Monthly Archives: December 2020

Thick and Fast and Thick and Slow

Politics, Satire and Silly

I write this on the day of the announcement about a trade deal between the EU and the UK. This post explores the twin themes: Thick and Fast and Thick and Slow. I will explain.

Thick and Fast

Now that we appear to have some sort of deal, we can expect one sure-fire thing: the lies will keep coming thick and fast. Johnson and his gang of no-hopers will try to convince us that it is a great deal, one which has been hard-fought and won thanks to the skills of the UK negotiating team. And it will all be bollocks.

The timing of the announcement is interesting, with no newspapers tomorrow (Christmas Day). But be assured that the usual suspects (Sun, Mail, Telegraph, Times, Express) will find space in their Boxing Day editions to spread even bigger lies than the government itself will do. Obviously, Johnson and co. will feed much of the stuff to the friendly media outlets.

The lunatic fringe on the Tory backbenchers (Master Francois and his ilk) are speaking of “star chambers” of tame lawyers who will check the “purity” of the agreement: to see if the small print accords with their delusional thoughts. And the big unknown will be Labour’s response. Worrying signals from Keir Starmer’s office in recent days seem to echo the phrase “a deal is better than no deal”. The honourable position for all Labour MPs is to abstain in the required Parliamentary vote.

One thing has been abundantly clear for four and a half years or more. Any deal with the EU will be worse for the country than EU membership. We must not allow the government to hide behind the smokescreen of the pandemic. Leaving the EU will make all of us poorer, slowly, year by year, estimated at a permanent loss of 2% a year off GDP growth. Certainly, the effects of gross mismanagement, procrastination and poor policies will continue to make Covid the bigger short-term shock. But the lasting, slow-burn damage will be leaving the European Union.

This image speaks for itself

So, prepare to be inundated with an avalanche of lies from our elected leaders: they’ll be coming thick and fast.

Thick and Slow

By way of contrast, if you were to look for an epithet to describe every member of the UK Government, “thick and slow” would be a good one. Historians will one day look back in amazement and disbelief at our misfortune: to have the most incompetent government of modern times at a time of our greatest need for at least 75 years.

Thick: it would be invidious to try to rank the members of the Cabinet in order of stupidity. For sure, Stupid Boy Pike, a.k.a. one Gavin Williamson and Little Miss Pretty Petrifying, a.k.a. Priti Patel would rank near the bottom of the pile: “rank” being the operative word.

There are those who believe that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, somehow stands above the pack. I disagree. Sunak is one of the country’s biggest problems. His failure to understand the impact of the pandemic on the poorest people – after all, his wife is richer than the Queen – or to implement consistent financial support for those losing their incomes cuts directly across attempts to control the spread of the virus. Millions of people are in such poorly paid and insecure jobs that they simply cannot afford to self-isolate when required. Sunak’s resistance to improving benefit payments to something closer to the European norm further compounds the problem.

Slow: We are in this mess now because of one of Johnson’s personality faults. He has a Trump-like desire to be liked and so has a pathological problem with decision making, particularly when it means being the bearer of bad news. Hence the last-minute U-turn on Christmas, the last of many – far too many – examples of delayed decision making.

Slow Learner

But perhaps the most damning indictment of Johnson and his gang is their collective slow learning. It’s generally understood that the UK government was too slow in March imposing a lockdown, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. The same mistake was repeated in September, when scientists and Keir Starmer all urged the Prime Minister to impose a 2-week circuit breaker. Johnson failed to do so and we had a 4-week lockdown – with only partial success – 6 weeks later. And now we’ve just had the third repeat of the same basic “too late” decision making and ruining millions of people’s plans for Christmas into the bargain.

So the unmerited trumpet-blowing we can now expect over the EU trade deal also acts as a convenient distraction from the government’s continuing serious mishandling of the pandemic crisis.  

I guess you need to be above a certain age to remember Victor Sylvester, bandleader and erstwhile king of ballroom dancing on British TV and radio. But fans of Strictly Come Dancing will no doubt also be familiar with the foxtrot pattern Slow, Slow, Quick Quick Slow.  Change “quick” to “thick” and there you have it. That’s your government, that is.

Next slide, please…

With acknowledgement to Rob Newman and David Baddiel

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Disaster and Disasterer

Politics

The world – or our little bit of it – has recently become very strange indeed.

On the day when we have one genuinely excellent piece of news – the first vaccinations against Covid – we find ourselves on the brink of disaster – or worse. And which of those it will be is in the hands of a man with the attention span of a gnat and no discernible talents whatsoever. I refer, of course, to our Prime Minister and his theatrical 11th hour and 59th minute dash to Brussels.

Dumb and Dumber

shipwreck

When I use the terms “disaster” and “disasterer”, I’m referring to the choice between Johnson’s putative feeble and thin trade deal with the EU and the bigger disaster of “no deal” (which Johnson dresses up as “Australian-style”). Choose your metaphor: Disaster or Disasterer, a Rock and a Hard Place, (for the classically-minded) Scylla or Charybdis; the Devil or the Deep Blue Sea, Dumb or Dumber. You choose: all of them worse than where we now are.

