The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Parliamentary Committee has recently published its report on disinformation and misinformation. (It recommends we don’t use the phrase “fake news” because nobody knows what it means.) Such manipulation of the truth, it says, is a direct to our whole democratic way of life and laws are in urgent need of updating. More regulation is required. This Committee achieved a remarkable degree of non-partisan consensus. The DCMS Committee highlighted in particular the role Russia and its “digital agents” have played in both the Leave campaign in the EU referendum and in the US Presidential election.

The UK government has, rightly, condemned Russia’s actions. But, hey, isn’t there some hypocrisy here?

USA Foreign Policy

Since the end of World War II, a central feature of US foreign policy has been interference in elections and regime change in other countries, particularly those in South America. During the Cold War, according to the Washington Post, the USA had 72 attempts to effect regime change in other countries.

Historically, the USA’s approach has often been less than subtle. Their means of interference has been military, up to and including invasion. Wikipedia takes a longer view, starting in 1846. The USA chooses to spend around 3.5% of its GDP on its military rather than, for example, providing healthcare for its 20 million poorest and most vulnerable citizens. Or a half-decent European-style welfare system.

Russia

Russia, with its tiny economy compared to the USA, can never outspend the Americans on military expenditure. But it has learnt the art of cyber-warfare – a much cheaper option. Anyone who has studied Russian history – I confess I have only dabbled – will understand that the rapid eastward expansion of NATO countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union has spooked the Russians.

Vladimir Putin, with his KGB background, wants to restore Russia to the world’s esteem comparable to the USA as a superpower. His training and instincts towards authoritarianism has driven Russia to “fake news” and to funding organisations to undermine Western liberal democracy. He exploits the very freedoms which are democracy’s bedrock to work against the interests of the west.

US Monsters

UK and US-based fascists have exploited the situation too. The USA has spawned monsters in the form of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter. (Apple, with its obscene stockpile of cash, is in a slightly different category. It can use its money mountain to bribe any politician, senior judge or law enforcement officer anywhere in the world, or, failing that, to pay for expensive lawyers to outwit law enforcement – or to make it prohibitively expensive to pursue cases against Apple.)

With all these companies registered in the USA and with that country’s light regulation, laisse-faire attitude to business, these companies have turned into monsters. Their sheer size implies a power which prevents them from failing. Their accumulated data about our lives is on a frightening scale. (Full disclosure: I still use Twitter, WhatsApp and Google – they’re so damnably convenient!) The companies’ chiefs, Mark Zuckerberg in particular, treat democratic processes with contempt.

Perfidious Albion

Only the EU as a body has shown any appetite for taking on the monsters. Trump broadly sees fines against them as anti-American. Historically, and particularly at the height of its Imperial power, the UK played Divide & Rule with the rest of Europe and in May’s mishandling of the EU exit negotiations, continues – in a futile way – to try to do the same. It won’t work any more. So May will fail, either by October, when the EU and EU27 want clarity on the UK’s position or by December, the last gasp opportunity to avoid an “over the cliff” disaster.

Fascists and “No Deal” Leavers

Western fascists like Steve Bannon share Putin’s methods, but ultimately for a different agenda. In Russia’s case, the motive is Russian security and self-esteem. For the western fascists, it’s the overthrow of democracy to enable Free Market Fundamentalism, which benefits only the richest 1% (or even really 0.1%) to continue into the future. The Tories are beginning to learn the limitations of trying to preserve a failed economic dogma within the constraints of Parliamentary democracy. The lessons of Pinochet’s Chile have been forgotten already.

Whilst there are no desaparecidos in the UK yet, as far as I know, it’s clear we are showing worrying signs of jettisoning democratic norms in favour of more authoritarian practices: see my 2016 post Sliding into Fascism for some early examples. More recent examples include the branding of judges as “enemies of the people” and talk of “saboteurs”, “betrayal” and “traitors”. A Tory MEP has even called for an update to the treason law to suppress dissenting views, specifically “extreme EU loyalty”.

Not Special

May’s almost uncritical sucking up to Trump and our continuing delusion about the non-existent “special relationship” with the USA exposes both the UK’s weak position and our hypocrisy. (Explainer: Trump used the phrase “highest level of special” in his UK press conference. Trump, with the attention span of a gnat, will say in the moment he has the world’s attention, anything that will make him liked – just for that moment. All his other actions support the view that he treats us with contempt.)

