there will also be some who will take the opposite view that this shows bullying and interference by the EC or at least by its recent President, and become more impatient.

Oh no -- not Danish sperm!

The beloved Polly Toynbee has a piece today on the announcement of Government measures in the event of a no-deal.  The proposals were  'greeted with a renewed chorus of panic from the CBI, the TUC, farmers, NHS, financiers – all but those blinded by Brexitmania.' All the right-thinking people then. No-one of any consequence voted for Brexit.

In more detail:

the UK faces a mountain of crisis, wrapped in burgeoning blankets of new bureaucracy. Look what businesses need to do: as well as customs declarations for goods from the EU, they must employ customs brokers, freight forwarders and logistics providers with all necessary software and authorisations. Each must register for a UK Economic Operator Registration and Identification number, with higher costs and slower processing times for euro transactions. And yes, there will be new tariffs....lorries... backed halfway up Britain....Supermarket CEOs say shelves will be emptied...

and, getting into her stride a bit:

The City is rumbling with Brexit warnings amid movements to other EU capitals. The 300,000 expat pensioners living in Europe are warned that no deal may threaten their pensions and healthcare [I think this means they may no longer be able to access British providers -- they won'tlose any actual money] . Even small parcels from the EU will incur VAT, and credit card charges will rise for visitors to the EU [because the EU ban on surcharges may not apply to the UK]. Police warn of the risk of losing data exchanges on EU crime. Who knew until these notices that no deal means a stoppage of Danish sperm bank donations? [Who knew that membership in 1975 would mean a tide of Danish sperm donations?]

There is real hope for a People's Vote:

By more than three to one, people now think Brexit talks will not end well. The Guardian/ICM poll finds a great shift among leave and Tory voters [the link points to one in January 2018. The results are, as always, ambiguous] . Meanwhile, a YouGov poll of the north-east found a startling change in attitudes among Labour voters, shifting from 59% for Brexit to 68% for remain [no link in the article but maybe she means this one] . This region voted leave by a 16-point margin, but is now 50:50, favouring a new vote on the deal [and on a no-deal, as remainers call it, a WTO deal for the Brexiteers]. [The swing is greatest among Labour voters it seems. As always,though, there are lots of don't-knows].

In the meantime, we can stoke the panic:

As a tactic, Brexiters have reprised the cold war dilemma. When nuclear policy depends on the principle of mutually assured destruction, it has to be unthinkable to both sides that anyone would ever press the button. Yet at the same time, the other side must believe you just might. In 1980, as Russia was invading Afghanistan, the government sabre-rattled by publishing civil defence leaflets telling citizens how to prepare for a nuclear war: what to do when the warnings sound, how to construct a fallout shelter or a fallout room, what food and water you need for 14 days and what makeshift toilet arrangements.[Sounds like a Guardian advice column]  It didn’t frighten the Russians but it terrified enough citizens here into a great CND revival [Did it? Must have passed me by]
No one suggests the cataclysm of Brexit compares to nuclear annihilation [i.e. she just has]  – but the tactical thinking is the same. In trying to frighten the enemy, all the Brexiters have done is terrify their own side. People are at last hearing the news of what no deal – and indeed almost any kind of Brexit – will really mean for everyday life, rather than the sunlit promised land of Brexlandia. Even Rees-Mogg has admitted we may not reach that place for half a century.

The Return of Rankin

A rather more detached and analytic Guradian piece on Tuesday -- written by J Rankin, of course, by far the most informative and the least concerned to just bang on and on or spit bile at the old upper classes.

Talks between the UK and the EU are to become 'continuous' we are told, instead of sporadic. How much time must have been wasted away before then, despite all that finger-wagging about the clock ticking?

There seems to be little actual agreement on the economic stuff, so little to report. Rankin still does not confine herself solely to panicky stuff but notes that:

May’s soft Brexit plan poses significant challenges for the EU, which is deeply wary of handing any competitive advantage to a large economy on its doorstep, or doing anything to undermine the EU’s common rulebook and legal system.

So economic interests are involved? Britain might actualy gain some competitive advantage? All this must be strange reading indeed to the Graundina reader in the agreeably gentrified street, aiming to stock up on tins of tomatoes.

There is even some 'balanced' (in terms of space at least) reporting of the UK Government's take:

Later this week Raab will set out more details of the government’s no-deal plans, but has rejected reports there could be shortages of medicines. “As you will see when we set out our plans, some of these hair-raising scare stories are very far from the truth and I look forward to explaining the context on Thursday.”

