Matthew Carr's Blog, page 17

In the Court of the Brexit King

If there’s  important lesson about politics that tends too often to go unlearned, it’s this: You don’t need to be a genius or a titan to take power and use that power for malign purposes.  In Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi – a surreal parody of Macbeth – the  foulmouthed, halfwitted childlike slob Pere Ubu massacres the King of Poland and his family and reduces Poland to servitude under his tyrannical and arbitrary rule.  The murdered Polish king’s son Bougrelas laments the destruction of his family and his kingdom by ‘vulgar Pere Ubu, an adventurer from who knows where? A vile scoundrel, a shameful vagabond!’

The twentieth century provided many examples of societies undone by politicians with far greater influence than their personalities or intellect might suggest, and our own era of rightwing populism has already brought forth a succession of malignant clowns to power in one country after another.

Here in our own disunited kingdom, we have seen a country that once prided itself on the caution, professionalism and sang froid of its ruling classes reduced to a gaggling chaotic madhouse by the most grotesque procession of charlatans that any era in British politics has ever produced.

All this was made possible by Brexit, and Brexit has given these men – for they are mostly men – the power that they are now exercising over all of us.  At the top, seated in his gilded – and recently re-adorned – palace at 10 Downing Street, is our own clown-king with his consort Carrie Antoinette.  Day after day we see him at one photo-op after another, wearing one new costume after another, thumbs up and hair all carefully-tousled, snickering, posturing and pouring out a stream of Christmas cracker puns and bumbling upper class affectations like a cross between Bane, Benny Hill and Bertie Wooster.

It’s all a bit of a larf really.  Or it would be, if it wasn’t for the 120,000-odd dead, the queues of people lining up for foodbanks, the corruption, the cronyism,  the abdication of responsibility, the evasion of accountability, the misgovernance and the ungovernance, the ongoing economic calamity of Brexit, the pathetic, dimwitted and reckless tinkering with the Northern Ireland Protocol, the baleful gloating at the EU’s botched vaccine rollout and the utterly dispiriting lies, evasions, diversions and distractions that ceaselessly flow from the mouths of Herr Bunter and his pals.

None of this seems to bother the government and his supporters, who often seem as indifferent to the nation’s dizzying descent as Pere Ubu was when asked about the state of the Polish economy:: ‘The finances are going fairly well.  A considerable number of dogs in woollen stockings pour into the streets, and the dognappers are doing fine.  On all sides one sees only burning houses, and people bending under the weight of our finances.’

There comes a point, and perhaps we’ve reached it now, when all this becomes so familiar and so routine that it starts to lose its ability to shock, when you’re tempted to shrug your shoulders and think ‘oh well what else can you expect from the Plague Island Banana Republic?’  But we really shouldn’t allow this to happen, and not only because this government has proven itself again and again to be dangerously useless, but because uselessness is not the whole story here.

It’s now nearly three months since Brexit was ‘done’, and the lineaments of the post-Brexit state are beginning to emerge.  It is not an appealing picture.  In the last week the Johnson government has rammed through one of the most draconian policing bills in British history.  It has sketched out what a post-Brexit foreign policy would look like, and announced its intention to increase the British nuclear stockpile by forty percent.   You really don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to work out what the impact of this increase is likely to be on nuclear proliferation, but there is no indication that the government has even thought about this, or gives a damn.

Now, the Sun reports that the government will be announcing changes to the Modern Slavery Act this week in order to ‘prevent ‘child rapists, terrorists and serious criminals as well as failed asylum seekers…from exploiting modern slavery safeguards to stay in Britain.’

According to the Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole – a greasy political lickspittle who really does embody the absolute worst the British press has to offer – this proposed legislation is aimed at ‘lefty lawyers’ and ‘dinghy-chasing’ lawyers who supposedly mount ‘spurious’ attempts to ‘pull illegal immigrants off deportation planes.’

How does Cole know these attempts are ‘spurious’ or without merit?  Don’t ask, because he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care.  For spivs like him, it’s enough for a Tory Home Secretary to assert that ‘criminals and terrorists ‘ are ‘diverting resources away from genuine victims of trafficking, persecution and serious harm’ to believe it.

Now, according to Cole ‘ judges will have the power to slap massive costs on have-a-go lawyers who use template papers and every excuse they can think of to try to stop deportations without merit.’ Never mind, as the Secret Barrister has pointed out, that judges already have these powers.  Never mind that  ‘illegal immigrants’ may well be refugees and asylum seekers with very good reasons for not being deported; all of them are now reduced to the generic category of ‘child rapists, terrorists, and serious criminals.’

As everybody knows, we Brits don’t like that kind of foreigner, and for the constituency that Patel is catering too, there is no other kind.

These policies have been rolled out against a new ‘battle’ in our neverending post-Brexit culture war, in which BBC journalists have been censured for making a joke about the Union Jack, and Huw Edwards – not exactly the Ed Murrow of the UK media – was told to take down a tweet of the Welsh flag.   Meanwhile the government is proposing to tear up the Northern Ireland Protocol  – which the Brexit neanderthal Mark Francois has called ‘Danegeld’ – regardless of whether it will be breaking international law – again.

So there you have it.  Police powers to make a Belorussian president blush.  Bellicose ‘global’ posturing backed up by Trident missiles to enable ‘Global Britain to punch above its weight – regardless of whether it instigates a retaliatory arms race.  An appeal to British racism and xenophobia that (almost) makes Theresa May look liberal by comparison.  Aggressive unionism – expressed through flagwaving culture wars and a vicious attempt to unseat one of the few respected politicians in the country

This is our post-Brexit UK, and if it looks just a teeny bit authoritarian and fascistic, we shouldn’t be surprised by that.  Leaving the EU was never an end in itself. Brexit was and is a radical rightwing nationalist ‘revolution’ that has no choice but to continue in the same reactionary trajectory.

To stop or change course would mean recognising the scale of the folly and disaster that the Brexiters have inflicted upon us. They will never do this.

That means we are stuck in this trajectory as long as this government is in power.  It means an intensified ‘war on woke’ to whip up hostility to popular movements for racial justice, gender rights and the rights of minorities, and climate change protests.  It means an orgy of flagwaving, capdoffing monarchism, and ‘if you don’t like this country, leave’ patriotism.

And while these barkers’ sideshows unfold, the government will continue to grind away at the essential constructs that make representative democracy possible – even in its imperfect form – and continue the construction of a strong (Tory) state that will become ever more difficult to shift.

Some may still insist that a liberal like Johnson would never do any of these things.  But he is doing them, and a politician so devoid of morality and integrity was never going to oppose the populist surge that brought him to power.  Johnson was always more rightwing than he pretended to be when he was mayor, which was one reason why he so easily became the poster boy of the Tory extremist wing.

Too many people didn’t see that, or didn’t care.  And now millions of us are trapped in the new country that he and his cabal are attempting to build, and if we can’t recognise the seriousness of the threat that it poses and find a way to build a broad movement of opposition that reaches out beyond the usual comfort zones, our Teletubby Ubu Roi will take us all down to a very dark place indeed, in which it will be very difficult to turn the lights back on.

 

 

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Ursula in Blunderland

At first sight, the government of a country that has just reached the grim figure of 100,000 covid-related deaths and the third highest per capita covid death rate in the world shouldn’t have much to celebrate.  Yet a poll this week suggests that  Johnson and his cabinet-of-the-damned have gained four points, bringing its potential vote to 41 percent.

The main reason for this is the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine program, which unlike most of what the government has done these last twelve months, is moving forward successfully, and has left its European neighbours far behind.

This week Johnson has also received a further boost, thanks to the shambolic response of the European Commission to its botched vaccination roll out.  In the space of a few days the  EU has announced that it will block exports of vaccines to ‘third countries’, including the U.K, and the Commission then announced yesterday that it would triggering Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, effectively imposing a trade border with the Republic of Ireland.

