Nick Tyrone's Blog, page 4

A familiar story with a new twist: More Brexit shenanigans from the Labour Party?

On Christmas Eve, 2020, Keir Starmer faced a choice. Vote for the poor Brexit deal Boris Johnson had managed to get at the last moment or refuse to play ball and vote it down. He chose the former. Ever since, Labour have mostly been silent on Brexit, hoping the issue would fade into the distance. Yet somehow, it’s like a wound they can’t help but pick at ineffectively.

On March 3, 2021, in his response to the chancellor’s budget, Starmer couldn’t resist, even mentioning the B-word straight out. ‘And instead of putting blind faith in freeports, the Chancellor would be better served making sure the Government’s Brexit deal actually works for Britain’s manufacturers, who now face more red-tape when they were promised less.’ Not a bad jab at the Brexit deal – the one Starmer had whipped his MPs to vote for, let us not forget.

An address of the issue of Britain’s departure from the EU, and more importantly, the terms and conditions under which that took place, did not emerge from the leader of the opposition’s mouth again until the end of March, on the campaign trail in Hartlepool, where the vote to Leave in 2016 was overwhelming.

‘The referendum was five years ago now. We have left the EU. There is no case for rejoining. We want to make our exit a success. We want the deal to work, we are asking how we make the UK a great success under whatever trading arrangements we make with the EU and the wider world.’

So, in the same month, Starmer criticised the EU deal, saying it was bad for British manufacturers, and then later said “We want the deal to work’. To be fair to the leader of the opposition, the two statements aren’t strictly contradictory – yet they seem consistent with a long line of Labour takes on Brexit being slithery and constructed to be heard in different ways by different audiences.

To add further confusion to all of this, Rachel Reeves, who currently shadows Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office brief but is rumoured to be headed for bigger things in the near future, said yesterday that, ‘the Conservatives seem disturbingly relaxed at watching a significant number of British businesses struggle with red tape or lost orders and having turned their back on having an industrial strategy, ministers are clueless about the future.’

Adding all this up, I can’t really tell if a Labour government would be fine with the deal we have with the EU as is or would seek to change it. And I think this matters, not just in a practical sense but in a political one as well. Labour risk sounding like they want to undo the deal and possibly even Brexit to Leavers, while sounding like they wouldn’t change anything about the deal whatsoever to Remainers. In other words, Labour will continue to suffer the fallout from Brexit much more than the Tories, which is a faintly ridiculous place to keep finding themselves in.

Labour seems to want Brexit to go away but when it doesn’t quite do that, they then issue these ineffective statements about it. They should either ignore it altogether or construct a coherent narrative about what a Labour government would be doing differently. It’s not a lot to ask, is it?

Quick note at the close here to thank everyone who checked out my last book, “Politics is Murder”, allowing it to sell enough copies that I have a new book coming out in the autumn (publishing dates are still being decided) which will be entitled “The Patient”. More about that in the weeks to come – in the meantime, if you haven’t checked it out already, here’s the last book:

Who would win a general election if it was called tomorrow?

What follows isn’t a prediction about what is going to happen in 2024. It’s just trying to gauge where the parties are at present and to that end, attempting to take a stab at what might happen if there was a general election that took place in the next couple of months’ time.

Several things to note: there won’t be an election called anytime soon, that is almost certain. Also, things can change drastically over the course of several years, it’s so obvious to say it’s almost redundant to point out. Boris Johnson could screw up in some manner that voters actually register and care about, for instance. Anger at the Brexit deal could rise quicker than anyone reasonable currently expects (although I doubt it, unfortunately). But if things don’t change over the next three years – if minds have settled on Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson and won’t be moved by events to come – then this is where I think we end up in 2024.

I believe that in a snap 2021 general election, the Tories would get a vote share of somewhere between 43 and 46%. Reform isn’t threatening them in any meaningful sense, and that’s when we’re still in the middle of a lockdown large portions of the right hate. I think Labour would get somewhere between 35 and 40%, although I actually think they’d land somewhere on the higher end of that scale.

The Lib Dem vote would almost certainly be further cannibalised, by Labour mostly, but also the Tories when many of those who voted Lib Dem in 2019 return to the fold, no longer casting their ballot on that issue. The Green surge, as it always does, will melt down to 2 or 3% come polling day.

I think the Tories would end up with something that looked a lot like Cameron’s majority in 2015. So, somewhere between 330 and 340 seats. A slim but workable majority. Labour would end up in Ed Miliband territory – 230 to 245 seats. An improvement on 2019, certainly, but nowhere near winning.

The Lib Dems would be crushed if there was a general election right now. No major issue to run on that is passionately loved by a significant minority, an election that would be seen as life or death between the two major parties by almost every voter, all in addition to having made a vote for the party in 2019 seem wasted, I don’t see how they wouldn’t get squeezed every which way. I think they might end up with no seats, or at best three or four.

The Greens will hold Brighton Pavilion so long as Caroline Lucas is there. The SNP would get every seat in Scotland bar maybe one or two – although that could be in the midst of changing. Will be interesting to see if the scandal enveloping the party has any effect on their electoral fortunes in May. That will tell us a lot about not only how the SNP would do in their Westminster seats at a general election, but the future of the United Kingdom.

Anyhow, as I said, things change, particularly over three years time. Labour people can hold onto the hope that anything can happen – and over the last decade in politics, usually has. Having said that, I am starting to fear there is nothing Starmer can do to break through and that the Tories are destined to win the next election. It always seems to work out for Boris Johnson in the end, somehow.

Three endings for “Game of Thrones” that would have been way better

While in the midst of a global pandemic, it’s nice to think back to the things we used to get worked up about when society was still a thing. Like “Game of Thrones”, Season Eight. We all loved the show for almost a decade leading up to the final series, having had to wait two years to see how it was all going to end. “Game of Thrones” was to the 2010s what “Seinfeld” was to the 1990s. Unfortunately, just like with “Seinfeld”, the way it finished was a huge let down.