The politics of the personal

Guardian journalism on Brexit has become increasingly personal since the Referendum, of course, with hatred of Johnson probably in the forefront, but with revenge fantasies extending to all opponents of the Islington tendency. The return of N Farage to active politcs has been greeted in the familiar way today:  'It is an exciting prospect: the “bad boys of Brexit” on the road once more, selling snake oil and lies wherever the freedom-mobile leads them.'

However, the bile is concealed in a soft revenge fantasy: it will all backfire and strengthen the campaign for a People's Vote (ie a Remain vote). That happens because campaigning to oppose what Farage sees as a May sell-out wil lonly reawaken debate:

Yet the very act of – to use his own choice of verb – “restarting” the campaign will encourage the impression that the 2016 result is suddenly provisional, that the battle is not yet won, that there is all to play for. This is precisely the narrative that the People’s Vote campaign has been seeking to encourage: that nothing is inevitable, that true democracy is all about absorbing and responding to new information, that there is, in Dunkerton’s [Superdry millionaire donor] words, a “genuine chance to turn this around”.

People will change their minds because of a compelling narrative -- the Cambridge Analytica view of public opinion. 

Farage must secretly know that d'Ancona and the Grudina are right ,so hhis decision must be further explained as something irrational, defying the march of Reason and Right. It's those populists -- they can't help it even if it leads to their own demise:

Populists survive by staying in motion. They are allergic to reflection, unable to stay still, naturally kinetic. They despise policy detail, nuance and pauses for thought. The essence of populism is not democracy, but the insistence that there are simple solutions to complex problems – solutions that are withheld from the public by a metropolitan elite of “saboteurs”, “enemies of the people” and consumers of carrot cake...They seek power by claiming that the best interests of the people are being thwarted by a nebulous conspiracy. Indeed, they need the public to believe in that conspiracy so that they themselves are not held to account for their failure to deliver what they promised.

Activity is all:

Imagine if May, in a bedazzling change of form, suddenly delivered the hard Brexit that Farage wants: all “control” taken back, untrammelled self-government, immigration slashed, Pomp and Circumstance pumped by Tannoy into every British classroom. What on earth would he do with his time then?

Hardly a compellingly narratived version of hard Brexit -- are we still being serious? And rather revealing in a 'you too' sort of way . What would Guardina columnists do when Brexit takes place? Continue to bang on and on? Revert to their usual concerns for lifestyle politics and symbolic insults? It seems to me that activists on either side need each other to keep the whole thing aloft.

Journalistic dark arts

A good example of Trojan horse tactics in the Oberver today in a column written by the fairly authoritative W Hutton.

The bad news is we’re dying early in Britain – and it’s all down to ‘shit-life syndrome’ 

Life expectancy figures are going into reverse. But abandoning Brexit could save us

The article summarises a recent study in the British Medical Journal on the decline in the increase of life-expectancy in Britain and America. There is also an actual increase in death rates among the elderly. The trends are summarised as showing that:

The malaises that have plagued the black population are extending to the non-Hispanic, midlife white population. As the report states: “All cause mortality increased… among non-Hispanic whites.” Why? “Drug overdoses were the leading cause of increased mortality in midlife, but mortality also increased for alcohol-related conditions, suicides and organ diseases involving multiple body systems” (notably liver, heart diseases and cancers).

Hutton elaborates this no doubt carefully-evidenced review with some further comments, but the evidence for these are much less clear. 'US doctors' for example are cited for this passage:

Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. ["shit life syndrome" -- source unclear].They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support and contingent access to healthcare. Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.

So we have progressed from a study in the BMJ to Hutton's summary of 'US doctors', supplemented (at least) by a bit of his own 'common-sense' commentary about poor people in America. Further inferential sliding is soon apparent:

[The poor] have a lot to be depressed about. They, and tens of millions like them teetering on the edge of the same condition, constitute Donald Trump’s electoral base, easily tempted by rhetoric [a dark art] that pins the blame on dark foreigners, while castigating countries such as Finland or Denmark, where the trends are so much better, as communist [where did this come from?]. In Britain, they were heavily represented [poor people or people with these attitudes specifically?] among the swing voters [i.e. last-minute ones, easily swayed] who delivered Brexit.