These gambits have been widely-criticised, and  they have given Johnson and his cronies an unusual taste of the moral high ground.  The origins of this dispute stem from the decision by the European Commission to take  control of the EU’s vaccination procurement effort in June, rather than leave it to individual states to do their own procurement.

Whereas the UK had confirmed orders for both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines by June, the EU did not secure its contract with Astrazeneca until mid-August, and the Pfizer contract until November.  The vaccine rollout was further delayed by the slow administrative process, which required input from each individual member state before vaccines could be approved.

It was not unreasonable in itself for the Commission to take overall control of the rollout program, because individual state procurement could have resulted in ‘vaccine nationalism’ and lack of coordination between member states.

In the end the EU signed contracts for 2.9 billion individual doses – more than enough in theory to take care of the continent’s needs.  But frustration at the slow procurement and approval process has now been compounded by a series of disastrous setbacks.  First the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNtech announced that would not be supplying the agreed amounts their vaccines.

Now AstraZeneca has said that it will only be able to deliver 30 million of a promised 80 million doses of its vaccine by March, due to production problems at its Brussels manufacturers.

The EU has accused these companies of reneging on their agreements, which may be true, but there also seems to have been some naivete in the way the contracts were negotiated, which allowed them to look for loopholes, for reasons which are not yet clear.  In any case the EU did itself no favours when it demanded that the UK hand over supplies of vaccines produced by AstraZeneca, on the grounds that the UK’s plants belonged to the same company.

On a purely technical level, this might not be an unreasonable assumption.  But the political optics are terrible, and they were made even worse by the Commission’s out-of-the-blue decision to invoke Article 16, after five years of warning of the dangers of a hard Irish border.  These hamfisted attempts at vaccine diplomacy  have not exactly covered the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her team in glory.  According to Der Spiegel, von der Leyen has a history of poor leadership, and an equally poor record of  unaccountability.

Given the behaviour of our own government, it’s probably not a good idea to linger too much on how a person like that got the job of Commission President. But von der Leyen’s ineptness also has wider implications for the global response to the pandemic. It is utterly and wearyingly predictable that the Brexit press and an army of social media commentators  are absolutely revelling in all this and hailing the UK’s vaccine roll out as a retrospective vindication of Brexit and even a kind of ‘Falklands moment’ for the government (go figure).

Today the Mail on Sunday was citing the row as proof that ‘the nation state, with its lasting common interests, its short lines of communication, its existing structures of experience and co-ordination, its single language and law’ will always do better than transnational entities like ‘the lumbering EU monster’.

The UK’s death toll was not mentioned in that juxtaposition, but no one would it expect it to be. But it really does take the absolute dog biscuit to find Brexiters waxing indignant about the EU’s threat to the Good Friday agreement, but that is what they’re like and they can’t be tamed.

Never mind that they ignored these warnings for five years.  Never mind that Johnson himself has threatened to trigger Article 16.  Never mind that the UK could have done what it did as a member of the EU, and that the EU might have rolled out its vaccine procurement program more successfully if the UK had been a member, which also would have benefitted the UK.   Never mind all that. For the Brexiters, Brexit can’t be considered a success until the EU collapses, and if the pandemic helps to achieve that, then that will be a happy ending for them.

Personally I don’t think this will happen.  Those 2.9 billion doses will eventually appear, and Ireland does not appear to see the Article 16 fiasco as lethal blow to its relations with the EU, even if Brexiters would like to believe that. But there is no doubt that von der Leyen and her team have committed a series of damaging errors, and unless it can recover from them, many Europeans will lose faith in the European project.

Beyond its implications for the European project, the UK-EU standoff raises serious questions about the global management of the pandemic and the dangers of ‘vaccine diplomacy.’   Brexiters might regard the vaccination ‘race’ as a test of national expertise, and revel in the fact that its European neighbors have not yet made it out of the vaccination world cup qualifying groups, but it won’t be much use if the UK achieves its vaccination targets and its neighbours don’t – unless we intend to cut all ties with the continent.

And these disputes between rich countries over vaccine access and procurement also ignore the global disparity between rich and poor countries.  Even if – or rather when – Europe and the UK manage to successfully inoculate their populations, the pandemic will not be eliminated until the whole world is vaccinated.

That is an awesome challenge, and it doesn’t take an epidemiologist to point out that there needs to be international coordination and collaboration  in order to mobilise vaccine production, maximise vaccine access, and turn vaccines into a common social good.

If this doesn’t happen, the world faces the impossible anomaly of post-covid societies coexisting with covid-ridden zones in which the virus continues to run rampant, or which are inoculated with inferior vaccines that maximise the possibility of mutant variants.

That is a lose-lose situation.  No wonder the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that the world is ‘on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure’ because of the global disparities in vaccine access and provision, and the ongoing hoarding by rich countries

The EU has been just as guilty of this as the UK and the US, and it will get us nowhere.  Because Covid, like climate change, is a global threat, that requires countries to act in tandem in their common interests, and to recognise that altruism is also self-interest.

Like so many of the world’s problems it demands that we think globally and act locally – and also unselfishly. That is not what we’ve been seeing over the last week.  No one expects to see it from Brexiters, but the EU – at least according to its own self-image – ought to do better and act in accordance with the values that it supposedly represents.

Otherwise we will slip into a global pandemic response that merely mirrors the gross inequalities that already undermine our attempts to respond to climate change.  We need coordination, fairness, justice – including the suspension of intellectual property rights so that generic manufacturers can make their own affordable vaccines.  The sooner we get all this the better, because contrary to what Brexiters are now saying, these ongoing ‘vaccine wars’ are  not an argument against international cooperation and collaboration, but another argument in favour of both.

 

 

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The Lie Machine

Political lying is not a new phenomenon, but there are many different kinds of political lies.  There are lies that governments tell their populations in order to achieve specific objectives in war and diplomacy.  There are up-front, out-loud lies based on the invention of facts, and  lies that are achieved through the concealment and obfuscation of contradictory fact.

In the Iraq War the British and American governments ‘stovepiped’ intelligence reports and stripped them of caveats and nuance, in order to make a case for war that they knew to be false.  Lying may also become an instrument of governance, intended to confuse, divide and disorientate the public to the point when it is no longer possible to distinguish between lies and truths – something that the political scientist Hannah Arendt once saw as a characteristic of totalitarian governments, and which has also become a technique of ‘post-truth’ rightwing populism.

In a 1971 essay on  the publication of the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam, Arendt observed how  ‘the famous credibility gap’ of successive US governments during the war ‘has suddenly opened up into an  abyss. The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader who wishes to probe this material.’

Arendt saw ‘the extravagant lengths to which the commitment to nontruthfulness in politics went on the highest level of government’ as a new development that was qualitatively different from the well-established tradition of ‘arcana imperii, the mysteries of government—and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends.’

Today the UK is sinking into its own ‘quicksand’ of lies, led by the most flagrantly dishonest government in its history.   This week CNN – increasingly you need to read non UK sources to get any idea of what is actually happening in this country – reported on the ongoing disintegration of the British economy as a result of Brexit.

Writing of the collapse of the fishing industry and the fraying of logistical supply chains, the article observed that ‘While it should be a source of embarrassment for the PM that his deal has made life very difficult for many of the industries that he has championed post-Brexit, Johnson’s public statements on the matter suggest he is oblivious to the reality that many are facing.’

The piece quoted a government spokesman, who claimed ‘From the outset we were clear that we would be leaving the customs union and single market which meant that there would be new processes after the end of the Transition Period. These were widely communicated through our public information campaign.’

