Category Archives: Rants&Rambles

Rants&Rambles

Patience

I do not think of myself as a patient person, which it turns out is a shame because patience is a virtue that makes people happier.

Patience, the ability to keep calm in the face of disappointment, distress or suffering, is a virtue that is worth cultivating. It is associated with a variety of positive health outcomes, such as reducing depression and other negative emotions. Researchers have also concluded that patient people exhibit more prosocial behaviors like empathy, and were more likely to display generosity and compassion.

A 2012 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology identified three distinct expressions of patience: 1. Interpersonal, which is maintaining calm when dealing with someone who is upset, angry or being a pest. 2. Life hardships, or finding the silver lining after a serious setback. And 3. Daily hassles, which is suppressing annoyance at delays or anything irritating that would inspire a snarky tweet.

I’m ok with (1) and (2) but rubbish at (3). The good news is that is that same study found that patience as a personality trait is modifiable so whilst I can congratulate myself for the first two types of patience, it is entirely possible, old as I am, to work on the third. Even if you’re not a particularly patient person today, there’s apparently still hope you can be a more patient person tomorrow.

Impatience is the “fight” component of the fight-or-flight response, according to M.J. Ryan, executive coach and author of The Power of Patience: How This Old-Fashioned Virtue Can Improve Your Life. “That’s why you’re beeping your horn at people in the car or getting annoyed in the queue or whatever it is you’re doing that’s your impatient behavior,” she said.

Amygdalae are the culprit. This almond-shaped set of nervous tissue in our brains is responsible for sussing out threats and regulating emotions. While this component of the limbic system is perfectly calibrated for protecting our ancestors from ferocious predators, it’s not as adept at determining credible threats in modern life. Sometimes it feels as if we interpret threats to our status e.g.. who gets served first or fastest in a restaurant, as more life threatening events.

Because we are poorly set up physically to differentiate between types of threat, we can overreact. The amygdala, Ms. Ryan said, is too unsophisticated to know the difference between a true danger (say, a growling tiger) and something substantially less life-threatening (dealing with an obnoxious person).

Figure out which situations set you off — careless drivers, technological glitches, slow-moving cashiers, slow service in a restaurant etc. — and you’re already on your way to taking control.

Next, think about what thought or suspicion sets off the alarm bells in your brain. “There’s something that you’re either saying to yourself, an image you have, a feeling in your body that is triggering that response, that you’re under threat,” Ms. Ryan said.

Once you figure out what you’re telling yourself about the situation — “I can’t be bothered to wait in this queue,” for example — then you can address your internal concern, interrupt the stress response cycle and stay out of fight-or-flight mode. For example: If standing in a long queue drives you crazy, an appropriate mantra might be, “I’m in no rush at the moment.” For those who blow a fuse circling for parking spaces, a mantra that might work could be, “I’ll find a spot eventually.”

The idea is to take a step back from the situation and try to look at it as objectively as you can. Is waiting in this long queue inconvenient? Sure, but be realistic and practical: It will soon pass, and, in all likelihood, you’ll forget it ever happened.

Next, spend a beat thinking about the worst case scenario. What’s the actual consequence of standing in the queue at the bank another 10 minutes or restarting a finicky device? Do any of these outcomes constitute a life-or-death threat? “Almost always, always, always, no is the answer,” Ms. Ryan said.

Sarah A. Schnitker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University and a leading researcher on the topic of patience, suggests using a powerful technique called cognitive reappraisal, which means thinking about a situation differently.

Take, for example, someone aggravated with a nitpicky co-worker. Instead of dwelling on your irritation, you could think about the times you’ve been the one who has frustrated others.

“Give grace to each other,” Dr. Schnitker said. Or perhaps more difficult to achieve, try to think, “you know what, this is actually helping me to grow as a person.” This could be as simple as acknowledging that the slow elderly lady ahead of you in the queue is just struggling with age, the need to connect meaningfully with another person within a lonely life, the physical disability that comes with arthritic fingers or failing eyesight counting out coins – and we will hopefully all grow old and expect to be treated kindly.

Another strategy she recommends is to focus on why and how patience is integral to your values.

“For instance,” Dr. Schnitker said, “if I were talking to a parent who is struggling with their kid, I’d say, ‘Well, first, let’s think about the really big picture: Why is being a parent an important role to you? What does that mean in your life?’”

Thinking about how patience ties into your larger sense of integrity and poise “will make it a whole lot easier to stick with practicing patience on a daily basis and building up those skills,” she added.

Perhaps the most common mistake people make is thinking sheer will can turn them into a more patient person, Dr. Schnitker said. If you do that, she cautions, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Just as marathon runners don’t run a marathon on their first day of hitting the trails, people who are serious about cultivating patience shouldn’t expect immediate results.

“You want to train, not try, for patience,” she said. “It’s important to do it habitually.”

She suggests practicing patience during less intense, even silly situations when the stakes aren’t so high. Reappraise a situation next time you notice you’re feeling short-tempered, practice mindfulness meditation or say your own custom mantra.“It’s like any other skill,” Dr. Schnitker said. “If you do it on a daily basis and then also connect it to that bigger picture story of why it’s important, it can grow and develop just like a muscle.”