I think there are three big problems with Season Eight. One is that the White Walkers, who had been slowly built up over the series to be the looming threat to all of civilisation (“Winter is Coming”), were way, way, way too easily defeated, and in a manner that was deeply unsatisfying to the story.

Secondly, Daenerys going mad out of the blue, seemingly all because Jon Snow might have been making eyes at someone else, felt really stupid. This is the woman who throughout the seasons had gone through unmentionable agony – only to get to the doorstep of her final triumph and have an adolescent tiff. To say it was poor is an understatement.

And finally, that denouement was terrible. Let’s put Bran, that weird Stark kid, in charge? Why would the people involved do that? We had eight seasons of them acting in a way that would make them even considering such a thing beyond imagination. To have them all agree to it for no real reason at the very end put the seal on Season Eight being one to forget.

So, how should “Game of Thrones” have finished instead? I’ve thought about this more than I should have and come up with what I feel are the only three endings that could have possibly made sense.

The really, really dark ending

“Game of Thrones” was at its heart a very brutal programme. That was part of its charm – you never knew just how bleak it was going to be willing to go. This could have played out to a conclusion that was even more desolate than anything that had preceded it.

The White Walkers advance further and further south. Meanwhile, the various human factions battle, weakening each other more and more. Finally, the White Walkers get to King’s Landing and….kill everyone and take over Westeros. That’s it – the White Walkers win in the end. All of the human conflict was nothing against the power of this mysterious force that they simply couldn’t unite to defeat. It ends with no hope for humanity’s redemption whatsoever.

2. The toned down version of Ending 1 above

In this one, the White Walkers would get to King’s Landing and take it over….but Daenerys would escape with a small band to Essos, hoping to come back and fight another day. The fact that she is the last one standing amongst the humans of Westeros is of little consolation – she has lost to a power she vastly underestimated and mistakenly saw as a sideshow to her real ambitions.

3. The ending where Daenerys wins but it actually makes sense

Daenerys manages to defeat the Lannisters and take King’s Landing – only to face a battle to the death with the White Walkers. Scared of their fate should the dreaded zombie army win, other Westeros factions are finally able to put aside their differences and fight together. Only, it is too late. King’s Landing is all but destroyed, and Daenerys wins, just, only to rule over a kingdom that has been completely gutted. She sits on the Iron Throne, overlooking a city that has been decimated. Having won in this Faustian manner, she goes mad.

In conclusion, the end of “Game of Thrones” was not of a piece with the rest of the programme. While not redemptive exactly, it sort of tried something of an upbeat ending that didn’t seem too ridiculous compared to the brutality of the rest of the story. And they failed. What a shame. At least we have seven great seasons of it to look back on.

Was the coalition government a good idea or a bad idea? For the Lib Dems? For the Tories? For the country?

I got to thinking about the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government this week. It is, in a sense, one of the more maligned governments of my lifetime. Labour people and indeed those on the left more generally paint it as an austerity creating beast; most Tory folk think of it as an unfortunate period that they had to endure before a full throated Conservative regime could take over. Even those remaining in the Lib Dems want to crap all over it, now thinking they can get the “progressive” vote back if only they apologise for taking part in this awful government enough times.

I will hold my hand up and say that the coalition government was the only one we’ve ever had in Britain that I liked during the time when it was in power. I can see upsides now of Blair and Thatcher’s governments that I didn’t feel at the time, which is different. I should confess that a lot of people I know and care about worked for the coalition government, including my wife, so it’s fair to say I’m not unbiased. Yet in trying to evaluate the pros and cons of the coalition from different perspectives, I have attempted to be as objective as possible.

I’ll start with the question of what effect the coalition had on the Tories and whether it a good thing for them in the long term, for the simple fact that this pretty easy to answer. While it probably helped Cameron hang on longer than he otherwise would have as Tory leader, it had no other real discernible effect on the Conservative party in the long term, really. I think the coalition delayed Brexit by a few years, that’s about it. Had the Lib Dems refused to go into government with them, there would have been a general election in a few months’ time and the Tories almost certainly would have won. Then, we would have had the same soap opera play out in the party as happened anyway, although we probably would have been spared Theresa May as prime minister (which, I’ll admit, is a strike against the coalition).

A brief note here on Labour and the Tory-Lib government. An enduring myth for many is the idea that Labour and the Lib Dems could have formed a government after the 2010 election. No, never. Not only were the numbers against this – together, the two parties still would only have had 315 seats – the real problem was that Labour really didn’t want it to happen. Or should I say, enough people around the top Labour table didn’t want a Lib-Lab coalition. Gordon Brown desperately wanted it to come together, I believe that much, but I don’t believe that anyone else – Balls, the Miliband brothers, Mandelson – really did. I think they figured it would be bad for them electorally to be in a fragile coalition that wouldn’t last, clinging onto power with the party that came a distant third. Better to let the Tories cut everything to death, making themselves unpopular in the process, and for the Lib Dems to commit suicide by going along with it. They’d be back in power in five years time, probably less.

I mention this because when evaluating the coalition from the perspective of what it did to the Lib Dems, this is important to bear in mind. The option wasn’t Lib-Lab vs Tory-Lib government, it was a coalition with the Tories or staying out of it all and waiting for the second general election of 2010.

Obviously, the coalition was bad for the Lib Dems. You can’t say anything else after what took place in 2015. However, it is worth looking at what happened in the 2010 general election and then trying to work out what might have happened if the Lib Dems had taken the alternative road and avoided going into government to get the whole picture.

