Category Archives: Political

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.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Immigration

I live in a mongrel nation. The more a person born in the UK claims “pure” blood, the more certain their heritage seems to be a total mish-mash of this and that. We are a country that has seen wave after wave of immigration, each and everyone of them adding something to what it means to be British.

Yet as brexit shows, we are a country that doesn’t much like immigrants.

I live in a country that dislikes, despises and begrudges immigrants their place in this country, whilst living in a part of that country with a high proportion of immigrants that seems to cope just fine. In fact the greatest irony of all seems to be that areas with high immigration value their immigrants best where as areas of low immigration are fearful of all and any changes that newcomers might bring.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising: I was brought up in a village with barely three surnames to rub together. Everyone was related in a byzantine set of connections, cousins to the right and left of me, with long memories for grudges. At his funeral, my father who had lived in the village since the age of five was still described decades later as that Scots boy who came down and married our girl.

But there is something more at play than simple parochial fear of the  stranger. Facts show that immigration is economically good for the country accepting immigrants, good for the host society in many and varied ways, so why don’t we believe those facts?

The act of moving from a poor country to a rich one makes workers dramatically more productive. A world with more migration would be substantially richer. The snag is that the biggest benefits of moving accrue to the migrants themselves, while the power to admit them rests with voters in rich countries. Democratic accountability is vested largely in national governments. Yet most Western countries, struggling with ageing populations and shrinking workforces, need more migrants. So they have to find ways to make migration policy work for everyone.

The first step is to recognise the causes of the dislike of newcomers.

Several stand out: the belief that governments have lost control of their borders; the fear that migrants drain already-strained welfare systems; the perception that migrants are undercutting local workers; and the fear of being swamped by alien cultures.

Assuaging these concerns and fears requires both toughness and imagination. Start by regaining control. Overhaul the outdated international systems for aiding refugees; at the same time, open routes for well-regulated economic migration to the West. This will require countries to secure borders and enforce laws: by preventing the hiring of illegal immigrants and deporting those denied asylum, for example.

Where they do not exist, the introduction of ID cards can help. Maybe it’s time of the UK to bite the bullet on this topic.

Second, encourage all migrants, including refugees, to work, while limiting the welfare benefits that they can receive. In America, where the safety net is skimpy, labour rules are flexible and entry-level jobs plentiful, even migrants who dropped out of high school are net contributors to the public finances. Sweden, by contrast has a policy that seems designed to stir resentment, showering refugees with benefits while making it hard for them to work. Turkey does a better job at integrating refugees, even if it does not recognise them as such.

A sensible approach would be to allow migrants to get public education and health care immediately, but limit their access to welfare benefits for several years. This may seem discriminatory, but migrants will still be better off than if they had stayed at home. An extreme illustration can be seen in the oil-rich Gulf, where migrants are ruthlessly excluded from the opulent welfare that citizens enjoy. The Gulf is not a model. Migrant workers receive too little protection against coercion and abuse. But because they so obviously pay their way, the native-born are happy to admit them in vast numbers. Elements of that logic are worth considering in the West.

Third, ensure that the gains from migration are more explicitly shared between migrants and the native-born in the host country. One way is to tie public spending, particularly on visible services such as schools or hospitals, more directly to the number of migrants in a region. Another, more radical idea might be to tax migrants themselves, either by charging for entry or, more plausibly, by applying a surtax on their income for a period after arrival. The proceeds could be spent on public infrastructure, or simply divided among citizens.

The more immigrants, the bigger the dividend.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Stockpile versus Hoarding

So my country has gone from madness to political madness and now people are seriously talking about the need to stockpile food in the event we bomb out of the EU onto WTO only rules. The UK produces just 60% of its own food. It is curiously unprepared for obligatory self-sufficiency, or even the kind of delays that a sudden change in customs might require for a just-in-time supply chain for supermarkets.

Living in relatively wealthy London will either be a decisive advantage or disadvantage. We have a lot of people living in close proximity to each other, which means more people fighting over the final few tomatoes in the shop, but it also means that the first place people will bring their goods to sell will be well-to-do London, where people can afford the higher prices and the stuff can be sold quickly and easily.

What sort of stockpile of food might we put together?

Sweden’s government delivered leaflets to 4.8m Swedish households, inviting them to consider how they could best cope in a situation of “major strain … in which society’s normal services are not working as they usually do”. The government had in mind all kinds of crises – natural disasters, terrorism, cyber attacks, all-out war – but the basic survival strategy for all of them was the food hoard.

