Operation Fear: low wages for Romanians or an unhappy Christmas for us

 Familiar refrains are emerging again, with this:

Business leaders call for relaxation of post-Brexit visa rules

Industry bosses say retailers will struggle to keep shelves stocked at Christmas amid worker shortage

The shortage of HGV drivers has been running for a while. Briefings for Britain has their own account of the shortage -- poor conditions for qualified HGV drivers, and EU standardisation rules have, in effect, encouraged transport firms to domicile in low wage areas in Europe. 

Meanwhile, industry sources said in addition to lorry driver shortages, there was a lack of tens of thousands of seasonal agricultural workers, and 14,000 needed in meat-processing plants.

The latter has led to exotica such as predictions of a shortage of turkeys for Christmas,. Apparently, Nandos and KFC have already experienced a shortage of chicken, and, horrors! McDonalds is allegedly short of milkshakes. These shortages seem to have lasted for a day or two! Our whole way of life is at stake!

The GUardina knows the source of the crisis:

Guardian analysis of labour market figures from the Office for National Statistics confirms the extent of the fall in eastern Europeans in the UK workforce since the start of the pandemic, and after Britain left the EU earlier this year.

The number of Romanian and Bulgarian workers in the UK, who would typically fill lower-paid logistics and food production roles, has plunged by almost 90,000, or 24% since the end of 2019.

I like the 'lower-paid' bit especially. Let's get those low-paid migrants back in so we can eat cheap poultry again!

 

The Graun also notes that 'the meltdown [was] triggered by Covid and Brexit', before warming to its theme.

Remainers right to predict Taliban takeover

I have taken my eye off the ball a bit lately, but, some (former diplomat?) chap on the ITV News managed a little speech summarising a theme that has cropped up once or twice. It is an excellent example of how to link just about anything on Brexit.

 

The illusion peddled by Brexiteers, especially Boris, was that Britain would be able to pursue a new course in international affairs to regain its place as a great power, in alliance with the USA. The Taliban takeover, with Biden's decision to withdraw, has shown the folly of this vision. Thus Brexit was a wrong move.

 

As many posts in this blog show, the concern for Britain's influence on world affairs was actually a big theme in Remain -- leaving the EU would threaten it and leave us isolated; Brexiteers were Little Englanders.That the dreadful blunders and miscalculations that led to the events in Afghanistan could have been traced mainly to a vote at a referendum in 2016 is ridiculous. Staying in the EU would hardly have made any difference -- EU spokespersons seem to have confined themselves to the usual pious hopes for peace and reconciliation.

 

Boris might well have blundered in his policy toward Afghanistan but his actions pale into insignificance compared to his predecessors, especially the seriously deluded and still pro-EU Tony Blair

What sort of home did football not come home to, exactly?

The last week or two have seen a familiar cultural trajectory, very similar to the much more prolonged one that we saw with Brexit, characteristic of the cultural politics of social distancing embraced by the new petite bourgeoisie

1. An imaginary community is constructed. Not 'Europe' this time but 'England'. It is a place of community, diversity, love and harmony, 

2. It is embodied, utterly ludicrously, in the professional football team! Professional football is not at all ruthless, exploitative, competitive and dominated by shady billionaires, but a nice game played by nice people. These people appear (!) young, community-minded and liberal in their gestures(!) -- anti-racist kneeling and charitable works. They are smartly dressed. They were from humble origins but are now millionaires, which shows what happens if you follow your dream and work hard, kids (we'll pass over the thousands who were not selected). They are very nice lads who give fans their old kit and are polite to their betters.

3. A struggle ensues to capture and develop this image (at rather short notice) and reinforce it in the liberal media, especially by the usual suspects like the Graun, C4 or Newsnight. Gone are the old condemnations of the flag of St George as exclusionary. In come black people (mostly not actual players) enthusing over professional football and the myths of community it peddles.

4. The team IS 'the nation'. Suddenly, regional differences, even Celtic ones, and all other social ones that seemed so important are magically resolved. We can all unite behind the team. All this stuff was analysed in Cultural Studies 40 years ago -- and here it all is again.

After the crash (England's defeat to an thoroughly well-organised and professional Italian team)...

5. The main terrain is still the cultural one.No-one cares about the tactics or the issues of skill (except specialist sports writers -- but luvvies do not read them)  -- it is all about fighting over 'the narrative'. And of course it rapidly gets polarised and becomes a matter of social distancing. It is nice people versus 'racists'.  Nice people must be right because the only ones who oppose them are unspeakable hooligans and racists.