Now that you know your triggers and are working on staying out of fight-or-flight mode, incorporate some stress reduction measures. If your impatience trigger is killing time in waiting rooms, designate a game on your phone that you play only when you’re at the doctor’s office. If you detest being in traffic, leave for appointments earlier. If you abhor crowded grocery stores, run your errands at off-hours.

Finally, Nedra Glover Tawwab, a licensed clinical social worker based in Charlotte, N.C., recommends being more sensible about setting achievable aims.

“Sometimes we overbook ourselves or we don’t allot enough time to do things,” she said. “Be reasonable in setting your own goals for yourself because there’s only so many things that you can do in a time frame or any day. ”If your to-do list has 10 items on it but you can only reasonably accomplish five, then you’re sabotaging yourself. Any inconvenience has the potential to throw you off-track when your day is planned down to the minute.

“I can’t fast forward time and I can’t make people move faster,” she said. “I can’t manipulate those things; the only thing I can manipulate is me.”

Political, Rants&Rambles

Nine lessons and no carols: Brexit Lesson 3

Brexit is a process not an event. And the EU, while traditionally poor at strategy, is very good at process. If we don’t start to take the process seriously and get better, we will get hammered. Repeatedly.

One cannot seriously simultaneously advance the arguments that the EU has morphed away from the common market we joined, and got into virtually every nook and cranny of U.K. life, eroding sovereignty across whole tracts of the economy, internal and external security, AND that we can extricate ourselves from all that in a trice, recapture our sovereignty and rebuild the capability of the U.K. state to govern and regulate itself in vast areas where it had surrendered sovereignty over the previous 45 years.

The people saying 3 years ago that you could were simply not serious. And they have proven it. They also had not the slightest plan on what they were going to try and do and in which order.

Bold, confident assertions, during and in the many months after the referendum that we would have a fully fledged trade deal with the EU ready and in force by the day of exit, and, not only that, rafts of further free trade deals with other fast growing countries across the globe, were just risible when they were made, and have now proven empty bluster.

Likewise, all the breezy assertions that “no deal” would pose no great problems for aviation, for road haulage, for medicines, for food, for financial services, for data and for any number of other areas – for most of which, “WTO terms” are simply not a safety harness.

No number of repetitions of the grossly misleading term “WTO deal” makes it any more real or effective. This is not because of Establishment remainer sabotage. It was because these were always fantasies, produced by people who at the point they said this stuff, just did not understand what they were saying.

Unfortunately, before much of the serious work to look at where we wanted to land post exit had happened, we locked ourselves into a date certain for the invocation of Article 50. That duly forfeited at a stroke any leverage over how that process would run. And it gave to the 27, who had, by the morning of June 24th, already set out their “no negotiation without (Article 50) notification” position, the first couple of goals of the match in the opening 5 minutes.

All the people who are now loudest in bemoaning the Prime Minister’s deal were, of course, the loudest in cheering from the rafters as she made this fateful error. Many are now hastily rewriting history to claim they were always against it. They weren’t, though. 

One cannot blame the EU27 for playing it as they did. Though one can and should blame them for having had too few serious top level discussions about how they see the relationship with the UK working after exit.

Before the Prime Minister had even turned up for her first ever leaders’ meeting, the combination of that decision to guarantee notification by a certain date and the red lines substance of her first Party Conference leaders’ speech had completely cemented the solidarity of the 27, which has held soundly ever since, on how to kick off and to design the sequencing of the process which has led to where we are today.

It’s about the one first order issue on which the EU27 have since held together in near perfect harmony. If that does not tell you something about this Government’s negotiating prowess, what will?

But in the total self-absorption of Party Conferences and Westminster, no one was paying much attention to how the EU was patiently constructing the process designed to maximise its leverage.

Even by April, when the first set of so-called Guidelines emerged from the leaders at 27, it was hard to get anyone here to read them. We were, as usual, preoccupied more with the noises from the noisy but largely irrelevant in Westminster, while the real work was being done on the other side of the Channel.

But those very expertly crafted Guidelines led completely inexorably to the December 2017 agreement. And the substance of that, in turn, led equally inexorably to all the elements of the deal now on the table which has caused the furore. The battle on sequencing which the then Brexit Secretary declared to be the battle of the summer of 2017, was actually long since lost before he started fighting it.

And because the U.K. had given no serious thought to the question of transitional arrangements until it was too late – precisely because of the fantasies propagated that this would be one of the easiest “trade deals in human history” and all would be definitively tied up legally by exit day – by the time they actually did focus, London was urgently begging for what is now pejoratively termed the “vassal state” transition, precisely because it knew that it could not be ready for a post Brexit equilibrium state by March 2019.

All the EU had to do was to ensure that the transition hinged off a Withdrawal Treaty containing a permanent legal all-weather backstop, and it knew that the U.K. had no alternative but to sign such a Withdrawal Agreement.