CNN also reported that:

Many of Johnson’s Conservative lawmakers are struggling with how to reply to their constituents. “The party gave us lines to read out when the deal came through presenting it as a huge success, but as time goes on, it’s clear there’s quite a lot of nasty surprises in Pandora’s box,” says one Conservative member of parliament who is not permitted to speak on-the-record about government policy outside of their brief.

Few people will be surprised that Johnson is ‘oblivious to the reality that many are facing’ in regards to Brexit, because he has shown the same obliviousness ever since joining the Leave campaign.  Observers of the unfolding Brexit debacle will also have noticed a very Johnsonian willingness to blame other people in his spokesman’s suggestion that hauliers and fishermen ignored clear government guidance.

Never mind that these ‘new processes’ were not clearly explained or ‘widely communicated’, or that many businesses did not even know what they were, because the government itself didn’t know what they were and gave businesses no time to prepare for them.

Such statements are now standard operating procedure from a government with a congenital unwillingness to acknowledge any facts that make it look bad. This is an arrogant government that lies repeatedly to cover its own arse, a government that never takes responsibility for anything, a government whose members are never accountable , never resign and never admit they have done anything wrong.

It is also a government that engages in organised lying, which orders its MPs to recite ‘lines’  on social media and other fora, regardless of whether they believe them to be true, and which prohibits them from saying anything that contradicts its positions.

This modus operandi isn’t  specific to Brexit.  Throughout the pandemic the government has shown the same dishonesty in relation to its numerous failed promises, its dodgy procurement contracts, its u-turns and delays, and the  100,000 death toll – a catastrophic failure of governance that ought to be a resigning matter for any government with even a scintilla of decency and integrity.

For Johnson and his cronies, these qualities are entirely absent.  Lying has become not just a means to a specific end,  but a strategy for power and political survival, based on the belief that the public will always have too short an attention span to notice the discrepancy between what it says is happening and what is actually happening, and that by doing this it will always be able to control the news cycle and remove itself from scrutiny.

There is never a good time to have a government that behaves like this, but there is no worse time than during a pandemic, when trust between the government and the public becomes not merely a key test of democratic legitimacy but a public health management issue.  Hannah Arendt concluded her essay with a quotation from a Vietnam veteran who expressed his hope that ‘ the country might regain its better side as a result of the war. I know it’s nothing to bet on, but neither is anything else I can think of.’

Some of us might express a similar hope that this country might regain its better side as a result of the pandemic.  As long as this government-of-liars remains in power, there is very little chance of that happening, and we will not begin to crawl out of the quicksand into which it has dragged us until we have decisively rejected it.

 

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Jelly on a (Tory) Plate

Some readers may be ancient enough to remember certain mathematics textbooks that asked you to calculate your weekly grocery bills, or how long it would take four men to dig a hole in road.  I was reminded of these exercises today, when I saw the following tweet from @RoadsideMum about the package she had received as part of the government’s Free School Meal program for children unable to go to school:

#FreeSchoolMeals bag for 10 days:

2 days jacket potato with beans
8 single cheese sandwiches

2 days carrots
3 days apples
2 days soreen
3 days frubes

Spare pasta & tomato. Will need mayo for pasta salad.

Issued instead of £30 vouchers. I could do more with £30 to be honest. pic.twitter.com/87LGUTHXEu

— Roadside Mum 🐯 (@RoadsideMum) January 11, 2021

A lot of people have been making similar calculations in response to this tweet,  and many have posted photographs of their own parcels to point out the discrepancy between the  contents of these parcels and what they might have bought if they had been issued with vouchers instead.   Marcus Rashford, whose campaigning efforts last year dragged a reluctant government into extending the free school meals voucher scheme, has described these parcels as ‘not good enough’, and even the government now says that these parcels breach its own guidelines.

We don’t know how the contents of these parcels were decided,  but the free school meals scheme is overseen by Chartwells, a catering company with extensive experience of schools catering, which prides itself on ‘engaging with young impressionable customers and developing a positive, healthy relationship around food.’ Last March Chartwells was heavily criticised for providing school meals to Bristol schools that consisted ‘mostly of snack bars, crisps and a slab of butter’, as part of its  £11-a-week-per-pupil contract with Bristol County Council.

Chartwells is a subsidiary of the £200 billion a year Compass Group, the largest catering company in the world.  Its previous director was Paul Walsh, a former member of David Cameron’s business advisory group. Before joining Compass in 2014, the big game hunting Walsh was also the CEO of the drinks giant Diageo. In 2010 Walsh criticised what he regarded as high levels of corporation tax under Labour.

Even after the Coalition reduced corporation tax in 2011,  Walsh continued to complain that levels were too high and threatened to move Diageo’s business abroad.  Yet in 2015 Walsh was one of the 150 business leaders who wrote an open letter praising the coalition’s economic record and urging the public to vote Tory.

The Compass Group’s shareholders also include the Tory peer Michael Bishop, now Lord Glendonbrook, former owner of BMI, whose personal worth is estimated at £280 million.

With these connections, it isn’t surprising that Chartwells got the contract for a program that the government had not wanted to implement in the first place.  Throughout the pandemic the government has consistently channelled procurement contracts to insiders, cronies and supporters, regardless of they offered the best service or value for money.

Even if we accept that Chartwells is a company with sufficient experience and expertise in school meals provision to justify its contract, its previous record should have flagged up the need for some form of oversight and local authority intervention in the implementation of the scheme.

Yet none of this appears to have been forthcoming.  Instead we find – once again – a web of connections that bind this incompetent, callous government and a coterie of wealthy Tory insiders, to some of the most vulnerable people in society.

As those old textbooks might have asked: if a family gets £5.22 instead of a  £30 food voucher, how much money does a Tory-connected company make?

We don’t know the exact answer, but we shouldn’t even have to ask the question.  And this calculation raises another question that is political and moral rather than mathematical.  Why did we vote for a Tory government that had to be dragged into providing free school meals in the first place, and which then appears to have allowed what should have been a public service – feeding hungry children trapped at home – to become yet another profit-making opportunity?

 

 

 

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On the Tenth Day of Brexit, My True Love Gave to Me

It’s less than two weeks since the Supreme Leader Comrade John-Son-Un signed the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement the day before the transition period for leaving the EU expired.  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a Brexiter was very heaven. John-Son-Un himself, never one to hide his light under a bushel, solemnly proclaimed that his ‘jumbo-Canada-style deal’ had finally ‘settled the European question.’

The demagogue-turned-peacemaker also claimed that his deal would ‘end some of the rancour and recrimination that we’ve had in recent years, allow us to come together as a country, to leave old arguments, old desiccated, tired, super-masticated arguments behind – an invitation that can only be compared to the school bully taking his foot off your neck and allowing you to join his playground gang as an honorary member.

As always, the Tory commentariat rose in unison to hail the greatest trade deal in history, all miraculously achieved thanks to the Supreme Leader’s diplomatic brilliance at the last possible moment.  Such fun! as Miranda Hart’s mum would say, though clearly not for everybody.

By New Years Day the Tory machine was turned up to full gloat.  Where were the queues of trucks that Remainers had warned about?  Haha, they aren’t there.

Never mind that it was a bank holiday, that pre-Brexit stockpiling had already been done, that European lorry drivers were wary of repeating what had happened in December – once again Project Fear had been found wanting, or so it seemed.

Now, ten days later, the bunting has been taken down, the paper trumpets have stopped parping, and slowly but surely the UK is learning a lesson that it should have heeded a long time before: that we really do live in the material world, and political decisions based on fantasies will have real-world consequences.

On the first day of trading, £6 billion worth of euro-denominated shares were transferred from the City of London to the EU, and the same amount was transferred the following day, in what one fund manager called ‘ a stunning own goal for the UK.’

Elsewhere, UK fishermen – the same fishermen who red-blooded pescatarian patriots like Mosley-Farage and John Redwood have so often sworn to protect – also discovered that they were no longer able to export to their largest markets.  On Friday, Scottish fishermen described a ‘catastrophe’ in which their catches were rotting on the harbours because of new customs and sanitary and phytosanitary requirements that prevented them from delivering fresh fish to European customers.

