Uncharted Waters

Last month's "prorogation" may not have been, in strict parlance, a “coup” – but the UK Supreme Court judgement today on Johnson’s suspension of parliament was historic, unanimous and damning. The suspension was unlawful – and the Houses of Parliament should and will resume their operations – from tomorrow.

For the umpteenth time (what a strange phrase!), we are all left pondering the question – “What Next?” At this stage, I am surprised that none of my foreign readers (namely 95% of my readership) have posed the obvious question for the situation in which a Parliament has consistently rejected the Government’s flagship Brexit Deal (and also No Deal) – for nigh on a year……As well as a proposal for a General Election.

Namely what is wrong with the idea of a Coalition or Government of National Unity?

There are two levels of answer. The first – rather fatuous one - is that it’s just not English!! Unlike the Europeans, they don’t do consensus. It’s part of the imperial tradition…It’s all or nothing…..none of these pansy compromises,,,,

The second more serious answer has me grasping for the path-dependency model which is used to explain why countries as diverse as Italy, Poland, Romania and Russia have had difficulty adjusting to the requirements of political modernity.

88 years ago (in 1931) a National Government took office in the middle of the Depression, headed by a Labour Prime Minister (Ramsay MacDonald) who had presided for 2 years over a minority Labour government supported by the Liberals - but his 1931 Cabinet consisted of Ministers drawn from the 3 main parties. MacDonald was branded a traitor by the Labour Party and subsequently expelled.

The experience has scarred the Labour party ever since – and made it very difficult to consider coalitions – let alone a National Government…..

But it's still amazing that you hear so few voices making such a call...in other countries it would by now have been deafening and irresistible....
But, then, the UK is not normal - and the victorious plaintiff correctly emphasised that the issue had once again demonstrated the need for a written constitution. But we all know that will never happen...And who said the Brits were pragmatists????

Update; I loved the reaction to the brooch worn by the woman who presided over the Supreme Court judgement – particularly the potential Shakespearian reference

Brexit – and its different levels of “explanation”

There have been lots of theories about “How Brexit happened” with the “explanations” generally turning out (at least in the newspapers and journals) to be little more than superficial rationalisations than serious attempts to understand what drove voters to turn out (or not) and to decide to put their cross at the top rather than at the bottom of the ballot paper…The “explanations” have included –

- The alienation/distrust of those marginalised by deindustrialisation who have been given the rather derogatory designation of “Left Behinds”
- An interpretation robustly challenged by Danny Dorling and others who correctly pointed out that it was the older, more comfortably-off conservative voters who were Leave enthusiasts
- A 25 year campaign of hostility to the EU by the tabloids – ably assisted by a maverick Daily Telegraph journalist, one BoJo. The resulting Euroscepticism is well mapped in an article “Not European Enough” (2019)

- A dramatic rise in net immigration to the UK since 2000 with results mapped in “a tangled web” 2019

- The silence of the Labour party in the campaign - giving Conservatives the freedom to be active in both the Leave and Remain campaigns

-  The  unimaginative nature of the Remain campaign – whose economic threats were seen as counterproductive

The researchers, of course, have been active – but few of their studies have surfaced in the media most of which have adopted their own particular “narrative” of the referendum result and are more interested to cover the never-ending pantomime of Brexit politics. There is, of course, one other “gatekeeper” between academia and the public namely Think Tanks which, however, focus on future policies and not on historical research.

So ordinary citizens are left on their own to google key terms and try to identify readable results of the research on voter motivation in the 2016 referendum. One of the best of these Brexit – understanding the socio-economic causes and consequences (2016) – appeared  remarkably quickly

You will notice that some of the research material resulting from that google search is very recent (2019) but I have just been reading a book which was written 2 years ago - The Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony Barnett (2017) which I find the best analysis of the issue.

Written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages - with each of its 34 chapters having an almost self-explanatory title such as “Jailbreak”, “The four breaches of trust”, “Roll the Dice”, “It was England’s Brexit”, “Big Britishness”, “The Legitimacy of the EU” and “No Left to Turn To”.