No amount of bold, but empty, talk about “no deal” being better than a “bad deal”, however oft repeated at whatever level of Government, made the slightest difference to the 27’s assessment of the negotiating reality: the U.K. needed much more time, and failure to get it would be much worse for it than all alternatives.

Whilst it is obviously good to know your “best alternative to a negotiated deal”  in all negotiations, you have to know whether you can walk out, and be very sure you understand what could happen if you do, and what you can do to mitigate all downsides.

But if you know you cannot mitigate, don’t bluff. It just makes you look weak, not strong, and it fools no one.

Those who were suckered into doing, or cheering, the wrong thing in the negotiation at the wrong time for the wrong reason, and duped themselves and others into thinking it would all be extraordinarily simple, cannot acknowledge that of course. So the narrative has be of “Betrayal” by a remainer elite who sabotaged the “no deal” plans

And if you set yourself a ludicrous, unachievable deadline for a complete regime change, don’t be shocked that others use the pressure of the clock and the cliff edge to dictate the shape of Brexit.

It is, in the end, the total absence of a serious realistic plan for the process of Brexit as well as a serious coherent conception of a post Brexit destination, which has delivered this denouement to stage 1 of what will be, whether Brexit proponents like it or not, a much longer process.

For the next stage, we need much less self-absorption, a vastly clearer, less self-deceiving understanding of the incentives on the other side of the table, and a less passive approach to the construction of the process. We need serious substance not plausible bullshit.

We already see in the Withdrawal Agreement the clear signs that, having succeeded with its negotiating plans in this phase, the EU will repeat the clock and cliff edge pressures in the run up the next U.K. election, knowing it can and will exact concessions as the deadline looms. But walking away to a “no deal” outcome, managed or not, does not escape that pressure.

One can of course blame the EU for overdoing their success in ordering the whole negotiations but the basic truth remains that it really helps, in a negotiation, actually to know what you are doing, where you want to go, the sacrifices you are willing to make and be stone cold sober about the real interests of the other party.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Nine lessons and No carols: brexit lesson 2

Other people have sovereignty too. And they too may choose to “take back control” of things you would rather they didn’t.

The sovereigntist argument for Brexit, which was one powerful element of the referendum campaign – taking back control of laws, borders and money – is a perfectly legitimate case to make.

If you think the consequences of living in a bloc where the pooling of sovereignty has gone well beyond the technical regulatory domain into huge areas of public life are intolerable for democratic legitimacy and accountability, that is a more than honourable position.

But others who have chosen to pool their sovereignty in ways and to extents which make you feel uncomfortable with the whole direction of the project, have done so because they believe pooling ENHANCES their sovereignty – in the sense of adding to their “power of agency” in a world order in which modestly sized nation states have relatively little say, rather than diminishing it.

They did not want that pooling to stop at the purely technical trade and regulatory domain.

Brexit advocates may think this is fundamental historical error, and has led to overreach by the questionably accountable supranational institutions of their club. They may think that it leads to legislation, opaquely agreed by often unknown legislators, which unduly favours heavyweight incumbent lobbyists.

Fine. There is some justice in plenty of this critique.

Then leave the club. But you cannot, in the act of leaving it, expect the club fundamentally to redesign its founding principles to suit you and to share its sovereignty with you when it still suits you, and to dilute their agency in so doing.

It simply is not going to. We see this exceptionalism, with the idea that deep mutual recognition agreements should be offered to the U.K., alone of all “third countries” with which the EU deals, and in the initial propositions on both financial services, other services and data.

We see it in the constant have your cake and eat it demands which run through every document the European Research Group produce or endorse.

If by sovereignty we must mean more than purely nominal decision-making power and we mean something about the genuine projection of the UK’s power in a world, then, as we get into the deeper trade, economic and security negotiations ahead, we are going to need a far more serious national debate about trade-offs.

And the trade-offs are real and difficult. No-one should pretend that all the answers will be great.

To take just one technical example, though it rapidly develops a national security as well as an economic dimension, cross border data flows are completely central to free trade and prosperity – not that you would know it from listening to our current trade debate, which remains bizarrely obsessed with tariffs which, outside agriculture, have become a very modest element in the real barriers to cross border trade.

The EU here is a global player – a global rule maker – able and willing effectively to impose its values, rules and standards extraterritorially.

Before the referendum, we had Brexit-supporting senior Ministers and advisers who should have known better, fantasising about the autonomy we would have to plough our own furrow once sovereignty had been resumed and we were no longer obliged to live under the jackboot of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Sobriety only started to set in in this debate after the referendum, as the implications of a failure on the UK’s part to achieve a so-called “adequacy determination” under GDPR from the EU started to sink in – because corporates across a huge range of sectors started to set them out for Ministers.

The same applies to so-called “equivalence decisions” in masses of financial sector legislation. Again, the consequences of failure to achieve such decisions will be the substantial erosion of market access into EU markets by U.K. companies.

What, really, are these “equivalence” and “adequacy” stories about? They are the EU projecting power – it does so quite as well as, probably more effectively than, Washington, in multiple critical regulatory areas – and using its pooling of internal sovereignty to impose its values and standards well beyond its borders.

