That Was the Year That Was

It’s been six months. Six months since I wrote anything here. Was I waiting for the dust to settle? Was I just too shocked? Was I trying to get on with life despite the lunacy? Probably all of the above.

It’s been a strange year and I don’t hold out much hope for normalcy in 2017. I just did one of those Facebook things where an app makes a picture of the words you have used during the year with the most used words in the biggest font. My most-used word of 2016 was Nazi. I didn’t post the picture.

On both sides of the Atlantic voters have made lunatic and self-harming decisions based on a consistent stream of lies in the media, both traditional and online.

In Britain the engineers of the Leave campaign immediately fled the scene, leaving my local MP to try to sort out the mess. Good luck with that one Mrs May. The next couple of years are likely to be bloody.

In the USA a misogynist, racist, narcissist was elected due to an exquisitely aligned set of circumstances that included, in no particular order, the Republican party being completely unfit for purpose and unable to field a rational candidate, the Democrats choosing a candidate who though supremely well-qualified was out of tune with the times, the Director of the FBI keeping alive a non-story about a minor indiscretion with email arrangements, the Russian intelligence service stealing and leaking information detrimental to the Democrats and finally a constitutional arrangement originally designed to appease slave-owners delivering victory to the candidate with almost three million fewer votes. If they reran the election a thousand times I doubt if they would ever see all those stars lining up in quite that order.

Compared to the ructions in Britain and the USA, the resignation of an Italian Prime Minister and the concession by the French Socialist Party six months ahead of the first round of voting seem like minor bumps in the road but they are both important. The tide of madness is not yet receding. Consider the irony that probably the single most hopeful political event of the year – to this old pink wishy-washy liberal leftie at least – was the news that Angela Merkel intends to run for another term as Chancellor of Germany.  

So what will 2017 hold? The portents are not good. It’s very easy to make comparisons with the 1930s and judging from that Facebook app, I have been doing. But despite the frightening similarities it’s not the same. There was no Internet in the 1930s and no nuclear weapons either. The people on whom the burden of scapegoat fell represented small minorities; Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Communists. Muslims are almost a fifth of the world’s population and so-called “minority” groups make up over 35% of the population of the USA. Events simply will not pan out exactly as they did in the middle of the 20^th century.

So, given that things will be different it is reasonable to believe that they will eventually be better. We will pass though this period of lunacy. People of goodwill will find ways to organise and resist the worst excesses. It will be hard and there will be more setbacks but the world will eventually be a better place.

My text for 2017 comes from a quote that I first heard from movie critic Mark Kermode although I don’t think he claims to have coined it.

“Everything will be all right in the end. And if it’s not all right now then it isn’t the end.”

After June 23rd, Then What?

Two days to go and it’s neck and neck. Polls suggest that the result of the referendum will be very close although interestingly the bookmakers have Remain at odds-on.

I thought that I had said all I wanted to about this debate a few weeks ago but events of the last ten days or so have prompted some more thoughts. In no particular order here they are:

• Whichever way the vote goes the next period of British politics will be bloody. The campaign has been nasty, brutish but not very short. Neither side has covered itself in glory and there will be accounts to settle – mostly although not exclusively, within the Conservative Party.
• Nigel Farrage has revealed another side to his character and it is horrible. In the past I have had a grudging respect for Farrage. I always disagreed with pretty much everything he said but on the whole I thought he conducted his politics transparently and with a degree of honour. That all changed with the “migrants swamping us” poster, although signs of an inner nastiness have been peeping through for a while.
• Just as with the politics, the economy is going to get rocky after the vote. In this case though there will be a lot more turbulence if the vote is Leave rather than Remain. It is likely that things would settle down over time but in the short term a Leave vote will almost certainly trigger a run on the pound and an emergency budget in which George Osborne or his successor will do still more damage to public services in the name of the Tories' peculiar brand of fiscal sado-masochism.
• If Leave should prevail the process of disentangling the UK from the EU will take many many years and will be messier than any of us can yet appreciate.
• I cannot believe that anyone with a functioning brain believes that the current government would apply any savings made by leaving the EU to improving the funding of the NHS.
• Jo Cox MP was not killed by the Leave campaign but there is no doubt in my mind that the spiteful and fearful rhetoric of some of its elements contributed to the disturbed state of mind of her killer.

From the above it may be gathered that I haven’t changed my view. I will be voting Remain on Thursday and my reasons are still the same as they were a month ago. I want to live in a world with wider horizons where my children are free to live and work where they choose and where they can benefit from all that the world has to offer. 

But wait, says the Leave campaign. By remaining in the European Union aren't we cutting ourselves  off from great swathes of the world outside Europe?

