So, we are now six days away from a possible “No Deal” that would represent a colossal failure of governance. May cosmetically opens talks with Labour without seemingly being willing to give an inch.
Mark “French Mark” Francois leaves us in no doubt that Brexit is on the side of the angels by appropriating the language of the “good book”: “Forgive them, father, they know not what they do”, implying very ironically a lack of epistemological awareness on the part of MPs with a different view to him.
Meanwhile our favourite “haunted Victorian pencil” shows his mettle:
So is the Mogg-man an obstructionist happy to forever snipe and undermine the EU from the sidelines? Or, is he the ambitious would-be Tory power-broker feeling he has to look like he supports compromise and gesture towards economic realities by backing May’s deal at MV3? He is now trapped between these two stances, but instinctively veers back towards his comfort zone.
At least the army are all well behaved and not in any way evoking memories of GB75!
Whenever anyone claims that Labour are “just as divided”, show them this fascinating graphical representation of the voting patterns on Brexit, from The Economist magazine:
It shows that the Tories now consist of at least ten significant caucuses (maybe 13, if you count a 5-6 MP cluster as a caucus!). None of which has enticed a single MP from another party to join it other than self-styled “maverick” Frank Field.
The Tories move in ever increasing numbers of ever smaller circles. Apologies to Esmonde and Larbey!
Who should we listen to and learn from? Jacinda Ardern, in her response to recent events in her country, showing compassion and leadership. Betty Boothroyd, Dewsbury-born former Labour MP and Speaker of the House of Common, who was 21 days old at the time of the Wall Street Crash, quoting wise words here from Harold Wilson on the European question in British politics and using some of her own regarding Boris Johnson.
So, how’s Brexit going? We’ve had Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door trying to save us (from what?), we’ve stockpiled the ginger beer and sparkling water. Yet, a day after the fabled, written-in-stone ‘Independence Day’, we are ever less certain what is going to happen…
The Prime Minister has managed a successful… mutation from a robot into a zombie. When asked why the Prime Minister was holding a third vote this week, which she knew she was going to lose, one cabinet minister this week was reported as saying: “Fuck knows. I’m past caring. It’s like the living dead in here.”
You are seeing the bizarre spectacle of brass-necked Tories trying to blame Labour when they themselves are the government, and, at third asking, 28 ERG “Ultras” rebelled; if all Tories and the DUP had backed the Deal it would have passed.
You are also seeing the right, finally, turning on their ‘own’. James Forsyth in The Spectator claimed that this was likely to have the cataclysmic impact on the Tories’ reputation for competence that Denis Healey’s going to the IMF for a loan had for Labour in the winter of 1976 – which, as Forsyth rightly notes, was based on a miscalculation and needn’t have been done. If it’s a “No Deal” or a supplicant Brexit – with a Customs Union, or such – they are going to carry the can with both Remainers and disappointed Leavers. For different people, both options have the ring of “national humiliation”.
For the Tories, it will be deeply worrying that The Spectator is turning on them, as it didn’t just back Brexit in 2016, it backed withdrawal from the EEC in 1975.
When the supposed “centre” represented by May has failed to be in the least bit competent, then, in the words of W.B. Yeats, “the centre cannot hold”. Which may not be so good for the public – both Leave and Remain – if it leads to a Canada or Singapore style free-market Brexit seemingly desired by most Tory leavers. It will be a bit more bearable for all but the ERG & Tim Martin cult if it leads to a Norway style arrangement with a socialist turn in domestic policies and a proper end to austerity. Which could happen, if Remain ‘liberals’ and Corbyn supporters can find a workable alliance.
Ah! But it is alright for us, the British people, as we’re keeping the Tory Party together, which is what really matters…! Aren’t we?! Witness events in Beaconsfield. While another Tory austerity backer, Dominic Grieve is obviously far preferable to those who have forced him out of the Beaconsfield Tory party by 51 votes (only 313 voted). These are people presumably happier to stand alongside Stephen Yaxley-Lennon than an intelligent and serious MP who they disagree with on one issue. They are obsessed with this one issue and the man who proposed Grieve’s de-selection stood for UKIP in 2017.