At the time, there was a long held idea within the Lib Dems, around since merger had happened a little over 20 years previous, that if the Liberal Democrats could just get their voices heard – if only their leader could get on TV and reach millions of people who could hear the Lib Dem message unimpeded – then the breakthrough would come. That theory was perfectly tested in the 2010 general election campaign when after the first leaders’ debate, the Lib Dems actually topped a nationwide poll on 33%, one point ahead of the Tories. Clegg was “more popular than Churchill”. Although the polling sagged a little as election day neared, the final week or so before the big day saw the Lib Dems hover between 28 and 31%. We all knew at the time that the Lib Dems had to breakthrough and take at least a hundred seats, otherwise it was clear the two big parties were never going to allow anything like what happened in those three-way leaders debates to ever take place again.

And then, the let down. The Lib Dems got only 23% and managed to lose five seats. The theory that if only the party could get a hearing in the media and by the public it would result in electoral breakthrough had been tried and shown to be false. This was existential; the whole point of the party was now in question. ‘If not now now, then when?’ had been answered by the electorate as: never.

Again, the Lib Dems were faced with two choices after the election. One was to form a government with the Tories; the other was to tell the country they couldn’t form a government with either party and let the chips fall where they may. They could have played up the latter as a principled move. But in the general election that would have followed, the Lib Dems would have been severely punished. As badly hit as they were in 2015? Hard to know. Probably not. But you have to ask yourself what future the Lib Dems had after the second 2010 general election with say, 20 or 25 seats, having refused a chance at government.

Before I go there, let’s dispel the myth that the Lib Dems could have done well in a second 2010 election. Had they got 100 seats in the one that actually took place and refused to go in with either the Conservatives or Labour, their pitch could have been strong in a follow up that year. ‘We will not sacrifice our principles,’ Clegg could have said. ‘Back a Lib Dem government.’ And at that point, that wouldn’t have seemed far-fetched.

That same pitch cannot be made by a party that had just been hyped to hell and ended up losing seats. We would have had a zombie parliament for a few months, with the Tories nominally in power with a minority government, until both parties could replace their leaders and have another go. I think the Tories would have won that follow up election, mostly in the same way they won in 2015, by taking Lib Dem seats. It would have been a clear choice between the Tories and another Labour government, and the choice a lot of voters would have made in Lib-Tory seats seems pretty clear. Any idea of a Lib Dem breakthrough would have already been proven impossible, crushing the party’s vote share.

For here’s something not enough Lib Dem activists who claim all would have been well had it not been for the coalition consider – by refusing to go into government after the 2010 general election, throwing the country into chaos for a period, the Lib Dems would have been destroying one of their most cherished ideas. Namely, the notion that coalition and parties working together, usually in a PR voting system, is a better way of doing things. Having been given a chance to form a coalition government and not taken it, they would have been essentially rubbishing this whole plank of their raison d’etre.

To conclude the Lib Dem section: yes, coalition was bad for the Lib Dems’ electoral fortunes, but so would staying out of government have been. Basically, the 2010 general election killed the party. Even after getting the break of the leaders’ debates and subsequent massive coverage, the breakthrough did not occur. The Lib Dems were able to freeze their moment of death in aspic for another five years by going into government, that’s all.

In retrospect, the biggest negative I can lay at the coalition’s door is that it made the Labour party go both crazy as well as become smugly arrogant at the same moment, which time has demonstrated to be a lethal combination. I don’t believe this would have happened without the coalition having come into existence; in fact, my gut tells me that Labour would have avoided their worst excesses if we’d just had a straight up Tory government instead of the coalition. Something about being told by the Lib Dems that New Labour was this right-wing evil force for years and years, only for the Liberal Democrats to then go into government with the Tories, traumatised Labour and the wider left very deeply. They have yet to fully recover, more than ten years later.

The one option the Lib Dems had in government they should have taken in hindsight was essentially merge with the Tories. Take Nick Boles idea and form a National Liberal party that would have taken the Tory whip in exchange for the Conservatives not standing candidates against them. Lib Dem activists almost certainly hate this idea for obvious reasons but think about it: this pact having been formed is the one thing that might just possibly have stopped Brexit from happening. It also would have made the Tories subsequent cultural swing to the right far more difficult. Who knows, the National Liberals might even have split the Tories by now if they tried this out.

My final thoughts on the coalition is this: particularly in comparison to all that has followed it, the Con-Lib government was a good one. Whatever else you can say about the Lib Dems, from whatever political persuasion, at least there’s that to say.

The five worst British political speeches delivered in the 21st century (so far)

I made myself some ground rules for this. One is that I would only count speeches made by Members of Parliament in parties that had at least two MPs in the House of Commons when the speech was delivered. Otherwise, I’d get lost in the weeds – there are loads of terrible speeches given by local councillors, for instance, ones that are several degrees worse than anything on the list to come in strictly aesthetic terms. Smaller party politicians have given some shocking lectures over the years as well.

What I’m after are the worst speeches delivered by people at the top of British politics; people we had every right to expect better of, in other words. Another rule I applied was that there could be no more than one speech from any particular figure on the list. Otherwise, what is to follow could have been called “the worst speeches given by Theresa May and Ed Miliband”.

And so, in descending order, here are the worst five speeches given by frontline British politicians in the 21st century (at least, so far):

5. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 Labour conference speech

His first as party leader, Corbyn’s maiden speech to conference as the big cheese is mostly remembered for a gaffe he made. A note within the text that should have been expunged from the autocue which read “strong message here” was actually read out loud by Corbyn. It’s the kind of thing that would have haunted a better political figure, one that wasn’t prone to much worse.

The mistake isn’t why this speech makes the list. It’s here because Corbyn’s eventual defeat, everything that was wrong with him and his movement, is all here, on full display. The speech itself is relentlessly boring and remarkably free of substance. For a guy who was supposed to shake up the established way of doing things, it is remarkable how free of any original ideas he seemed to be in his first big set piece.

If you want to understand why Corbyn eventually got politically crushed, it was all there in 2015.