The current U.K. debate on sovereignty leaves so many corporate players mystified and cold because in “taking back control” over our laws and leaving the adjudication and enforcement machinery of what used to be our “home” market, we are privileging notional autonomy over law- making over real power to set the rules by which in practice we shall be governed, since departure from norms set by others when we are not in the room will in practice greatly constrain our room for manoeuvre.

 The massive costs of deviation will force large scale compliance with rules set when we are not part of setting them


Political, Rants&Rambles

Nine Lessons & No carols: BREXIT lesson 1

First Lesson:  “Brexit means Brexit”

This means primarily that leaving the EU is genuinely a major regime change, with massive political, legal, economic and social consequences.

Being just outside the EU outer perimeter fence is not AT ALL similar to living just inside it. Which is where David Cameron sought to entrench the U.K. – outside political, monetary, banking, fiscal Union, outside Schengen, and with a pick and choose approach to what used to be the third pillar of justice and home affairs. His was the last attempt to amplify and entrench British exceptionalism WITHIN the EU legal order.

It failed. A majority voted to leave altogether

Once you leave the EU, you cannot, from just outside the fence, achieve all the benefits you got just inside it.

First, there will, under NO circumstances, be frictionless trade when outside the Single Market and Customs Union. Frictionless trade comes with free movement. And with the European Court of Justice. 

Second, voluntary alignment from outside – even where that makes sense or is just inevitable – does NOT deliver all the benefits of membership. Because, unlike members you are not subject to the adjudication and enforcement machinery to which all members are.

And that’s what we wanted, right? British laws and British Courts.

Fine. But then market access into what is now their market, governed by supranational laws and Courts of which you are no longer part – and not, as it used to be, yours – is worse and more limited than before. That is unavoidable. It is not, vindictive, voluntary, a punishment beating, or any of the other nonsense we hear daily. It is just ineluctable reality.

Leaving the EU whilst continuing to trade with it, as our largest single trade partner means that we have effectively sacrificed real power and influence over how the EU sets the rules and regulations for the majority of our foreign trade, and in return we receive only nominal power over our own state.

The solidarity of the club members will ALWAYS be with each other, not with you. We have seen that over the backstop issue over the last 18 months which will pale into insignificance when it comes to the actual trade negotiations. wait till the trade negotiations.

The solidarity of the remaining Member States will be with the major fishing Member States, not with the U.K. The solidarity will be with Spain, not the U.K., when Madrid makes Gibraltar-related demands in the trade negotiation endgame. The solidarity will be with Cyprus when it says it wants to avoid precedents which might be applied to Turkey.

The EU is negotiating with us, not as a member, but as a prospective soon-to-be third country, a competitor on the global stage. We voted to become a third country and an opponent and rival, not just a partner, now. It is time to accept the consequences.

Rants&Rambles

Farce

Parliament has descended into farce. The government has come up with a version of brexit that no one likes, neither those that voted to leave nor (obviously) those that voted to stay within the EU. Rather than put their proposal to a vote and lose, the government after four days of debate, decided to pull the vote, offending everyone and try to re-open discussions with the EU. We’re supposed to be leaving in March.

Not surprisingly, her own party called for a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister, Theresa May, which she then won by around 2:1. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but considerably more than the margin in the referendum.

So here we are. The PM is set to attend an EU meeting today that may generate some kind of non-legally binding letter that states the intent of the EU is not to hold the UK forever hostage in a customs union (the great fear of the most strident leave campaigning MPs). Even if she manages to achieve this, it is unlikely to placate her own MPs who are so far to the extreme and lack such trust in the process that nothing will satisfy them. 

Perhaps more importantly it will also likely fail to please the DUP, a small political party currently propping up her minority government, who quite rightly point out that legally it is entirely clear that the customs union will last forever (whatever intentions might be) for N Ireland unless the EU agrees otherwise, thus creating a border between N Ireland and the rest of the UK, taking one step too far towards a re-united Ireland.

So there will be some face saving letter written that will fail to please most of the MPs currently objecting to the government proposal which is now scheduled to be put before parliament after the Christmas break at the end of January. 

I’m assuming that the PM is hoping that given a choice between a bad deal (her proposal) and no deal at all, most MPs will vote for her deal which is somewhat ironic given the much quoted “No deal is better than a bad deal” parroted for the first year of brexit by her government.

But with that legislation is an amendment put forward by one of the MPs that removes the automatic process whereby we would leave the EU with no deal whatsoever. This would then leave responsibility for directing the brexit negotiations back to parliament where there seems to be no consensus as yet, as to the best way forward. Unless…

The loyal opposition party, Labour are biding their time and hoping MPs will become so disgusted with the way things are going that they can call a vote of no confidence in the entire government and thus force a general election where they themselves might win.

This strategy has a couple of obvious flaws. Whatever their faults and internal arguments or ambitions, the members of the Conservative party will never vote down their own government. The DUP have stated that they will also not vote to overthrow the Tories so there just aren’t enough votes available now we have a fixed term parliament to force a general election.