Which brings us to… Erm, Change UK. Anti-system? They sound like some sort of soulless and convoluted public-private finance initiative! If they are the answer, I am really not sure what the question is. Maybe: “Do you feel nostalgic for the bland corporate aspect of the late-1990s?”
Didn’t quite think I’d ever really be saying this, but the DUP come out of Thursday’s events with credit compared with a certain two leading Tory Brexiter politicians… If you cannot base your vote on principle in something as important as this, then when can you? We knew already, but it gives final confirmation that they cannot be trusted.
I know Labour have been vacillating madly over this, but they’ve just about held the central line for a customs union style Brexit… Which only got five fewer votes than May’s deal in MV2.
The two sons of journalists and newspaper editors have just ceded their principles for pure (hypothetical) personal gain. This situation is so blindingly obvious that the penny has even dropped with Piers Morgan, perhaps the last man in the UK to realise that the de Pfeffel one is a **** and deserves all the articulate ire he got from Jonathan Meades. Now, the penny is dropping even with fellow shallow, power chasing fools! (albeit one who can get it right very occasionally, see his editorial stance at the Mirror over the Iraq War).
Think of that, these Tories are giving Piers Morgan the chance to pose as a sage commentator on events… Ed Miliband, meanwhile, has the last laugh.
So, how is Britain readying itself for Brexit, now possibly postponed to 12 April rather than in five days? Just how is the great, patriotic rebirth and throwing off of the ‘totalitarian’ foreign yoke going?
Well, we have seen Mark ‘French Mark’ Francois misunderstanding Will Self when Self had the temerity to claim, feasibly, that ‘probably all racists and anti-Semites’ voted for Brexit. In the context of hate crimes having more than doubled in five years, it is incumbent on the many decent Brexiters to disown and condemn their fringe ethno-nationalist element. Self only faltered in not adding Islamophobes to that list.
Even absurder than Francois’ umbrage, was noted Brexiter commentator @PrisonPlanet with this bombast:
“Activate the Queen”! This theatre of the absurd is just getting out of Beckett gear, and heading towards Ionesco… I’ll get the chairs…
Well, we do live in a country when 8% or so in polls claim they will back UKIP, a now avowedly Islamophobic party led by Gerard Batten, who claimed the Queen committed treason against herself in 1992 by signing the Maastricht Treaty, in a bizarre act of lèse-majesté…!
On Friday, as part of a dozen-‘strong’ pro-Brexit protest in Plymouth – that bizarrely aimed to disrupt the 8.30pm arrival of the Brittany ferry – 62-year-old spokesperson Karen Gadd was disheartened enough by the reality that followed promised social media ‘support’ to advocate a very patriotic flight from the country: “People on Facebook were saying they’re coming – but they haven’t turned up. I feel sorry for people having to to grow up in this country. I’m advising my kids to leave the country – to go to Greece or somewhere.”
A return to the sort of 1960s/70s ‘brain drain’ that provided ballast for our entry to the Common Market, anyone? I’ll get me coat.
Gadd also bemoaned Remainers getting “very nasty” while presiding over a protest that included the burning of EU flags. A day later, death threats to Margaret Anne Georgiadou, who founded the popular ‘Revoke Article 50’ petition were reported.
In Sunderland, there have been sightings of A4 bits of paper attached to walls claiming that if we don’t get Brexit on 29 March, then the anonymous scribe won’t pay his or her council tax.
Amid such banal absurdity, what better than scenes Michael Portillo, Andrew Neil and Liz Kendall engaging in a ‘Brexit danceathon’ on the BBC’s bastion of political analysis: This Week? That the great veteran reggae DJ David Rodigan decided to involve himself, and reggae music, in this spectacle is genuinely baffling.
