Tag Archives: Brexit

Article: The Brexit Box

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Brexit has failed. If you still need convincing of that, this post is not for you. I’m taking it as a given.

If you too take it as a given, where does that leave the case for rejoining?

Surprisingly elusive. Why?

Because our debate has become boxed in, and confined to three dominant positions.

First: the Brexiteer position. They cannot countenance it being undone. They will argue democratic mandate, patriotism, sovereignty, EU malignancy and uplands upon which the sun, if only we wait long enough, or believe hard enough, will eventually shine. If you’re taking the failure of Brexit as read, you won’t be hugely impressed by such arguments.

Second: there is the Political Pragmatist’s position. Broadly where Starmer’s Labour party sits. Here the position is that the politics of rejoin are too dangerous. Who wants to open up that ugly debate again? And apart from being ugly, it is dangerous: the evidence of Brexit’s failure might not be enough to win a rematch, because it was never really about evidence. Such is the thinking, and you can see why politicians who want to debate other issues, and paint a positive picture of the future, feel the need to shy away from reopening festering wounds.

Third: there is the Resigned Remainer’s position. This school of thought extends the political pragmatist’s thinking and adds in: rejoining would be hard. The EU might not want us back. There will be various obstacles arising from our having left which will be hard to unravel. There might be genuine problems with the EU which need addressing. There are certainly issues within the UK which made fertile ground for anti-EU sentiment, and these have not been addressed. The EU might impose unpalatable conditions on a rejoining UK. The EU might insist on evidence that the UK is, on second coming, there to stay, and how would that be demonstrated? More god-forsaken referendums? Accession is never a quick process – it’s a ten year or more deal – and so we might as well accept our lot outside the EU and make the best of it.

Of course there are nuanced views, and there is some travel between the groups. I’d say Tony Blair’s position – ‘we’re out for a generation’ – has one foot in the Pragmatists’ camp, and one in that of the Resigned Remainers.

The problem with all of these camps is they are defeatist. The first because the Brexiteers can’t bear to have been found out, and wish to strangle at birth any attempt at repair. The second because, by design, it locks out debate and leaves its principal proponents, the Labour Party, far behind fast-changing public opinion. The third because, although it welcomes debate, it nevertheless looks out through an Overton Window of despair.

There must be a fourth camp. A camp where energy, urgency and hope thrive. Where we know that our standards are still more or less aligned with those of the EU because until recently we were a leading member of the bloc. An energised effort to maintain that alignment will make returning to the fold smoother and easier; it is not something to let slide for a few years while we wait passively for the stars to fight in their courses. Heaven cannot rescue us; we have to do it for ourselves.

In this fourth camp, of course there is acknowledgment that there’s work to be done in facing squarely the failings of our system. Inside or outside of a trading bloc, we cannot leave millions of our own people behind and call ourselves a decent society. Enough of that crap.

And there is, no doubt, more to be done to make the EU feel like it belongs to its member states rather than sitting on top of them. Energised determination to rejoin the EU does not mean blind belief that the UK or the EU are perfect as they are. On the contrary, it demands the political will to fight on a grand scale for the tough stuff: dramatic redistribution and re-engagement inside the UK, and real leadership and painstaking, unglamorous cooperation on the international stage.

We need to break our discourse out of the Brexit box, and shift it towards this fourth camp. We need our best politicians to step forward, occupy and lead this fourth camp. Drive. Belief. Statesmanship. Britain led in Europe before. Britain can lead in Europe again. Britain, and Europe, have nothing to gain from delay, and everything to gain from haste.

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Article: I Was At School With Steve Bray

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I was at junior school with Steve Bray. Steve was smart but rebellious. He looked at the rest of us like we were dunces when our teacher asked if anyone knew what the ‘DC’ in Washington, DC stood for. Someone said ‘Democratic County’ and Steve shook his head in despair. Steve’s brother was a certified genius and had been helicoptered off the Isle of Wight to a scholarship at some glamorous school for geniuses on the mainland. Steve probably had identical smarts, but less good fortune.

Steve was the bane of our authoritarian teachers’ lives. When we were very little, they taught us how the Romans brought civilisation to Britain. Steve threw up his hand and said, ‘Do you call strapping a man to a boulder and then rolling that boulder down a hill civilised? Because I don’t.’ This didn’t go down well.

Aged about nine, Steve’s IQ was assessed at over 156 on the Wechsler scale. He was extremely widely read, and knew more about most things than most teachers. When he challenged them, it was hard for them to admit error, and they needed to ‘win’, to save face and keep order. Their arguments boiled down to ‘because I’m the adult here’. He would counter with the question, ‘How does being born at an earlier date than me make you right?’

Steve was an atheist and didn’t want to attend school ceremonies at the nearby church. The school insisted it was an integral part of our community life. At Harvest Festival, with donated food bedecking the long tables, and parents in best bib, the chaplain talked about sacrifice being at the heart of Christianity, with the symbol representing Christ’s sacrifice at the centre of it. Steve put up his hand: ‘I think you’ll find the cross predated Christianity, and was in fact a pagan symbol adopted by the Church.’ Steve was barred from attending school church services after that.