It’s also worth noting that the country is sick of brexit and want the whole thing over with, or at least progressing. They don’t yet realise that we’re just at the start of the process, that the trade deal as such is going to take many more years to negotiate. Any attempt to derail the process or unseat the government at the moment may well be very unpopular with the electorate and lead to a defeat in a general election.

Most likely the proposal from the government will remain deeply unpopular and be voted down. The Grieve amendment taking “no deal” off the table will be popular and will pass.

Labour may call for a vote of no confidence in the government, but it will fail.

So what happens next? The quick answer is that no one knows.

The government could throw its hands in the air, decide that the whole process was unworkable and undesirable and unilaterally revoke the whole Art50 process. A recent ECJ ruling has confirmed that the UK could do this and remain within the EU on the terms it currently enjoys.  but this seems a very unlikely outcome. As things stands it would run counter to the referendum result, undermining faith in government and parliament.

It is possible for the UK to apply to the EU for an extension to Art50, the process we are currently within that requires us to leave  at the end of March 2019 but it would need the approval of each of the other 27 EU states. Permission would only be given if there was a clear reason such as the need to call a general election or to call for another referendum if the decision on next steps was given to the electorate.

And as we creep closer and closer to the March deadline, unless there emerges a clear consensus within parliament as to the best way forward, a second referendum seems more likely, tinged with the spectre of leaving with no deal at all and the chaos that would cause.

We are edging ever closer to the edge of the waterfall.


Political, Rants&Rambles

brexit means this?

So now we know what brexit looks like, or do we?

Last week the EU and UK published a draft divorce agreement. Nearly two-and-a-half years after the UK shocked their own government by voting to leave the EU, we are about to discover what Brexit actually means.

Ofcourse the deal still has to be agreed by the EU and, harder still, by  UK Parliament. Several ministers, including the Brexit secretary, resigned in protest; Theresa May could yet be toppled. MPs must now grapple with multiple loyalties: to their constituents, their parties and their own beliefs, all of which are likely to have shifted since the referendum. Within weeks they will have to make the biggest decision facing Britain, and one of the biggest for Europe, in generations.

If the country has learned anything since 2016, it is to look before it leaps. Yet, in what well summed up the level of debate on Brexit, both hardline Leavers and Remainers alike trashed the deal before they had read a word of it. This makes no sense.

The terms of the divorce will take time for MPs and those they represent to digest—and they may well be amended by European leaders before Parliament has its vote. Nor is it clear what would happen in the event that the deal were voted down: more negotiating, a second referendum or crashing out without a deal? But as the crunch vote nears, mps must consider how to approach this fateful question.

First, we have to forget the past. The cheating that went on during the campaign, the premature triggering of Article 50 and the thin preparations are maddening. But they are questions for the inquiry that will surely one day dissect this national fiasco.

The task before Parliament is to decide in a cool-headed way whether adopting the terms on offer is better for the country than rejecting them.

Those who backed Remain—a group that includes most MPs—will find little in the deal to make them think they were wrong. Although it legally sets out only a temporary framework, its terms are clearly worse than the status quo.

Yet if they are to respect the referendum, MPs need also to judge the deal against what voters were promised during the referendum.

The Leave campaign had no formal manifesto, and most of those behind it have since fled the government but the animating idea was to “take back control”. In some ways the deal does this, notably in immigration, where Britain would reclaim the right to limit migration from Europe. The price of this is being kicked out of the single market, which would hit the economy. MPs must decide whether the government is right that the public accepts this trade-off.

But in other ways the UK will unequivocally forfeit control. It will stay aligned with many of the single market’s current and future rules, to keep trade flowing and the Irish border open, something the  EU has made a condition of any deal.

Once outside the EU, the UK  will have no say in setting these rules. European judges will still arbitrate on such matters, even though the UK will no longer be able to nominate them. This is not taking back control but giving it up.

Meanwhile, as long as it remains in a customs union Britain will not even get the consolation prize of signing trade deals with other countries, something by which many Brexiteers have come to set enormous (and unwarranted) store.

The deal also has implications for the integrity of the United Kingdom. It would keep open the Irish border, but create a deeper regulatory divide between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain. Whilst most English voters do not care much about Northern Ireland, MPs, particularly those from what is formally called the Conservative and Unionist Party, should ask themselves whether it is right that an accidental by-product of Brexit should be a step towards Irish unification.

Hanging over this debate about the pros and cons of the deal is the question of what overturning it would do to the health of Britain’s democracy. Parliament has the legal right to ignore the referendum. But after a record number of people voted (to “take back control”, no less), it could be catastrophic for trust in mainstream parties if it were to do so.

The democratic argument is complicated. The vote to leave was an expression not just of Euroscepticism but of a wider frustration. It exposed divisions by age, region and class that the old left-right party divide had covered up. Far from bridging those divides, the bitter arguments since the referendum have if anything caused the two sides to move even further apart.