SINKING GIGGLING INTO THE SEA (c) Jonathan Coe
You can feel that this is the twilight of the No Dealers not just in the drenched squib of Nigel Farage’s march – as drolly assessed by Hannah Jane Parkinson – but also in the fact that the pro-No Deal petition is outscored by the Revoke Article 50 petition by a factor nearly 10:1: 519,942 to 5,097,195, to be exact (as of 3:16pm, today). In Boston and Skegness, Lincolnshire, the strongest ‘Leave’ bastion of 2016, only 1.42% of constituents have signed the pro-‘No Deal’ petition, while 2.18% back revoking Article 50. I am not saying there has been a massive shift, but there has been some and Remain opinion is getting more deeply entrenched – and is slowly growing – the longer this process goes on.
Even by most Tories, ‘a No Deal’ is seen as a necessary ‘bargaining chip’, not as a desirable way forward. Maybe only 20 ERG-ultra MPs are sufficiently headbanging to want it. Others know their party’s reputation would be widely destroyed by presiding over at least a decade long economic decline and the national enfeeblement of No Deal. WTO terms would be an act of self-relegation comparable to exchanging a well-stocked, reliable emporium you’d been using for decades for Del Boy’s stall on the market. A stall manned by an 80-year-old Del Boy who should have retired years ago.
No Deal tends to get around a quarter of public support when the three options (May’s deal, No Deal and Remain) are given. It loses by 14% when it is just Remain v. No Deal (57% to 43%) protests don’t gain traction because it is a ‘way forward’ of masochists, desiring pain for intangible gains such as ‘taking our country back’ and blue passports. Never do they actually engage with or address the valid concerns itemised across 29 areas by Swati Dhingra and Josh De Lyon here.
We have witnessed Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel aptly diagnosing that Brexit was like waiting for Godot “and Godot is never coming.” For the sort of Brexits many were imagining in 2016 simply are not coming, as they were far-fetched pipe dreams planted by a populist anti-immigration campaign. They rule out misguided but actually feasible Brexit plans like Richard North’s ‘Flexcit’ plan (2013), because that plan involves compromise, the EEA and the recognition that any divergence has to be long-term to have any chance of ‘success’.
Frankly, we are in a pitiable state. And the public can see it; only 7% – probably UKIP and ERG ultras – blame the EU for what are self-inflicted wounds. Objectively, we can all see that it is May in the driving seat, who has been pandering to Gove, Johnson, Davis, Fox and Farage with ‘red lines’. The British government have achieved the unlikely and brought Viktor Orban closer to the EU consensus, giving the authoritarian Hungarian leader the chance to pose as a sage moderate. As reported by Rankin and Boffey, they have enabled one EU head of state to say the UK needs to be taken care of, “like a patient”.
A patient who might be better treated by EU doctors than by certain British journalists.
Day 995 in the British Brexit house! Ah, and a tiny section of the housemates (100, apparently! A few lasses but apparently mostly elder gents) have opted to spend £50 to spend their Saturday morning at political march in Sunderland. In the rain. As you do.
I get it. The people of provincial or ‘Average Britain’, as Donald Horne described it in 1969, feel let down. They have been let down, by all governments from Thatcher onward and, most emphatically, by the austerity politics of Cameron-Clegg. Misty-eyed Remainers should read James Meek’s accounts of how globalisation has damaged specific communities, such as this one about Cadbury’s in Keynsham. The EU is not as some call it a ‘dictatorship’ but its free-market ethos has led to people losing out in certain places.
What I simply do not get is the trust large numbers seem to place in certain public figures: witness one Nigel Farridge. Why trust him more than a May, Miliband, Cameron or Blair? He’s done little constructive work as an MEP. He grandstands and speaks a populist language that makes him seem ‘different’ to a large number of people who opt to see politics in simple terms. Sometimes, seeing politics in simple terms is necessary; usually, it is dangerous and at the core of the problems we face.
A minimum of research leads you to the conclusion that this man, who went to fee-paying Dulwich College and became a stockbroker in the City of London in 1982, is no true man of the British people. He is a man of the affluent south east, very in favour of free-market economics which tend to benefit the already well-off; his emphasis on immigration is a tactic, as he steps back from associating with UKIP now that they have explicitly moved to the far-right. This ‘patriot’ has strong links to powerful nationalists such as Putin and Trump and he is regularly paid to appear as a ‘broadcaster’ on Murdoch’s Fox News.