4. Jo Swinson launching the 2019 Lib Dem general election campaign

I don’t think any political speech has ever personally disappointed me as much as this one did. It was watching two things I didn’t want to happen unfold at once: one was the end of the Lib Dem resurgence that had happened since the summer of 2019, and with it the end of the party; the other was Brexit definitely happening, and probably a very harsh version of it at that. For in this short speech, the leader of the Lib Dems demonstrated that her party were woefully unprepared for the election ahead.

The mistakes got worse and were doubled down on via the horrid campaign strategy that was yet to unfold, and yet in Jo’s launch the writing was fully on the wall. The talk about her becoming prime minister. No strategy at all around how to stop Brexit nor how they were going to overcome the fact that to people on the left, they were the party of austerity and tuition fees and to people on the right, the party of trans-activism and soggy soft left values and policies.

So much of what has happened since in British politics was prefaced here.

3. Theresa May’s 2017 Conservative party conference speech

There are two amazing things about this speech from my perspective. One is that the fact that there are two speeches worse than this already in this still young century gives one a real idea of how in trouble our political class really is. The second is that May managed to hang on as leader of her party for a further 21 months after delivering this turkey.

Part of the reason it is so bad is, yes, she was clearly feeling rotten. The letters falling off the sign behind her and the prankster who handed her the P45 aren’t really her fault either. Yet even after stripping all of that away, this is still a terrible speech, one in a series of awful ones delivered by May during her fractious time as prime minister. I mean, I could have picked almost any speech between the summer of 2018 and when she stepped down in 2019 here, so it wasn’t like the 2017 conference speech was an isolated incident.

The 2017 speech demonstrates exactly why the Tories should have ditched her immediately after the catastrophic general election of that year. There are no ideas in the speech; no answer for why her party failed so badly a few months previous. Just a lot of hot air on Brexit that we later found out for sure she didn’t believe a word of.

2. Liz Truss’ speech to Conservative party conference, 2014

A conference speech delivered when Truss was DEFRA Secretary, this should be the worst speech ever given by any British politician, ever – the fact that I can pick out a worse one delivered in the last two decades reflects badly on the state of British politics.

There is so much to say about this speech. It’s almost so bad it’s good; think of this as The Room of British political speeches. For a start, it’s the way Truss delivers it – in a sort of confused yet upbeat haze, as if she had suffered a heavy head injury and then taken a load of amphetamines to keep herself awake. A hallmark of the speech is how many long, inappropriate pauses there are in it, as if Truss were making the whole thing up off the top of her head and found herself struggling for the next line several times. Or as if she was hallucinating applause where there wasn’t any.

She begins by saying that she is “infatuated with British food” in a way that is slightly unsettling before moving onto a comparison between herself and Ed Miliband which feels like it lasts for six years. She trots out lines like, ‘Conference, this is not about targets and turbines!’ and then seems shocked when she doesn’t get a clap for it.

If you watch the whole thing (and here it is, if you fancy it), you might get past the awkward, David Brent-esque first few minutes and figure that Truss has settled down into a dull, run of the mill conference speech. Yet watch until the end (it’s only 11 and a half minutes, a fact that continually astounds me to this day) – during the last three minutes, she goes completely off the deep end. It’s rightly the stuff of legend.

This Truss speech is notable amongst political nerds for two lines, both of them contained within these golden final three minutes. One is when she extrapolates on how much cheese we import before telling the crowd “That is a disgrace!” in a manner that is unquestionably hilarious; the other is when she tells the crowd she is going to Beijing to open new pork markets before striking a goofy pose. They are beloved for how camp the delivery of both of these lines are; what I’ve never seen commented on is the fact that they are utterly contradictory.

One moment, Truss is shouting about how importing food is a “disgrace”; in the next, about how we need to open up markets to free trade. There is no attempt whatsoever to explain the friction between protecting your internal market from external competition and opening things up as much as possible so that your suppliers have access to larger external markets. Nope, in Liz’s world, somehow we’re going to be super-protectionist and super-free trading at the exact same time.

In other words, more than a year before the EU referendum campaigns really got underway, here are all of the problems of Brexit and Truss’ subsequent tenure as International Trade Secretary displayed in a nice eleven and a half minute package, complete with campy faces and poses.

Oh, and I haven’t yet mentioned the classic final line of the speech, delivered in by now classic Liz Truss style: “I will not rest until the British apple is back at the top of the tree!”

Ed Miliband’s 2014 conference speech

There are several speeches made by Ed Miliband that would have definitely made this list had I not had the “one person, one entry” rule. His resignation speech, where in the midst of Labour having lost almost all of Scotland, his shadow chancellor having been beaten in his seat and the Tories getting a majority no one thought was possible, Ed thought he’d lighten the mood with a shout out to his Milifans, is worse than some of the others I’ve listed already in this article.

But given I could only pick one Ed M masterpiece, nothing else comes even close to how bad this speech is. The 2014 Labour leader’s speech is the ne plus ultra of terrible political speeches. I would be shocked if anything for the rest of this century displaced this doozy.

I had the pleasure of being in the crowd in Manchester myself for this one. My favourite memory of it was an older lady swivelling her head in every direction, clearly trying to gauge other people’s reactions to the apocalypse unfolding in front of her. The kind of thing one does at a really bad movie, wondering if everyone is as shocked as you are at the poor quality of what is on display.

The first twenty-five minutes of the speech – twenty-five – is Ed recounting random stories of meeting people in posh parts of north London. It’s a little look into Ed’s world. He is mistaken for Benedict Cumberbatch. Young people approach him to say things like “My generation is falling into a black hole”. A little boy compares him to Superman.

I think the impression this section was supposed to convey was one of Ed Miliband as a normal person, out on the doorstep, talking to people across the country. Except, it does the exact opposite, painting Miliband as a weirdo who hangs out in NW3 chatting up upper-middle class students when he isn’t being mistaken for Benedict Cumberbatch on Hampstead Heath.