We’re supping with the devil in a US-UK trade relationship. Use a long spoon or, better still, don’t sup at all and stick with people who share our values: the rest of Europe and the EU. I for one, don’t want to “take back control” and hand it over immediately to Trump’s America.

There’s a First World song, sung, rather subversively, by the Allied troops to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. The lyrics are quite easy to remember.

We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here
We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here
etc.

It seems strangely topical. I’m referring, of course, to the total mess we’re in with the government’s negotiations to leave the EU.

Forces of Darkness

David Cameron made a huge strategic mistake in trying to sort out the ideological split in his party by calling a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. We have found out the hard way that, in trying to appease the irreconcilable faction of his party, he simply spread the cancer of polarisation to the whole country.

I have struggled to find the right words to describe this rabble of irrational Europhobes. I first called them the Crazies, a fairly accurate term I thought, and have taken to calling them Dunces in recent months. (DUNCE was meant to be a smart-arsed acronym for Deluded, Unhinged, Nasty, Crazy and Europhobic.) But the term “Forces of Darkness”, used by Tory Remainer Anna Soubry in a recent interview, perhaps captures better the evil nature of the people to whom I refer.

European Research Group

The core of the Forces of Darkness is the so-called European Research Group. Its current Chair is the omnipresent Jacob Rees-Mogg, a cartoon caricature of the most out-of-touch Tory imaginable. The ERG, according to Wikipedia, currently has a researcher by the name of Christopher Howarth. Is any reader aware of any actual research on Europe or the EU by this character?

The ERG, despite its name, is an extremist far-right group who wants the UK to crash out of the EU, weakening it in the process, and to establish the UK as a small-government, low regulation paradise for the mega-rich. The rest of us are there to be exploited. It’s a common feature of extremist right-wing lobbying groups to hide behind bland, neutral-sounding names: the Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange come to mind, to name just two. Another common characteristic is the total lack of transparency in their funding sources. The ERG is possibly an exception to this and has found a way to misuse MP’s expenses, within the rules, to fund their propaganda at taxpayers’ expense. (The Wiki article – link above – explains more.)

How many Tory MPs are there in these Forces of Darkness? The ERG claims 80. 62 signed the February 2018 letter to the PM and some put the true figure at 40 with a few cowardly Tory MPs willing to sign a letter for a quiet life). With May’s wafer-thin “majority” in the Commons propped up by the bigots of the DUP, that’s enough to frighten Theresa May.

A Recap

May wasted two years trying to reconcile the irreconcilable within her party: a compromise between the Crazies, Dunces or Forces of Darkness (as you prefer) and the saner Tory MPs. There’s a clear majority in Parliament of MPs who voted Remain in the referendum.

The Chequers agreement and the White Paper recently published were May’s attempt at bringing reality to bear on the negotiations. It contains elements which the government knows already will be rejected by Brussels. It led to two Cabinet resignations (plus several others) and a complete cave-in by May in accepting four wrecking amendments by the ERG before a key Commons vote last Monday. Long-standing arrangements about pairing were broken by the Tory Chief Whip Julian Smith to scrape the vote home by the slimmest of margins.

The net effect of May’s caving in to the ERG is to push the UK further apart from the EU, who remain impatient and frustrated by the lack of consistency in the UK’s negotiating position. We were already a laughing stock to the rest of the EU. The mind boggles to think what our reputation is now. “Perfidious Albion” is a phrase that’s been around a long time. We still deserve that epithet.

The Will of the People?

On a single day in June 2016, without any information of the implications, the UK electorate voted as follows:

• 37% voted Leave
• 34% voted Remain
• 29% didn’t vote

The Forces of Darkness and their cheerleaders in the right-wing press – yes, Dacre, it’s you again – have tried very hard to persuade us that “the will of the people” is a hardline anti-immigration version of what 37% of us voted for. It is they who are making all the running at present. Time is short to correct this.

A Binary Choice

May’s painfully constructed compromise over two years is crumbling fast. Polarisation grows stronger by the day. The risk of a disorderly “no deal” crash out of the EU is increasing. It seems that we are heading for a simple “stay in or crash out” binary choice. So be it. I know which side I’m on.