Today, he began to lead a march that tries to latch onto the iconography of the 1936 Jarrow Crusade, following a fairly similar route. However, it is not quite the same as that tenacious endeavour of the Great Depression, born of material despair. To quote the Chronicle here: ‘The route features notable gaps, where it appears the campaigners will be transported up to 30 miles from the end of a stage and to the start of the next, instead of walking.’ And, as Geoff Thomas (via David Stubbs) has noted: ‘Farage’s marchers are being asked to complete the route to London in half the time the original Jarrow marchers took. These were 200 men selected on the basis of physical fitness from a larger pool of volunteers. Some 20 miles a day they’ll have to cover and, unlike on the Jarrow march, no rest days.’
Jarrow is now represented by Stephen Hepburn MP, who I gather represents some of the Blue Labour tendency John Gray identifies in yesterday’s New Statesman: Gray plausibly argues there is massive, latent support in provincial England and Wales for combining left-wing economic policies such as nationalisation with an agenda of law and order and cutting immigration. In 2017, some of these insecure, fearful voters went to Corbyn because of the former, some went to May due to the latter.
Former Jarrow MP at the time of the Jarrow march was Ellen Wilkinson; when education minister in 1947, she called for a high-minded ‘Third Programme Nation’, with access to culture and education shared by the many. It is a shame this only partially came to pass and then dwindled entirely, despite the efforts of fine folk like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Arnold Wesker and Jennie Lee.
We are living with the consequences, but need to deliver tangible economic improvements for ‘Average Britain’ and address its justified anger at governments of the last 40 years. While consistently arguing against the scapegoating of immigrants. If not, we will be threatened with a Farage-fuelled, Boris Johnson-led Britain, as John Gray warns.
A ‘Fox News Nation’, if you will. Ponder on that.
Somehow, I don’t think the Jarra marchers were charged £50 for the privilege of marching alongside an ex-stockbroker in a flat cap. Apparently one who, by many accounts, got into his car by the time the gaggle reached Seaham.
Day 993 in the British Brexit house! Lots of shouting, a pair of mad dogs in the Question Time audience having a barney, more yakking on about ‘sovereignty’ than about sharing or saving the planet. Less evidence of thinking or, even, research going on from the ‘researchers’ (ERG). Less and less evidence that even Brexiters can agree on what they want: Gove is for being a “vassal state” of the EU that controls immigration, Johnson is for an even deeper isolation which threatens the UK itself.
I cast Channel 4’s Dispatches on ‘The Brexit Millionaires’ via the laptop, onto the telly. It got me wondering just what the Leave voters in places like Sunderland make of the profiteering leading figures on their side… For example, Jacob Rees-Mogg (who has made an estimated £7m since the Brexit vote) and Crispin Odey (who made £220m). Also, the patriotic Mogg man’s firm has invested not in the UK, or even Somerset, but in China and Russia. You “get your country back”, but instead empower a new super-rich elite just as deeply embroiled in global capitalism; but who aim to gain from the economic recession of No Deal and avoid tougher new EU rules on Tax Avoidance that are due to come into effect shortly. Jacob has taken his lead from his father, former BBC Governor and Times editor William, who advocated a game-playing approach to “disaster capitalism” (see Andy Beckett’s article here).
To widen the picture… Observe: Farage, live on the BBC yesterday, claiming he would try and sabotage an extension to Article 50 through his connections in Italy. Apprehend: our favourite person with a “de Pfeffel” middle name trivialising child abuse, and proving unable to see the irony concerning a certain colossal amount of public money poured in the Thames over a farcical bridge project in a certain mayoral tenure. These really are tawdry, entirely self-interested people who simply cannot be trusted with power. They are not cavaliers at all, or Brexiteers – as there is no unity behind a specific cause.