Meanwhile, the road delivery company DPD UK announced that it was pausing deliveries to Europe because of new regulations, evidence was beginning to emerge that EU businesses were no longer exporting to the UK because of VAT and customs regulations,  and  £32,000 in fines have been handed to truckers leaving the UK or trying to enter Kent without the new permit.

Despite the Supreme Leader’s repeated insistence that there would be no border in the Irish Sea, it turns out that there is one after all, and that shops and supermarkets in Northern Ireland are reporting significant disruptions in supplies from the UK.

And it isn’t only supermarket and manufacturing supply chains that are affected by ‘non-tariff barriers to trade.’ Yesterday, it emerged that the UK government had declined an offer from the EU to grant visa-free access to British musicians, despite having previously claimed that Brussels ‘red tape’ had prevented this from happening.  Now it turns out that the British government rejected the opportunity to allow British musicians to travel to Europe without the 90-day Schengen visas, because it didn’t want to grant the same right to European musicians.

Consider what has happened here.  The British music industry – worth £5 billion annually – is one of the country’s greatest exports, and also constitutes one of the greatest forms of ‘soft power’ that this country has.  Yet the government actively harmed that industry – and the livelihoods of those who work within it – because it regarded foreign musicians as another category of unwanted immigrant to be controlled at the border, and then it blamed its own intransigence on the EU.

I don’t know what you call this reader, but it looks just a little scurrilous to me.  And let’s not put all this down to a few teething problems.  Some of this economic damage might be repaired, assuming – a big assumption right now – that the political will is there.  But much lost business will never return.  Yet throughout the last ten days, Brexiters have either played down the disruption or ignored it completely.

Others are up in their bedrooms playing with their chemistry sets.  On 6 January the newly-ermined Daniel Hannan – one of the most dishonest spivs in the whole Brexit scam – recommended that the UK jettison the EU’s labour and environmental protections and its tax regulations.  Using the Mens Health imagery that Tories who have done nothing much but grift for a living seem to love when making other people’s lives worse, Hannan claimed that removing these regulations would make us ‘fitter, leaner, and more globally engaged.’

And the next day the Supreme Leader himself met with 250 business leaders on a conference call and asked its participants to tell him ‘which regulations could be ripped up now that the U.K. has completed its divorce from the European Union.’

The Bloviator-in-Chief claimed that ‘firms can now look with certainty at the year ahead’ and asked for suggestions for which ‘red tape’ to get rid of – all this without mentioning the new reels of red tape in which so many companies are now entangled as a result of a TCA that they were not prepared for.

Yesterday, the government announced that it was removing another bit of ‘red tape’ that prevented sugar-beet farmers from using a pesticide containing neonicotinoid thiamethoxam – a chemical banned by the EU because it kills bees, following lobbying from the National Farmers Union.   This, only three years after the then Environment Secretary Michael Gove promised to ‘maintain and enhance’ environmental standards and implement a ‘Green Brexit.’

Promises, schmomises, and only a fool would expect Gove to keep his.   After all, this is the man who told parliament in September 2019 that the representatives of the British car industry were fully prepared for a No Deal Brexit even though the same representatives said they had told him no such thing.  Last year, Gove insisted once again that his own government was also fully-prepared for No Deal.

Yet only yesterday he warned British businesses that they  could face ‘significant border disruption’ in response to the deal that supposedly eliminated the obstacles that his government had prepared for.

It’s hard to keep up with this, and clearly Gove hopes we won’t.  No wonder business leaders met with Him last Thursday and complained of the ‘baffling’ regulations that had produced what one of them called a ‘complete shitshow.’

This is the shitshow we are all living in, ten days into 2021,  and  none of it needed to happen. Even if you believe – and obviously I don’t – that this government has been acting in good faith, it could have asked for an extension to the transition period  in order to give businesses a chance to adjust to the new post-Brexit order and ensure that systems for dealing with it were in place and working properly.

They didn’t do any of this, essentially because the Brexit ultras were afraid that any loss of momentum might provide space for the British public to reconsider.

They forced this calamity through, and now we are trapped in the world that they made, and that they refuse to take any responsibility for.  Now, it seems, we must face the double whammy of a disastrously-managed pandemic and a botched-Brexit, and feed on unicorn bones and boiled blue passports, and drink sovereign tea, while the likes of Daniel Hannan and the new business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng – one of those who once argued that British workers were ‘among the worst idlers’ in the world – toy with our futures as if we were flies to little boys.

These are the Sunlit Uplands, and no one will be surprised  that Jacob Rees-Mogg has shut down the cross-parliamentary committee charged with overseeing the implementation of the TCA.

If you were this government, would you want MPs or the public looking at the impact of a ‘world-beating’ agreement that is pulling your country’s economy to pieces? Any such scrutiny might shed light on one of the most destructive scams that any country has ever perpetrated on itself.

It suits them very well to brush this disaster under the carpet of the pandemic,  and that is one more reason why we should never, ever forget what they have done or let them get away with it.

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The Trumptown Putschists

Many years ago, when I moved to Spain in 1988, people used to talk about the coup attempt of 1981, when Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero and 200 Civil Guard officers took over the Spanish Congress of Deputies and held MPs hostage.  Years later, people could still remember what they were doing on the day of 23-F, as it’s known in Spain, and would tell you how they or their families had packed their bags and headed for the French border.   Such reminiscences did not seem melodramatic in the country where a golpe de estado – coup d’etat – against the Spanish Republic in 1936 ushered in civil war and the overthrow of Spanish democracy.

As Marx might might have said, the ‘Tejero coup’ repeated that tragedy as a black farce, but even though it ended in ignominious collapse and a triumphant affirmation of Spanish democracy, it was a farce that had very real possibilities of becoming more than that.  Its protagonists included real soldiers, tank regiments, high-ranking officers, preparation, and strategy.

None of this can be said about the crazed events that took place yesterday, when a rabble of diehard MAGA supporters, NeoNazis, QAnon conspiracists, white supremacists, and neoconfederate seccessionists swarmed the US Capitol building, in a violent and chaotic riot that had no precedent in American history.

Though questions remain to be answered about the collusion of the Trump administration that allowed this ranting mob to run rampant through one of the iconic institutions of US democracy, this was not a coup per se.  Its participants could not count on the support of the armed forces.  They were not part of an organised national insurrectional movement, and they had no coherent strategy for taking power.

This was an explosion of rage and hatred, fuelled by baseless conspiracy theories of a rigged election that have been carefully and consistently nurtured by the most politically-depraved president in US history and the Republican Party machine. This fantasy has been amplified by a gaggle of lawyers, attorneys and political fixers, by mainstream rightwing media outlets and the social media fringe.

For weeks, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have been awash with extremist rightwing accounts urging their supporters to ‘burn down DC’, kill Nancy Pelosi and other ‘traitors’, and declaring ‘We want blood.’

All this was well-known, yet nothing was done to prevent it.  Today, many of Trump’s ‘populist’ supporters abroad are at pains to condemn the rioters, but not the president who has done so much to turn his country into a toxic morass of hatred, resentment, paranoia and white status anxiety.   Only hours before the assault yesterday, Trump was at a rally urging his crowds to march on the Capitol and promising to march with them.

Naturally he didn’t do that.  Because even though Trump has no qualms about inciting violence against migrants and minorities, or placing the lives of his country’s elected representatives in danger, he is not the type ever to put himself in harm’s way.   He is a playground bully sado-demagogue, who turns his thugs loose on the vulnerable and then runs off to hide as the shots are fired and the kicks are administered.