And yet, if Cameron hadn’t been such a weak useless Prime Minister, all of this could have been avoided.

We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…

In my recent post A Song for Europe,  I regretted the lack of attention paid by UK media and by Parliament to the workings of the EU over the past 45 years. Another very British cultural trait seems to be our sense of fair play and sticking to the rules. Cricketing terms are frequently used: “sticky wicket”, “straight bat” and, of course, we long for a “level playing field”. There’s a fair chance that the UK Civil service is imbued with these characteristics.

B&B Insurance

A fairly inconspicuous news story caught my eye recently. It covered concerns by owners of B&Bs and Guest Houses that the costs of taking out extra insurance would force them out of business. The insurance was as a result of a new EU regulation designed to give holidaymakers the same level of protection as those booking through a website or travel agent.

It turns out that the need for insurance was NOT part of the EU regulations but had been “slipped in” by UK civil servants to the UK legislation to enact the new rules. In other EU countries, no such insurance requirements had been enacted. It’s obvious the whole government machinery is swamped with dealing with the infighting over the UK’s plan to leave the EU. So maybe that’s the reason. Or maybe somebody – Parliament, the press? – could have checked this out first?

Fisheries Policy

The UK fishing industry employs around 11,800 people: that’s about 10% more than Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, just to put it in perspective. But its political profile is much higher than its size. There has been much talk about “taking back control” of fisheries policy if/when we leave the EU. This overlooks a number of key facts. Fish can swim. They don’t recognise national boundaries, so “British” fish are, in reality “European” fish. And many of the restrictions placed on catches over the years are based upon scientific evidence of overfishing and to ensure sustainability.

The amount of fish caught by British fishermen is the result of three figures:

1. The total amount of fish allowed for sustainability reasons, based upon scientific analysis agreed by all EU nations;
2. The UK’s share of the EU total. This is currently around 30% of the fish caught in “British” waters. The UK has a disproportionately large area (see EU Common Fisheries Policy) owing to the British Isles being surrounded by water. Much of the fish in this is shared with other fisheries and would continue to do so if the UK were not part of the EU;
3. The allocation of the UK’s share to individual fishermen: this is wholly under the control of the UK Government. Government policy, based upon narrow, dogmatic economic measures, tends to favour larger boats and fleets. The UK boats tend to be smaller, so the UK allocates 44% of its quota to foreign-owned fishing fleets, according to Greenpeace.

A fuller analysis can be found on this FullFact page. But my conclusion is that, if anyone is not playing fair with the fishing industry, it is the UK Government.

Railway privatisation

Perhaps the most obvious example of where the EU seems to get the blame is railway privatisation. The disastrous decision to privatise the railway industry was taken by the John Major Government. Even Thatcher baulked at the idea. New Labour were too cowardly to reverse the decision while they had the opportunity. But the other major economies of the EU, including France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, have managed to keep their railways in public hands. Indeed, their state owned railway companies now own bits of ours. Deutche Bahn (Germany) owns Arriva, Nederlanse Spoorwegen (Netherlands) owns Abellio and SNCF (France) owns a stake in Govia.

The pie chart below shows that EU-based nationalised railways own more of the UK rail franchises than the UK private sector. The small UK public share is the East Coast Main Line, “temporarily” renationalised after the third collapse of the private franchise.

The upshot of all this: being a member of the EU is not a barrier to keeping the railways in public hands.

Better Scrutiny

So what should have happened? Firstly, Parliament should do its job properly and pay more attention to the UK legislation passed on the basis of EU regulations. And the media should have spent more time in scrutiny of the way the EU and the UK parliament actually works, instead of spreading lies. Yes, I’m mainly criticising the Telegraph, Mail and Sun.

None of the countries in the rest of the EU really understands the rules of cricket And the Brits – in particular the English – don’t understand how the EU works. Perhaps that’s the underlying tragedy behind the dire position we find our country in.

Pardon me if I haven’t been paying attention.

Cabinet Collective Responsibility

David Cameron, that worthless piece of shit who, unbelievably, was once our Prime Minister, started it. He suspended collective cabinet responsibility for the duration of the formal EU Referendum Campaign. May asserted after the Chequers meeting that she was reimposing this again. Excuse me, but it’s two years since the referendum. Surely collective responsibility was reimposed then. Implying it was not so is a rewriting of history – or am I missing something? This seems nothing more than a convenient lie to cover up May’s extremely weak position within her own Cabinet.