For all his brashness, Steve was an astute reader of people. One of our teachers used to devise spelling tests notionally for the whole class, but which in fact were targetted at me. I was a good speller, and he wanted to catch me out. I expect I enjoyed this attention, but Steve suggested that the guy had a prurient interest in me. (His words were blunter than that, but I’ll spare you.) I think I knew deep down he was right, and possibly Steve alerted me to, and saved me from, potential trouble there.

Steve refused to follow the rules and wear his cap en route to school, and the sadist in charge of discipline made it his business to call Steve into the tuck shop, where he kept his bittersweet lair, and beat Steve hard with a shoe. Steve was tough, but the beatings were tougher. I’ll never forget his broken face, thick with tears as he left the tuck shop after a particularly severe thrashing, clutching his rear. His bravado was gone, replaced by the shock of pain, shame and raw fear.

But bravado was Steve’s fallback. He used to encourage me to play truant, and once the sadist came by in his car – surely not by chance – and wound down his window to ask if we were, as we had informed the school, unwell. I hung back, frozen in fear. But Steve took a drag on a cigarette and leaned into the sadist’s window, and blew the smoke into his face. ‘Very,’ he said. I couldn’t believe the daring.

We lost touch when I left that horrible school, but I gather Steve was expelled soon after.

I met him again at college, where he had morphed into a mouthy socialist worker. He riled our teachers with brilliance of mind, rigidity of argument and incapacity to conform. He talked openly in class about his reliance on cannabis, and did precisely no work. He was cleverer by miles than me, and knew more about politics and philosophy than I will ever know, so, arguably, precisely no work was the amount he needed to do. He was perhaps not the greatest of abluters, and his sweet, defiant, gifted maladorousness went with him when he was ‘sent down’ after a couple or three terms.

Another Steve Bray – and by now you may be suspecting, correctly, that these Steve Brays are not the one who was arrested yesterday in Westminster under the new ‘noisy protest’ law, and are creative amalgams of individuals I have known – was a gifted university philosopher. A maths prodigy plucked from poverty and sent to Oxford at 16, he was the sharpest mind I’ve known to date, and a brilliant, empowering and illuminating teacher. His colleagues more or less hated his guts. His unwashed and unkempt presentation, his verboten cigarettes in the hallowed halls, his popularity with enthralled students. And above all, his incessant challenge. Like new-Bray-on-the-block, Mick Lynch, he would gladly, and firmly, fix a fellow don with a hard stare and state, ‘You Are Wrong. That Is A Lie.’ He demolished arguments with a devastating flick of the intellectual wrist, and left distraught scholars lost in the ruins of their painstakingly-built theses. He was never given tenure.

I’m guessing at your school, or your college, or your place of work, or in your family – somewhere in your story, there is a Steve Bray. Someone who tells it how it is. Someone with a good brain who can’t be quiet, can’t be polite, can’t help standing up to authority.

In my experience, the Steve Brays of this world speak for those of us who are too shy, too conformist, too cautious, too careful to pipe up. In doing so, they put their heads above a dangerous parapet. We all know – and even THEY know – that it is only a matter of time before the powerful take them down. Even when they are right – especially when they are right – they threaten order. They cannot be tolerated. If existing rules cannot be brought to bear against them, new ones will be cooked up to do the job.

The rest of us hang back, keeping our distance, not wanting to go down with them. We tell ourselves there are better ways to make the points they are making. More nuanced ways. More polite ways. More constructive ways. We tell ourselves, perhaps, that some systems are better reformed from the inside, justifying our conformity. We tell ourselves that, in the end, these guys are society’s losers, and it’s a shame, but their way is not the right way.

I have also met the real Steve Bray. The “Stop Brexit” Steve Bray. But I can’t say I know much about his story. I don’t know if he’s unusually clever, like the others I’ve known, or was beaten at home, like one I’ve known, or a little bit ‘on the spectrum’, like the ones I’ve known. I don’t even know if he’s a good bloke, decent though he seemed when we chatted. Like all the Brays I’ve met and you’ve met, I highly doubt he is a messiah, and I’d be surprised if he wasn’t a very naughty boy.

But I do know this. He speaks the truth. If “Stop Brexit” Steve had been wrong, and Brexit had turned out to be all sunlit uplands and Britannia ruling the waves, he’d be a forgotten irrelevance by now. ‘That bloke with the hat,’ we’d say. ‘The one with the megaphone. What was his name?’

But he wasn’t wrong. Brexit has demonstrably torpedoed our economy, our unity and our international standing. It has damaged us below the waterline, and he was right to warn us. Ain’t no megaphone loud enough to get that existential message across.

Is he wrong now on corruption inside government? Hardly. From a ‘system’ in which the Prime Minister polices himself, to the wholesale dispensing of public funds to friends, family, donors and client media, the corruption charge appears all too real.

To this corrupt regime – to this Vote Leave regime – Bray isn’t just a pain in the arse armed with a megaphone; he’s a pain in the arse armed with the truth.