Overturning the vote would risk making them irreconcilable but adopting a Brexit deal like the one on offer would be unlikely to heal those wounds. Indeed, if the referendum was a howl by the left-behind against rule by remote and uncaring elites, this form of Brexit could make those problems worse. Anger at unaccountable rulers would not be assuaged by a deal in which Britain followed orders from people it could not elect. And those keen just to get the whole thing over with might find that Brexit marked only the beginning of national argument about the relationship with the behemoth next door.

Nor is it clear that the democratic thing to do is to hold people to the result of a two-year-old, narrowly won referendum, when the consequence of the vote has turned out to be quite different from what many voters expected. Polls suggest that a small majority now prefers Remain to Leave; more might prefer Remain to a compromise like the deal on offer. Almost all MPs want to respect the will of the people. The question is whether the people’s will found its perfect and enduring expression in 2016, or whether it might have changed.

There is no simple way out of this endgame. Whether the Brexit deal is accepted or rejected, it will scar Britain for years. Too many politicians are still grandstanding. Some Brexiteers still pretend there is a Planb that would deliver a painless exit.

Labour is mainly concerned with forcing a general election.

That needs to change, and fast. This decision must be made in the most reasoned way possible and with the maximum information available. Politicians of all stripes have spent the past two years talking about the national interest. In the coming weeks they must weigh up where they think it lies.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Nowhere Good to Go

Unsurprisingly, most of the people I know are fundamentally opposed to leaving the EU. However we’ve all had a couple of years now to get used to the idea that we’re leaving and bound for disappointment.

Looking through the more right-wing media outlets what is perhaps most striking is how disappointed people who voted to leave find themselves.

We’re leaving in March 2019, and no one is happy.

But looking around the political landscape, there is a total lack of alternative directions to be found. And there is something of a lack of ideas for what happens once we’ve left.

Part of the problem is the all-encompassing nature of the brexit negotiations which just suck up all of the political air, leaving none for discussing real-life politics.

Beneath the chaos of the Brexit talks, big ideas are forming that will shape the next decade. At last there are signs that politicians are starting to think about the direction that Britain should take after it leaves the EU.

Some of the fundamental ideas that have underpinned Western governments of all stripes for decades are being questioned from right and left. A party which could come up with persuasive answers might dominate British politics for many years.

The people have spoken

The Leave campaign’s demand to “take back control” resonated because it applied to more than just Britain’s relationship with Europe. It chimed with those sick of a hyper-centralised state, where feeble councils take marching orders from an out-of-touch London. It tapped into growing anger at the outsourcing of public services to remote and incompetent private companies. It pointed to the firms that bypass employment law by treating staff as “gig” workers with few rights. And it reflected a feeling of impotence in the face of a system of global capitalism which, ten years ago, sent Britain into recession after bankers thousands of miles away mis-sold securities that no one, including themselves, understood.

On becoming prime minister in 2016, Theresa May assured voters that she had heard their cry, and boldly vowed to reshape “the forces of liberalism and globalisation which have held sway…across the Western world.” She has not kept this promise. Her lack of imagination, squandered majority and the all-consuming Brexit negotiations—the ones with her party, rather than the EU—mean that, more than two years on from their great howl, the British people have seen nothing in return.

When Brexit day comes next March, and Britain is left with either a bad deal or with no deal at all, the call for revolutionary change will not have been sated—it will be stronger than ever.

Meanwhile the Labour Party is marching ever further and more confidently to the left. Many of the ideas in its manifesto last year recast old policies, such as renationalising the railways, which would not answer the fundamental new questions being asked of the state. But since then Labour’s economic plan has evolved. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell now proposes “the greatest extension of economic democratic rights that this country has ever seen”.

McDonnell correctly identifies that power has drained from labour towards capital in recent years. But his proposals to redress this balance would see the state strong-arm its way deeply into the economy.

Companies would have to nominate workers to make up a third of their boards, while pay would be determined by collective bargaining. 10%  of companies’ equity would be expropriated and put in funds managed by workers’ representatives, that would become the largest shareholders in many of the biggest firms.

Workers would receive some dividends, but the majority would go to the government.

The Treasury would be “reprogrammed” to channel money to favoured industries despite the history that shows us government is lousy at picking industrial “winners”

Coupled with a plan to raise the minimum wage so that it embraces 60% of employees under 25, the package represents a transfer of power not just to workers but also to the state and the unions.

It all feels a bit too “big state” for my taste.

“The greater the mess we inherit, the more radical we have to be,” Mr McDonnell told the conference. Brexit is likely to provide the mess required to justify a socialist shock-doctrine.

The Tories have been slower to regroup. Some want to dust off the free-market principles of Thatcherism and apply them to new areas, lifting planning restrictions to encourage housebuilding, say. Others want the party to blunt capitalism’s sharper edges, for instance by mimicking the trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt, whose target today would be the overmighty, rent-seeking tech monopolies. Still others believe the remedy for Britain’s fractiousness is to update Benjamin Disraeli’s “One Nation” Conservatism, arguing that its modern mission should be to unite a country whose deep divides—by age, class, region and more—were exposed by Brexit.

These ideas could mark a dramatic break with the past.