That Elusive “Sovereignty”

Apologists for leaving the EU have been banging on for years about something called “national sovereignty”. There is quite a good definition statement of this abstract concept to be found in this US website. In the abstract, this sounds like a good idea – as long as you don’t think too deeply about it. As far as we are allowed to know, at the time of writing, the issues still divide UK and EU negotiating positions seem to boil down to two things.

The first is our future theoretical desire to deviate from EU norms and standards, in state aid for UK companies, workers’ rights and consumer protection mainly. And the second is how any divergence is policed – and by whom. (Rumour has it that there’s a deal already hammered out for fish. Topical comparison: more people work at the Addenbrookes Medical Campus in Cambridge than in the whole UK fishing industry, but no matter, for now.)

Lockdown in My Head

To be honest, I have some instinctive liking for having these theoretical freedoms. Consider, for a moment, the restrictions of our day-to-day freedoms brought about by the Covid lockdown restrictions. There’s a kind of “lockdown in my head” feeling of frustration and unease flowing from those things I’m currently not allowed to do. (We’re in tier 2, by the way.) It’s a feeling that won’t quite go away: akin, I guess, to some form of mini-imprisonment.

But, in practice, life is not that much different from “normal” times. The amount of socialising we do these days is pretty minimal, Zoom meetings have replaced face-to-face ones and we do more shopping online. Furthermore, medical issues over the period from 3 years to 1 year ago meant that my activities were curtailed compared to my life before then. Our holiday plans have been much changed, but we still managed a weekend break in February (before Covid really struck the UK) and a week in a cottage in Wales in September. We’ve been relatively fortunate so far. But that “lockdown in my head” feeling is still there, in the background.

So I do “get” the instinctive desire to be “free”.

In the Real World

John Donne

But now we must get real. As John Donne said in his 17th century Meditation XVII, “No man is an island”. The bald fact is that we live in a very interconnected world. Back in the 19th century, when Lord Palmerson was Foreign Secretary, Britain could flex its muscles and send in a gunboat to teach Johnny Foreigner a lesson. That was because Britain was indisputably the strongest nation on earth – and we threw our weight around. We had 10% of the world’s GDP; that’s now less than 2.5%.

Nowadays, we need collaboration with other countries, and our nearest neighbours in particular. 40% of our food is imported, mostly from the EU – frictionlessly until 31st December. Combatting transnational crime and terrorism needs good cooperation and easy transfer of data and intelligence: all under threat after the end of this year. The EU is the only entity so far on a global stage to challenge the overmighty power of companies like Google and Amazon. Britain alone will be powerless against abuse of dominant market monopolies.

Our supply chains (for example in motor manufacturing), our love lives and relationships, our holidays and trading by companies large and small have been built around frictionless movement of goods and people. From January 1st? For people, all that stops. For goods, we still don’t know.

By acting as the rogue state of Europe – for example, by breaking international law – we have poisoned the well of trust needed to smooth the flow of day-to-day interactions across borders. (I believe some sort of deal has been brokered so that we can withdraw the offending paragraphs from legislation going through Parliament – but it’s all a bit unclear as I write.)

So the prized concept of “sovereignty” is, in reality, illusory. This means Johnson and co. are chasing an illusion with no upsides in practical terms.

Before the Normans

But there is a deeper psychological illusion lurking behind all this insanity. Leave extremists, like Johnson and Rees-Mogg, seem to have a different understanding of the concept of freedom itself. Look at the language they use. Behind it lies a mythological past dating back to the days before the Norman conquest in 1066. We learnt at school about the Battle of Hastings, the Domesday Book – how dare they write it all down to ease taxation? – and Norman castles all over the land, to oppress the local populations behind the safety of battlements and drawbridges.

This stuff cuts deep into our national psyche. The myth of a golden age of “free” Angles and Saxons lies beneath this yearning for the illusion of “sovereignty”. And I feel it is high time we let it go and face reality in the 21st century.

Labour Must Abstain

If Johnson does come back from Brussels with a deal, beware the lies which will be spun: world-class, heroically won or whatever. It will bring disruption, extra bureaucracy, shortages of food and medicine and lost jobs – to name a few. And don’t let the government hide behind the tribulations of the pandemic: these problems will be Tory Government-made and were avoidable.

So Keir Starmer must lead his party to abstain: on the positive, moral principle of “a plague on both your houses”. Let the government take the blame they deserve. At the end of the same John Donne poem mentioned above, we find the equally famous words: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. Johnson take heed.

bell

When the month ends, it will be “good riddance” to 2020: it’s been an awful year. Ring in the New Year by all means: the vaccines, at least, bring hope. But our status in the world will have been diminished mightily. A mournful chime for us all.

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