The leaflet recommended that every home lay down a stock of non-perishables:

  • specifically breadstuffs with a long shelf-life (the leaflet mentioned tortillas and crackers),
  • dried lentils and beans,
  • tinned hummus and sardines,
  • ravioli,
  • rice,
  • instant mashed potato,
  • energy bars

Switzerland has long had a similar sense of foreboding: legislation passed in the cold war still demands that every citizen has access to a nuclear shelter. But the list of recommended foods to be kept in the larder (or bunker) in case the worst happens is, as one would expect of Switzerland, more thorough. “Tick the items you need on the following list … and ensure that you always have them in stock” is the advice of the Swiss civil defence authorities. The list begins with

  • nine litres of water per person (for an emergency lasting three or four days)
  • pepper and salt,
  • dry sausage,
  • dried fruit and pulses,
  • tinned meat and fish,
  • hard cheese,
  • pet food and
  • condensed milk, chocolate, sugar, jam, honey and crispbread.

And I don’t seriously believe that the water supply would be threatened so I’ll not be building up a stock of water bottles, but I am considering some of the rest. I’m also considering stockpiling some alcohol to get us through the first few months of readjustment to this brave new world. My list looks something like this:

  • wine, beer, cider
  • breadstuffs with a long life, crackers, crispbread and pastry snacks
  • lentils and beans, whether dried, tinned or packaged ready-to-eat
  • dried pasta
  • olive oil
  • rice, especially carnaroli/arborio
  • spices, ketchup, long life bottled/canned chilli sauce, garlic puree, ginger puree, tomato puree,
  • dark chocolate
  • dried pet food

And all of this fades into total insignificance compared to the risks to the medical supply chain into the UK.

No insulin is made in the UK: it can’t be by March.  So a no deal Brexit threatens our insulin supply according to medicines regulator Sir Michael Rawlings.

What are the government going to do to prevent type-1 diabetics dying ?

Political, Rants&Rambles

English

My daughters are English. I am not. We all live in England, but in London so does that really count? What does it mean to feel yourself to be first and foremost English and only British as an afterthought?

A lot has been written since 2016 about whether the Brexit vote marked an eruption of English nationalism.  Explicit English nationalism remains nonexistent or dormant, not active, unlike other nationalisms in these islands. That the Brexit vote was, in part, an immense expression of English identity is, on the other hand, beyond dispute.

Recently the BBC has been reporting on English identity. Most of it is based on a large survey by YouGov that explores the language, contours and contexts of that identity. Its findings should be a real wake-up call for anybody who is serious about modern British politics, especially on the left.

The fundamental finding in the BBC’s English Question surveys is that 80% of people in England strongly self-identify as English.

On one level this is hardly surprising. England is where they live. It’s where most of them were born. But let the idea and its implications sink in. And note also that there are almost no exceptions at all. This isn’t just coastal towns or leafy lanes. In every region, every class, every age group and almost every other demographic subset, a majority strongly  self-identifies as English. The only subset exceptions, though they are important ones, are black and minority-ethnic adults (but only by a whisker), people who self-identify as British not English, and people of other nationalities altogether.

Almost as important a finding, however, is that a strong sense of English identity actively coexists with other identities. Again, this is hardly surprising. Which of us self-identifies as one thing alone?

The most common of these other identities, not surprisingly, is a British one, with 82% strong identification. On this, with the sole exception of other nationalities, every subset in the survey (this time including black and minority-ethnic adults) strongly identifies with Britishness . Additionally, half of the survey strongly feel an English regional identity – up to 74% in the north-east. Around a quarter strongly feel European too.

There is much else in the BBC/YouGov survey, most notably it shows that whilst the Scottish and Welsh are optimistic about where they and their region are heading, the English are pessimistic and look to recreate their past.

The greatest contributors to English identity, the survey suggests, are the natural landscape and the nation’s history. The strongest image of England is a pre-industrial bucolic nation populated by well-mannered and virtuous citizens. People generally see England as conservative and traditional rather than liberal and outward-looking.

There is more than a hint of nostalgia about people’s sense of Englishness. Almost three times as many of its residents think England was ‘better in the past’ than believe its best years lie in the future.

In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, by contrast, significantly more people think their country’s best years lie ahead rather than behind them.

So while the rest of the UK feels pretty optimistic about their prospects, England seems particularly glum. The more English people feel, the more retrospective they are, and English wistfulness is particularly strong among those who voted to leave in the Brexit referendum.

England’s Christian tradition is important for almost half of Leave voters, but only 29% of remain voters. Leave voters are significantly more likely to talk of Englishness in terms of history, fair play, tolerance, plain-speaking and friendliness than those who wanted to remain

Many on the left prefer the silence. Some find England embarrassing – a “not in my name” country. Many prefer to navigate the multiple identities of Britishness while leaving the self-identifying English alone. As a result the left of centre is not much represented in the English conversation.  Nationalism and Englishness is often conflated by those on the political left where as those on the right of politics seem determined to present a pastiche.

Labour embodies this unease. Few Labour policy documents mention England at all, even when they concern policy areas such as the health service or education, which are devolved and on which, therefore, “national” policy actually means English policy.

Faced with English identity, Jeremy Corbyn is little different from Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. This week Brown made a fine speech about bringing the country together with a programme of reforms. Yet the word England appeared just once in his speech, and only in the context of English regionalism, not English identity. It is hard to think of any senior Labour politician since Tony Benn or Michael Foot who talked about England with any degree of comfort. Their view of England may have been unduly romantic and radical, but at least it existed.