I remember the bar at the Midland hotel the evening after the speech. It was full of young Labour researchers, many whom had come to Manchester with the dream of becoming a SpAd in clear sight, now drinking away their sorrows and talking to each other about what they’ll do after the general election defeat in half a year’s time. Sometimes, a political speech can have profound effects, particularly when they are the opposite of what was intended.

Why we should be thankful for how the Trump presidency turned out in the end

Today is the last full day of the Trump presidency. It is easy to take his loss in November for granted, forgetting how likely his re-election seemed at the start of 2020 (and which the thinness of Biden’s wins in crucial states bears out). It is also easy to underestimate how much worse Trump’s presidency, as bad as it was, could have been.

I could start almost anywhere but I’ll begin with North Korea. At the start of Trump’s term, I thought the potential for the situation on the Korean peninsula to go in a horrible and possibly devastating direction was massive. But in a sense, I overestimated Trump and his ability to plow any course for a sustained period of time.

What happened with North Korea during Trump’s time in charge of the free world was farcical on many levels. By bending to Kim Young-un’s wishes on almost everything right up front, including giving the dictator a series of PR wins in return for absolutely nothing, we had a whole section of right-wing punditry bleating on about how Trump should be in line for a Nobel Peace Prize. This was a valuable episode in that it demonstrated the vacuity at the heart of a lot of this stuff; how so much of political discussion is just partisan point-scoring.

Then Trump declared he was “in love” with Kim Yong-un at a rally and his supporters cheered him on all the way. This was so far off the reservation, even the most previously slavish towards Trump neocons had to take at least a moment to catch their breath. Then, predictably to anyone who knows even the first thing about foreign policy, the North Korean dictatorship just kept on doing whatever the hell it wanted. People stopped claiming Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, for the North Korean fiasco at least.

And yet, things haven’t got particularly worse in that part of the world. They haven’t got better either, but that’s a different story. All right, Kim Jong-un is talking now about not only developing nuclear weapons but WMDs that can strike American targets. But that this hasn’t happened already does show one of Trump’s strengths as president – his behaviour was so unbelievably weird that instead of making world politics worse he froze a lot of it in aspic. If world affairs was a big party, Trump was like the guy who had been hired to MC events, only to show up drunk, take his trousers off and start giving a speech about his lurid sexual peccadillos, leaving the party guests unable to do anything else other than stand and silently gawk.

Russia could have made big advances on the world stage during Trump’s presidency, but it didn’t really happen. Chinese power is greater, but it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t have taken place anyhow, under any president. In fact, apart from the Middle East, where Trump seems to have done some good mostly by accident, his presidency is remarkable in how little of a footprint it will leave on history.

Another worry at the start of Trump’s term in 2017 was how much he would undermine America’s institutions. Yet he fought the institutions and the the institutions won. In the end, he tried going full-on autocrat by trying to overturn the election result that is due to kick him out of the White House tomorrow; it completely failed due to strength of the US legal system. It didn’t matter how many Republican Congressmen and Senators publicly backed Trump attempt to subvert democratic norms in America, the system was robust enough to handle it. His final attempt at what was as close to an outright attempt at revolution as he was willing to dare failed spectacularly on January 6th. He clearly wanted to game the system and was stopped at every turn.

In summary, Trump’s presidency was nowhere near as scary as I feared four years ago, partly because of a fault in Trump’s personality that stopped him from ever truly testing the systems in America and abroad, but also that what little he did try, the systems were ultimately resistant to. This is something we should take away from this episode in history as a huge positive. Having Trump in the White House should have caused more lasting damage to the west; it turns out our way of life and the rules it stands on is much more robust than some of us might have feared.

My thoughts on the Priti Patel bullying scandal – why I think the right should be careful with what they are doing here

I don’t think there should be much more to say on the Priti Patel bullying scandal. She broke the ministerial code – again – and therefore should have been sacked. That’s it; I don’t see that there is anything more to talk about on the issue. Yet I am seemingly alone on this one; I’ve never seen anything like this incident as far as bad takes go.

Part of the response has broken along partisan lines. Figures from the right defending her; those from the left saying what she did should not just have been sacked but possibly had some fate far worse befall her. I saw her compared to both Adolf Hitler and Harold Shipman on Twitter over the weekend. You’d think the left would learn that crying wolf over fascism was a bad move that has a tendency to come back to haunt them, yet sadly there seems to be no sign of this realisation seeping through.

Yet the right have been even worse. Defending a Tory Home Secretary, fine, I get it, but being seemingly bereft of ways to explain her keeping her seat at the cabinet table despite having been found guilty of breaking the ministerial code – once again, not for the first time – they decided to reach for something equal parts absurd and dangerous. Some began to explain Priti Patel’s predicament through the lens of identity politics of a kind they would skewer the left for were it to be engaged in the defence of a Labour MP.

“If Patel was Labour, the left would be howling that this is all racist,” said several centre-right pundits. Yes, you’re right, they almost certainly would have. Problem is, plenty of Tory MPs seemed happy to bring race into the whole Patel situation themselves over the weekend. One Conservative MP on Twitter spoke of Patel as “female, BAME, the daughter of immigrants”, leaving me to wonder what any of those things have to do with Priti Patel either being Home Secretary in the first place or being found guilty of breaking the ministerial code. The right have spent a lot of time lecturing the left for bringing race into situations where it is uncalled for; doing the same thing when it might smell politically advantageous is hypocritical in the extreme.

It’s like Brexiteers defending Trump’s current behaviour by saying that because Remainers ignored the 2016 result with all the “it was the Russians wot did it” malarkey, that gives them carte blanche to fall in behind the idiotic conspiracy theories doing the rounds in the GOP at the moment. This is incredibly poor thinking. If you thought that the Remainers’ actions post-2016 were awful, it is hard to see how doing something that reminds you of this enough to explicitly make the connection between the two behaviours doesn’t mean you are doing something equally terrible.  