So he did that yesterday, and later in the afternoon, with four dead, and pipebombs and weapons turning up across the capital, and American democracy humbled and humiliated, he popped up once again to condemn the violence – almost – while also telling the ‘great patriots’ responsible for it how much he loved them and felt their ‘pain’ , and understood their anger at the election that he still claimed had been rigged.

This is what we have come to expect from the Trumpshow.  And as shocking and insane as this denouement is, it doesn’t constitute a serious coup d-etat.  It is not intended to overthrow the government, seize control of the state, install Trump as dictator, or start civil war.  Trump and his supporters might like to do all these things, but for the moment at least, that prospect is beyond their power.

A rightwing goon cavorting in the rotunda in a a Jamiroqui headress is not Jefferson Davis, and yesterday’s assault does not reprise the guns of Fort Sumter.  But that doesn’t mean what happened yesterday had no strategy at all, or that it can be dismissed as a freakish aberration.

On the contrary, Trump and his supporters are playing the same long game that they have been playing ever since they refused to accept Biden’s victory.  They are radicalising their extensive base, and laying the basis for the permanent destabilisation of the Biden administration, through a series of  ‘mini-insurrections’, militiarisation and acts of Timothy McVeigh-style ‘leaderless resistance’ in the coming years.

Now that the Democrats have flipped the Senate, they have even more reason to do this than they had before.  So I suspect we will see more, not less, of what we saw yesterday, played out at different points across the country, because it is very difficult to separate yesterday’s ‘extremists’ from the 74 million voters who voted for Trump, many of whom are as convinced that they were cheated of their rightful victory as the fascists who ran amok in the Capitol.

In effect the riots are a kind of radical rightwing theatre, dramatising and rehearsing the national confrontation that Trump and his supporters would like to see.  It remains to be seen whether Trump himself benefits from this, or whether the political rewards accrue to whoever emerges as his chosen successor, but whichever way it turns out, the movement that he created already poses the gravest threat to American democracy and the future of the republic since the Civil War.

To defeat this movement requires the Biden administration to show courage, vision, and determination in developing policies that actually benefit the American population, repair some of the damage of the last few decades, and draw some of the toxins from a traumatised, destabilised society that is now capable of anything.  The new government will have to  maintain the coalition that won the election, while widening the emerging splits in the Republican Party around a new pro-democratic consensus.

It will have to inspire and undertake a serious attempt to counter the disinformation and misinformation that has led so many Americans to embrace the barking conspiracy theories that the populist right has used so effectively.

Last but not least, Biden will have to take legal action against the president and his cabal, and carry out a full investigation of the security failings that allowed yesterday’s riot to happen.  Any attempt to avoid this confrontation in the name of ‘national reconciliation’ or ‘healing’ will prove counterproductive.

Biden said yesterday that the assault on the Capitol ‘borders on sedition.’ Bordering does not apply here, and Trump and his supporters should face the full force of the law for what they have done and what they have tried to do.

All this is a lot to expect, but without it, yesterday’s riots will not be a freakish aberration, but the beginning of something much worse. Because its protagonists may not be the greatest putschists, but their movement does have teeth, and a democracy that wants to survive as such needs to show that it has teeth too.

 

 

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Why I’m Not ‘Moving On’

Many years ago back in 2003, the Dixie Chicks played in London on the eve of the Iraq War, and their vocalist Natalie Maines had the temerity to criticise the war, and George Bush, while introducing one of their finest songs Travellin’ Soldier.  This statement dragged the group into a political storm.  The Chicks, as they’re now known, had their songs  blacklisted on American radio stations, fans publicly destroyed their CDs, and members of the band were called ‘traitors’ and subjected to the kind of vile abuse – including death threats – that we have now come to take for granted on social media.

Faced with the ferocity of this response, Maines initially issued a disclaimer and then apologised, to no avail.  In 2006, she withdrew the apology, and the group issued another powerful song I’m Not Ready to Make Nice, in which Maines sang ‘ Forgive, sounds good/Forget, I’m not sure I could/They say time heals everything/But I’m still waiting.’

I’ve often been reminded of that song in the last few days as we’ve stumbled into our post-transition Brexit, accompanied by calls to ‘move on.’  This chorus doesn’t sing in the same key.  On the one hand there are the familiar screeching notes of Brexiter triumphalism, such as this tweet from the deeply obnoxious Isabel Oakeshott:

It is unbelievable that Remainers are still moaning. On and on they go! We’re out. Get over it!

— Isabel Oakeshott (@IsabelOakeshott) December 31, 2020

Few Remainers will be surprised by this after four and half years of hearing exactly the same messages.  At the other extreme, we find Jess Phillips, writing in the Guardian about her decision to vote for Johnson’s deal.  Phillips recalls with regret how the Brexit debate ‘ placed us all as Leavers and Remainers, as if this was the single most defining part of our personality and nothing else mattered.’

Yet now, Phillips also wants to move on, because

From today, it is my job, as always, to get the very best for the UK for the future. I am not a Remainer, my constituents are not Leavers – we are all just people who want peace, safety, security a decent job and a nice place to live.

Meanwhile Keir Starmer, one of the architects of the ‘six tests’ that Johnson’s deal has failed to meet, also insists that the UK is ‘ forging a new path in the world’ and that its ‘best years are still to come.’

It’s easy to see why, from the point of view of its party political interests, the Labour Party has taken this position.  It wants the votes that were lost to Johnson, and believes that the best way to get them is to make the best of a bad job, without actually saying that Brexit is a bad job.

One can quibble with that calculation.  But behind this positioning there are also legitimate questions to be asked: At what point do we put the divisions of the last four and half years behind us? Is reconciliation between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ possible?  And if so, on what terms?

Needless to say, these questions demand a great deal more from the losers, who marched, wrote, campaigned, and issued warnings about Brexit, all of which were entirely ignored by a Tory Party that only listened to Brexiter extremists, and only abandoned May’s ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ mantra at the eleventh hour, because the damage that would have ensued was so horrifying that even Johnson couldn’t contemplate it.

So we have no choice now but to adapt to the fait accompli that has been forced down our throats.   But that doesn’t mean that we have to like it, or acc-en-tuate the positive., simply because the negative is too depressing.  If we hadn’t believed that Brexit was a gratuitously retrograde step and a pointless act of national self-harm, we wouldn’t have opposed it in the first place, and we aren’t obliged to embrace this sour ‘victory’ and shake hands with the victors.

To do that would require us to pass over the lying, the chicanery, the scamming,  the grifting, and the dark sleazy machinations that brought about this outcome, and ignore the moral transformation of the country that has taken place these last four and half years.

Writing in the New York Times today, Peter Gumbel, the child of German Jews who found exile in Britain in the 1930s, described a country that his parents ‘would be heartbroken to see… today. Inward, polarized and absurdly self-aggrandizing, Britain has lost itself. In sorrow, I mourn the passing of the country that was my family’s salvation.’

Millions of us also mourn  that passing, which few Brexiters – either from the right or the ‘Lexit’ left – have even recognised, let alone condemned.  As Gumbel put it:

The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the surge of national exceptionalism that accompanied it revealed deeply held prejudices about migrants. Xenophobia and racism, presumed to be banished to the margins of public life, made an ugly return to the mainstream. And anyone with an international mind-set was suddenly at risk of being tarred, in the words of the former prime minister, Theresa May, as a “citizen of nowhere” — an ominous phrase not just for a family like mine that was once stateless.

Indeed it is.  And it is very difficult to make common cause with those who supported or tolerated this outcome.  Because contrary to Phillips’s suggestion,  ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ – even allowing for the nuances and complexities that these categories include – are not superfluous identities that can be set aside so that we can all get on at Christmas.

Brexit has made millions of us strangers to each other, and millions of us strangers in our own land, because Brexit has come to represent fundamental differences about what kind of country we want to live in, about the new forms of global citizenship emerging in the 21st century, about who belongs in this country and who doesn’t, about pooled sovereignty, tolerance, and national identity, about the legacies of the British imperial past, and our relationship with our closest neighbors.