The actual football doesn't matter. The result doesn't matter. The England manager said as much. It is a matter of developing as 'role models', of being tolerant and welcoming to minorities, of doing charitable works (Rashford's campaign to restore free school meals during the holidays was described on Newsnight as him 'feeding a whole nation'). Luvvies would not love them otherwise. Prince Harry for England coach!

It is just like the way the Remain campaign shifted from the issue of whether the EU actually brought prosperity to whether it offered some superior but ineffable way of life, and how the debate polarised and became a culture war against ignorant racists.

There did seem to have been some pretty crude racist tweets because, of the 5 penalty takers for England, only the white ones actually scored, which clearly invites the naive positivism characteristic of racism. However, the liberals were close to that positivist racism too, claiming that football was nicer and more civilised because there were more black players in the team ( causes and effects were nicely blurred). 

Liberal championing of campaigning footballers also inevitably brings political retorts of this kind from N Elphicke, Tory MP: [Rashford, who missed a penalty, should have] "spent more time "perfecting his game" rather than "playing politics" (reported in the Times). Liberals never learn. Note that this is not racist, of course. This might be harsh. Professional football is harsh. £46m was at stake. Dealing with economic and political alliances is harsh. Sentimental politics get us nowhere.

In fact, the latest issue of Spiked reminds me, there is a need to check just how much racist reaction was actually generated and by whom. They have agendas of their own, of course, but they claim:

industry experts and security professionals... told me that racist abuse of English footballers does exist, but that much of it comes from foreign accounts and bots. It doesn’t come from frustrated and virulently intolerant English people firing off salvos of abuse while pissed up and pissed off....Manager Gareth Southgate must have recently been told the same. He explained to no-doubt disappointed reporters yesterday that a lot of the abuse ‘has come from abroad – people that track those things have been able to explain that’.

The media love reporting tides of horrid reactions from sexists and racists, and, of course, they can't possibly actually show any. The Daily Mail shared a couple with banana and monkey emojis. Lots of people seem to have seen them. I spent about 20 mins searching through Twitter and found lots of hostile comments but no racist ones

It's only football -- or is it a blow against Brexit?

Classic Graun commentary on England v Germany in the Euros qualifier yesterday (before the match):

Patriotic hubris and old footballing rivalries are harder to sustain in a world becoming more closely connected

Noting that some of the players play for clubs in the opposing countries, the writer , one Philip Oltermann, who also has a book to plug, thinks this represents some sort of imagined Graun future where sporting rivalries offer

a story of increased international entwinement, at a time when Brexit has spun the two countries in different directions. As vessels for narratives about the nation state, for once, they no longer look fit for purpose. Instead, they look ahead of the curve.

So it is not just a game then?It does have some political and cultural significance? It can be watched by Islington luvvies? He offers them a few guidelines to reinfirce their cultural distance from ordinary fans. The English press  offered:

pictures of Paul Gascoigne and Stuart Pearce, Photoshopped to look like second world war soldiers, were published in the Daily Mirror in 1996 [!] alongside the headline “Achtung! Surrender”....Germany’s dominance on the football pitch and the tennis courts (Boris Becker and Steffi Graf won their respective singles tournaments at Wimbledon in 1989[!] )] touched a deeper paranoia about being sidelined by what was now Europe’s largest economy....When Germany knocked England out of the Euro semi-finals in 1996, John Redwood urged Times readers to “think again about the problem of Germany”...Tabloid attempts to frame that encounter in terms of martial conflicts of the past – “Let’s blitz Fritz” wrote the Sun in 1996 – look in hindsight more like desperate diversion tactics, a case of “Don’t mention the economy”

 Meanwhile the cosmopolitan and only slightly superior Germans:

have spoken of the clash in more celebratory tones. “To play against England at Wembley, that’s awesome”, said midfielder Leon Goretzka....One reason for this has purely to do with sport: Germany’s real grudge matches are against teams that have inflicted painful defeats, like Italy or the Netherlands. Matches against England, by contrast, tend to produce happy memories: England have won only six out of 24 matches against West and reunified German teams since 1966. Germany won England’s last match at the old Wembley stadium, and the first after it was demolished and rebuilt. “Four World Cups and three European Championships” is the correct response to England’s “Two World Wars and one World Cup” chant.

The cultural critics (with popular history books to write) just cannot move on. It's like all that stuff about the return of Teddy Boys and fears of Napoleon (elsewhere) their parents used to frighten them with.

The Times had a slightly different account from its man in Hamburg, incidentally, describing German fans singing not Ode to Joy but a parody of the UK national anthem based on their goalkeeper as king.

 

Meanwhile, the Gru report today of the England fans' reactions to the match and the win did not seem too hostile. 