This isn’t intended as a bash-Labour point. For the most part, Labour is no better and no worse than anybody else on the liberal left in this regard. There are honourable exceptions, notably the former minister John Denham, no longer in parliament but actively pushing his English Labour Network. A recent Institute for Public Policy Research speech by the maverick shadow cabinet member Jon Trickett was another important recognition of the need for a political conversation to develop on the left that includes, not ignores, England.

England is not going to go away. And the current English mood is a challenge to every aspect of the progressive tradition. As the BBC/YouGov survey shows, England is not just a place with a real sense of identity. It is also a pessimistic place. Most people in the survey think England was better in the past. The pessimism is widely shared across all parts of England. Only one in six people in England think the country’s best years lie ahead of it.

But this pessimism is not something that need embarrass the progressive traditions in politics. There isn’t much sign of a harking back to whiteness or for the empire. It’s about feeling that the country is incredibly beautiful, has a rich history, and is witty and polite. But the country also used to make things, used to matter more, used to be more caring and connected.

The England that cries out from this survey is not at ease, is disempowered, is disconnected from Westminster and insufficiently able to shape its own future at local, never mind national, level.

English identity is a cultural issue that requires more than just a constitutional answer. Nevertheless, England is the largest nation in Europe without its own parliament and it has become difficult to argue against one, with powers similar to those in the rest of the UK. An English parliament would force the progressive wing of politics to engage seriously with England’s mood and England’s needs. Compared with an English parliament, combined or regional authorities just don’t cut it.

And what is the alternative? If the progressive tradition in British politics cannot find ways of listening to, connecting with and speaking for England, its sense of itself and its sense of place, it risks not just electoral failure but the loss of a much larger argument. To cede the politics of England to the right is to ensure that it is the right that speaks for England. That seems to be what is happening.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Grenville

In the UK no one ever talks about how much they earn: it is considered incredibly rude to ask and incredibly vulgar to share. So a strange proxy has developed, where instead we talk about our houses, where we live and how much our neighbours’ house cost them. It allows everyone to establish relative wealth without talking about earnings.

More than other countries, the idea of wealth and financial well-being in the UK is predicated on owning a house yet the government now seems chronically unable to develop a policy that would allow most adults to buy their own property in the future.

My generation caught the tail-end of the housing price boom so to a certain extent we are now sitting on a huge pile of entirely unearned wealth. We cannot sell our house since we need somewhere to live, so the cash value of our property is likely to remain untapped until we die.

The average age of beneficiaries in the Uk is 61, so my kids will not inherit this wealth (which will be taxed in the UK, albeit only amounts about £1m) until they are long past raising their own families. So my children, unless we dig deep into our pockets to help them buy (and most parents are obviously not wealthy enough to do this out of income and/or savings) will rent property.

Given that rental property is a feature of an entire generations live and expectations, the UK needs to have a decent policy towards rental housing, which includes social housing.

With the burnt out Grenville Tower still standing over central London, and the personal testimonies of loss being heard in the investigation, the LSE Housing and Communities, in partnership with the National Communities Resource Centre at Trafford Hall, have published what they consider to be the ten most important lessons to be learned:

Lesson 1: There should be a single point of control for any multi-storey block so that everyone knows, whether it is staff, residents or emergency services, where to go and who is responsible whenever an emergency arises.

Lesson 2: A full record of work that has been done must be kept, including the costs, the rationale, the specifications and implementation, with a continuous sequence of recorded information from start to finish, handed over on completion to the responsible owner/manager.

Lesson 3: There should be the equivalent of an MOT test for all multi-storey, high-rise and tower blocks as they have complex and linked internal systems, involving the interaction of many different technical features including plumbing, electrical wiring, heating, lift maintenance, roofs, windows, walls, fire doors, fire inhabitors, and means of escape.

Lesson 4: The containment of fire within each individual flat (commonly known as compartmentation) is absolutely crucial. A breach in the party or external walls of flats, often caused by installing television wiring, gas piping, electric wiring, plumbing or other works, creates a conduit for fire.

Lesson 5: In-depth fire inspections should happen every year in every block, using qualified inspectors, checking walls, doors, equipment, cupboards, shelves, etc. to ensure there are no breaches of fire safety or containment.

Lesson 6: Knowing who lives in all the flats within a block, including leasehold properties, private lettings, and subletting with the right to enter, inspect and enforce where there is a potential hazard affecting the block, is essential to exercising control over conditions and safety. Leasehold agreements should specify the obligation to provide access keys in case of leaks, fire, or breaches of containment.

Lesson 7: On-site management and supervision maintains basic conditions and is essential for security. The landlord can then enforce a basic standard, both in the stairwells and within units. The proximity of neighbours makes enforcement of tenancy conditions vital.