To some extent, the ‘European question’ has always been about questions that had nothing to do with Europe, and now we must all ask them, in a new context that nearly half the country never wanted, and which is almost certain to disappoint many of those who did want it.

It’s often been said that Leavers and Remainers share the same desire for decent healthcare, public education, housing, meaningful and well-paid work,  but these shared aspirations were not enough to transcend the divisions of the last few years, and it may well be some time before they are able to do so in the future.

Like Trumpism, Brexit has shown how ‘cultural’ and ‘national’ divisions can triumph over economic considerations.  Now all of us are obliged to navigate a post-Brexit future which is likely to produce economic stagnation, diminished international influence, reputational decline, and even the disintegration of the United Kingdom.  This week the Brexit-supporting Morning Star recognised that EU employment rights gave basic protections to British workers, which Johnson’s deal now threatens to diminish or take away.

As the Brexit right pursues its fantasy of a deregulated Singapore on Thames, and the Johnson government revisits the deal which it signed in bad faith and seeks to redesign the UK as a libertarian tax-free dystopia,  it will be very difficult to ‘move on’ from Brexit.   This doesn’t mean there won’t be times when Leavers and Remainers find themselves on the same side, and perhaps in the course of these struggles, some of the brutal divisions of the last few years may be overcome.

But it is equally possible that the far-right, in partnership with a Tory Party that has staked its own future on a nationalist culture war whose consequences it did not understand, will seek to widen and intensify these divisions in order to conceal and distract from their political failure, incompetence and fanaticism.

Given these possibilities, it is not incumbent on ‘Remainers’ to ‘shut up’ or jump on board the Brexit calamity train for the sake of an easy life.  On the contrary, it is up to us to continue to hold the architects of Brexit to account, and campaign for the open, generous, tolerant society that the Brexiters claim to want, even as they have gleefully destroyed it.

That doesn’t mean gloating whenever things go wrong, when Brexiters find the money they were promised doesn’t materialise, and jobs and prosperity bleed away.  Many people voted Leave because they believed what was promised.  And if – when – they discover that they were used and cheated, it is not for those who warned them to mock them or say ‘we told you so’, but to find ways to work together again to build the country we all deserve.

I hope I live long enough to see that happen, and that one day we may rejoin the EU, purged of our political toxins, our prejudices and our foolish grandiosity and exceptionalism,. At the same time I see the European Union not as an end goal in itself – but as a by-product of a new political and moral transformation.

In other words, whether we rejoin, and recover from the political tragedy of Brexit,  depends on whether we are able to become a different country that reflects our best traditions rather than our worst.  That has always been our challenge, and it still is.  And in the meantime, as the Dixie Chicks once sang:

It’s too late to make it right

I probably wouldn’t if I could

‘Cause I’m mad as hell

Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

Amen to that.

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2020: The Year that Wasn’t

Of all the things I expected from 2020 last New Year’s Eve, I have to say I did not expect to be living under actual or semi quarantine for nine months in the middle of a pandemic.  My wife was more prescient.  As far back as last December she expressed concern that the virus in Wuhan might reach the UK.

I didn’t believe her, but next time I will take her warnings more seriously.  Because this has been the year in which global society has been comprehensively up-ended in a way that few of us thought possible, as Covid-19 ripped through our interconnected shrunken world with startling speed and destructiveness, killing nearly 2 million people and infecting millions more.

Throughout this dismal year Covid has reminded us that – regardless of the technological achievements of 21st century global civilisation – we are biological creatures that can be unraveled by biological transformations – transformations that human activity has helped to cause.

The virus has wormed its way into the transportation and communication systems that bind that civilisation together, preying on its frailities and weaknesses.  Like the 1918 flu pandemic, it has exposed inequalities in public health provision, in the social, economic and racial divisions that have made some groups more vulnerable than others.

It has tested the resilience, preparedness, solidarity, ingenuity and inventiveness, of societies across the world.

For those who have lost loved ones to this vicious disease – often without being able to be physically near them  – 2020 is a year that they will never forget.  Millions of people who have had their lives thrown into turmoil will never forget it either.  Many have lost their jobs and livelihoods, or found themselves trapped in their homes.  Many will have undergone ordeals that may never be recorded.

I definitely consider myself one of the lucky ones.  Though my family and I caught covid at the beginning of the March lockdown, we weren’t as badly affected as some.  We have spent the quarantine in a warm and comfortable house.

We’ve had food, books, music, walks, things to watch.  We’ve been able to take exercise, and we’re fortunate to live in an area with the Peak District only  fifteen minutes from the house.

That said, 2020 is not a year I will look back on with much affection.  In terms of social interactions, and interactions with the wider world, it’s been a kind of half-life, stitching together meetings and encounters in gardens, parks, and hills, never knowing for sure whether the person you meet could be the one who infects you or the one you infect.

It has been galling and infuriating to observe the Johnson government’s catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic, with its delayed lockdown entries and premature exits, its over-promising and under-delivering, its failure to build resilience in terms of test and trace, its arse-covering and its lying, its botched comms and U-turns, its brazen cronyism and corruption – all of which has been hailed as some kind of triumph by the Tory press.

Many of these errors can be traced back to the same qualities that led to the Iraq War and of course to Brexit: British (English) exceptionalism; the unwillingness to listen to expertise or learn from good practice until too late; arrogance and hubris – all magnified by a government chosen for its loyalty rather than its competence and led by a terrifyingly narcissistic and sociopathic Prime Minister who appears only to want the country to love him as much as he loves himself.

This combination has ground the country down, creating one of the highest covid death tolls in the world, and adding to the chaos, disruption and anxiety caused by the pandemic, while wearing away at the public patience and solidarity without which no quarantine can be effective.  Last March, millions of people in the UK accepted quarantine restrictions with an impressive seriousness, resolve and sense of solidarity.

Despite the Dominic Cummings episode, and the government’s U-turns and chaotic messaging, much of that still holds.  Most people comply with the rules, even when the rules change so quickly and so suddenly that the government itself doesn’t seem to know what it wants.   At the same time it’s clear that public patience is wearing thin, and the growth of the ‘anti-lockdown’ movement is proof of that.

This ‘movement’ has many variants.  It includes those who think that covid is a ‘fake pandemic’ designed by evil puppetmasters to strip us of our freedoms;anti-vaxxers who believe that Bill Gates wants to put micro-chips in our brains; and libertarians who think that lockdowns and mask-wearing have no scientific or medical value.

Some of its adherents argue that lockdown ‘cure’ is worse than the pandemic itself; that the economic damage and/or damage to mental health is greater than the harm caused by the virus.  They will point out that most people who have died of covid are over sixty, or suffer from ‘underlying health conditions’ – categories that are far closer to the old Nazi concept of ‘worthless mouths’ than these faux-humanists are prepared to admit.

Instead of ‘police state’ lockdowns, they argue, lets just ‘shield the vulnerable’ and let everyone else carry on ‘as normal’ and ‘protect the economy.’

Never mind that there is no feasible or ethical way to ‘shield’ more than fifteen million people and pursue anything resembling normality, short of forcing the elderly and all the other underlying health condition weaklings into camps or quarantine towns.

Never mind that other countries -Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea – have all found ways to protect the economy and protect lives.  For the anti-lockdowners, everything is a culture war, and individual freedom – or simply clicks and media attention – is always more important than social solidarity.

Given the platforms that some of these people have, and given the ability – the only real ability that it has – of this government to alienate almost everybody sooner or later, it’s actually amazing that the constantly shifting rules and tiers are observed at all.