[The mood] ranged from quiet confidence to bold optimism...“Germany’s not very good at the moment, and the English team are fit and young,”...“I’m nervous, I can’t lie, it’s risky. But I think the side is balanced and they’ll come through with a masterstroke. I see us going through to the quarter-finals,” said an assured Wasam.[probably not a white racist?]... “This is a new England. The side has good penalty-takers, they’re young, fit, confident – I believe we could win this,” said a vibey Ali as the pair bopped to Mas Que Nada [that old racist chant] ...“I reckon we’ll scrape by.”...“It just proves anything can happen,” said 26-year-old Sarah Asher on her way to the pub to celebrate England’s first knockout win against Germany in 55 years.

No-one mentioned the War.

 

 

The Graun balances on a sausage

Lots of background manoeuvring here over the provisions (sic) of the Irish Protocol and the end of the grace period in June after which we have to implement the full idiocies of EU policy on 'allowing' goods into NI from the mainland. 

 

Newsnight last night miscalculated and got the balance wrong and had 2 EU critics on for 1 supporter. One was a Trump delegate to NI who criticised Biden's reported approach to Johnson -- he had issued an unprecedented demarche (diplomatic rebuke) over Johnson's recalcitrance and had urged him to settle with the EU (confirmed today by the Times). N Dodds was allowed to voice his suspicion that the EU did not care about the Good Friday Agreement at all, as when it threatened to suspend it to block vaccine trade, and was using the issue to punish us for Brexit. Unlike the previous night, everyone's sound feed worked well too. E Maitlis did not rant either -- surely it cannot be that she only rants if she has the crowd behind her?. What happened?

 

The Graun had three pieces of various degrees of partisanship;

 

The first reported the official views of both sides (EU patience is wearing thin, UK is confident settlement will be reached), and made some simple debating points. The one I have never heard before is the EU point that the crisis can be mostly solved quite simply:

“If you are sending sausage, cheese or meat products to Northern Ireland the very easy solution is to just put the sticker on it: ‘for Northern Ireland only’, and … we agreed on a simplified export health certificate [which could still be the real problem?]. Do you think that one of these things has happened? No, none, nothing was done,” he said.

Other areas where substantive progress was not made, according to the UK, included freedom of movement for pets without passports, trusted trader status for agrifood suppliers, and tariffs on steel and parcels...Progress was made on guide dogs entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain and the EU’s repeated request for access to UK customs IT systems. The EU had promised further proposals on the supply of medicines and livestock movements, Downing Street said....

In particular:

In a statement, the UK side said no substantive progress had been made on the prospect of a veterinary agreement, which the EU believes could mean 80% of the agrifood checks disappear and could work as a temporary measure...Ministers have objected to the proposal on the grounds that it would mean London observing EU laws again, just six months after Boris Johnson went ahead with a hard Brexit, severing the country’s links to the bloc’s trade rules.

This gets us to sausages and chicken nuggets(eventually)

 

The second item explains in more detail:

the EU is insisting that the full gamut of ​​​​​​sanitary and phytosanitary controls will need to be imposed from 1 October on imports from Britain on meat, fish, eggs and diary [sic], including time-consuming export health certificates (EHCs), which need to be completed by a vet or other qualified person. This would be a killer for trade, making it overly expensive for products to enter Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK....The EU has so far demanded dynamic alignment, if only temporarily, between UK law and its rulebook for these controls to be dispensed with. That is not something the UK will countenance, largely on ideological grounds: they didn’t do Brexit to sign up to EU law

In particular:

From the end of this month, a grace period on an EU prohibition on the sale of chilled meats imported from outside the bloc is due to come into force. The UK could unilaterally extend the grace period on that ban again – but such a move would almost certainly lead to the EU taking the British government to binding arbitration and potentially enforcing tariffs on UK goods entering the single market in retaliation for breaches of their agreements....It is claimed by Frost that many of these difficulties, arising from erecting a regulatory border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, couldn’t possibly have been foreseen in the scale and scope they are now taking.

One final possibility, which again I have never seen raised before, certainly not in the Graun, appears in a third piece

Politico on Wednesday reported that EU officials and diplomats had floated the idea of checking all goods coming from the island of Ireland into the rest of the single market. Such a plan, if confirmed, would mean throwing Ireland under a bus so is unlikely to be a runner. However, it will fuel the UK’s position that the EU is prioritising the single market over peace in Northern Ireland.

Overall, an unusually balanced,almost 'investigative' piece from el Gordo. Perhaps it is detecting a change in the wind. After all, the Times reports that:

New polling and research by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found that the majority of those surveyed in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria now held the view that the European project was “broken”....[In particular] Around 62 per cent French people polled perceived the EU as “broken” rather than “working well” ahead of their own presidential elections in April.