At last we get to the main point:

What our citizens are experiencing is criminal, even if it has nothing to do with the EU, the great lie so brilliantly told [dark art] by Brexiters and the malevolent political genius that is Nigel Farage [blimey!]. [Not entirely a lie, surely? The EU has at least something to do with austerity and poverty in the UK?]. Instead of blaming Brussels and impoverishing ourselves with Brexit, Britain should be launching a multipronged assault on shit-life syndrome [which has lost its quotation marks and thus has become established] and the conditions that cause so many to die prematurely. Acknowledging the crisis, together with measures to address it, will be crucial to winning any second people’s vote on Brexit.

The piece concludes with a plea for a major reformist agenda for British politics that will remove the conditions that made Brexit happen (and thus validate a People's Vote making a promise of such reforms, perhaps on the side of a bus). Experts have suggested such an agenda -- himself and Andrew Adonis! Only by adopting this agenda would things improve -- hardly what the subheading asserts so confidently. What if the campaign for a People's Vote does not embrace the Hutton/Adonis agenda? It doesn't seem to place much emphasis on economic reforms so far.

The whole strategy is summarised thus: 'The life expectancy numbers [somehow ignoring the substantial spin Hutton puts on them] tell a dramatic story. It is time to act on their [sic] message.'  The authors of the BMJ study support a People's Vote? I tire of pointing out how such transparent special pleading will only induce scepticism. Throughout the Classical World, Odysseus (originator of the Trojan Horse plot) was soon known as a cunning untrustworthy bastard.

Announcing cult politics

News in the Observer today of a new contender in the struggle:

Fashion boss gives £1m boost to People’s Vote campaign 

What will the money be spent on?

The donation will fund a polling blitz that organisers hope will inject critical momentum into their campaign...Campaigners for a public vote are now planning what is described as one of the “biggest polling operations ever undertaken in UK politics”, examining support for a referendum on the final Brexit deal in different parts of the country and among specific sections of the population.

Then a strange bit on some current problems for People's Vote supporters:

However, serious issues remain over how a second vote could be achieved, whether there is enough time to hold it and what question voters should be asked. Both the Tory and Labour leaderships oppose the idea.

Then back to the donor, after a puff for his kit (Superdry):

“I will be paying for one of the most detailed polling exercises ever undertaken by a campaign so that more and more people have the confidence to demand the democratic right for their voice to be heard – to get a People’s Vote on any Brexit deal or the outcome of these negotiations.”

So how could increased polling help overcome some of these serious issues and increase public confidence in democractic rights? I do hope this is not all leading up to the practice of dark arts again, with targeted ads based on detailed knowledge of the beliefs of particular key groups? Will a People's Vote be marketed in the same way as was Superdry? Will Facebook ads be involved? Ads on the side of a bus? I hope the line between political persuasion and telling lies will be policed carefully.

More likely, it is the result of a successful lobby on the part of polling organisations or advertising/lobby agencies to persuade a millionaire of their power to pursue dark arts  which will etc...

 

Clutch at straws, whistle in the wind, fly a kite and head for any port

Prominence given in el Guradian to the musings of a senior civil servant, a former Head of the Civil Service no less, one B Kerslake. His argument runs like this: (a) the Government has left it too late to prepare for a no-deal (b) the consequences of a no-deal will be catastrophic (c) 'Parliament' will have to demand an extension for the negotiating process to avoid a catstrophe (d) 'the European commission would almost certainly insist on some “re-examination” of the original decision to leave'

The reply is more prominent than usual: 

The co-chairman of the pro-Brexit Leave Means Leave campaign group, Richard Tice, said Kerslake’s intervention was intended to “soften people up” for a delay to Britain’s withdrawal....“That would be absolutely appalling. People up and down the country would be furious that our civil servants and government have deliberately ignored the will of he [sic] people,” he told the Today programme... “What we have just heard from Lord Kerslake is part of the deliberate negativity from the civil service who are looking to soften people up in order to extend article 50. It is completely unacceptable.”

I think maybe even the Graun is spooked a bit by the authoritarian undertones of the Kerslake argument -- 'Parliament' will act in what way exactly -- diktat from a new Prime Minister? The EC will insist we go through the referendum again (surely it wouldn't risk it) or will it just pronounce the results null and void anyway?

If it's not sinister it's whistling in the wind, hoping for some external set of events or Strong Person to save the day? Or it's a kite flown now to frighten us all into settling for the EC's final offer?

Bad news -- wages might rise!