It is one of these rare books that you realise half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely – not only underlining (in my case in different colours) but making copious notes about….Indeed, for the first time ever, I transcribed my first set of comments into a larger notebook - partly for some of the one line quotes, partly the better to follow the argument….Barnett was the moving force behind Charter 88 and has a bit of a hobbyhorse about constitutional issues which I don’t find easy to follow..

Let me, very briefly, try to do justice to his book. He starts it by suggesting that if there is one symbol to represent the modern world it is that of the prison - with surveillance everywhere and everyone

“trapped by the way voting and its outcomes are bought, corrupted, manipulated, spun by the PR industry and calibrations of costly marketing analytics” and then arguing that

“Brexit (and Trump) are attempts at mass breakout from the marketised incarceration of contemporary corporate democracy”

The breaches of trust which have sown the dragon seeds of public distrust and sullen anger in the US and the UK are 
- first the 2003 Iraq invasion itself in the face of massive protest (which offended the liberals); 
- the subsequent destruction affecting the Middle East as a whole which was ultimately proved to have been a disaster (offending the right - which had been expecting victory and “greatness”)

- The global financial meltdown was the third breach of trust 
- and the corporate greed it revealed was the final breach (arfuably started by the parliamentary expenses scandal) . 

Many of us thought that the third breach of trust would not only lead to a rethink about globalisation but to the birth of a more balanced model - and it was Colin Crouch’s The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism which alerted us in 2011 that Neoliberalism was still very much alive and kicking…. Barnett puts it very eloquently –

“A democratic warming that began on the left but only became a hurricane capable of taking power after picking up force in the warm waters of the right”

He goes on to suggest that the attraction of Brexit was what he calls the “jailbreak factor” – “the experience of democracy being so confining that any offer to escape was attractive”. It’s noticeable that Remainers cited mainly economic factors for their vote (75%) whereas Leavers discounted the economic, having just 2 major concerns – ending EU decision-making and immigration. Remainers were focused on the future, Leavers on the past…..

Although Barnett was a Remainer, he is pretty savage about the EC dishonesty around the Lisbon Treaty and has a great quote about the campaign –

The UK (although he correctly argued that it was actually England) walked out of Europe on two Big British Eurosceptic boots – one marked Leave, the other Remain

He later emphasises that both Leave and Remain were run by right-wing sects – with the Labour party sulking in the undergrowth – their slogans about the future being indistinguishable, “global Britain” in one case, “world Britain” in the other….I  kid you not! I’ll finish with one final quote –

“the Brexiteers have abandoned a very ambitious but achievable aim of growing like Germany within the EU for the fantastical ambition of growing even faster while outside it”

Brexitannia (2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DzbctACZWY is a far more thoughtful film of an almost sociological depth based on about 200 in-depth interviews the length and breadth of the country and including commentaries. It’s reviewed here by Zero Anthropology

"Inside Europe - 10 years of turmoil" (2019) the BBC documentary referred to in the opening

Resources
Brexit Geographies – 5 provocations; (2018) Looks a good analysis 

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/explaining-brexit/

https://ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CSI-Brexit-4-People%E2%80%99s-Stated-Reasons-for-Voting-Leave.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5856072/pdf/PIRS-97-117.pdf

https://blog.usejournal.com/brexit-a-detailed-summary-of-what-the-hell-is-going-on-for-my-american-friends-61c92b04d9f7

http://natcen.ac.uk/media/1319222/natcen_brexplanations-report-final-web2.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/13/brexit-boris-johnson-parliament-written-constitution

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/35620/ttr-2018-special-brexit.pdf

https://www.eurozine.com/explaining-brexit/?pdf

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/theo-veenkamp/

https://adamtooze.com/2017/03/02/notes-global-condition-mapping-debate-around-left-behind-white-working-class/

https://braveneweurope.com/2337-2 youtube

ttps://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/on-anthony-barnett-s-lure-of-greatness/

Is this a Coup d’Etat?

Quite astonishing that this question apparently is now the heated topic of conversation the length and breadth of the benighted land I once knew as home….with some people in little doubt that the five-week suspension of Parliament which starts next week is precisely that – and the government arguing, on the other hand, that it is a routine affair…    

These, of course, are very uncivil times in which emotional and insulting words are too casually thrown around. “Words”, however, “are important – they are all we have…..”