 

 

What do Labour remainers want now?

I've almost forgotten this blog, which shows how things have moved on. The disputes about the protocol in NI continue to aggravate, of course, and Newsnight and the Graun do their best to blame Boris's Brexit deal (with some justice), avoiding the malicious EC/Eire campaigns to weaponise the issue. There are some signs that sense is prevailing behind the scenes.

A re-run of the issues appeared with the latest local election results (one by-election too), with a nearly complete story of Labour disaster. Debates about what happened inevitably took a characteristic form in the Remainer press -- how Starmer had failed to win over Labour Brexiteers (not that he had really tried). That was going to be difficult because it was clear the metropolitan Labourites still hated their guts as ignorant racists after Brexit. 

So what does metropolitan Labour want now all the last straws have been grasped -- the Deal has been ratified, so there is not even the forlorn hope of a Norway option. There just might be a hidden bond if the UK is forced to sign the EC common agreement on veterinary standards but is that even likely?

The blessed L Elliott, one-man beacon of sense in the Graun has put it well:

Until Labour remainers properly accept Brexit, the party will be stuck in limbo

Labour is now more fundamentally split over Europe than the Tories were under Thatcher and Major. The bulk of the party’s supporters voted remain and still feel strongly that the result of the referendum was bad for Britain. A significant minority, concentrated in towns such as Hartlepool, voted leave and have resented being told that they got it wrong.... Responsibility for this rift lies primarily with the hardline remainer element in the party...

Immediately after the referendum, the assumption was that leave voters would quickly regret what they had done and show buyer’s remorse. When that didn’t happen, Labour remainers threw their weight behind the campaign for a people’s vote, a second chance for those who had got it wrong first time to come up with the right answer. This culminated in Labour’s worst general election performance since 1935 – and a much harder Brexit than would otherwise have been the case...

...the remainer left [my only objection -- the metropolitan new petite bourgeoisie are ultra libs, not left] kept up the fight. Its conviction that life outside the EU would be disastrous was apparently confirmed when the government decided to organise its own vaccine procurement programme separate from Brussels. As talks on a new trade deal rumbled on into the autumn of 2020 there were confident predictions that the economy would collapse, supermarkets would run short of food and the M20 would become a lorry park.None of this has happened

When voters in industrial Britain made their unhappiness about being forgotten known in the Brexit referendum, they were patronised and vilified. The government, through infrastructure investment, the siting of vaccine plants in the north east and the relocation of part of the Treasury out of London is at least seen to be doing something

Remainers often give the impression that they welcome bad economic news on the grounds that it makes rejoining the EU more feasible. This is not a good political look.

Alternatively, remainers can allow Labour to re-coalesce around the following propositions: Brexit has settled the UK’s relationship with the EU for years if not decades to come; there are advantages as well as disadvantages to life outside the EU; there is a duty to improve the lives of those who voted to leave in June 2016.

I don't think they will be sensible though. It's too cultural a matter, too connected to social distancing and class politics.That will remain (sic), although it might take different forms, some of which we are seeing already -- sexual identity politics, struggles over heritage. We can only hope the new forms take over rapidly, but the old duty to improve the lives of the despised is more remote than ever. They voted for Brexit -- serves the nasty racists and misogynists right!

Covid trumps Remain

I am only an occasional reader of the Speccy, and took up one of their free schemes only to read the report of the Euro poll on racism by R Tombs,. But they also have this today:

A poll out today – carried out by JL Partners for the often fanatically pro-Remain Bloomberg – shows that 62 per cent of people believe that leaving the EU helped the UK roll out vaccines more quickly than it could have done as a member. Another 67 per cent believe the EU has been ‘hostile’ to the UK during the row over vaccine supply. And, reflecting on all that, 54 per cent of people would vote to stay out in a rerun of the referendum, one of the highest margins in favour of our departure since the vote itself back in 2016. Bre-mourse? Bre-grets? Those it seems are now safely in the past. If there was a vote – a People’s one, or some other sort – we know what the result would be. Brits are now firmly of the view that we did the right thing by getting out. In effect, it has shifted public opinion decisively in favour of leaving. 

The effect may be even more dramatic internationally. Over the last five years, most businesses, trade bodies and governments bought into the standard hardcore Remainer narrative. Inside the boardrooms of Tokyo, San Francisco, or Dubai, insofar as they took any interest in the matter, they largely accepted it was a vote driven by racists, nostalgic for the Empire and hoodwinked by some deceitful slogans on the side of a bus.