If you can’t think of a real reason that Priti Patel should keep her job as Home Secretary, and are reaching in desperation for something that looks and smells like left-wing identity politics, maybe, just maybe there isn’t actually a good, non-partisan reason for her to stay in the job.

One reason why bringing race into all this is dangerous, beyond hypocrisy on the right being displayed, is that it helps to add to an already perilous situation regarding ethnicity and power. When Diane Abbott was under fire for getting her maths wrong a few years ago, many Labour figures tried to turn it into a question of race; saying that any critique of Abbott was racist by definition. She was shadow Home Secretary at the time, meaning holding her to account was important. By trying to make any criticism thrown at Abbott into a matter of race, the left were unconsciously creating the following, horrible syllogism:

A. Any BME person who ascends to the cabinet or shadow cabinet can never be criticised for any wrongdoing, regardless of what they have done, due to their ethnicity.

B. Members of the cabinet and shadow cabinet must be held accountable for their actions in our democracy.

C. Therefore, BME people cannot be in the cabinet or the shadow cabinet.

To be clear, I do not believe it was the intent of any Labour people to advance this idea when they were calling anyone who questioned Diane Abbott’s maths a racist. Like I say, it was unconscious. But now I find some Tories doing the same thing when a Home Secretary of theirs who just happens to be an Asian woman and it scares me. This sort of thing is playing with fire. Going backward on ethnic minority representation should not be something we allow to happen. If this all becomes a matter of flinging race into the equation when it does not belong there in any way, we risk falling down a slippery slope.

To summarise: Priti Patel should have been sacked for breaking the ministerial code. That should be obvious to anyone not invested in a partisan way in the whole thing. And please let’s stop using race in ways that are dangerous. That’s it.

Here’s my prediction for the 2020 US presidential election

Today is the day politics nerds – and those who are deeply interested in the political fate of western civilisation – have been both anticipating and dreading for four years. The US presidential election. The chance for Trump to be judged on his presidency. For once, the hyperbole surrounding an election is fully justified – this really is the entire future of the western world we’re talking about here.

In 2016, I predicted on the day of the election that Donald Trump would win. I didn’t employ any sophisticated psephology to come to this conclusion; I went with my gut. I asked myself if America felt on the verge of electing the first woman president, or if it was about to elect a reality gameshow host and figured the latter felt way more likely. In making my prediction in 2020, I’m trying as best I can to stick to the same method.

Having said that, I can’t ignore all of psephological reality either. It’s well known that Biden has a large lead with those who have voted early, but that Trump catches up with those who intend to vote today. This brings two things to mind for me. One, in voting terms, it’s better to have votes banked than rely on turnout on the day. Some pundits have gone on about the Trump army, desperate to vote for their man. I think the reality is much more prosaic. I can imagine a lot of long time Republican voters not bothering this time out – it happened in 2008 with Palin. Two, I don’t believe the huge surge we’ve seen in early voting is simply down to Covid – or even more importantly, that this is indicative of an electorate desperate to hang on to its incumbent.

Trump has run a surprisingly bad campaign as well. The attacks on Biden have been weak and they haven’t gone after Kamala at all, which is interesting. I thought we were going to get a whole run of “we are one heart attack away from a (dogwhistle: black, female) socialist in the White House”. The Hunter Biden thing is terrible campaigning 101. The Hilary emails had cut through because they were simple to understand, fit in with what people didn’t like about Clinton already and were specifically related to her. Some crap about Biden’s son that no one’s heard of that is complicated and weird? This is what they decided to try up the homestretch?

I think it’s going to be a blowout for Biden. Like, 350+ in the EV, Trump never has a chance to declare victory because it’s never in sight. This is what my gut is telling me. Mostly.

There is a nagging worry that won’t go away, however. Not that Trump will win, but that it will be a close Biden victory instead. If that happens, it will be hell. Trump will cling on with everything he’s got – and given it’s all to play for, most of the GOP will play along. All the while, democracy in America will be dragged further through the mud as everything becomes relative, everything a partisan battle front.

Like I say, a Biden blowout feels like what’s going to happen. The only reason we’re so wary about it is what happened in 2016. But learn from the 2019 general election in the UK – a lot of us figured Corbyn might do better than expected because of what he pulled off in 2017. Except, in politics, lighting never strikes twice. Trump was extremely lucky in 2016 and won it by the skin of his teeth. Four bad years, up against a better candidate whom he is trailing by around eight points going into today, having run a terrible campaign, the question isn’t whether Trump is going to win. It’s whether he gets blown away, creating a new era of American and indeed, western politics – or whether there is a painful battle to get to the other side, one that will leave its scars. See you on the other side, folks.

Defending Robert Peston’s “The government is socialist” tweet

Yesterday, Robert Peston tweeted out a thread about how he saw the current Boris Johnson-led government as being socialist. Peston really went for it, describing Johnson as “more Castro than Castro”. As a result, people rushed to belittle his claims. What was interesting to me was that the ones who tried to substantially rebut Peston’s claim – as opposed to just vacantly insult him – oddly demonstrated the strength of his thesis by accident.

First off, it’s worth examining what the government is doing and how it could – or even should – be considered socialist. As Peston points out, millions of workers have essentially been subsidised by the government since the Covid crisis began. A huge portion of the economy is being propped up by government money. It may not be socialism as you tend to think about it, but it certainly fits the textbook definition.