But whereas an insurgent Labour has united behind a growing list of detailed plans, the Tories’ thoughts are ill-defined, and the party far from agreed on which to pursue. Their leader, on the rack in Brussels and fighting for her job in Westminster, has no time for philosophising. She is unlikely to make way for a successor until Britain has left the EU. Yet there is no time to lose.

Too many Tories doubt that plans as drastic as Mr McDonnell’s could ever be enacted in Britain. That is complacent. The grotesque folly of Brexit will be enough to persuade many wealthy Britons to ditch the Tories, even if it means electing a far-left chancellor. And Britain’s winner-takes-all system lets governments quickly and dramatically reshape the country. Mr McDonnell would not face the checks and balances that have restrained President Donald Trump.

Britain is at last getting the battle of ideas that the referendum result demanded. That presents big opportunities, but also grave risks. It is time for those who dislike the sound of the future described by Labour this week to do some hard thinking of their own.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Disenfranchised

Voted Labour all of my life but cannot imagine myself voting for the current leadership.

I have friends (Jewish) who genuinely feel that they will be threatened if the current Labour leadership comes to power. They feel their citizenship will be questioned, violence against them will increase and be tolerated (not just the verbal kind) and that one way or another they will be encouraged to leave.

If you’re not Jewish, it can sound absurd, but then you pause and remember the Windrush scandal where British citizens, people who have lived here legally, all or most of their lives, were literally rounded up and deported within the last decade.

And then you think about the millions of EU citizens being held hostage to the current brexit negotiations and the hostile immigration policies being implemented to encourage people to leave.

And you see the rampant anti-semitism expressed on line and in the Labour Party where Jewish MPs are routinely harassed and threatened, where they require bodyguards to attend their own political conferences.

I’m not Jewish. It’s a religion with a tiny minority in the UK, and mostly people just don’t recognise the problem because they personally don’t have to deal with it. But an intolerant society doesn’t stop with just one religion, just one minority group.

And if we tolerate racism against one group, where does it ever stop.

At some level, Corbyn may or may not be anti-semitic himself. Either he is, or he is so incompetent a leader that he can’t seem to stamp it out amongst his own supporters.

Is that the choice: an anti-semite or an incompetent? Because at this moment in time, I can’t vote for either.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Bending the Rules

One of the key features of brexit campaigning was restricting or controlling immigration, so it’s worth reading the recent report on immigration from the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee. Many EU countries interpret the principle rather more loosely than Britain ever has and so there is considerable room for a fudge to develop.

It advises Theresa May’s government that Britain should not offer EU citizens preferential terms after it leaves. Yet it pointedly adds that “preferential access to the UK labour market would be of benefit to EU citizens”. This clearly hints that a regime favouring EU migrants could be a bargaining chip to win better access to the EU’s single market.

The principle of getting free trade in return for free movement is implicit in the single market’s rules. As a matter of economics, a single market could be built around the free movement of goods, services and capital. But the EU deliberately adds free movement of people, which most citizens outside Britain see as a benefit of the club.

Yet it also permits exceptions and other EU countries have long been amazed that, given Britain’s hostility to EU migration, its government has never applied the constraints allowed on free movement. It was one of only three countries not to limit the migration of nationals from central and eastern European countries for the first few years after they joined the EU in 2004. Even today it is more generous than it needs to be. In June Britain chose not to extend limits on free movement from Croatia, which joined the EU in 2013, for two more years.

Britain is also in a minority in having no registration system for EU migrants. Post-Brexit, it could use such a system, as Belgium does, to throw out migrants who have no job after six months. Denmark and Austria limit migrants’ ability to buy homes in some places.

Most EU countries are also tougher than Britain in insisting that welfare benefits cannot be claimed until a migrant builds up some years’ worth of contributions. Equally, the EU’s posted-workers directive is used by many to try to stop any undercutting of local labour markets.

Britain is lax in enforcing both its minimum wage and its standards for working conditions.

Non-EU countries in the European Economic Area have other options. Liechtenstein, a tiny principality, has quotas on EU migrants, despite being a full member of the single market. Article 112 of the EEA treaty allows Iceland and Norway to invoke an “emergency brake”, although they have never used it. And non-EEA Switzerland, which is in the single market for goods, not only limits property purchases but also makes most employers offer jobs to Swiss nationals first.

This particular concession was secured after the EU refused to accept a Swiss vote in 2014 to set limits on free movement. Yet a further referendum on the issue is now threatened, so Brussels may have to bend its rules yet again. All this comes as other EU countries besides Britain are looking for new ways to constrain the free movement of people.

The MAC report itself points to the irony that all this is happening as EU migration to Britain is going down fast. It notes that the country may be ending free movement just as public concern about it is falling. It is not too late for a compromise in which Britain accepts something like free movement in principle, but heavily constrains it in practice.

Though of course it might be too late.

Control works both ways and more and more EU citizens are deciding to leave the UK, finding it increasingly expensive thanks to its falling exchange rate and increasingly unwelcoming thanks to its anti-immigration rhetoric.  This is also true for non-EU immigrants.