A piece in today's Garnuida seems to add to the usual worries:

Companies in Brexit 'supply shock' as fewer EU citizens come to UK

Businesses are struggling to fill vacancies as a result of drop in new EU workers, says report

Will this mean even more shortages? Should we stockpile industrial components too? Stock up on parts for televisions or boilers? No real need to worry -- we are talking about those companies represented by The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. In the companies concerned 'The number of people applying for the average low-skilled vacancy has fallen from 24 to 20 in the past year and from 19 to 10 for medium-skilled posts.', which doesn't exactly scream 'Shortage!!' 

There is an authoritative graph showing numbers of EU immigrants declining (although immigration from other countries is increasing).

And there is another problem: 

...shortages were forcing many companies to raise wages. ...Half of organisations with recruitment problems said they had increased starting salaries in response...“With Brexit looming we’re seeing a talent shortage and a more competitive marketplace. In this candidate-short landscape the pressure is on employers to not only offer an attractive salary, but also additional benefits.”'

So on balance is Brexit likely to be a good or bad thing in this case for the Guradian?

The poverty of historians

An authoritative piece in the Observer today showing that Brexit might be in trouble. A study uses polling data to suggest that opinion in a number of Parliamentary constituences has shifted substantially and that a majority now favour remaining in the EU. The details are a bit vague as yet -- the study

combined the polling with detailed census information and data from the Office for National Statistics....multi-level regression and post-stratification, similar to that used by YouGov in its pre-election model, which proved far more accurate than conventional opinion polls. However, the polling sample used by YouGov for its election model was much bigger, covering some 50,000 people. 

And there are some interesting anomalies:

The doubts among Labour Leave voters have been accompanied by a less dramatic hardening of Brexit support among Tory voters. While no constituencies saw a switch from Remain to Leave, support for Brexit went up in some constituencies

So the implications for a national referendum are still not clear? This study seems to be connected to a strategy to persuade MPs to reject any deals and Remain, reassuring them that they are unlikely to be voted out?  

But what sort of journalistic values then adds to this study a ludicrous piece by an historian, the egregious D Olusoga?

Peterloo 1819. Destroyers on Mersey, tanks in Glasgow 1919. In 2019? 

Is revolution in the air? With dark mutterings of betrayal and warnings of catastrophe it is not too far-fetched to see a pattern  

If ever there was a ridiculous argument....There were dark events in 1919 and 1819, we are told, and of course there will be an equally disastrous event in 2019.' It's all really spooky: 'for some reason we have a problem with 19th years.' Did 'we' somehow forget in this story 1805--15,  1853--56, 1914--18 or 1939--45?  Or did 'we' scratch around for some way to add fuel to the fire of panic about an impending Brexit by searching desperately for apparent precedents and finally light upon this preposterous idea of some magic problem with 19th years?

On it goes: 

talk of large-scale job losses, a sterling crash, the stockpiling of food and medicines and crops rotting in the fields or in the backs of lorries on the M20, combined with dark mutterings from the Brexit camp about betrayal, raises the prospect that next year we might make it three in row [sic]

 The clincher must surely be this:

The odds on 2019 becoming another of history’s ugly sisters shorten further when we remember that Nigel Farage, the leader of what purports to be a political party, warned last year that if Brexit were not delivered, the result would be “widespread public anger in this country on a scale and in a way we have never seen before” and that he personally would “don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines”. Political leaders in healthy democracies do not speak like that. This is not normal.

And to round it off:

Just as today’s historians are struck by the parties and general joviality that characterised the long hot summer of 1914, future scholars might wonder how we remained so calm as we approached the edge of the cliff, especially as the decisive moment happened to come in a 19th year.

Would this sort of stuff, more akin to astrology than history ever have seen the light of day in a 'quality' newsapaper if its perceived ideological importance were not so obvious?The whole episode is also revealing about activist historians like Olusoga. British historians were always scornful about 'methods', arguing that actual history was too complex to be managed by theories or methods designed to test them. But all this did was to leave a vacuum for ideologies to fill, beliefs in inherent complexity, the role of great men etc., or some commitment to activist politics, with history as the unwinding of oppressions of various kinds. Now history seems to be about telling whatever arbitrary story serves your immediate purpose.

What -- no guns?