The problem is, “socialism” is a loaded term that has come to mean different things to different people. One left-leaning comedian on Twitter had a response to Peston’s thread that was telling: “He (meaning Boris) just whipped his government to vote not to give food to starving kids at Christmas, Robert”. The assumption behind this comment is that no socialist government ever had or even could choose not to pay for children’s school meals. This is the mode of thinking in which socialism is defined as a form of economic organisation in which only nice things happen to nice people and nothing bad ever happens again. Truth is, if you look at the history of socialism, taking food away from kids is actually a pretty socialist thing to do. I don’t even have to go to Stalin or Ceausescu to find things that might be relevant to this; the harsh push and pull of resources – with some people going hungry – was a common feature in every socialist society of the 20th century, even the supposedly softer ones like Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Another form of rebuttal to Peston’s tweet hits on one of my great political pet peeves. This is when left-wing commentators present social democracy and socialism as basically synonymous when they feel like it, then make out like they have nothing to do with one another if it suits them later. George Eaton’s tweet at Peston was a classic of this type, saying “A statist economy is not the same as a socialist/communist one – as any Gaullist or Christian Democrat will testify”. What makes this statement annoying beyond touching on my pet peeve is that George is actually wrong here. What the government is doing at present isn’t social democracy, which is way more interested in outcomes, such as poor kids not going hungry over half-term. No, what we’re seeing is a form of actual socialism, ie seizing of the means of production by the government.

You could argue that they have been forced into doing this by Covid. Yes, to some degree. But there are other factors which suggest that the government doesn’t mind experimenting with socialism anyhow, albeit in a way that most left-wingers would dislike. The way they are fighting to expand use of state aid post-Brexit, for instance. A lot of people argue this is just a tactic to force no deal. I don’t think so, mostly because of how the expanded use of state aid fits into Dominic Cummings’ writings over a number of years. And let’s face it, he’s really running the country right now.

The only thing in Peston’s thread I materially disagree with is that this turn towards socialism by the Tories will hamper Labour – I believe the opposite to be true. The Conservatives becoming much more statist blunts a lot of their traditional attack lines on Labour – you know, the ones around “Labour will trash the economy by spending on everything”. You can’t use that line when you are clearly already doing the same. If the choice at the next general election is between “evil socialism that is mean a lot of the time” and “nice socialism that helps poor people”, a lot of voters will choose the latter. This is one of the main reasons elections were always banned in socialist countries; otherwise the government of the day would be putting the above choice to the people and lose every time. I don’t think the Tories abandoning fiscal responsibility has been factored enough into the electoral calculus.

However you choose to define socialism, it makes no intellectual sense to define it as “anything that feels nice to my metropolitan liberal sensibilities”. Socialism can and often has been brutal. Finally, just because you think of yourself as a socialist and hate the Tories doesn’t mean they aren’t using their own form of socialism to their own ends.

A look back at Glen or Glenda – can the Ed Wood’s “masterpiece” tell us anything about the trans debate in 2020?

“It’s the longest hour on Earth,” is my brother’s capsule review of Ed Wood’s first feature, Glen or Glenda, a 1953 film that is about transgenderism/transvestitism. I have always found this and other critiques of the movie that describe it in such harsh terms unfair; noted American film critic Leonard Maltin once described is as “possibly the worst film ever made”. Yes, Glen or Glenda is poorly directed and produced – it is an Ed Wood movie, after all – yet it is ambitious in its own way and has a good message. In fact, that message is weirdly topical in 2020.

Let’s start with some background. George Weiss was a producer of what was known at the time as “Z movies”. These were films too cheap to even be considered B movies. The whole concept of B movies originated in the days when double features were a thing in American cinemas, where the B movie would sort of be like the B-side of a single; something of obviously inferior quality, meant to at least partially take up space. Z movies are films that were much cheaper than that, often using non-actors and padded out using stock footage and/or sections of other B or Z movies. They played at drive-ins a lot, often performing the function B movies did for A movies for B movies themselves.

Weiss was a specialist in a type of Z movie known as exploitation – movies made as quickly and cheaply as possible to cash in on whatever the latest tabloid sensation happened to be at the time. In early 1953, that was the story of Christine Jorgensen, the first person widely known in the US to have had sex reassignment surgery having been born biologically a man. Weiss wanted something done as swiftly and for as little money as possible to try and cash in on the Jorgensen story and Ed Wood assured him that he was the man to do it.

It was shot in four days and you can tell. A large portion of the film is composed of stock footage with voiceover on top. According to legend, the film failed to live up to even Weiss’ low expectations, but he’d pre-sold the film and put it out anyhow. It was supposedly poorly received amongst audiences of the day and Weiss and Wood never worked together again on a film that saw the light of day, although Weiss did produce part of a film a few years later that was directed by Wood with the working title Hellborn which was never released.

Part of the issue with Glen or Glenda is that it is highly experimental. This is unusual for Wood, who in all of his later pictures tried to stick within the boundaries of genre, albeit it ineptly. For instance, Plan 9 is sci-fi, Bride of the Monster is horror. Glen of Glenda is essentially an art house movie. It begins with five minutes of Bela Lugosi alone in some sort of mad scientist laboratory. He pontificates on the meaning of life, like in this, the film’s opening monologue:

“Man’s constant groping of things unknown, drawing from the endless reaches of time brings to light many startling things. Startling? Because they seem new. Sudden. But most are not new to the signs of the ages.”

Lugosi stares down at stock footage of a street scene and says:

“People, all going somewhere. All with their own thoughts, their own ideas. All with their own personalities. One is wrong because he does right. One is right because he does wrong. Pull the string! Dance to that which one is created for!”

I can only imagine what 1953 American audiences must have thought of this Lugosi intro. Once it finishes, we come to our first proper scene: a male transvestite has killed himself in a hotel room and the police have arrived. This leads to what frames most of the rest of the movie – making the Lugosi scenes even more bizarre in the context of the film, if that were possible – the cop who found the transvestite’s body talking to a psychiatrist about the case. As standard film set ups go this is pretty lame – we have no idea why this cop is so obsessed with a case that involved no criminality for a start – but as Ed Wood set ups go, it’s actually not bad.