Maybe the greatest irony will turn out to be that immigrants reject the UK.

Rants&Rambles

Liberal

Liberals contend that societies can change gradually for the better and from the bottom up. They differ from revolutionaries because they reject the idea that individuals should be coerced into accepting someone else’s beliefs. They differ from conservatives because they assert that aristocracy and hierarchy, indeed all concentrations of power, tend to become sources of oppression.

Liberalism thus begins as a restless, agitating world view. Yet over the past few decades liberals have become too comfortable with power. As a result, they have lost their hunger for reform. The ruling liberal elite tell themselves that they preside over a healthy meritocracy and that they have earned their privileges. The reality is not so clear-cut.

At its best, the competitive spirit of meritocracy has created extraordinary prosperity and a wealth of new ideas. In the name of efficiency and economic freedom, governments have opened up markets to competition. Race, gender and sexuality have never been less of a barrier to advancement. Globalisation has lifted hundreds of millions of people in emerging markets out of poverty. It could be so much better, but it has also been so very much worse.

But ruling liberals have often sheltered themselves from the gales of creative destruction. Cushy professions such as law are protected by fatuous regulations. Financiers were spared the worst of the financial crisis when their employers were bailed out with taxpayers’ money. Globalisation was meant to create enough gains to help the losers, but too few of them have seen the pay-off.

In all sorts of ways, the liberal meritocracy is closed and self-sustaining. Liberal technocrats contrive endless clever policy fixes, but they remain conspicuously aloof from the people they are supposed to be helping. This creates two classes: the doers and the done-to, the thinkers and the thought-for, the policymakers and the policytakers.

The founding idea of liberals is civic respect for all, set outing the Economist centenary editorial, written in 1943 as the war against fascism raged, t in two complementary principles. The first is freedom: that it is “not only just and wise but also profitable…to let people do what they want.” The second is the common interest: that “human society…can be an association for the welfare of all.”

Today’s liberal meritocracy sits uncomfortably with that inclusive definition of freedom. We live in bubbles. Remote from power, most people are expected to be content with growing material prosperity instead. Yet, amid stagnating productivity and the fiscal austerity that followed the financial crisis of 2008, even this promise has often been broken.

That is one reason loyalty to mainstream parties is corroding. Britain’s Conservatives, perhaps the most successful party in history, now raise more money from the wills of dead people than they do from the gifts of the living..

People are retreating into group identities defined by race, religion or sexuality. As a result, that second principle, the common interest, has fragmented.  Leaders on the right, in particular, exploit the insecurity engendered by immigration as a way of whipping up support. And they use smug left-wing arguments about political correctness to feed their voters’ sense of being looked down on. The result is polarisation. Sometimes that leads to paralysis, sometimes to the tyranny of the majority.

At worst it emboldens far-right authoritarians.

Liberals are losing the argument in geopolitics, as well. Liberalism spread in the 19th and 20th centuries against the backdrop first of British naval hegemony and, later, the economic and military rise of the United States. Today, by contrast, the retreat of liberal democracy is taking place as Russia plays the saboteur and China asserts its growing global power.

This impulse to pull back is based on a misconception. As the historian Robert Kagan points out, America did not switch from interwar isolationism to post-war engagement in order to contain the Soviet Union, as is often assumed. Instead, having seen how the chaos of the 1920s and 1930s bred fascism and Bolshevism, its post-war statesmen concluded that a leaderless world was a threat. In the words of Dean Acheson, a secretary of state, America could no longer sit “in the parlour with a loaded shotgun, waiting”.

Even if today’s peace holds, liberalism will suffer as growing fears of foreign foes drive people into the arms of strongmen and populists.

It is the moment for a liberal reinvention. Liberals need to spend less time dismissing their critics as fools and bigots and more fixing what is wrong. Liberals need to side with a struggling precariat against the patricians.

Liberals should approach today’s challenges with vigour. If they prevail, it will be because their ideas are unmatched for their ability to spread freedom and prosperity

They must rediscover their belief in individual dignity and self-reliance—by curbing their own privileges. They must stop sneering at nationalism, but claim it for themselves and fill it with their own brand of inclusive civic pride. Rather than lodging power in centralised ministries and unaccountable technocracies, they should devolve it to regions and municipalities. Instead of treating geopolitics as a zero-sum struggle between the great powers, America must draw on the self-reinforcing triad of its military might, its values and its allies.

The best liberals have always been pragmatic and adaptable. Before the first world war Theodore Roosevelt took on the robber barons who ran America’s great monopolies. Although many early liberals feared mob rule, they embraced democracy. After the Depression in the 1930s they acknowledged that government has a limited role in managing the economy. Partly in order to see off fascism and communism after the second world war, liberals designed the welfare state.

Liberals should approach today’s challenges with equal vigour. If they prevail, it will be because their ideas are unmatched for their ability to spread freedom and prosperity. Liberals should embrace criticism and welcome debate as a source of the new thinking that will rekindle their movement. They should be bold and impatient for reform. Young people, especially, have a world to claim.