Survivalism might have taken root in a delightfully tame and amateur (and unarmed) British way as 300 Guardian readers have let the newspaper know of their plans to stockpile, ready for a 'messy' Brexit:

My first purchase was an additional shelving rack for the garage and several plastic storage crates...my one “luxury” touch is three-packs of Boost chocolate bars at £1 each and with long dates....[Echoing the Gruan's own story a while back]... do I trust the government to take care of my family in the event of a crisis, or do we need to take responsibility ourselves?...I’ve got cartons of passata, tinned tuna, carrots, potatoes, onions, pulses, water chestnuts, plum tomatoes, curry paste jars, coconut milk, tomato puree, rice, pasta, water, orange juice, squash, spaghetti hoops, soups, stews, tinned fruit, herbs and spices. I’ve also got a good amount of DIY tools, buckets, lightbulbs, matches, candles, firewood, bleach, Dettol, first-aid items and common medicines....If I have to, I’ll dig up my garden and grow my own fresh veg...I have a young son to support and can’t afford to be caught up in the panic buying that will undoubtedly occur when a no-deal is near...

There is also an opportunity to bang on and on, of course:

We also seem to have enough idiots at the helm who are quite willing to drive this country off an economic cliff-edge, knowing that they personally have good financial cushions to land on and who really aren’t bothered about the “collateral damage” they’ll inflict on others....So far Brexit proceedings have been disastrous, in my opinion, and I fear we have not yet seen the worst of it. Food shortages will only be one of many trials ahead of us... Although I of course hope the nonsense in parliament will resolve itself, and better yet Brexit will be stopped altogether...I also worry about the effect Brexit is having on our culture – it feels as though the toxicity it has unleashed and the resurgence of the far right is far from played out.

The Gudrian has done some other people a service by including names and basic locations for the hoarders, and we must be grateful for the tips about looking for shopping market trolleys loaded high with tinned spaghetti hoops or lightbulbs. Locate your local Guardian readers NOW!  Identify or follow these people home and your Brexit survival plan is complete -- come the crisis, knock at their doors and ask them to share!

Brexit and the worldwide patriarchal conspiracy

A staggering piece yesterday. Brexit will 'screw over women' in particular because Bexit will set events off into an inevitable chain. First there will be a shortage of care assistants from the EU; second this will mean a general shortage of insitutitonal care for the elderly; third the elderly will have to be cared for at home; fourthly, home care will mean fewer women will be able to work. Intervene at any stage to explore assumptions, as you wish. It is all based on a Department of Health Report leaked to the Daily Telegraph, which admits the whole thing is 'admittedly a worst-case scenario' arising 'if EU migrants are barred from coming to the UK'. 'Barred'!

However, in skilled hands there can only be one conclusion:

It’s tempting to see this as yet another unexpected down side to the June 2016 vote. After all, who could have predicted this? (I mean, apart from anyone who’s bothered to think seriously [a link to another Telegraph article on the EU's role in promoting workplace equality legislation] about the relationship between workplace equality and the European Union.)...In truth, though, I think Brexit and the desire for a return to traditional gender roles have always gone hand in hand. The repression of female advancement is not a side-effect, but a fundamental part of what was longed for as part of the Brexit package. And now we’re getting it... Many of the sentiments that formed a backdrop the Leave vote – misty-eyed visions of colonial dominance, lazy fantasies of Blitz spirit pluck – betray a yearning for a time before paid maternity leave, childcare vouchers, the Equal Pay Act, workplace equality targets and all-women shortlists. It’s a time when life was simpler and everyone knew their place – men in the factory, women in the home. A time before identity politics, marital rape laws and crises of working-class white masculinity. 

Of course there was also:

frustration at feeling ignored by a distant political class, hunger for any form of change, the promise of that extra £350m for the NHS, a decades-long diet of racism and immigrant-blaming from the right-wing press [and elites using] ...the twin evils of red tape and human rights legislation to position an undeserving other (women, ethnic minorities) as the real victims. Race is undoubtedly a factor. So, too, is gender. 

It all adds up when we consider that it was the over-65s who voted most clearly for Brexit, and that a majority of women in every category (except that one) opposed Brexit. All parties hold to the view that women are the main carers. 

Then the most convincing evidence:

I know my parents don’t believe their vote was harmful to women of my generation, nor would they have wished it to be. From their perspective, EU-endorsed feminist ideology and uncontrolled immigration robbed their only daughter of the traditional stay-at-home role I was born to have.

And some indirect quotation (?) from somewhere unknown -- (parents again?) as a final condemnation of  'the deal patriarchy is offering'

We’ll all muck in! It’ll be like the war! Only we won’t be sending men to the front line, just women back to the kitchen! I can’t wait!