So, like all the Brays I’ve met and you’ve met, they will stop him. Make no mistake, he will lose. They will take him into their tuck shop and whoop his ass. The question for the rest of us is are there really politer, more constructive, more effective ways to speak truth to this particular brand of corrupt, dishonest and self-policing power? Or to put it another way, when he eventually exits the tuck shop a broken man, will we, who did not stand with him, be able to meet his gaze?

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I’m Not Listening To The Spring Statement. Here’s Why

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I’m not listening to Chancellor Sunak’s Spring Statement.

Here’s why.

He’s already told us what we need to know: ‘The government cannot be expected to solve every problem.’

He’s not kidding.

He and his government have certainly created enough problems.

They’ve cocked up our supply chains with the sclerosis and bureaucracy of their botched Brexit. They’ve pushed workers away so that we can’t pick our fruit, we can’t pick our vegetables, and our farmers can’t bring their meat to market because they don’t have the staff to do the job.

Road hauliers, pushed away by Brexit, aren’t here in sufficient numbers, so that what we do have, we can’t distribute.

All of these contribute to inflationary pressure.

We can see it in the prices at the shops, rising each and every week.

Inflation is running wild, and wages and benefits aren’t keeping up. Everyone is poorer.

Adding to this problem – not solving it – will be Sunak’s National Insurance rise. This is a tax – on workers and employers – at exactly the wrong time.

He has let it be known that he might tweak the thresholds at which this additional tax bites, but really? Big f*cking deal. There should be no NI hike at all. There should be a reduction.

And don’t forget, these guys are masters, absolute masters – with weasel words and diverting headlines to distract the media – at making it look like they are giving, when in actual fact they are taking away. They’re brilliant at it. For a day or two, in all the hullabaloo and earnest analysis, we can’t see what they’ve done. Only when the smoke clears, a week or three later, does it become clear. And by then it is too late.

This time, let’s not be fooled.

Because for a dozen years, that is precisely what they have done. Under the guise of prudent economics and a ‘balanced approach’, they’ve chipped away and chipped away at our infrastructure, our health service, our local services and our benefits, and now, when the British people face a historic cost of living crisis, what have they got for us? Nothing. They ‘can’t be expected to solve every problem’.

On energy prices, they’ve promised a loan to offset soaring price hikes. A loan! This is your government, in your hour of need. Men and women paid by you to really grip problems. But they say they ‘can’t be expected’ to help you, and instead they’re behaving more like payday loan sharks, bunging you a few quid now, only to come back later to claw it back, when you’ll probably be in an even worse position.

On fuel, they’ve said they might take 5p off a litre of fuel. 5p! 5p is what Tesco might offer you as a reward for doing your shopping there. It is not what a government does to remedy a dramatic crisis. And remember, half the pump price is fuel duty and VAT. Sunak will still be taking about 80p from you in tax for every litre you buy.

VAT remains on energy too. As the prices rocket, so does Rishi’s revenue.

He can afford to do more.

We cannot afford for him to do so little.

Rishi Sunak and his family are richer than Queen. He is a man who will never, ever have to worry about the price of a meal, the price of fuel, or the cost of a warm home. Never. Rich people can make fair choices for all, but they cannot know the fear and the disabling horror of lying awake over how to pay for the basics. If they did, they could never say, in the face of a historic crisis, that they ‘can’t be expected to solve every problem’. Such a sentence wouldn’t even flash across their minds.

When he says he can’t be expected to solve every problem, he really means he’s not going to solve any problem. He really means ‘suck it up’. The ‘whatever it takes’ Chancellor has, in short order, become the high tax, no heart Chancellor. The ‘whatever it takes for me to build a war-chest for the next election (when I might be leader)’ Chancellor.

On their own admission, the Tories ‘can’t be expected’ to solve our problems. Their record, from austerity to Brexit, proves the contrary: they’ve created and contributed to our problems. They’ve ground Britain and its people down for a dozen years. It’s time for change. It’s time to take the country back from people who just don’t get it. It’s time to #takebackBritain.

You can join #takebackBritain at www.reimagine.uk.com

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One Small Thing, Doctor

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Small thing, but a big thing.

The extraction of only five letters, to be exact, but a very dishonest extraction.

Here goes.

February, 2019.

International Trade Secretary, Dr Liam Fox, gives a speech at Policy Exchange, London to set out the UK’s role in global trade.

He cites the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review. It “sums up our position perfectly”.

He quotes the report as follows:  (note the blue highlight, it’s important)

And, he says gleefully, “It’s hard to put it better than that!”

But the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review DID put it better than that.

Here’s what the Review said – without Fox’s mischievous omissions:

See what the good doctor did there?

In 2.14, “the EU” is omitted! Quite an omission in its own right. But also our EU membership is included in – and substantially affects the meaning of – what follows in the next paragraph, 2.15.

Note also how, in 2.15, the final sentence, which Fox neglects to include from the “perfect” description of the UK’s position, specifically refers to our membership of the EU when it talks about our role in maintaining and championing free trade and strengthening the global economy.

So. Five letters extracted. Meaning dishonestly altered.

It sums up our Brexit manipulators perfectly.

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