Some words have a precise meaning which can be undermined when used as an insult….which is perhaps what Napoleon meant when he apparently said

“Why and how are words so important that they cannot be too often used”.

Fascist is one recent example (although, for me, all adjectives ending in “ist” run this danger). TS Eliot put it best when he wrote….

“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”

Thinking before we act or speak is always advisable…   Parents used to advise their teenage kids to “bite their tongue” after blurting out a questionable remark….but that probably shows my age…

So my first reaction is that talk of a “coup” is not all that helpful.

Wikipedia’s entry for "prorogation" is quite useful. I certainly had no recollection of John Major having used it mid March 1997 to avoid having to answer questions about the “cash for questions” affair – leading to New Labour’s election 6 weeks later…

But a lot of people have a vague memory of its use by Charles I in the 17^th century – leading to a certain event known as the English Civil War…

But, normally, the “prorogation” (or suspension) of Parliament is a routine matter lasting a few days….But there is something called the “Party Conference Season” – the 4 week period at the end of September and beginning of October when the British political parties hold their Annual Conferences.

So, technically, it is true that the prorogation adds only a few days to what, otherwise, would have been a normal parliamentary recess…..

But these, patently, are not normal times. And it has been all too easy for “Remainers” to paint the abnormally long period of prorogation as a denial of government accountability….

There are at least 2 blogs which focus entirely on constitutional issues and it is interesting to see what they have been saying. The Constitution Unit has had only one post on the question – to which its answer is very clear…it’s “improper” and should be reversed.

UK Constitutional Law has a more varied response…. And, of course, the two legal appeals so far made against the prorogation have failed – with the Supreme Court making the final decision in a week or so…

So for those of a betting nature, I would simply remind them that the government generally has the inside track…..

Update; Andrew Rawnsley of the Observer is always good for a reflective Sunday piece on the week’s politics in the UK which tries to look round all the corners…Today’s also suggests that resignation is on the cards

pps; How naive I am to complain about loose language. My blog hits have in the past week limped along at under 100 a day. Until the weekend when they first went to 500 and have in past 24 hours hit the 1000 mark......proof (if I really needed it) that it pays to use extreme language!!
ppps A very good balanced analysis from a public admin Prof with echoes of Jim Callaghan’s famous question  can be read here

Johnson's Real Game?

Blogposts zap into cyberspace and rarely get a response.
Boffy’s Blog is one of blogs I recommend on my blogroll and is run by someone who clearly sleeps with one eye open!

I feel privileged that he has taken the trouble to correct/update my last post with no fewer than two comments which I am happy to bring to my readers’ attention in a proper manner – with the relevant hyperlinks thrown in as a bonus…….  

You have missed Johnson’s real nuclear option – to which I drew attention in my post of 3 September – and that is to wait until October 17th, having spent five weeks attacking (those who deny Brexit and) the cowardice of the opposition who refuse to fight an election…….then simply resign rather than ask for an extension.

He knows the opposition is comprised of an unprincipled rabble with no concept of strategy, and wholly consumed by concern for immediate parliamentary tactics - what Lenin called “parliamentary cretinism” - and their own party interests. The Liberals have said again they will not vote to make Corby Prime Minister as head of the rabble alliance. Labour cannot possibly support anyone other than Corbyn without destroying itself.

When the rabble alliance collapses, unable to form an alternative government, this results automatically in the General Election that Johnson wants, because they only have 14 days after he resigns to do so.

He goes into the election looking principled and able to restore order, they go into it looking like the unprincipled, disorganised, squabbling rabble they actually are.

Labour's Brexit position always shaky has disintegrated again on contact with the battlefield. It now appears to be that a Labour Government would negotiate its own fantasy Brexit deal, then it would put it, along with remain to a new referendum, and in that referendum, it would then argue for a Remain vote, against its own deal that it had just wasted time negotiating.

You really could not make this nonsense up, and that indicates that the rabble alliance really do not have a clue, which is why, unfortunately, Johnson is likely to win.