But discipline has held – just.  And now, at the end of this year-of-the-damned, we find ourselves in a contradictory predicament, in which infections and deaths are rising once again, yet the prospect of mass vaccinations offers at least the possibility that 2021 may bring some approximation of normality.

The speed with which these vaccinations have been developed is one of the positive takeaways from 2020. Contrary to the jingoistic bleatings of our ‘Secretary for Education’, as he is misleadingly known, this achievement is not due to our British greatness.

It is a tribute to science, and to the ingenuity and dedication of the community of scientists who made it possible.  So I end this year with a salute to them.

But most of all I salute the doctors, nurses, and NHS workers who have unflinchingly fought this virus throughout these last nine months, often risking – and losing – their lives when they should never have had to, because they were not supplied with the equipment they should have had.

In a country dominated by grifters, charlatans, profiteers and cynics who care about no one but themselves, the humanity, courage, and selflessness that the NHS has shown can point our way forward to something better than we have allowed ourselves to become.

I salute the care home workers, who watched covid devastate the people in their care when the virus was allowed to run unchecked, many of whose stories still need to be told.  I salute the delivery workers and supermarket workers and all those who kept the country fed throughout these last months.

Many of them have been on low wages and zero hour contracts throughout the crisis, like the 70-year-old delivery worker who came to our house throughout the year, getting 50p for every parcel he delivered.

These workers always deserved better and now they deserve it even more.  And we, as a country, deserve better than the grifting incompetents who have seized control of the country during these last ten years, and continue to choke the life out of it.

Tonight I will raise my glass to the prospect of their downfall, and the moment when the country recognises the destruction they have wrought and makes them pay for it.

I have to admit, I’m not holding my breath that this possibility is on the horizon, but I will continue to look forward to it, and do what little I can to bring it closer.

I hope you can do the same.  And I wish you all health, happiness, and safety over the next twelve months, and a better year than the one we’ve had. And I hope, as the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet once put it, that ‘you must take living so seriously/that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees -and not for your children, either/but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier.’

Hikmet wrote those lines serving ten years in a Turkish jail for his political opinions.

He never gave up, and neither should we.

 

 

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Have Yourselves a Kakistocratic Brexmas

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when the long-awaited announcement was finally presented to the world, hastily wrapped in cheap PR wrapping paper and served up by the grifter-in-chief in his very own Santa’s grotto.   Preceded by a hark-the-herald-angels fanfare from the government stenographers in the rightwing press,  the Supreme Leader of Brexitania, Comrade John-Son-Un, announced that a trade deal had been agreed with the European Union.

These ‘tidings of great joy’, as the Great Helmsman called them, arrived at a point when the Covid death toll has just reached 70,000, when millions of people saw their Christmas plans shattered due to yet another combination of the headline-grabbing over-promising, followed by last-minute U-turns that has characterised the UK government’s catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic.

Even as the Lord of Misrule took the podium, more than 10,000 lorries were stranded in Kent, without food or assistance from a government that had failed to liaise with the French before announcing the new Covid variant, failed to help the stranded drivers afterwards, but still took time out to lie to the nation about how many trucks were actually stranded.

In the midst of this mayhem, cameth John-Son-Un, with his tousled hair, his smirking dishonesty, and his pantomime-horse gravitas, to inform a battered nation that a deal had been done, that would ‘give certainty to business, travellers, and all investors in our country from January 1. ‘

Behind him the Christmas tree lights sparkled to remind us that John-Son-Un had become Santa Claus – in his own eyes at least – and that – hurrah!- he was giving his country the ‘certainty’ that any sane government should not have left till one week before the moment when it was required.

He even brought Christmas cracker jokes, as he promised that  his ‘oven ready deal was just the start – this is the feast, full of fish’ and  ‘the basis of a happy and successful and stable partnership with our friends in the EU for years to come.’

The Tory media and political machine duly hailed the deal as a ‘victory’ and a British diplomatic triumph.  That wise statesman Michael Gove – truly the Thomas More of our times – called for the end of the ‘ugly politics’ of the last four and half years.  Even Nigel Mosley-Farage declared that ‘the war is over’ – a ‘war’ that only ever existed in his mind and the minds of his fellow-ethnonationalist fanatics.   Arise Sir Nigel, Lord of Thanet – you heard it here first.

Johnson has since gone to claim that his ‘jumbo, Canada-style’ agreement has finally ended the ‘European question.’  Meanwhile social media has been awash with Brexiter gloating of the type that followed the referendum, telling Remainers to ‘get over it’ and suggesting that anyone who thinks this deal is a poor outcome must hate their country, and so on and so forth.

Never mind that many of those hailing the Comrade Leader’s Brexmas deal had only hours before been demanding No Deal as the only way to ensure full ‘sovereignty’ and denouncing anything less as a ‘sell out’ and a ‘surrender.’

In the end, they settled for this ‘surrender’, at least for now.

This tawdry fakery and triumphalism is a fitting end to a dismal four and half years in which nothing, literally nothing, has been done to make this country a better place.  Brexit has sucked in all the energies of government, brought down two prime ministers and an opposition leader, and put in power a man who has demonstrated time and again that he is unfit for anything except campaignin.

Now, after months of recklessly playing chicken with the EU, John-Son-Un finally baulked at the prospect of driving his country off an economic cliff-edge in the midst of a pandemic, and is now offering a thin bare-minimum trade deal that leaves the UK worse-off than it was in 2016 as a diplomatic triumph.

This is a triumph, in the sense that persuading Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter not to shoot himself in the head would have been a triumph, and I very much doubt that Santa Johnson or his team were responsible for it.

Nevertheless it is true that Brexiters have completed the destructive process that began in 2016.  They have cut the formal ties developed during a 45-year membership of the Common Market and the European Union.  They have trashed their country’s reputation, treated former allies and trading partners as enemies.  They have lied, grifted, and cheated, demonstrated crass ignorance of the consequences of their own red lines, made idiotic and unrealistic predictions, and they have not even batted an eyelid or express an iota of regret about any of this.

To bring us John-Son-Un’s Christmas gift, they have ruthlessly deployed the full arsenal of rightwing populist weaponry, using the ‘will of the people’ as a political battering to recast criticism and opposition as treason or undemocratic behaviour.

While claiming to uphold the sovereignty of parliament and the right to ‘make our own laws’, they have tried repeatedly to bypass or neutralise parliament in order to avoid scrutiny or accountability. They have attacked judges for trying to ensure that parliament had a role in the Brexit process. They have purged civil servants with knowledge and expertise entirely on the basis of their Brexit sympathies.

They have repeatedly appealed to the most xenophobic sentiments of the British population, whipping up paranoia and hostility towards EU nationals living in the UK.  At no time – not once – have any leading Brexiters ever acknowledged this or tried to do anything to stop it, and why would they, when it suited them so well?

Only today the execrable buffoon David Davis was telling Radio 4 that you can ‘never trust a Frenchman.’   And now these people have the gall to pontificate about ‘ugly politics!’

So their work of destruction is done, and now they must try to build, in the extremely unpromising context of the pandemic.  It would be an understatement to say that the government’s record doesn’t bode well for this endeavour.  Yet it must now unpick EU-derived law and regulations – many of which it once helped shape – and lay the basis for a post-covid economic recovery, and develop new trade linkages in a volatile world that has always watched – with more horror than admiration – our descent into the political vortex since 2016.

The government that ‘got Brexit done’ is not a government of builders, or a government that knows how to use the resources of the state in the best interests of its citizens.  Throughout the pandemic, it has taken action too late, and generally when it has been shamed into it.  It has failed to build resilience and has often seemed more concerned with generated positive headlines or providing financial opportunities to cronies and insiders

This is not the government to build Jerusalem in England’s green, pandemic-ravaged land.  On the contrary, the destructive impetus of Brexit has placed this country’s future in the hands of a radical rightwing government that is only a few posh accents away from Trumpism; a government that is the closest we have ever seen in this country to what the Greeks called a ‘kakistocracy’ which the Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state/a state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.’