I wonder what has fuelled this rant the most -- the personal Oedipal conflict with parents, generalized into a hatred of Brexiteers, especially the over-65s, or a considered case about the EU's role in promoting gender equality?

More than strawberries and olive oil...

There seems to be a daily drip of scare stories about Brexit during the silly season for the quality press. Particular ire seems to have followed a statement by L Fox, Trade Secretary or something unlikely, that no-deal is now likely. If that was bluff designed to pressure the EC, the EC's useful idiots of the quality press can be relied upon to match it. The Times has a story about Brussels cutting off UK access to their police databases. If that is not enough to petrify respectable citizens everywhere (although it could also make the EC out to be a lot of dangerous ideologues), The Grunidan has one closer to home even than that:

UK would run out of food a year from now with no-deal Brexit, NFU warns

Farmers’ union says supplies would only last until August of each year if Britain had to be self-sufficient

Addressing a good opportunity to pitch relevance: 'Britain would run out of food on this date next year if it cannot continue to easily import from the EU and elsewhere after Brexit, the National Farmers’ Union has warned'.

I can imagine Gudrian folk everywhere reacting in horror. Just when I was thinking how people survived the winter in mediaeval times, wondering if I could turn the garden into a veg plot, and looking up recipes for preserved fruits, salted fish and meat, game, pease pudding and onions, some caveats appeared to spoil it (my emphasis throughout) :

Research showed 7 August 2019 would be the nominal day that Britain would run out of food if it were asked to be wholly self-sufficient based on seasonal growth, the NFU said....Changing eating habits over the past three decades have helped fuel the increasing reliance on food grown overseas, with perishable items such as tomatoes, lettuce and citrus fruits expected to be available all year round...[We import lots of bacon, but] Defra statistics showed the next most vulnerable food category after fruit is fresh vegetables, with 57% of UK requirements produced in Britain, followed by pork at 61% and then potatoes, of which 25% are imported.

Then a hint of a hidden agenda:

“The statistics show a concerning long-term decline in the UK’s self-sufficiency in food and there is a lot of potential for this to be reversed,” Batters [NFU spokesperson] said.“And while we recognise the need for importing food which can only be produced in different climates, if we maximise on the food that we can produce well in the UK, then that will deliver a whole host of economic, social and environmental benefits to the country.”

 

Remainer eats red meat

Panic seems to be rising in a column in the Guardian today as some of the political realities  appear.

J Harris leads with saying 'A stack of Brexit impact reports from local authorities obtained last week by Sky News identified a catalogue of dire consequences...'.

However, the usual pleas for a GNU/second referendum etc will probably not work:

Ukip is back in the polls, and has newly strengthened links to the far right. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Boston in Lincolnshire, the town whose 75.6% vote for Brexit made it the most leave-supporting place in the UK. Many of the people I spoke to were already convinced that Brexit was doomed, and full of talk of betrayal. Some of what I heard was undeniably ugly, though much of it was based on an undeniable set of facts. People were asked to make a decision, and they did. The referendum was the one meaningful political event in millions of voters’ lifetimes, and we were all assured that its result would be respected. Whatever the noise about a second referendum, this is the fundamental reason why the likelihood of Brexit interrupted remains dim.

Faced with this impasse, Harris advocates:

one imperative above all others: the defeat of the zealots who saw the dismay and disaffection of so many potential leave voters, opportunistically seized on it – and now want to pilot the country into a post-Brexit future that is completely inimical to their future.  

The hatred brewing inside the bellies of the new petit-bourgeois journalist tendency is out in the open: 

Two things pull together some of the most notable members of this coalition: personal wealth sufficient to ride out Brexit with ease, and increasingly evident ties to Steve Bannon, the former strategy guru to Donald Trump, who is now spending half his time in Europe and plotting the arrival of something called The Movement, a pan-European populist organisation.. [NB The link to Bannon also leads eventually to a wonderful piece on cultural marxism as an unwitting source for the New Right!]...a rightwing politics that has decisively left behind any semblance of moderation, and fully embraced the reckless mindset of the revolutionary...the City outfit Rees-Mogg co-founded in 2007, and from which he makes a great deal of money, is so unimpressed with Brexit-related “opportunities” that it has set up two investment funds in Ireland...odorous whiff of the hypocrisies and deceptions that tend to come with privilege, and the sense of Brexit as yet another chapter of the class war....a cadre of moneyed wreckers cynically manipulating a mess of resentments that their own politics triggered back in the 1980s, cheating their way to victory... If we want an end to the fear and anxiety that currently define the national mood and a future worth living for, these are the saboteurs who will have to be crushed.