This is indeed highly plausible….My thanks to Boffy for taking the trouble of drawing it to everyone’s attention. That, so far, no one else has taken up that idea is indeed a sad reflection on the British commentariat!

Update; Despite appearances, Johnson is no fool…and has revealed a ruthlessness in the past week which few had expected. In removing the whip from 21 Conservative MPs (and effectively removing the chances of their surviving as MPs in any future election), he has cleared the decks of dissenting voices and warned the remaining Tory MPs to be in no doubt of the consequences of any disloyalty to his line….

And, in the latest explosive news, a senior Minister of his has just resigned with a massive attack on his leadership for “political vandalism”.

The same story also confirms that Johnson is also this weekend considering placing a simple motion of “No Confidence” before the House and whipping Conservative MPs to support it. 

Of course, he doesn’t seem to have the votes for it any more – and the Speaker may well rule it out of order (on the basis presumably that it repeats last week’s failed motion) 

But if that is the way he goes in the next 36 hours, then it would clearly demonstrate that Boffy is right....and that his first act on October 17th will be to resign. 

My hunch is that he will not want to show his hand too soon.....and that he will not therefore seek a "No Confidence" vote on Monday

Update; The Constitution Unit blog had this post a couple of weeks ago https://constitution-unit.com/2019/08/23/might-boris-johnson-try-to-call-an-election-sooner-than-people-think/#more-8307

British PM threatens to defy the Law?

After two posts on “Life and Death” issues, it pains me greatly to find myself returning to UK politics and Brexit. And I do so only to help answer the questions of my non-UK readers who form the bulk of this blog’ readership.

Yesterday saw the House of Lords confirm the earlier House of Commons vote which seems to make a “No Deal” exit from the EU illegal. Logically this would require the Prime Minister to seek from the EU an extension to the deadline of 31 October. He has, however, apparently indicated that he will not seek such an extension – thereby putting himself as PM in the remarkable position of being in contempt of the law
And the Commons also denied Johnson’s attempt to force a General election - with opposition leaders confirming they would vote down the further attempt he is rumoured to be seeking on Monday. It is, after all, their last day before he (with the Queen's gracious permission) "suspends" them (for 6 weeks). The mind boggles!

I thought the flowchart in this recent article was complicated – until I saw the various options presented by this specialist in EU politics.

The BBC flowchart seems to be simpler - although I don’t quite understand their comment that a simple motion with a specific date for an election would require only a simple majority since that is surely ruled out by the “Fixed Term Parliament Act” of 2011 (which requires a 2/3 majority)

But it was public admin academic Colin Talbot who put the issue most pithily in this blogpost

What if the Government tables a motion for a General Election under the terms of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act?

This requires a two-thirds majority of all MPs – whether present and voting or not. That’s 434 MPs. They have already tried it once and failed. It’s unlikely to succeed when they try again on Monday. After that Parliament is going to be Prorogued (suspended) so it will be impossible before it resumes in Oct.

What if the Government brings forward a one-line Bill to suspend the Fixed Term Parliaments Act and call a General Election?

The Government could do this and try and fix a date that meant the GE could not stop Brexit happening on 31 Oct. They would need a majority, which they don’t have. It would be open to amendment, which could negate what they are trying to do.

What if the House of Commons passes a vote of No Confidence, in the terms stipulated by the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, next week?

This, quite uniquely, would require the Government to move such a motion itself and puts the Opposition Parties in a dreadful quandary -  difficult to vote against it (and thus vote confidence in the Government), so it would pass. It only requires a simple majority.

This would trigger the 14-day period during which a General Election can only be averted by passing a motion of confidence in HM Government (who ever that might be by then).

Except Parliament would be suspended because it will be Prorogued. There would be no House of Commons to pass such a resolution. The clock would tick down and a General Election would be triggered after 14 days, probably after 1stOct. The PM can then fix that election for a date that means the UK will crash out of the EU on 31 Oct. There would appear to be nothing Parliament could do to stop it.