The psychiatrist does some boiler plate on the differences between transexuals and transvestites that is mostly reasonably accurate, save one huge, glaring issue – the film advances the idea that people with gender dysmorphia are in fact hermaphrodites. Further, that in most cases the alternative sexual organs are hidden, and what sexual reassignment surgery does is bring them to the fore, so to speak. I realise this is a massive scientific error, but at least the rest of it mostly stacks up.

At least until we get farther on in the movie. There you will find some more fake news to digest, my favourite being:

“Seven out of ten men wear a hat, so the advertisements say. Seven out of ten men are bald.”

It is also filled with wonderful Ed Woodisms, a personal fave being:

“Modern man is a hard working human.”

Interpolated between scenes involving the psychiatrist talking about why men’s clothing is a form of torture in voice over, all over mostly random stock footage of motorways and metal factories, is what is the film’s central story – that of Glen, a transvestite, and his fiancee, Barbara. In one sense, the scenes with Glen and Barbara are the real movie, with everything else around it being padding.

Glen is played by Ed Wood himself in what I believe is his only appearance as an actor, or at the very least the only speaking part he ever took in a movie. Which is strange given Wood is one of the best actors in any of his films. I wouldn’t call him great or anything, but he has a presence and intensity utterly lacking in a lot of the thespian wannabes that haunt his pictures. A prime example, unfortunately, being the woman who plays Barbara – Wood’s real wife at the time, Dolores Fuller. What plays out on screen is essentially a version of Wood and Fuller’s real story; Wood was in actual fact a transvestite himself. Despite essentially playing herself, Fuller is really not up to it, giving one of the worst screen performances I have ever seen, anywhere, ever. In fact, the more I think about it, one of the main reasons people dump on this movie so much is down to her performance, which is never less than hideous in any scene throughout Glen or Glenda.

To recap, we have the psychiatrist/stock footage segments, the Glen and Barbara story and the Bela Lugosi portions, the latter of these being jarringly random both in context and in and of themselves. Picture Lugosi sitting in a large chair while stock footage of running buffaloes are crossfaded over him, all while the ageing Hungarian bellows:

“Pull the string! Pull the string! A mistake is made! The story must be told!”

This is all ticking along – and then you hit the 35 minute mark and it all goes out the window. What you get then is an almost entirely dialogue-free 15 minute art installation which I think tries to give us deeper insight into the psychological torment Glen suffers from as a secret transvestite. The psychiatrist is lost completely during this very long section – but Lugosi comes back every once in a while to babble some random crap like:

“Tell me! Tell me, dragon! Do you eat little boys, puppy dog tails, and big, fat snails?”

It is hard to explain this 15 minute “artsy” section with any cogency. Satan features heavily. Glen pops in and out of women’s clothing. There is a whole section involving whips and chains and women who are not in any other portion of the movie (some of these bits apparently came from other Weiss productions). Once the art installation is finished, we finally get to the iconic scene: where Glen finally tells Barbara about his transvestism and she takes off her angora sweater, leaving her in nothing but a bra up top, which she hands it to Glen.

That should have been the end of the movie. But we’ve got another 15 to 20 minutes left to play out. You see, the problem is that Ed Wood had been instructed by Weiss to make a picture about transsexuals. And the overwhelming majority of Glen or Glenda up until the 50 minute mark is about transvestites – and in fact, the film specifically and repeatedly tells you that transvestites are not transsexuals and shouldn’t be confused for one another. At least, the parts that aren’t random crap are about that. So, not only would Wood have not made a film about transsexuals were he to end with the angora sweater scene, he would have made a film that was very, very specifically not about transexuals and furthermore, kept reminding you of that fact.

What we get to make up for this deficiency is, well, more stock footage, but that won’t be a surprise to you if you’ve made it this far. This time, the psychiatrist tells the story of “Alan”, a thinly disguised Jorgensen who decides to undergo surgery to become a woman. It’s pretty lame going, unfortunately. Wood tacked it on and it feels it.

Overall, I appreciate both the ambition and the sensibility of Glen or Glenda, despite its glaring problems. And seeing a film that at least is partially about transsexuality from the early 1950s – and a movie from that era that is 100% about not fitting into society’s norms – made me think about where we are in this debate now that it is 2020.

The strangest thing about the current trans debate that hit me after a rewatching of Glen of Glenda is that the film’s central conceit – that people who are born into the wrong body as well as anyone who feels compelled to do things that drive them out of the mainstream of society should be treated with compassion – is now more controversial in a way than it was in 1953. Feeling bad for trans people is now considered looking down on them in some fashion. The main societal narrative of the day says we should treat trans people like gay people – that their lifestyle is no way bad for them and it is only society’s opprobrium that stands in the way of their happiness. Only, I think this is a poor way of looking at things.

Surely being born into the wrong gender, ie, a gender you don’t feel represents the gender you feel you are inside, is an unfortunate turn of events. You can’t choose to have a penis if you weren’t born with one, to start with. The surgery that exist to get as close as possible to changing one’s gender is still pretty substandard. Pretending this doesn’t matter is also bizarre. It’s sometimes as if being transgender is being presented as a lifestyle choice, when surely to those with gender dysmorphia, it’s much more serious than that.

Pretending our bodies are meaningless and that we can imagine ourselves as anything and have that imagination become reality, is ludicrous and self-defeating. I would go back to the ethos of Glen or Glenda – can’t we all just accept one another and our idiosyncrasies for what they are? If someone’s lifestyle has zero impact on your own, why do you care what someone else likes to wear?

If you haven’t seen it, give Glen or Glenda a whirl. It’s not as much fun as Plan 9, but it’s actually got even more heart. Again, while it can’t be described as “good” in any normal sense, it’s weirdly entertaining.