Lesson 8: The maintenance of multi-storey blocks is an engineering challenge where precision and quality control are essential. Judith Hackitt’s Interim Review of Building Regulations recommends higher standards, stronger enforcement, and far greater professionalism in designing, delivering, and running complex multi-storey buildings.

Lesson 9: There should be no shortcutting on cost and quality as short term savings can lead of long-term costs, as Grenfell Tower shows.

Lesson 10: Tenants are entitled to have a voice in the safety, maintenance, and general condition of their blocks. They often know more than staff about who lives in blocks and about earlier works as they have often been around longer than housing staff. They know what changes have been made. They are valuable conduits for vital information, and can thus help their landlords and their community.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Borders

It is beyond infuriating to read people suggesting that Ireland is an EU problem, and that the UK need not put up a border at all.

We are more than 18 months along in this process, leaving in March next year, and the UK government has still not established what it wants to happen as a result of brexit. In particular the UK has still not worked out how to reconcile the UK commitments:

  • to leaving the EU,
  • leaving the single market,
  • leaving the customs union; and yet,
  • still maintaining no border within Ireland whilst also not setting up a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

None of this is new. None of this is rocket science and none of this is particularly contentious. It is not possible to square this circle: the only reason that the Labour Party has agreed membership of a customs union as policy.

FactCheck spoke to Aoife O’Donoghue, Professor of Law at the University of Durham to understand the issue.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-what-are-the-options-for-the-irish-border-after-brexit

She explained that the no-border option is off the table: “that’s gone. If the UK had chosen to stay in the customs union and the single market, you could do that. But in deciding not to, that means there has to be some form of border.”

Given the conditions imposed by the UK government, some form of border control between Ireland and the UK is inevitable.

Because let’s be very clear, there is no technological solution currently available that would remove the need for border controls and border inspections in Ireland. The most automated, technological advanced border in the world between Sweden (EU) and Norway (single market but not customs union) the average stop for each lorry is 20 minutes. They deal with significantly less traffic than we see from Ireland.

The UK government itself has already rejected the most up to date comprehensive technological solution (SMART2.0) presented to the Eu as inadequate and unsuitable for Ireland.

And aside from trade tariffs, once we are outside of the EU and not committed to following all of the same rules, regulations and standards, then we will have to see manual stops, inspections and certification of livestock at the border, if only for basic health and safety and disease prevention.

Which also explains why those people bleeding on about the Common Travel Area (CTA) between the UK and Ireland have entirely missed the point. The CTA pre-dates membership of the EU by both the UK and Ireland. It required regulatory alignment between the UK and Ireland to allow free movement between the two islands. It was effectively replaced by membership of the EU, which ensured the same thing and also allowed free movement across the broader membership countries.

When we leave, Ireland will remain in the EU and will change its rules, standards and regulations in line with the EU. The only way to maintain a CTA would be for the UK to also agree to change all of its rules, standards and regulations in line with the EU, despite being outside of the EU, and obviously with no say on how those rules, standards and regulations were decided.

& the harder the brexit, the harder the border between the UK and Ireland will have to be, where the very extreme end of the spectrum is a hard border where the UK leaves with no deal and has to default to World Trade Organisation rules.

If the UK defaults to WTO rules (using copied-and-pasted versions of the EU’s tariffs in the short term), the EU would still have to maintain its side of the border. That would require check goods coming into Ireland from the UK. That’s because the EU’s existence as a free trade area depends on its ability to demonstrate to the WTO that it can control its external borders properly.

In theory, the UK could decide not to impose checks on goods moving the other way (i.e. from the Republic into Northern Ireland). This could make a hard border slightly softer though of course basic checks on livestock etc would be required from a health and safety, disease prevention perspective.

But there’s a catch: under WTO rules, unless you’re in a free trade bloc like the EU or NAFTA, you have to obey the “most favoured nation” rule.

That means if you lower trade tariffs for one trading partner, you have to lower tariffs to all your other partners. Professor O’Donoghue explains:

“If the UK chooses not impose any tariffs on goods coming across the [Irish] border… that would mean that the UK is giving the EU (because Ireland is the EU in this context) complete open access. So its most favoured nation tariff is zero. That means it would have to give a zero tariff access to every single country in the WTO.”

Abolishing import tariffs unilaterally would have a seriously damaging impact on UK manufacturing and agriculture.

So then we are faced with the option of a hard border between N Ireland and the rest of the UK which is likely to be very difficult politically. We currently have a minority government propped up by the support of N Ireland’s DUP. It is inconceivable that they would vote for any kind of “special status” viewing it as a step towards a reunited Ireland. Some MP’s may well think that perhaps we should just sacrifice the six counties of N Ireland entirely, but again, with a minority government they simply don’t have the votes to force the required referendum in N Ireland.

& then there is the sad truth that whilst the DUP may fight tooth and nail to avoid “special status” other devolved governments such as Scotland might well argue that they would like to be part of the N ireland “special status” having voted convincingly to remain within the EU.