BUT, to do this the Government would have to pull this stunt whilst Parliament is still (just) sitting. If they did the reaction would likely be explosive. We could well see unprecedented moves to overturn Prorogation by the House of Commons appealing directly to the Queen? This would obviously create a huge constitutional crisis. Or Parliament could try and pass a Bill suspending the FTPA?

Of course, if the Government were voting No Confidence in themselves to try to force a General Election through this highly dubious route, it might not be seen as so bizarre for the Opposition to vote the other way? In these strange times, who knows?

What if The Prime Minister extends Prorogation?

It is perfectly possible for Boris Johnson to go back to the Palace and ask Her Majesty to extend Prorogation so Parliament does not re-assemble, and he cannot be challenged.

If he did something so blatant there could be push-back from the Palace, through the Courts, and even by the House of Commons doing something unheard of like re-assembling itself.

                     

A Scottish and English court have both upheld the Prime Minister’s right to suspend Parliament for 5 weeks but appeals will be heard in the Country’s Supreme Court in what is expected to be a 3 day hearing on 17 September. But in the meantime Parliament is muzzled and shackled…..so is the state of the UK this day of the Lord 7 September 2019

Rogue Prorogues Parliament

My readers will be expecting me to throw some light for them on the suspension of the British Parliament – and I never like to disappoint. At this time of the year there is normally what is called a “parliamentary recess” (approved by the House) and the current one started only a day or so after Johnson was elected the Leader of the Conservative party and went to kiss the Queen’s hand – at the end of July. According to the House of Commons website, the recess was due to end next week (September 3) – at which point a variety of parliamentary games will be deployed – including a possible “vote of confidence”

On Wednesday, however, the Prime Minister asked and received from the Queen a “prorogation” (ie suspension) of Parliament from 9 September until 14 October – leaving only 2 weeks before the country is scheduled to leave the European Union.

The reaction has been outrage – even from Conservative MPs and ex-Ministers. MPs are given only four days next week to hold the government to account…Although I grant you that MPs have not been able to do much with the additional power they have had for the past 2 years (since we got what is called a "hung parliament" ie one without a clear government majority)

The historian, Richard Evans, has an article in the current issue of Prospect Magazine which puts this action in a useful historical context -

It was to Hitler’s advantage that nobody apart from his own followers took him seriously. An upstart from Austria with a comical moustache and a funny accent, he didn’t fit the image of a normal politician.

Trump and Boris Johnson may not be upstarts in the same way—far from it—but it is striking that neither possesses the gravitas the electorate used to expect of its leaders. Many voters are amused by these showmen. And in Britain, many lend Johnson (and perhaps the equally convention-defying Nigel Farage) support because they imagine, as many German voters did in the early 1930s, that they will do whatever is necessary—including breaking the rules of politics—to resolve the crisis into which the nation has got itself, in Johnson’s case bypassing the elected representatives of the people.

But if Hitler’s rise teaches us anything, it’s that the establishment trivialises demagogues at its peril. One disturbing aspect of the present crisis is the extent to which mainstream parties, including US Republicans and British Conservatives, tolerate leaders with tawdry rhetoric and simplistic ideas, just as 
Papen, Hindenburg, Schleicher and the rest of the later Weimar establishment tolerated first Hitler and then his dismantling of the German constitution. He could not have done it in the way he did without their acquiescence. Republicans know Trump is a charlatan, just as Conservatives know Johnson is lazy, chaotic and superficial, but if these men can get them votes, they’ll lend them support.

Weimar’s democracy did not exactly commit suicide. Most voters never voted for a dicatorship: the most the Nazis ever won in a free election was 37.4 per cent of the vote. But too many conservative politicians lacked the will to defend democracy, either because they didn’t really believe in it or because other matters seemed more pressing. 

On a lighter note, Fin O’Toole has an excellent piece in “The New York Review of Books” which catches an important aspect of the Etonian public school fool who is now UK PM

The anthropologist Kate Fox, in her classic study “Watching the English”, suggested that a crucial rule of the national discourse is what she called The Importance of Not Being Earnest:

 “At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the proscription (banning) of ‘earnestness.’”

Johnson has played on this to perfection—he knows that millions of his compatriots would rather go along with his outrageous fabrications than be accused of the ultimate sin of taking things too seriously.

