Elites and the mediocre combine against npb journos

A few Brexit snippets in the GHRaun recently. First

But from Monday the victory for wildlife [from the lockdown] will end as the first machines and crews start work on a 27-acre Brexit customs clearance centre to process lorries coming from the EU into Dover from January, prompting anger from local residents, a Tory MP and other politicians. 

 What an alliance --local residents, an MP (Damien Green no less) and irate blackbirds! And right at the end:

 Ashford borough council’s deputy leader, Paul Bartlett, welcomed the plans, saying on Facebook: “A HMRC clearance depot is vastly preferable to the warehouses proposed by [owners] AXA/Friends Life and granted planning consent by ABC in 2015.”

Then

People going abroad will need to take out policy that includes health, as EHIC runs out on 31 December

And we are promised

From Monday a new marketing campaign to get the public prepared for life after the Brexit transition period will include TV, radio and digital adverts. Advice for people in Northern Ireland is set to follow in a few weeks’ time as negotiations with the EU continue....Meanwhile, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was reported to be poised to introduce tax cuts and an overhaul of planning laws in up to 10 new “free ports”.

I can't wait to see what patronising crap the Government produces this time. 

And finally some interesting  cultural commentary as N Cohen interviews A Applebaum

Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies.

Cohen can never fail to make it all relevant

They [once] asked [Johnson] about Europe. “No one serious wants to leave the EU,” he replied, which was true enough as Johnson was to prove when he came out for Brexit.

There is some good serious argument:

You can read thousands of discussions of the “root causes” of what we insipidly call “populism”. The academic studies aren’t all wrong, although too many are suspiciously partial. The left says austerity and inequality caused Brexit and Trump, proving they had always been right to oppose austerity and inequality. The right blames woke politics and excessive immigration, and again you can hear the self-satisfaction in the explanation....Applebaum offers an overdue corrective....Politicians hungry for office, plutocrats wanting the world to obey their commands, second-rate journalists sniffing a chance of recognition after years of obscurity, and Twitter mob-raisers and fake news fraudsters, who find a sadist’s pleasure in humiliating their opponents, propelled causes that would satisfy them.

[Populism is] a war of one part of the elite against another part of the elite, she says. Brexit was an elite project. “The game was to get everyone to go along with it”. Were all the southern Tories who voted for it a part of the oppressed masses? “And who do you think funded the campaign?”...They may pose as the tribunes of the common people now but they were members of the intellectual and educated elite willing to launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite. 

Cohen insists:

The Anglo-Saxon world is not so different from Poland and Hungary....Britain has handled Covid-19 so disastrously because only servile nobodies, willing to pretend that a no-deal Brexit would not harm the country, could gain admittance to Boris Johnson’s cabinet

Rather a lot to discuss in there but on we go...

Careerism is too glib an explanation for selling out...bigotry and racial prejudice were never enough on their own to move her friends away from liberal democracy. 

'On their own',note. And eventually Cohen/Applebaum sees it all as a conspiracy against the meritorious:

Applebaum understands that a society based on merit may sound fine if you want to live in a country run by talented people. But what if you are not yourself talented? Since the 1950s, criticisms of meritocracy have become so commonplace they have passed into cliche. Not one I have read or indeed written [blimey!] stops to consider how one-party states represent the anti-meritocratic society in its purest form. Among her friends who became the servants of authoritarian movements, Applebaum sees the consequences of the lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due.

Back to the UK

I didn’t doubt for a moment that there would be thousands of mediocre journalists, broadcasters, lawyers and administrators who would happily work for the new regime if it pandered to their vanity by giving them the jobs they could never have taken on merit. 

Overall, lots to note. Populism is right wing,and covers the spectrum from Orban to Johnson. It is the same as wanting to Leave. Elites and fractions of them determine everything, with plebs following along docilely, or maybe doing a bit of bigotry and racial prejudice. No one loves the courageous truth-telling new petite bourgeoisie who have embraced meritocratic credentialism as their preferred closure strategy and are shocked to realise it no longer works as ideology.

Anne Applebaum's book is now on sale.