Just read the headline

Classic Guardian piece today on its front page (although it is relegated in the later online version). There is the classic  dilution of assertive headlines by more cautious comment, but little evidence of the famed 'news values' of balance andindependence.

The headline says:

UK has seen 'Brexit-related' growth in racism, says UN representative 

'Brexit has contributed [my emphasis] to an environment of increased racial discrimination and intolerance, the UN special rapporteur on racism has said'. There is a stronger claim too. Not only has intolerance increased but it has actually had an effect

“The environment leading up to the referendum, the environment during the referendum, and the environment after the referendum has made racial and ethnic minorities more vulnerable to racial discrimination and intolerance,” she said.  

What is the evidence? The UN rapporteur, one Prof Tendayi Achiume, looked at “The discourses on racial equality' before during and after the Referendum, and the 'policies and practices upon which the Brexit debate has conferred legitimacy'.  “Many with whom I consulted highlighted the growth in volume and acceptability of xenophobic discourses on migration, and on foreign nationals including refugees in social and print media.”

Consultees included 'Deborah Coles, executive director of Inquest, which gives legal assistance to families whose loved ones have died in state custody' [dispropotionately ethnic minority males]. And there is 'Stafford Scott, of race relations charity The Monitoring Group, who also gave evidence to Achiume, welcomed comments from Achiume about how police gangs databases disproportionately skew towards identifying black young people as perpetrators of gang violence, and which he described as “part of the process that sets up our community to be viewed as a suspect community by the entire state.” 

  Achiume seems to have had a busy time:

Achiume spent 11 days in the UK investigating the impact of Brexit on racial equality. But she went beyond that mandate, highlighting the scandal of misapplication of “hostile environment” policies on the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants, the disproportionate criminalisation of black people, and the “sustained and pervasive” vilification of Muslims via Prevent, the government’s counter-radicalisation strategy. 'Achiume also expressed alarm at the stark increase in hate crimes and incidents across the UK after the referendum to leave the EU.'

She mentions specifically the Windrush scandal  and the Lammy review of discrimination in criminal justice cases. She says the “Widespread enforcement of the Prevent duty is fuelling distrust among racial and ethnic minority communities, especially those who are Muslim.” andparticulalry criticises the vague criteria implied in Prevent policies.

Now I know my own limits as someone still interested in social science research instead of journalistic consensus posing as expert opinion, but I am a tad sceptical that consulting lobbying organisations is going to cover the issues of evidence. Nor does it seem easy in the research community [sic] to isolate causals from clusters of complex variables. There seems to be no attempt in the article at least to separate out factors operating before and after the Referendum: any claimed amplifying effects of the Referendum are not clear. 'Racism' also seems to remain as a compound factor, consisting of attitudes and practices,mostly concerning State policy, and it is combined with xenophobia.The implied link between State policy and public attitudes, marshalled during the Referendum campaigns,maybe, is not clear. To make one obvious point, A Rudd and T May, both architects of the Windrush scandal, were Remainers.

Perhaps the actual Report will be clearer. The Guardian might once have clarified a few points too, maybe even raised some critical issues.Even thinking of any problems, let alone helping readers grasp them, seems impossible with this irresistible combination of Guardian special interests.

 

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.

Brexit moral panic -- social media are involved!

The moral panic has been going on so long, there is some repetition of themes, although different ones can be highlighted and any new opportunities exploited. The topics have to be 'moral' in the broadest sense (rather than, say,excessively technical) and there has to be an alert group of moral entrepreneurs ready to amplify.

The classic ingredients are clear in the latest scandal about the dark arts of marketing companies. A couple of naive public school bullshitters running Cambridge Analytica were caught in an undercover video sting bragging about how they could organize scam on politicians or influence voters with devious psychological targeting followed by social media campaigns. The Trump election was mentioned, and, inevitably, soon so was Brexit. I don't know if any liberals were pleased that the Trump campaign was bent or annoyed in case some of the scam on him had been engineered.