“Boris being Boris” (the phrase that has long been used to excuse him) is an act, a turn, a traveling show. Johnson’s father, Stanley, was fired from his job at the World Bank in 1968 when he submitted a satiric proposal for a $100 million loan to Egypt to build three new pyramids and a sphinx.

But the son cultivated in England an audience more receptive to the half-comic, half-convincing notion that the EU might be just such an absurdist enterprise.

What he honed in his Brussels years is the practice of political journalism (and then of politics itself) as a Monty Python sketch. He invented a version of the EU as a gigantic Ministry of Silly Walks, in which crazed bureaucrats with huge budgets develop ever more pointlessly complicated gaits. (In the original sketch, the British bureaucrats are trying to keep up with “Le Marché Commun,” the Common Market.)

Johnson’s Brussels is a warren of bureaucratic redoubts in which lurk a Ministry of Dangerous Balloons, a Ministry of Tiny Condoms, and a Ministry of Flavourless Crisps. In this theatre of the absurd, it never matters whether the stories are true; what matters is that they are ludicrous enough to fly under the radar of credibility and hit the sweet spot where preexisting prejudices are confirmed.

This running joke made Johnson not just highly popular as a comic anti-politician but, for many of his compatriots, the embodiment of that patriotic treasure, the English eccentric. There is a long tradition of embracing the eccentric (though in reality only the upper-class male eccentric) as proof of the English love of liberty and individualism in contrast to the supposed slavishness of the European continentals. No less a figure than John Stuart Mill wrote in “On Liberty” (1859) that

“precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”

Mill associated eccentricity with “strength of character,” but Johnson has been able to turn it upside down—his very weakness of character (the chaos, the fecklessness, the mendacity) provides for his admirers a patriotically heartening proof that the true English spirit has not yet been chewed up in the homogenizing maw of a humourless and excessively organized EU.

For those who want to know more about the constitutional issues involved, the same magazine has this useful note on the issue

Update

For the political junkies who want to know the full story behind the plot to suspend parliament, it’s here

Will Hutton is a respected economics writer who has analysed and mapped the choices open to the British people to bring it into the 21^st Century in a variety of books – starting with The State We’re In” (1995), He also has a useful article in today’s Guardian on the constitutional issues behind the suspension.

Long Live the King!

So the UK now has a new Prime Minister – if one viewed by the world (and most of Britain) as a total – if charming - clown. But this seems to be part of a world-wide trend (eg Italy, US, Ukraine) which has seen celebrities ascend to such heights…

Johnson is actually brainer than he lets on – his buffoonery is a carefully cultivated act he has been honing since childhood, when he first realised that it made people laugh and like him. Most men, when appearing on television for example, will comb their hair – Johnson does the opposite, ruffling it to ensure he retains his trademark image of disorganisation…. John Oliver captures this well with this short sequence.
And this extensive article from the LRB places Johnson firmly in the tradition of British satire. 

Here’s a youtube discussion Boris Johnson took part in a few years back (2016?) with an Oxbridge Professor on the merits of Greeks and Romans - which gives a measure of that bit of the man… 

How did it happen?

Appointed to his position by a curious system created by the Conservative party (some 20 years ago) but used rarely for the appointment of the country’s Prime Minister, Johnson was the clear favourite from the start – but attracted the support of a bare majority of Conservative MPs. And was then subject (along with Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt) to a fortnight of debate within the membership (of 160,000) Conservative party members.

From this he emerged last week with the support of 66% of Conservative party members – and was duly anointed by the Queen on Friday.

What did he then do?

Under the (unwritten) UK constitution, this is enough to allow him to appoint a Cabinet – which he duly did over the weekend. 

It’s been called the most right-wing cabinet ever seen in the UK – and it is certainly one being readied for another election in the autumn – only some 2 years after the last one called by his predecessor Theresa May who had inherited a good majority but lost it in that gamble. 

And he has appointed as one of his key advisers Dominic Cummings - who figured in the film I blogged about earlier in the year

But Johnson and his government are highly vulnerable to any vote of confidence – a bye-election this week could see the government’s theoretical majority reduced to one! And it is clear that there is no majority in the current Parliament for a no-deal Brexit…

As usual, the Brexit blog gives the pithiest summary of the situation….And Richard North’s EUReferendum blog gives us this assessment of the No-Deal option.