Dear me! And in the Guardian too! Classic moral panic stuff, but no real need for any analysis of ideology here. Caught between reckless upper class manipulations of grievances, and working class grasp of those grievances, the new middle classes can only offer a revenge fantasy.

Brexiteers stole my peanut butter

A light jesting piece in the Grundina today that might be worth some sort of freudian  'symptomatic reading' if I could be bothered. The author is one H Freeman, who seems to have become a cultural commentator, having risen from the ranks of occasional writer about fashion and celebs in a playful outsiderish sort of way (she is American I think).

The central conceit of the piece is to invert what Freeman takes to be central planks of the imagined world of Brexit Britain. So a 'hard Remain' would involve us having to adopt the worst of European tastes --Nutella not peanut butter [jam, surely, preferably made with cheap British strawberries?], speaking Flemish, drinking coffee out of bowls, wearing berets etc. Laugh! (well no, not much.

I read it first as  material for my never-ending quest about what a hard Remain might actually mean for people, but Freeman ducks that serious issue altogether, of course (except she does say that it would probably involve joining the euro). 

A symptomatic reading would focus on the bizarre stereotypes and luvvie contempt for others that seem to have produced some deep anger and disgust in this rant .

the British people realised that Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Arron Banks had somehow made themselves the rulers of this country...the Brexiters, immediately took this to mean that the people had not just spoken but specifically said, “Please give us the most extreme, most self-defeating, most ideological Brexit possible, even though it means breaking almost all the promises you made during the campaign, such as more money for schools and hospitals, staying in the single market and customs union, and a deal being totally easy to pull off. We don’t care about the quality of our lives – just give us hard Brexit!... As the Brexiters told us once the wheels of hard Brexit started to come off, Brexit was not actually about finances, but about identity. “I never said it would be a beneficial thing to leave [the EU], just that we would be self-governing,” Farage said in June on LBC radio....based on nostalgia, like hard Brexit

The steroetypes about Europeans and their culture are nearly as bad, though, a mixture of disgusting foods, silly incomprehensible languages and, worst of all, outdated clothes. Some of the things Freeman seems to think we would lose are really American imports -- incuding peanut butter.  

It is possible to argue that it is Freeman who is culturally conservative and nostalgic for the old days when we could expect the right sort  of people to be running the country, nice and paternalistically, when extremism was kept in check, when European culture meant the sort of comically backward things you encounter on holiday and could laugh about, and it could all be managed by a Londoner connoisseur consumer dabbling in the most trivial 'multicultural'  goods (the world as cultural supermarket as Turner once said about religious belief).

What about the Islington Tendency?

The beloved P Toynbee writes another panic-stricken piece in the Guardian today, ostensibly on the issue of voting for members of Labour's NEC. The drift is readily apparent:

Brexit should be Labour’s focus. Its NEC candidates ignore it at their peril 

Toynbee displays her usual take, perhaps even more desperately:

Here we are in the midst of the greatest national existential crisis since the war, with the country divided and dangling over the edge of a precipice, months from committing mass hara-kiri over a fanatical Tory idea mendaciously missold in a referendum. And yet, 19 candidates have forgotten to give it even a passing mention.

National existential crisis? Does she mean expensive British strawberries again? Will Brexit come to war with the EC? Committing hara kiri while hanging over a precipice yet! 

You might argue that domestic issues of austerity were important, which Toynbee does in her day job, or even the curious moral panic about anti-semitism which has provided Labour with its own silly season sideshow, but 

This reticence on Europe might signal Labour’s reasonable worries about holding its Brexit-voting seats, [nothing really to worry about then?] but the strongest impression is one of absent-mindedness.... But too many in Labour, including its leaders, have treated it as a sideshow – which is bizarre, since Brexit chaos offers the best chance of Labour suddenly winning power [really? Based on what?]....Labour’s leaders need to sharpen their focus on the coming Brexit crunch that will get them there: still in his many speeches, Corbyn usually sidelines Brexit.