And at stake is our trade relationship with Ireland, one of the very few countries that we run a trade surplus with (around £6bn)  in both trade in goods and services.

Round and round we go: where we stop nobody knows.

Political, Rants&Rambles

Control

One of the big claims from the “leave” campaign for brexit i.e. leaving the EU, was that it would lead to control over immigration. Obviously it ignored the obvious truth that most immigration into the UK was from outside of the EU, and the fact that there were any number of ways the UK could have chosen to control EU immigration (like many other EU countries) whilst staying within the EU.

It also was vulnerable to the accusation of racism.

The latter was always answered by the claim that what “people” wanted was to control the type of immigration so that skilled people would always have a place here.

Turns out post-referendum that’s not working very well for us because actually telling immigrants that you don’t want them, generally makes them stay away. We may reach a stage when we don’t allow people who want to come and work here through the border, but it’s much more likely that people will just choose not to come because they don’t think we’re a very welcoming place, or very nice people.

In the aftermath of Brexit, LinkedIn data quickly showed that fewer people from the EU were showing an interest in taking up jobs in the UK.

Their hiring data shows that the UK has gone from being a country that gains talent from the EU to one that loses talent to it.

The change is significant.

  • Over the last year alone, migration to the UK from the EU has fallen 26%, while more people are leaving the UK for the EU than were previously. The UK remains a net importer of talent from non-EU countries, because the number of professionals leaving for these countries is still lower than the number arriving from them. However, it is importing talent at a significantly lower rate.
  • Net migration to the UK from the rest of the world is also dropping. It’s down 20% over the last year, almost as significant a reduction as migration from the EU.
  • The UK is no longer seen as a good place to advance your career and there is no better example of this critical perception shift than Ireland. The UK has been seen as a place for Irish professionals to gain experience for decades. However, data now shows migration from Ireland dropping 37% over the last year, the biggest decline of all EU nations.

Does reduced migration from overseas mean more opportunities for British professionals?  Looking in detail at London, traditionally the UK’s largest net importer of talent from abroad: London has not been immune to the switch in migration flows, and is also now losing talent to other countries rather than gaining it. However, domestic migration into London is unchanged. It is not increasing to fill the gap ie. there is an acute shortage of skilled people developing.

 

It turns out that if you tell people to f*ck off, they don’t like you, don’t want to work for or with you, and you end up all alone.

They think the UK is racist – who could not have seen that coming?

 

Political, Rants&Rambles

Tired

I am so very very tired of brexit. I am most tired of people talking nonsense and pretending they’re talking facts, pretending that they’re providing useful information, when in reality they’re just propagandists for a movement that they cannot possibly believe in anymore. Why are they still so invested that they’re willing to tell outright public lies, with no shame. because after one or two times of having the lie identified and corrected, then it cannot be called a mistake. It is deliberate.

I am tired of the MEP who keeps retweeting that we can’t possibly belong to a customs union with the EU to solve the Irish border problem because Turkey has a customs union and also still has a hard border with the EU.

And he writes this knowing that the UK is nothing like Turkey, would not have the same type of arrangement with the EU and that one customs union could be very different to another. He writes this without providing any alternative answer to the border in Ireland.

You have no idea how wearing it is reading people who say that a hard border would be Ireland or the EU’s “fault” and Ireland’s responsibility,  totally ignoring the fact that we have chosen to leave and create the problem in the first place. It also totally ignores the realty that WTO rules would require a hard border between the UK and EU if we leave the EU, the single market and the customs union without a comprehensive free trade agreement. Under WTO we are simply not allowed to offer other countries preferential treatment i.e. a soft border.

I have gone beyond weariness when it comes to people suggesting we should just bomb out onto WTO like all the other countries.

Other countries, Mauritania excepted, do not trade on WTO rules. Not even N Korea trades on just WTO rules. Countries like China, the US, India etc all have decades of treaties built up so that they can trade on better than WTO terms. There is an excellent EU database that lists nearly 1,000 treaties with third parties that we are walking away from as part of brexit (http://ec.europa.eu/world/agreements/searchByType.do?id=1)

And some of these will be about trade and some will be on other topics like security, health and safety, aviation, shipping etc.

None of them are trivial. And the UK has made no progress to resolving any of these issues. Our joint application (with the EU) to the WTO to split our trade schedule has been rejected by key countries such as NZ and Australia. Third party countries are refusing to simply grandfather our treaties via the EU e.g. the US suggesting it want better access to our airspace now we’re leaving the EU and vulnerable to a bit of shoving around.

I am tired of the MP who writes that we can have a perfect trade arrangement just like Switzerland, without being a member of the single market or the customs union, who is just choosing to ignore the fact that Switzerland is a part of EU schengen, that it has freedom of movement without control of immigration numbers above and beyond that within the EU.  And then this person goes beyond ignoring uncomfortable truths and just lies when they describe it as trouble free, ignoring the vast amount of customs declarations and inspections required to avoid VAT fraud.