So now what? The Institute of Government Think Tank has just published a briefing on the issues which confront him and his government. What is very clear is that Theresa May did her best to keep the UK within the ambit of the EU and that we now have a government which is determined to take the country out of Europe "lock, stock and barrel"!

A Pause for reflection

With my usual serendipity, I had plucked a rather worn-looking book from the library over the same weekend – Timothy Garten Ash’s “Facts are Subversive- political writing from a decade without a name” (2010) - one of whose essays bears the title “Is Britain European?”, written in 2001) and is one of the best things I have read on the subject, taking me back to the series of posts I did on British (or English) identity I did earlier in the year……This is one of the last of about a dozen posts on the subject I did then……

Garten Ash’s article has also got a great set of references – including the name of a historian I hadn’t heard of Jeremy Black  who has just produced Britain and Europe – a short history (2019)

A lot of us are looking to historians to help us make sense of this moment in the history of a country about which a lot of us grew up being very ambivalent…

As a Scot with a Scottish father and English mother - and educated in a state school - I didn’t absorb much English history so come fairly fresh to the stuff flowing from sophisticated English nationalist academics such as this first part of a series which is presumably being written to put Brexit in "proper" context. Jonathan Storey is a retired History Professor (from the Insead Business School in France) and runs a blog which offers thought-provoking views of the UK and Europe - in posts which are even longer than mine! . 

Further references
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/the-empty-promise-of-boris-johnson - the most powerful expose I’ve seen
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/boris-johnson-profile/594379/ - another devastating psychological profile

http://kyq4.blogspot.com/2019/07/from-attlee-to-boris-integrity-to-post.html - my friend Keith’s great summary of the man the country has allowed to become PM

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/27/boris-johnson-no-10-pericles-greek-hero

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/29/no-deal-brexit-tory-joke-boris-johnson-economic-britain

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/29/jacob-rees-mogg-language-rules

https://storybookreview.wordpress.com/2019/07/26/brexit-and-the-british-constitution-part-i-the-roots-of-the-old-constitution/

https://infacts.org/

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n13/james-wood/diary

Brexit: Behind Closed Doors, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvKGWQXi3rM

Narratives of Encroachment

Like most people, these days, my attention tends to wander…my eye will soon catch something else. It’s not often that an article is able to hold my attention but “Turning Inward; Brexit, Encroachment Narrative and the English as a “secret people” achieved that amazing feat…

I almost missed it since it had been lurking as one of hundreds of hyperlinks which I store in a file but rarely activate.

And my attention was held because the author – one Prof Patrick Wright - had cunningly embedded in the article a video of his presentation which made even more interesting points than the article itself. But the sound-level was so low that I had to strain my ears to identify the embellishments he was making to the text.

Truly the sort of cunning technique one would expect from a Professor of “Literature and Visual and Material Culture”!! He is also the author of On living in an old country – national past in contemporary Britain, published in 1985.

The basic argument of his paper is that English society has been portrayed over the ages by certain writers with particular themes and symbols eg rustic meadows, the sound of a cricket ball and warm beer. The gallery of writers includes William Cobbett, GK Chesterton, JB Priestley and George Orwell….each of whom, admittedly in very varying degrees, paints pictures of “sturdy yeomen” under threat…

 While the Brexit campaigns have rightly been condemned for its appeals to xenophobia, and for the lies, misrepresentations and sheer opportunism of its leaders, there is more to be said than that. To the considerable extent that this resurgence of English identity has been engineered by partisan politicians, campaigners and journalists, it has also been activated by the deployment of allegorical narratives that work by simplification and polarisation.