A strange whistleblower and former employee of Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie, toured the studios saying electoral law had been broken since apparently separate Leave organisations were in fact working together, mostly in both hiring Cambridge Analytica or what might be its subsidiary,and thus, in effect, exceeding the spending cap for campaigns. Wylie is rather televisual, with a neat business suit and sober eyeglasses topped off with pink hair and a nose ring. He seems to have eclipsed an earlier whistleblower  (Shamir Sanni) who also argued there was common funding between two allegedly separate campaigns. He worked for one of them. He was outed as gay by a former aide to the PM is the way the Guardian put it, although you could also read the statement as suggesting the whistleblowing was personal revenge for splitting up with the adviser: that would be 'weaponising' sexual identity for the Guardian. Whatever, it seems to have worked in shutting Sanni up.

The Wylie story has more legs, involving public school toffs, dodgy money, the dark arts of targeting, and Facebook, allegedly the source of the data. It helps if you believe that these techniques and organizations are both devastatingly effective and somehow morally distasteful, certainly when compared to respectable journalism. I must give Newsnight some credit here for raising some doubts. They didn't go very far into the actual technicalities of the psychological scales used to identify target groups (which seemed pretty basic and naive and included items like 'political interest' and 'extraversion'), or demand to see exactly how this junk data allegedly produces targeted videos. But Chris Cook did at least raise some doubts about whether any of it actually worked -- why didn't Remain win since they also had access to experts and were also assisted by expensive but technically independent Government campaigns to remain?

Cook concluded we should be sceptical about the claims of all marketers, campaigners and strategic communicators who obviously had a vested interest in talking up their expertise. Even the gullible K Wark raised some of the doubts in a subsequent live interview with Wylie. He rapidly got off the technical one to the moral and said the point really was that British electoral law had to be upheld or else it was cheating. He positively bristled with virtue,and spoke on behalf of British citizens who wanted rule by law. His only comment on whether any of this actually did have an effect was to ask why else would money be spent on it.

I think we should be told!

Unusual content in the Gudniar today, happily hidden away in the 'Journal 'section now concealed somewhere in the middle of the paper as one of several pullouts

Ulrike Guérot ( probably not even an English person!)  has criticised the EU as undemocratic! To be fair, the Graun publishes an article like this about once a year, while the rest of it bangs on as usual about the muddles over Brexit, dire warnings from EUrocrats about punishment during the transition period, solemn paternal finger-wagging about clocks ticking and the rest.

This one reminds us that 'Opinion polls show that anti-EU sentiment is held by roughly 30% of the EU’s 500 million citizens. A large majority support the EU but want it to function differently: more democratically'. Not only that:

The EU is searching for answers to a key question: who decides? Who makes the decisions in the EU? It’s never entirely clear. Brussels institutions or nation states? Should it be the European council (which is made up of the heads of state and government) or the regions? The European Central Bank or the Eurogroup, which represents the eurozone finance ministers? Should the region of Wallonia, alone, have a veto over the EU-Canada free trade agreement? And on Greek bailouts, is it the so-called financial troika, is it the European parliament, or should it be the EU’s voters in a referendum?

The primary question is this: how do we decentralise the power that is currently held by a handful of European institutions, and create the conditions for the will of European citizens to express itself politically and be translated into actions and laws?

Should we worry? No -- we just have to democratise, as even some EU leaders are realizing. We were reminded yesterday that universal suffrage is less than 100 years old just in the UK, and that only after a huge struggle, but Guérot urges us to hope and long for the (distant) future:

Of course, to achieve this would require a major shift – with citizens, rather than states, recognised as the sovereign actors of EU politics. That may sound like a distant or unrealistic prospect, but who is to say that far-reaching ambitions must always be off limits – especially if they’re about giving voters more of a say?...To those who think this is utopian, the European project itself was a utopia until it actually happened.

So when 'the EU' or 'Brussels' or Barnier or Juncker offer a policy or a threat -- whose is it?

Do mention the War...

Should have written this yesterday after the Graun's headline story (sic!) that the outgoing German ambassador has moved on and given  a speech about the Brits still worrying about German doimination of Europe: 'Ammon said Britain was rightly proud of its history, but some Brexiters were motivated by a sense of national identity built around Britain standing alone in the second world war.' He then went on to trot out the usual dire warnings of the impossibility of ever getting a good deal ,which only made us wonder how much of the earlier part of this speech was really him, as opposed to some EU script.