So this government will fail, because its promises and predictions were unrealistic and unrealisable in the first place, and because it has preferred loyalty to knowledge, experience or expertise.  And as it fails, it will slip easily back into Brexit mode. It will reignite conflict with the EU, over this or that trade dispute or regulatory divergence, because it will always be politically convenient to encourage the population to believe that we still being ‘punished’ for the victory that Johnson proclaimed on Christmas Eve.

It will wage more culture wars against imaginary ‘elites’, whip up hostility towards immigrants and refugees and the ‘activist lawyers’ who oppose its dictats.  It will engage in increasingly brazen corruption and cronyism, commit blunder after blunder, and all the time it will lie, dissemble, and seek to remove itself from accountability.

It will do this because, this is exactly what it has always done, and this is what Brexit has enabled it do do.

And the great challenge that now confronts the millions of us who are genuinely horrified and disgusted by these developments, but who still believe that we have the ability to act in accordance with our best traditions, is how to build the broad political coalitions, with depth and breadth in our communities, that can prevent any further descent, repair some of the damage, lay the groundwork for the future that our young people deserve, and find our way to a place where the events of the last four and a half years will be one day be regarded with shame.

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The Country of the Blind

I recently bought a copy of the  official guide to the 1992 Seville Expo in connection with a novel that I’m currently working on.  Most of it is written in the tourist-guide kitsch that you would expect to find from an exhibition that celebrated Columbus’s voyages as the beginning of an ‘age of discovery’ leading us triumphantly into the new millennium.  The history it describes is history with the creases smoothed down, and the cracks and dark corners hastily filled with clichés before being painted over with sugary liquid.

With hindsight however, even this dizzy romp through the dawn of globalisation comes with a certain unintended irony, and never more so than when it refers to our own benighted homeland.

Take the section on the British pavilion, which waxes lyrical about the pavilion’s ‘gigantic manifestations of Earth, Air, fire and magical theatre of Communication’ all of which enables visitors to ‘discover how the British spirit of adventure, imagination and enterprise is inextricably linked to the basic ingredients of life on Earth.’

It’s probably best not to linger too long on what any of that actually means.  It’s the upbeat mood music that counts.  Thus page 37 informs us that ‘The United Kingdom shows the traditionalism and modernity of a nation with a long history of stability. ‘

That at least makes some sense, or it seemed to then,  because until very recently that is how the UK was generally seen by the outside world, and it was also how the country liked to see itself. Whether it was Cool Britannia or Danny Boyle’s Olympic Games pageant,  we were one of the oldest states in the world and a country that age could not wither.  We were old, but we were also modern, with our quaint parliamentary rituals, our stately homes, Beefeaters and James Bond.

We were the country of Oasis, Mr Bean and the Royal Family; a country where the more things changed the more they stayed the same.

Other less-blessed and less-enlightened nations might fall to pieces and succumb to extremism, political violence, chaos and misgovernance, but not us.  It was taken for granted, both here and abroad that whatever happened in the wider world the UK would sail on serenely, guided by the same wise, enlightened rulers and the instinctive moderation, tolerance and good sense that had always kept us straight in the past.

Am I overdoing it here?  Definitely.  And I’m certainly leaving a lot out.  But hands up anyone who recognises any of these clichés now?

As I write, we are less than three weeks from the end of the transition period for leaving the European Union, with negotiations between this government-of-none-of-the-talents and the European Union on the point of collapse – most likely a deliberate, engineered collapse on the British side.

If that happens, the country faces the very real possibility of a serious breakdown in the day-to-day trade arrangements that keep the country fed and allow many of its industries and businesses to function, of food and medicines shortages, rising prices, and job losses.  Driving on the motorway last week I saw messages warning hauliers that they will face new regulations on January 1st, even though neither the government nor the haulers know what the regulations will be.

Last week the posh ape who the British (English) electorate incomprehensibly made their prime minister shambled off to Brussels, where he proceeded to alienate and insult his European negotiating partners even more than he had already.

He then compounded the damage by seeking a personal phonecall with Merkel or Macron in a crude attempt to undermine Barnier and engage in some good old British divide-and-rule – a request which was turned down.

Bear in mind that these shameful and embarrassing games are being played in the middle of a lethal pandemic which has already delivered the most serious blow to the economy in 300 years.  In these circumstances no government with the slightest concern for the welfare of its population would flippantly embrace even more economic disruption and chaos that it has clearly not planned for or prepared for, and whose own incompetence has been glaringly exposed by its cackhanded management of Covid-19.

Yet with each day that passes it is becoming clearer that the government wants precisely this outcome, or at least refuses to believe it will actually happen.  Only this week Johnson told the British public and businesses to ‘prepare’ for No Deal – or an ‘Australia-type deal’ as he disingenuously likes to call it, with no indication of what the public or business is expected to do.

Johnson is not a politician with a moral brake or a moral compass and he is not likely to be slowed down or brought back to decency and common sense by Tory MPs and leading Brexiters, who have been urging him to break off negotiations and have a ‘clean Brexit’ with the disturbing fanaticism that you might have expect from a cult embracing mass suicide or the imminent arrival of heavenly beings.

Nowhere in this chorus is there any concern or consideration for the consequences that economists and businesses have warned about.  Instead a new and entirely predictable strategy is already emerging, in which any chaos or disruption will be blamed on the EU, or ‘intransigent Remainers’ or foreign enemies du jour.

As I write, British tabloids are cheering the forthcoming deployment of navy warships in the Channel to ‘protect our fish’ and Twitter is awash with Brexiters eagerly anticipating an armed confrontation with the French and/or with the EU.

Let no one believe that this has anything to do with fish.  This is World War 2 ‘England alone’ mythologising rewritten by Benny Hill and acted out by Teletubby armchair warriors for whom the EU has become a target in their own first person shooter game.

None of this is accidental. The military posturing, the xenophobia, the bad faith, the blustering aggression and the endlessly whining victimhood are all consequences of the extremist nationalist disease that has rotted the brain and heart of a country that has always had the potential to be so much better, yet somehow failed to live up to it in the last four years.

It is a country that is very far from any notion of ‘stability’; a country that embraces ruin and humiliation as a kind of liberation; that treats its neighbors and former trading partners like enemies; a country that rages about the Proms and the Vicar of Dibley and every manufactured rightwing culture war, yet cannot even find the will, the basic common sense, and the basic attention span,  to unravel the greatest grift in its entire political history and avoid inflicting one of the greatest wounds that any country has ever voluntarily inflicted on itself.

In his poem The Country of the Blind, C.S. Lewis wrote of ‘the mouldwarps’ who ‘With glib confidence, easily/Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set/Fools concocting a myth, taking the worlds for things’.

Our mouldwarps  are the Farages, the Hartley-Brewers, the Claire Foxes, the Johnsons and the Rees-Moggs.  Their lies and fantasies have unraveled us, and turned us into something uglier and nastier than we could ever once have imagined.

There is no happy ending for this. From next year, things may get even uglier, and the notion of British ‘stability’ will become even more threadbare.

That is a desolate prospect, but these grifters have nothing else to offer.  Most of them will never feel the consequences of what they’ve done.

Some of them will actively profit from it.  So we may not have hit the bottom yet, but even as we continue our freefall we should take this as a salutary lesson.  We are not exceptional. There is nothing intrinsically virtuous or sensible or superior about being British or English.  Any country, in the right circumstances, is vulnerable to the forces that have undermined us.

Perhaps, if we can learn this, and come to terms with how it happened we might be able to pick up the pieces, morally, politically, and economically, and find a way to work together to build a society where our better natures can flourish.

Because we are better than this.  We have to be.  Otherwise the direction of travel can only be further down.

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