In these encroachment narratives, the traditional nation and its way of life is typically squared off against a vividly imagined and probably advancing threat — be it immigrants, bureaucrats, Europe, ‘experts’ etc. Where the reality addressed is likely to be complex and full of nuance, encroachment narratives of this kind press that reality into a brutally simplified and prejudged opposition between good and evil. They often defend a traditional idea of community against modern forms of society and political organisation. They tend to favour common sense and instinct over long words, abstract knowledge and expertise. They make a virtue, particularly in the English context, of insularity and shrinkage. They champion the small, the grounded and the localised, as opposed to the large and mobile sweep of internationalisation and cosmopolitanism. They are highly resistant to any possibility of compromise or synthesis between their opposed terms.

 ……….Encroachment narratives abound in the writings of William Cobbett (1763–1835), the campaigning journalist and furious defender of the beleaguered Georgian countryside, whom Raymond Williams would place among the founders of a characteristically English idea of culture, and whose name now appears as a proto-Brexiteer in blog posts. He conducted his ‘rural rides’ as the agrarian revolution proceeded in the 1820s, producing a fulminating account of England as he saw it at this moment of transition…..
As G.D.H. Cole would assert much later, Cobbett lived before it became apparent that the urbanisation and industrialisation, which Cobbett saw as entirely hellish, would eventually open new possibilities of working class politics. As it was, Cobbett raged against everything he could blame for the destruction of the traditional rural community: the Reformation, the national debt, tea drinking, decadent MPs sitting for rotten boroughs, the genteel fashion for mahogany furniture, sofas and picturesque views in which the countryside was dissociated from utility, the abolitionists (accused of being more ‘concerned’ about distant slaves than about native English labourers) and, as some of Cobbett’s admirers still struggle to accept, Jews. The list is long, varied and disconcerting, even after Cobbett has bundled up everything on it to produce the overwhelming biblical monster he named ‘the thing. 

Polarised allegories also feature strongly in the writings of G.K. Chesterton, who may well appeal to the Brexiteers not just as the author of ‘The Secret People,’ but as the man who turned being a ‘Little Englander’ into a positive virtue.

The presentation was made at a British Academy symposium and can be read with others on the British Academy website in the report European Union and Disunion – reflections on European Identity (2017) which I had downloaded some time ago without noticing the Wright contribution. But it encouraged me to activate google search and discover a Demos pamphlet from 1995 The Battle over Britain which clearly laid the basis for the subsequent Cool Britannia theme. A decade later, Gordon Brown tried in vain to get the notion of British identity taken seriously but was faced down by a wave of criticisms including the redoubtable Tom Nairn who called him The Bard of Britishness  

This is the latest of what has become quite a series of musings about what the 23 June 2016 Referendum might tell us about the sort of people the Brits are… When I then went on to ask whether novelists don’t perhaps have better insights than specialist academics, I had forgotten the debate of the mid 1990s and the later one sparked off by poor Gordon Brown. 
But it's ironic that what has tuned out so far to be the most insightful of the bunch, should have been penned by an academic - if of a rather unusual sort !

Resources for English identity

- England’s Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (2018) - explores the various strands which have created the english weave over the centuries - looks very strong on theory

- The Lure of Greatness – England’s Brexit, America’s Trump; Anthony Barnett (2017) – probably the best analysis of the issue, written in Barnett’s special style which bursts with insights and references and therefore comes in at 370 pages. . Each of its 34 chapters has an almost self-explanatory title. It is one of these rare books that you realise half-way through that you need to go back and read more closely and make notes about….I received the book only in September and will devote a special post to it in the autumn

- The party politics of Englishness 2014 – a typical exploration by a political science academic of the question

- The debate on Englishness can no longer be avoided; 2012 short article

- British identity and political discourse – analysis of New Labour’s search for identity; a useful little piece from an outsider from 2010

- Priestley’s England – JB Priestley and English culture (2007) a biography of the man which looks at the society in which he became such a famous name.

- BBC Postscripts; a lovely tribute to the 1941 radio talks Priestley did in which you can hear excerpts

- Priestley’s Finest Hour; Commentary from one of the librarians of the University collection of Priestley’s works

- English Journey; JB Priestley (1936) Gives a sense of the sort of people he met as he travelled around by bus

- The secret people; GK Chesterton. The poem which was apparently used by a lot of Brexiteers

- Rural Rides; William Cobbitt (1830) an early example of a political travelogue by a great radical