This is the one element of the Leave argument that does resonate just slightly with me. I have friends in Australia, the USA, Canada, New Zealand and many other places across the world. My vision for a community going forward is one in which world-wide friendships may be just as valuable as those with our close neighbours such as France, Spain or Germany. So, here’s a modest proposal. When the dust has settled and we have decided to stay with the existing European Union let’s start a political movement to change and extend it. Let’s open up the community world-wide. I propose that any country in the world that has effective rule of law and respect for human rights be offered association with the European Union that would allow full, free and reciprocal movement of goods, people and capital based on commonly agreed standards. By definition this means that such associate members would need to participate in the EU’s decision-making processes. The mechanisms for doing this would need to be defined, and if managed effectively they would feed through into a streamlining of existing EU governance. Obviously this could not be achieved overnight and maybe not even over decades, but as a long-term goal it seems to me a pretty good one for the 21^st century.

Freedom to Change

About fifteen years ago I was having a quiet dinner with a good book in a branch of the Olive Garden restaurant chain in Atlanta, Georgia. Being alone it was easy for me to eavesdrop on conversations going on around me, so of course I did. One in particular has stuck in my mind. A waitress was chatting with a couple at a table near me.

“So, you moved from New York! You must be finding it’s so different here!”.

I couldn’t resist a small snigger at this statement. To my European eyes and ears the differences between New York and Atlanta were so tiny as to be insignificant. OK it was a few degrees warmer here and the accent was strange in a slightly different way but in every respect that actually matters to people’s lives there was no difference between the two cities.

I thought about that conversation today while I was pondering the innate conservatism of the USA. For a country that prides itself on being the land of the free it certainly accepts a whole lot of constraints on how it goes about its business. Perhaps the clue is in that last word, business. It was Calvin Coolidge who said that “the business of America is business”. Actually he said “the chief business of the American people is business” but the first version is snappier. The context was a discussion about press freedom but I suspect the applicability is a lot wider.

One of the biggest advantages that American businesses have over those in other parts of the world is an absolutely enormous domestic market that plays by a consistent set of rules from sea to shining sea. It is this advantage that the European Union is trying to emulate by the adoption of the single market provisions of the Maastricht Treaty and of course the single currency. It’s fair to say that the former has so far been more successful than the latter but that neither of them comes close to providing the homogeneity of the USA. But I digress.

American business, and so by extension America, likes predictability. It establishes structures that are surprisingly rigid, perhaps to give it a firm platform from which to launch new ventures. Sometimes this works very well. Every electrical outlet in the whole of the USA will take the same plug. Consumer goods come in standard size packages wherever in the country you happen to be. The success of Silicon Valley over the last couple of decades is built on a platform of education, financing, infrastructure and a huge domestic market that have no equal anywhere in the world. Sometimes though the expectation of predictability applies constraints that don’t happen anywhere else in the world. Just recently I have been struck by examples of this where the USA does things differently in two superficially quite distinct areas of endeavor – high politics and professional sports.

Take sports first. During the football season that just finished the FA Premier League in England was won by Leicester City in one of the greatest underdog-comes-good stories of all time. A year ago Leicester were on the edge of relegation from the Premier League but a new manager somehow set them on a path to beating the best in the land on a regular basis with a team that cost a fraction of those fielded by Manchester United, Chelsea and the rest. It was a story that resonated around the football-playing world because pretty much everywhere in that world the top teams achieve that status by consistent excellence over many years. If they fall from grace they can be relegated to play in lower levels of competition, sometimes to return after a period in the wilderness, sometimes to continue falling through to lower and lower leagues until eventually disappearing from the map altogether. Not so in US professional sports. Teams there are first and foremost businesses and the financiers that own them wouldn’t invest if there were any possibility of relegation. Not only that but the system is arranged such that each year the best new players are allocated to the teams that had the worst record the previous season. There is no need for teams to scout the country for the best young players and it would actually be pointless to do so because they wouldn’t be allowed to sign them anyway. This system means that the professional leagues are self-perpetuating. The same teams will always play against the same teams. There are no long-term progressions. There are no existential failures. To an outsider’s eyes this lack of risk makes US professional team sports inherently uninteresting. And yet they are wildly popular in the USA. There is something in the national character that values spectacle over meaningful competition, continuity over Darwinian struggle.

The same tendencies can be seen every four years as the Presidential election cycle comes to a climax. It may not have been designed that way but the modern sequence of primary elections, caucuses and party conventions means that the process for deciding who will stand before the American people in November is a hugely expensive and complicated closed shop. I know of no other country in the democratic world where citizens need to state a party affiliation when registering to vote or where the state colludes with political parties in quite the way that it does in the USA. I checked the US Constitution. The word “Democratic” does not appear at all in the document or any of its amendments. The word “Republican” does appear but only in the context of the Constitution guaranteeing a “republican” form of government to the States. And yet everyone behaves as if the two-party system were laid down by law to provide the only possible channel for political activity. This has some strange consequences, most notably the way that there is almost no political coherence or discipline to either party. Both of them are merely vehicles. As an outsider looking at the first two years of the Obama presidency I couldn’t understand why it seemed impossible to get anything much done when the Executive and the Legislature were controlled by the same party. Eventually I understood that the two parties are actually corporations and the real politics takes place in structures that have nothing to do with whether the politician follows the donkey or the elephant. In Europe over the past few years insurgent politicians have started their own parties like Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain. In the USA the insurgents – Trump and Sanders - have been constrained to operate under the banners of the establishment.