I don't suppose they will ever get it. A bit like Nougayrede last time, Brexiteers can only be understood as under the spell of an ancient religion, nationalism in this case.They need a new religion, still something sacred they can believe in (global capitalism). Of course, they evidently cannot choose this religion for themselves but have to be led by elite spokespersons.

Guardian letter writers debated the issues rather better today. Naturally, I quite liked this one:

Will continental politicians and diplomats ever realise that the UK is not abandoning Europe, but leaving the EU (German ambassador tells Brexiters: stop fixating on second world war, 30 January)? If the German ambassador wants to understand the “finest hour” legend, he should look for the truth beneath the mythology. In standing alone the British people put the interests of Europe first, resolving to die fighting rather than allow the Nazis to dominate the continent. [bit flowery, that last sentence]

EU -- the sentimental case

Not much has been happening on the ideological front lately. More same old same old really, with hopes rising then falling for a new referendum, mostly because that great statesman, much admired by Remainers, not at all a figure of fun and derision, one Nigel Farage formerly of UKIP,  said he might be thinking of advocating one. He was even lined up with other great statesmen like Sir (sic) Nick Clegg. The flaw seems to be that it would not be at all popular withthe elctorate. The background has been the same old threats of punishment from EU bureaucrats in the next round of talks,so tiresome that even P Hammond has said he wearies of them not getting over it.

Thank God the new tabloid Graundina is there to provide me with copy in the shape of an opinion piece by one N.Nougayrède. The gist seems to be arevival of a very old case for the EU as a defender of liberal social policy, once potent during Thatcherism in the 1970s, as she admits. Even I supported the EEC as it was on those grounds, hoping the organized left, in the shape of the powerful Communist and Socialist parties especially in France and Italy, would be our champions, while the Eastern Bloc was a bulwark at least against global capitalism.

Those days have gone long ago, so what remains of the case for the EU as a progressive social force?. Nougayrède finds a few straws drifting past. First, she is sure that Brexit will throw usbackto Thatcherism:

It will not deliver anything worthwhile to those who feel left behind. “Independence day” will be a blow to workers’ rights, to the struggle against inequality, to the fight for the environment. It certainly won’t bring protection.

Meanwhile ,the EU will help that struggle:

Last November in Gothenburg, the EU held a summit on the “European pillar of social rights”. Macron attended. The “social pillar” is a plan designed to promote fair wages, a minimum income, healthcare, gender equality, a better work-life balance, data protection, unemployment benefits, access to transport, and rights for disabled people. While it may be no more than a list of intentions, the social pillar is a good roadmap all the same.

Labour has failed to make that case for hope. 

But as Delors [earlier described as a 'French socialist', albeit 30 years ago] once said, “no one falls in love with a market” (or a customs union, for that matter). What people can relate to emotionally is a collective struggle for values, decency, social fairness – and they can be made to feel proud to be part of something larger than their own country, if that something is made to work for the common good. In this globalised world, the EU is our common shield against the negative impact of unregulated capitalism, and the manipulations and illiberal practices of big corporations and large hostile powers.

At least we see why the emotional tone has been so important to Remainerdom -- 'people' can't relate to arguments about markets but only to romantic 'collective struggles' and pride in belonging to some big imagined community. 

It's surely far too late for any hope in resistance to globalism and corporate dominance.

It is not clear whether the last sentence is  something 'emotional', perhaps designed for those plebs who need it, or whether Nougayrède really means it. She does note that 'To be sure, in recent years we’ve seen an avalanche of leftwing criticism of the EU', but she assures us that Greece and Catalonia want to stay in. 

Curiously, the piece ends with a suggestion that Labour reaches out to progressives in the EU to help it stop Brexit: 'has Labour even thought about sitting down with representatives of Spain’s Podemos or with Nordic or German social democrats to discuss how to do it?'

Overall, the struggle between progressives and conservatives is all in terms of options in the EU  -- we can have a progressive EU if only we will stop this pesky Brexit. Then all we will have to do is wait for the discussion on the social pillar to end, wait while the EU decides how to implement it, wait until the local states decide to interpret it, wait...