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.