Can I tell you how tired I am about those people who claim that outside of the EU we will enter some tariff free existence and food prices will fall because the EU insists on high tariffs. And clearly no one has actually looked at a breakdown of what tariffs are paid in reality, the kind of data to be found on the ITC site https://www.trademap.org/Country_SelProductCountry.aspx?nvpm=1|826||||0702|||4|1|1|1|1|1|2|1|1

Obviously most of our imported food comes from our nearest (EU) neighbours so is entirely tariff free, or from one of the many countries with a trade agreement with the EU (Kenya etc) so pays no tariffs, And even when tariffs may be a technical possibility (importing tomatoes from Morocco) there are quotas that mean in practical terms tariffs are rarely applicable. Plus there are Entry Price Requirements that allow individual countries such as the UK within the EU to set their own criteria for tariffs.

Because let’s be clear: removing all tariffs on agriculture would seriously fuck with our farming sector.

And can I just point out to the newspaper that the MP suggesting that our trading future is golden, just like that of Australia and NZ, is not a bright young star with novel ideas but a shocking fuckwit who seems not to recognise that NZ and Australia have an exceptionally comprehensive free trade agreement in place, that includes freedom of  movement for people. In other words they have something approaching the system that we’ve just voted to leave. Could she also please acknowledge that Canada and the US have a hard border, something we’re committed to avoiding in Ireland, despite belonging to a free trade agreement called  NAFTA.

But most of all I am tired of people who pretend that this is what they voted for and what they want. You did not vote for the UK to become poorer.

You did not vote for us to become a free trading nation, wheeling and dealing our way around the planet at the cost of a hard border in Ireland and screwing up the Good Friday Agreement. And to those few sad bastards who did vote for that fairy tale: take a look at how our government’s negotiations have played out and tell me that you still think it was a good idea.

You voted to limit immigration, mostly living in places where very few immigrants live and fundamentally out of fear that, one day, they might decide your neighbourhood was somewhere they wanted to live and that you might have to cope with someone who was “different”.

And the reality is that most immigrants have always come from outside of the EU, but you told yourself that you weren’t being racist, that you didn’t mean immigrants like the ones you know, the ones that you’re friends with. Still friends now? Seriously? That’s not friendship. You told yourself that no one you knew would be affected and if they were, you just wouldn’t tell them. You wouldn’t tell the doctor or the nurse or the health visitor, not because of shame but… Well, okay maybe out of embarrassment.

You voted to turn back the clock, without regard to the impact that might have on the younger generation because, let’s be honest the 1960s and 1970s were actually pretty shit to live through.

And even though 10,000 people die each week in the UK, around 9,000 pensioners 80% of whom voted leave ie. 700,000 leave voters dead since the referendum and even though 500,000 predominately remain voting teenagers have arrived on the electoral roll since the referendum, you still bleed on about the “will of the people”

As if electoral fraud in the form of criminal funding of the on-line campaign hadn’t happened. As if 32m people could not have been persuaded by entirely legitimate arguments or racism to vote in either direction, yet if only 800,000 were persuaded by criminality then the entire referendum would have gone the other way, because the vote was narrow and probably a cheat.

I am so tired of this shit show.

 

Political, Rants&Rambles

Bias?

The BBC is planning a Brexit Special looking at all aspects of the BBC’s coverage of this extraordinarily divisive issue – specifically whether the corporation has kept to its charter commitment to impartiality, not just in its journalism, but also in its programming.

Do let them know what you think of the BBC’s Brexit coverage across the board – has it shown due impartiality not just in its news journalism, but also in its general programming its dramas and even its comedy shows ” announced on Radio 4 Feedback Friday 23rd March.

And having received the notification I really need to work out what it is that I think of their coverage.

I think that, as regards Brexit, the BBC has in some crucial respects got its approach to these issues wrong. I have not undertaken any kind of systematic study of their coverage – like most people I dip in and out of it, and then only parts of it (R4 Today,  BBC2 Daily and Sunday Politics, BBC1 The Andrew Marr Show, BBC1 News BBC1 Question Time, BBC1 Newsnight and BBC News Channel).

I also dip in and out of other broadcasters, mostly Channel 4 News, ITV Peston on Sunday and ITV News. None of those three seems to me to have the same problems as the BBC in their Brexit coverage and I think that comparison is important as it is suggests that other, equally serious, news organizations, which will also have asked the same questions of themselves as the BBC, have come to different answers.

I’m obviously very well aware of the possibility that my estimation of the BBC’s approach is no more than a reflection of my own views and biases about (and against) Brexit. But if I only saw through that prism then presumably I would be one of those who sees the coverage of Sky, ITV and Channel 4 as pro-Brexit, which I’m not.

I’m equally well aware that there are very many people who regard the BBC as being systematically biased against Brexit. But it seems unreasonable to accept the argument that since both Brexit sides accuse the BBC of bias this suggests that the position is about right. Precisely because of the polarisation of views over Brexit, the BBC would attract criticism from both sides almost whatever it did, so that criticism cannot in itself be taken to prove their approach.

