Rejoiner hearts leap as King of the North triumphs

Remainer hearts lifted a bit (not too much) as Burnham won a by-election for Labour, because he defeated Reform at least, and has supported Rejoin in the past, although a recent national poll suggests a large minority suspect his integrity despite his local support (most don't know, of course). The Times did its best by publishing photos of him as an effete Cambridge English graduate, years ago, looking like a member of an elite dining club, rather than his current chosen image of hardened Northern son of the soil. He is a Blairite for my money.

D Cummings, by contrast, is usually seen as the wild man of British politics, a driving role behind Brexit as among the most heinous of his crimes. He was an adviser to Boris Johnson once, but was soon deposed. He has remained as a trenchant critic of the British state and its conservatism, and he writes on Substack and elsewhere.

This piece appeared on UnHerd, which is, alas, protected by a subscription barrier. It is typical Cummings prose:

So now [politicians].... don’t want to look at [the real]... questions. Their response now is: instead of looking at all the very, very obvious big things like our totally farcical procurement system, totally farcical planning system, totally farcical energy, totally farcical housing, totally farcical MoD, totally farcical welfare, a Westminster and Whitehall that is pathological about on [sic] technology and doesn’t want to take it seriously — the answer to those problems is to rejoin the EU. 

They’re pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow a great thing, when you can barely even see the single market in the data. If you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it’s super bad for the EU, you have a perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market.

You look at the 10 years since Brexit and it’s basically characterised by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. It’s a constant soap opera, and both sides — both sides in the sense of the kind of inside-Westminster Left and Right — have been much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020. 

 

I looked up the item by Draghi in the Corriere della Serra (translation by Google). It is not exactly favourable for Cummings. It does argue that important matters including conflict and technological change are now decided by powerful state systems, not market or economic forces. He has in mind the USA, China and Russia, of course. By comparison, the EU still favours a rather weak and cumbersome state apparatus based on a 'common market'. 

 

While before we relied on markets for the direction of the economy today there are large-scale industrial policies. While before there was compliance with the rules today there is the use of military force and economic power to protect national interests. While before the state saw its powers shrink, all the instruments are now employed in the name of the government of the state.

Europe is poorly equipped in a world where geo-economy, security and stability of sources of supply more than efficiency inspire international trade relations.

 [original spacing and font size  -- sorry --  and emphasis]

That market is still riddled with internal barriers:

European states are about to have a giant military enterprise with 2 trillion euros - including a quarter in Germany - of additional defence expenditures planned between now and 2031. Yet we have internal barriers that are equivalent to a tariff of 64% on machinery and 95% on metals.

Agreement with Cummings so far, but then Draghi argues for the same old option.He is certainly not in favour of national independence. What we ned is -- greater centralisation of 'Europe', especially financial centralisation, the adoption of 'common debt' ( central banking)...  

for example with an agreement on projects of common European interest and with their common funding, an essential condition for achieving the technologically necessary and economically self-sufficient dimension . ...Only forms of common debt can support large-scale European projects that insufficient fragmented national efforts would never be able to implement 

In a way this still supports Cummings,because this was the  issue before and all along.There is no soft form of 'alignment' with the EU. The old 'common market' is indeed dead. It is Europe as a superpower or nothing.