Blink

So what do we know so far?

The Leave extremists – the Dunces – blinked first. That’s basically because they have no plan.

Attention seems to be now focussed on how long Boris Johnson can remain as Foreign Secretary. Basically this means how long until his next undiplomatic outburst and whether May meant it when she said “no more dissenting leaks”. We’ll see soon enough.

How Rees-Mogg and the backbench Dunces will react is anyone’s guess. They’re all impervious to reasoned argument.

The EU’s Position

The day-long squabble was for the cabinet to agree on a compromise between two positions already rejected by the EU. Why they should agree to what was cobbled together at Chequers is anybody’s guess, but Michel Barnier at least used warmer language in his initial response.

Don’t Mention the War

May seems to have failed in her attempt to peel off Germany from the EU and EU27 by her trip to Berlin before the Chequers “summit”.

There will be more compromises to come once the EU has had a chance to see – and reject  sections of – the White Paper. Chequers was just a preliminary skirmish. The real war within the Tory Party hasn’t started yet.

Wasted Years

The real tragedy is the fact that two years have been squandered by internal Tory Party squabbling, while we – business especially – stood by open-mouthed and helpless. Strong? Stable? In the National Interest? Pull the other one.

Labour’s Position

Iain Dale, LBC journalist, on Newsnight, asserted that many Tory Party members will be tearing up their membership cards. Good! Anyway, they’ll be dead soon. More importantly, he asserted many people will simply stop voting. Apart from the big question mark over the health of our democracy – no small issue – that’s also good, as it will ensure the Tories are out of power for a long time. But it does open up the window for a new populist, neo-fascist party on the extreme right. Some of those “non-voters” will be attracted to its siren calls.

The Labour Party must get clear its message to secure “traditional” Labour supporters by redoubling its message. It’s convenient that it also happens to be true. The EU has never been the problem for rising inequality, crumbling services, the housing crisis and job insecurity. Blame all that on Free Market Fundamentalism. Started by Thatcher, pushed by Osborne, continued by Hamilton, austerity is a political choice, not a necessity. I think the message is slowly getting through. It’s imperative Labour seizes the moment and also uses the Remain majority in Parliament cleverly and tactically.

Is Corbyn the right man to do that? We’ll see.

The black market flourished during World War Two. Some of that approach spilled over into the 1950s and beyond. This was best betrayed by the figure of Flash Harry, played by George Cole in the old black and white Ealing comedies of the time. Some of this spirit was still apparent in the TV series Minder, co-starring Dennis Waterman, twenty years later.

Spivs do deals. Citizens negotiate. So who are we, we Brits? Spivs or Citizens?

Spivs

OK, the Americans elected, by a flawed electoral system*, a spiv. (*Reminder: Clinton won the popular vote.) But one with an American flavour, more Tony Soprano than Arthur Daley. But then, of course, the defining moment for the USA was Prohibition in the 1920s and 30s instead of the war for us.

There’s more than a little of the spiv in David Davies, our, don’t laugh, Chief Negotiator. But Theresa May left the EU summit threatening the EU27 about security cooperation. It came from the “they need us more than we need them” way of thinking we hear from time to time. As Marina Hyde says in Saturday’s Guardian: “Of the many roles in which May has been cruelly miscast herself, that of crap blackmailer is the most excruciating”. Blackmail: classic spiv behaviour.

Britain has never taken the time over the past 45 years of membership to really understand how the EU works. Media coverage of the routine work (where decisions actually get made) is virtually non-existent. The lies about straight bananas and the rest, dreamed up years ago by a bored Boris Johnson in his role as Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, hold a resonance to this day. It’s clear May has never bothered to educate herself either. It’s that or she has been bullied into taking a spiv-like stance by the Exit extremists in her cabinet, or, more likely, by the right-wing press. She continues to mistake these extremist views for public opinion.

At a time of real existential crisis for this country, she has failed to act in the public interest. Yes – I’m sorry – I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve said that already in earlier posts.