A standard way to think about balance is the amount of air time given to each side and whether each side is allowed to reply to the other. This seems to be how the BBC have dealt with Brexit, effectively using the approach adopted to party politics, especially in General Elections, with the two main parties getting equal air time. So, for every ‘remain’ statement there is a ‘leave’ response and vice versa and this supposedly ensures impartiality.

The trouble is, this doesn’t really work very well for Brexit.

Many of the technical issues of law, public policy, political theory and economics around Brexit don’t sit well with normal electoral senses of balance.

Taking economics, whilst it is not a precise science – if indeed it is a science at all – the overwhelming balance of opinion amongst economists, including those employed by the Government, is very clear: Brexit will be economically damaging and the main debate is the extent of the damage. Yet ‘balance’ suggests that the pro-Brexit minority of economists be given equal billing with the anti-Brexit majority.

So the BBC policy of “balance” creates a false equivalence – placing verifiable facts from one side of the Brexit debate against airy assertions from the other to create an illusion of balance. So economists who quote the government’s own predictions of a Brexit penalty of between 2-8% of GDP must be “balanced” with the wildly optimistic predictions of Brexit economist Patrick Minford.

Giving equal time in these circumstances suggests equal weight can be found in each argument which is clearly not the case.

And in any number of brexit panels or discussion shows before the referendum and even now in the panel shows with just one year to go, audience members believed and still believe that the economic evidence is equally split.

Audience members believed there was as much to be said on one side as the other and so voters might as well toss a coin on the economic issues. This seemed to be true regardless of whether the people were for, against or undecided about Brexit and I believe was a direct result of the ‘balanced’ approach to reporting by the BBC on issues or topics which are fundamentally unbalanced.

As a minimum, the BBC reporter should challenge the outlying view to make clear it is exceptional and by no means mainstream. people are allowed to believe in fairies and fairy tales, but they need to have it clearly explained that this is what they’re choosing to believe. Fairy tales are not documentaries.

There is another and perhaps more subtle point: the boundaries around what was and wasn’t part of the ‘campaigns’ were not clear. This was shown by, for example, coverage of Obama’s ‘back of the queue’ intervention, treated in many BBC bulletins as if it was statement by the ‘remain’ campaign with a response given from a ‘leaver’. Actually,it was an important new fact – the fact being not that Obama was necessarily right in what he said, but this was the view of the US president – to which both sides should have been asked to respond. Not doing so was subtly to endorse a key Leave campaign claim that the opposition was not simply the Remain campaign but the massed ranks of the global ‘establishment’.

Also, beneath this is a deeper and probably much more controversial point: almost all of the factual arguments made by the Leave campaign were untrue (£350M a week for NHS, Turkey is joining the EU etc.) but ‘balance’ required the BBC to treat them as being as valid as the opposing arguments.

Typically in an electoral campaign the division is between competing claims of ‘what we should do’, and those can reasonably be treated equally. They may often draw upon disputed facts, of course, but that’s almost always because the facts are susceptible to reasonable differences in interpretation. It could be argued that maybe the Leave campaign’s ‘take back control’ slogan was of that sort.

What was meant by “taking back control” could be regarded as a matter of opinion and could be treated in that way. Are people talking about border control, about control of immigration numbers?

But the same isn’t true of the £350M claim for well-attested reasons, and indeed the BBC’s Reality Check said so. But what it didn’t do was report as headline news that it was not true in the same way as it would (if necessary) report that the claims the earth was flat are untrue.

Yet, for all the indeterminacy around economics and politics, the £350M claim – which, don’t forget, was one of its headline slogans, is still periodically defended by Boris Johnson and is being recycled as the ‘Brexit dividend’ by the government – was as untrue as saying the earth is flat. It was just a matter of arithmetic, but couldn’t be treated as such by the BBC because it was regarded as a matter of opinion, to be treated in a balanced way.

The consequence was that the ‘let’s take back control’ and the ‘let’s spend £350M a week on the NHS’ slogans were treated in the same way, when they were entirely different kinds of claim even though they appeared to be versions of the same thing (i.e. if we take back control then we can spend £350M a week more on the NHS).

Due impartiality would have led to them being treated differently (one as debatable, the other as untrue); balance meant that they were both treated as being legitimately debatable.

Even if ‘General Election’ approach to balance could be justified during the Referendum, it’s less defensible in ‘normal’ news reporting rather than campaign reporting. Here what matters is what gets reported and what doesn’t and/or with what prominence. Such judgments are invariably difficult and contestable, but my overall sense is, again, that the BBC have erred towards a subtly pro-Brexit stance.

A recent example of under-reporting was the heavily criticised lack of coverage of large anti-Brexit marches in various cities. It’s difficult to be sure, but I think that had comparably sized pro-Brexit marches occurred they would have been more prominently reported. With more certainty, it can be said that other broadcasters gave the marches more prominence, and did so earlier, and that exactly the same criticism was made of the lack of BBC coverage of an anti-Brexit march in March 2017.