So what does this all prove? I’m not really sure but there are one or two lessons. Mostly it is that there are more cultural differences between the US and Europe than may be obvious at first sight. The idea of freedom is so central to the American self-image and yet in many ways the American Way is much more constrained than systems in other parts of the world. For two hundred years the American system delivered wealth and power greater than any country has ever known. The desire not to try to fix something that ain’t broke is strong. However in the last decade or so something has gone awry. How else to account for the rise of Donald Trump? Maybe it’s almost time to loosen up some of the bindings and try some other kinds of freedom. Lyndon B Johnson famously said that “Freedom is not enough” while Robert Frost said that freedom lies in being bold. Wise men both.

In, Out, In, Out, Shake It All About

It’s a month to R Day. The most momentous date in the British political calendar since 1975. The date that will decide whether Boris Johnson’s all-in gamble pays off and we get a different Old Etonian as Prime Minister. The date that will decide whether there will be another vote for Scotland to leave the UK. The date that will bring out the very worst in modern journalism. And we might just decide whether to leave the European Union or stay in for another forty years.

I was 18 in 1975. The referendum that year was the second time I had voted in a national ballot – the first being the autumn re-run of the previous year’s general election. I voted for staying in, along with two thirds of the people who cast their ballots that day and the rest is history. At that time I had “been abroad” only four times, twice to Spain and twice to West Germany. All of them on school trips. My actual experience of the rest of the Common Market, as we knew it then, was minimal but already I knew that I liked the idea of having a wider horizon than these off-shore islands could offer.

The intervening forty years have been interesting to say the least. I grew up in the days of the cold war and the Iron Curtain. Fifteen years after that referendum the Iron Curtain rusted away. A world order that seemed set in stone proved to be as ephemeral as any that had gone before and the European Community, as it was by then, found that its scope had been more or less doubled. Expansion duly happened and to nobody’s surprise the countries joining from the east were somewhat less developed than those that had received Marshall Plan aid in the post-war period. This led to imbalances in both financial and human capital within the expanded community. The rebalancing, which is still going on, has led to a certain amount of tension and opened the door for countries like the UK to rethink their commitment to the European Union. Which brings us to the forthcoming referendum, and the shouting match that passes for debate which is dominating the airwaves and press today.

When I look at the antics of both the Leave and Remain campaigns I am immediately put in mind of the dying Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet as he calls down “A plague on both your houses!”. It appears that there is no possibility whatsoever of rational debate and the political heavy-hitters on both sides have resorted to appeals to base emotion and fear - not to augment their arguments, but in place of having any. On the one hand Johnson, Farrage, Duncan-Smith and the rest are pandering to the worst ugly, myopic, little-Englander mind set exemplified by the Daily Mail and other elements of the gutter press. Sadly the so-called opposing arguments are nothing of the kind. Cameron and Osborne are basically making the same points but claiming that their vision is better because we aren’t really full members of this odious institution. We can still keep Johnny Foreigner out because we didn’t sign up to Schengen and we don’t need to offer solidarity to our southern European partners because we never joined the Euro.

The economic arguments proposed are more or less vacuous. Will house prices rise or fall as a result of a vote this way or that? Will jobs be created or destroyed? Will the currency fall? Frankly the case on both sides is weak. Economic theory is barely better than examining entrails as a means of predicting the future, and when the models in use are predicated on pre-existing beliefs it is probably worse. For what it is worth I am unconvinced that there will be any substantial economic difference to the lives of most British people whatever decision is taken next month.

So, if the economic arguments are at best suspect and the leaders of both campaigns somewhat (or extremely, take your pick) odious how then to decide which way to vote?

For me it is simple. The question is whether my horizon is large or small. Whether I want to belong to a small community living in fear behind its secured borders or be part of something bigger and broader with a richer culture. Whether I am content to see Westminster and Whitehall govern every aspect of my life or whether I want to see decisions taken at an appropriate level. We don’t need Whitehall Mandarins to decide how much my local authority can spend on children’s services or street lighting, but equally no national government on its own can take meaningful action on climate change, the refugee crisis or the framework for global trade. Above all the seventy years since the end of World War Two have seen the longest period without a war between European nations since the nation state was invented in the Treaty of Westphalia. The European Union as currently constituted is far from perfect (really, really far from perfect) but in my view it offers a more positive and hopeful path to the future than a collection of 28 squabbling, and occasionally warring, nation states. The simple fact of its people having the freedom to live, work and contribute to society anywhere from Galway Bay to the Black Sea seems to me to be most important political achievement of the last hundred years.

So, just as in 1975, I am going to vote to Remain on June 23^rd. I hope that my fellow citizens will decide to do the same. Not because their own economic prospects will be better or worse as a result but because they are able to see beyond the fear mongering and lies and take a view of how the world might yet be a better place for our children than it was for our parents.