See: Liam Fox, who has “rolled over” trade deals with around 9 out of 69 countries we currently benefit from via our EU membership. If so, it will take us until 2033 before he is finished! And my rough calculation doesn’t take into account that the hardest deals – i.e. with bigger world powers – are yet to do. Move to a different part of the superstructure: the media! Gather: Julia Hartley-Brewer, who constantly harks back to the supposed folk wisdom of one 2016 vote and who refuses to stare 2019 reality in the face.
To paraphrase both The Doctor and Special Agent Dale Cooper: “WHAT YEAR IS THIS?”
It comes to something when Hammond and even Gove are made to seem as beacons of probity, in comparison. Architects of much austerity are able to assume a mantle of “reasonableness” due to the nature of their avaricious opponents on the “Brexit Right”, who have notably walked away from responsibility. Seems we could now be sucked into another, debased, poisonous referendum (though, admittedly, it would be better if a choice between the Deal and Remain, as thus less abstract and more concrete; no scope to allow people to imagine their many Brexit panaceas).
The lie of a Hard Brexit posits exchanging EU membership with a say, for pipe dreams of the Commonwealth, with probably less say. The Commonwealth is far less populous than the EU, has no political organisation behind it and which we were proportionately trading much less with by the 1960s anyway. Imports from the commonwealth dipped from 38% of our total imports in 1948 to 20% in 1972; over the same period, exports fell from 38% to 20.5% Brexiters elide the likely necessity of the British in a ‘No Deal’ situation having to beg ‘charity’ from the trustworthy, outwards-looking Groper in Chief of the USA… The latest disgrace is that these pipe dreams seem to be fusing with Troubles nostalgia, see Johnny Mercer MP’s comments on an ex-British soldier being tried for alleged crimes during Bloody Sunday in 1972: “one soldier too many”, implying none should ever be legally held to account.
It really does seem pointless to go ahead with Brexit. Democracy is a changing process, not a faith with landmarks set in stone. However, considering current political economy and how the cards are stacked, a Norway option would be the most sensible and is a genuine compromise. I’m unsure we actually deserve it though. It’s hard to maintain enthusiasm in one’s country when so often the level of debate (at least online) is: “Brexshit”, “Remoaner”, “we won, you lost, get over it!” and our favourite, currently, “Why don’t we just leave?!”
Now, that delight, a second referendum. A 5-page questionnaire with ranked options and attached supplementary reading matter would be apter for this issue than an insultingly simple binary. If we do get the likelier, self-harm avoiding outcome of a Deal versus Remain, the ERG will try to claim betrayal. With some gall, considering the utter lack of ideas and plans they have had – and their selective blindness to the United Kingdom’s constituent nations, Northern Ireland and Scotland. These ‘researchers” incompetence has led to a scenario whereby we have seen IRA mail bombs to London and Glasgow, in 2019.
If we have to have another referendum (not generally a good way of doing things; imagine if we’d taken this approach in the 1960s to abortion, capital punishment and the decriminalisation of homosexuality?), then instead of Osborne, Cameron, Mandelson, what about getting Caroline Lucas, Patrick Stewart and Neville Southall to front it? The decent MP, the captain and the keeper! With some more adept political operators from the left and centre running the campaign than, gulp, the mighty Will Straw.
Much national humiliation – and worse, danger to security and life – might have been avoided had the Tory government (and Labour too) backed the SNP’s late 2016 plan: for Brexit, but with single market and customs union membership. But maybe a bit of humiliation is due, given so many politicians and voters still have an inflated idea of our world status. No one has learned the lessons from Eden, Blair or indeed remembered why we asked to join so many times in the first place.
Last night was what seemed like Part 13,377 of an absurdist morality play-turned-soap opera, with John Bercow out-Blesseding Brian Blessed (or is that Henry Irving?) and a “HOUSE OF FOOLS” (Daily Mail front page) only narrowing rejecting a seismic, UK threatening historical change. A government whipping against its own motion, which had been given ballast by Hammond and Gove’s dire forecasts for the future. A Gove now happy to assume the “expert” mantle, perhaps not appreciating the lessons of the old ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ fable. Government ministers abstaining on a matter of vital national importance. Historically, this will likely rival the Suez Crisis; we can only hope that it will involve less needless loss of life.
May's Britain... 