Citizens

I thought, wrongly as it turns out, that we were more “European” than we actually are. Half of us are, but not quite enough to win a simple 50:50 vote. European values – but not the EU – gave us the European Convention on Human Rights. The EU provides the foundation for much of the anti-discrimination and workers’ rights protections that many take for granted and other continue to use in their fights in the courts against patently unfair treatment. There are many in the Tory Party, not just Leavers, who would much prefer to see the whole Rights legislative framework dismantled. They see Responsibilities, not Rights, and see privileges as handed down on high from those entitled to run the country to the undeserving rest of us. For which, of course, we are supposed to be grateful.

European values, upon which the very values of the EU are built, start from the other end of the argument. During the course of the last few days, key European Leaders, in particular Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Leo Varadkar have all spoken of European “values” when discussing issues debated at the summit. Varadkar, in particular, has been the most outspoken, at least as reported in print. He cites these values as fundamentally incompatible with any proposals likely to emerge from the Chequers away day next Friday. In other words, May will spend a whole day debating amongst the warring factions of her own Cabinet to come up with a White Paper that will be rejected out of hand by the EU27. Other key EU leaders have supported Varadkar. So the old British strategy of “divide and rule”, so successful in the days of the British Empire, won’t work this time.

That doesn’t stop May going on a futile round of meetings at various EU capitals this week. And, anyway, isn’t it the job of the Foreign Office to give May impartial advice in this area, Oh no, wait a minute, I see a problem here… who was it May appointed as Foreign Secretary?

Nevertheless, by temperament, I’m an optimist. I mean that in the general sense that, on average, tomorrow will be better than today. One way we achieve that is by listening to each other with mutual respect and learning from this. Right now, we seem beleaguered and voiceless.

Teflon Spivs

Arthur Daley and Flash Harry are easy to identify as spivs. A more lovable type would be Delboy Trotter, of Only Fools and Horses fame. John Sullivan’s excellent script allowed all the main characters – and some minor ones too – to be developed into fully-fleshed, rounded characters. I, like many others I suspect, shed a tear or two at the “this time next year, we’ll be millionaires” moment just after the birth of the baby. But I digress.

In Britain, we have a very subtle, and very British, way of disguising our worst spivs as respectable members of society. I use the term “Teflon Spivs” here to describe them. Sometimes, all it takes is a little Latin: I speak of our Foreign Secretary again. A posh voice works: when coupled with a total disconnect from modern, everyday life, it’s irresistible to some. Yes, of course I mean Jacob Rees-Mogg. We simply build on our good old English class system. It still does the trick for a significant minority. Together with our undemocratic “first-past-the-post” voting system, it’s usually enough to keep the Tories in power on a minority of the votes cast for non-progressive parties.

Teflon spivs abound in all areas of the Establishment. The House of Lords and the honours system are both inherently designed to promote Teflon Spivs. The Big Four accountancy firms are made up of them. The revolving door between the arms dealers and the MoD (the most corrupt Department in Whitehall) accommodates them. And some – I stress some – company directors fit this description. Oligarchs – who seem usually to be foreign, mainly Russian for reasons of geopolitics – are a significant subset of these characters.

Class War

The Labour Party has made itself largely irrelevant to this debate. There aren’t really any spivs – of either Teflon or non-Teflon variety – in the Labour Party. It is engaged in its own internal debates between the “Blairites”, who essentially said the Teflon Spivs, like the poor, will always be with us and we must accommodate them somehow, and those, including Momentum, who want to confront this position. Single-issue groups, on gender equality – think Me Too and similar movements – or the self-help groups following the Grenfell Tower disaster – offer room for hope.

Me? I think we’re overdue a proper class war. With social media and smartphones, this one will look different from the old days. I’m of the wrong generation to say what it will look like. But something is needed.

Spivs or Citizens?

That last paragraph means that I think more like a European than a traditional English person. There are a lot of us, but, sadly, not enough to set the terms of the debate. With the Rees-Mogg wing of the Tories impervious to facts and rational ideas, injecting liberal rationality into the ring is futile. So I guess things will get a whole lot worse before public opinion changes enough.

Right now, we are two countries, split down the middle. Danny Dyer was right when he blamed this on David Cameron. It may be a turning point – it may not.

But in the end, it will all boil down to what sort of country we want to be: spivs or citizens?