The function of ideology as uniting fellow-believers has triumphed here over any attempt to provide some sort of discourse to weave together another world-view -- Labour Brexiteers can just be ignored again.  Opposition to Brexit makes those of the Toynbee tendency (repentant social democrats) feel better? The separation of passionate Remainering from the concrete politics of the Labour Party is seen in the choice of Toynbee's nominee for the NEC -

Best and most passionately anti-Brexit on the list is Eddie Izzard, who belongs to no one’s slate: “I am a proud British European. I am a strong pro-Europe voice on the NEC.”

Years ago, S Hall argued that the then Social Democrat Party (established by P Toynbee with other Labour rebels) were Bonapartists in the Marxist phrase -- cobbling together some sort of temporary consensus to win power but doomed to oblivion because they lacked a substantial base, especially in class division. History is unlikely to repeat itself, even as farce, with Eddie Izzard as our leader.

A deal might be close -- so panic!

A nice rumour in the Guardian and elsewhere today, hastily denied by all parties, that a deal with the EC might be in sight, a so-called 'blind' Brexit. 

Anti-leave group fears ‘blind Brexit’ postponing key decisions would be worse than no deal

I can see the benefits, not least for the weary politicians involved who will be able to kick the can down the road and retire. It might even make political and economic sense while  preserving propriety all round -- Mrs May will have delivered a legalistic form of leaving, and the EC can claim that punishment and retribution are still on the cards even if delayed a bit.


Remainers want a second referendum of course, which they hope will deliver a firm Remain vote. This possible blind deal has even produced:

a rare criticism of the European commission... the EU [EC = EU as ever] should not offer May a face-saving deal in which many of the major issues were deferred for negotiation during the transition after the UK has legally left the bloc...A vague deal on future relations is more likely to be acceptable to May’s MPs, and harder for the Labour party to oppose.

An MP said: “A blind Brexit is being talked about because some see it as a short-term face-saving deal for both the British government and the European Union, both of which are now terrified that concluding with a failure to agree a deal will result in a humiliating no-deal Brexit."'

Enthusiasm for the imagined utopia of 'Europe' might turn out to be stronger among Remainers than among the EC itsef! Not even the EC can be trusted to preserve the Faith!

Guardina mindsets

A long complaining piece in the Guardian today from a German couple deciding to leave the UK because of Brexit:

Auf wiedersehen, Britain: Brexit is forcing my German family to leave the country we call home

As usual, I was hoping to find in it some basis for the passionate appeal the EU seems to engender in people

The husband and father apparently speaks on behalf of his family. How has he been 'forced' to leave? This seem to be Snowflake for not liking what Brexit might imply.  It might be that no security to remain is actually offered despite promises, or  that the parents might have to register to stay in the UK, which is somehow offensive because it was a 'free' right before. He feels he has turned from being a European citizen to being a supplicant. He 'had no say' in the decision, nor was he allowed to vote in the Referendum, although Commonwealth citizens were.

He is an arts journalist, so there is also the fall in the pound which apparently prevented the chance to buy a painting for the nation,and the need to transfer the European Youth Orchestra from the UK to Italy

UK politicians seem to be 'distressingly myopic and feckless' and inept. 'Journalists seem biased and underinformed in equal measure.' Brexit has dominated the agenda for his work. He seems to have worried himself by reading jokey remarks about the smaller Toblerone chocolate bar being a 'Brexit Toblerone' (attributed to J Prescott). The UK will lose the talents of himself, his wife (a surgeon) and his two (apparently very bright) children, so there.

The article then goes on to describe life in Germany in pretty bleak terms. There are German equivalents of B Johnson. The kids' new school is not multicultural. The kids feel the UK is their home and support the English football team. There is 'impoliteness, control freakery and permanent moaning that I associate with much of German public life.'

On balance, the UK seems better if anything. What's the problem?

Our response to Brexit is as much emotional as a practical. Isn’t that correct, though, considering that the leave vote was entirely rooted in emotion? It is not easy to stay calm and rational when faced with the visceral, self-aggrandising, jingoistic drivel that flows endlessly from some in the leave camp. It is painful to see how Britain, particularly England, has bought into its own imperial, nostalgic myth and is now falling prey to the resulting delusions.

I must say I still don't get it. We might get a glimpse of what might be called a working ideology at the level of ordinary thought, based on incorrigible affect. If it is all based on emotional reactions, anything counts as evidence -- the 'validity of tears' again. Emotional reactions are the only possible response to political and economic questions. We should re-run the Referndum, this time just asking people how they feel?