There was also a striking lack of coverage and follow up reporting by the BBC of Christopher Wylie’s appearance in front of the Commons culture committee with folders of evidence alleging Vote Leave’s overspend during the referendum.

As Wylie made a convincing case that Vote Leave had distorted our democracy with data and cash, news sites across the world, from Canada to Denmark, began to run the story prominently. But not the BBC, which initially tucked his evidence into a report about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal to appear in front of the same committee. The corporation did just enough to cover itself but in reality it was pressing the mute button and that, too, has implications for our democracy.

To take a converse case, last August the BBC gave prominent coverage to the Patrick Minford and Economists for Free Trade (formerly, Economists for Brexit) report claiming huge benefits from hard Brexit. The question arises as to why their work was selected for coverage? It was not new work but based on work that had been reported before the referendum,  re-published in new form. Secondly, the underlying work had been heavily and extensively criticised by several leading economists from the LSE and Sussex University amongst others.

Thus, however it was covered, it is questionable whether it should have been covered at all. That is not, as Nick Robinson suggested at the time, a ‘censorship’ argument – every day all kinds of research are put into the public domain but it’s not censorship that very few are selected for reporting by the BBC. I am not certain, but my memory is that no other broadcaster gave any prominence to this story. As a minimum, any coverage of the re-formatted report should have been presented with clear caveats about it’s nature as an economic outlier, closer to fairy tale than fact.

This feeds into a wider issue of the prominent platform given by the BBC to certain pro-Brexit figures. The most egregious example is the joint highest tally of 32 appearances on Question Time by Nigel Farage, which continued even after he ceased to be UKIP’s leader. UKIP being a political party whose membership could probably all fit into a very tiny garden shed.

It has also emerged that the only MEPs who have appeared on Question Time since 2012 are from UKIP, with the sole exception of the equally pro-Brexit Tory MEP Daniel Hannan. UKIP’s voter numbers (at least until recently) may have justified representation on the programme and that since they have had no MPs (except, for a short period, Douglas Carswell who defected from the Tories), it would be to their MEPs that the BBC would have to turn. But that doesn’t explain the absence of the MEPs of other parties.

UKIP has been represented on Question Time in a staggering 24% of the programmes since 2010, compared with just 7% for the Green Party.

And obviously since being nearly wiped out in the last General Election, UKIP’s voter numbers couldn’t justify any appearances on mainstream news programmes.

UKIP aside, the BBC seems to give an extraordinarily regular platform to Jacob Rees-Mogg, and this goes back to well before he was the chair of the ERG which is sometimes given as the justification for the attention given him. He is hardly the only pro-Brexit Tory backbencher, let alone the only Tory backbencher, and yet his presence is ubiquitous on the BBC. Of course, he features on other news outlets as well but – again, it’s only my impression, but something that the BBC could easily verify – to nothing like the same extent. Maybe this isn’t so much pro-Brexit bias as some idea that he is an ‘entertaining character’ perhaps along with Nigel Farage.

If so, that is to miss the serious political intent his persona conceals. At all events, there is no one individual on the remain side to whom the BBC gives the same exposure and this means that even if each Rees-Mogg appearance is balanced with a remainer, the public are not presented with a readily identifiable speaker – another subtle but significant skew towards the Brexiters.

There is another issue about the BBC’s extensive use of Rees-Mogg, especially since the Referendum. He, like other regularly featured Brexiters such as Iain Duncan Smith and Bernard Jenkin, is not a member of the government. The LBC journalist and presenter James O’Brien recently made the point that the government are unwilling to put up ministers to defend Brexit policy.

In their absence, Brexiters outside the government get used instead.

But that is a major failure of political accountability and, as O’Brien says, it would be better to empty chair the government rather than to use proxy spokespeople. For that matter, if such proxies are to be used, why almost invariably look only to the Ultra Brexiters of the ERG? There are, after all, many who support Brexit but in its soft rather than hard variant and by ignoring them the BBC, again subtly, skews not just towards Brexiters but to the most extreme amongst them.

Beyond who is on programmes, there is also a problem in the way that they are interviewed. The first is that of interviewer bias, but again I think this is a far more subtle matter than is sometimes acknowledged. I don’t think it is a problem in itself that journalists in the BBC or elsewhere have discernible political views. We expect them to be serious, thoughtful people and serious, thoughtful people have opinions of their own. I certainly don’t pretend to know for sure, but I have the impression that, for example, Sky’s Faisal Islam and Jon Snow of C4 News are remain-inclined, whereas I have the impression that John Humphrys and Andrew Neil of the BBC are leave-inclined.

Having their own personal views isn’t an issue, but what is an issue is how it affects their conduct. Taking that BBC duo, I have never heard Andrew Neil conduct an interview on Brexit which is not tough and well-briefed, regardless of what side of the debate the interviewee is on. To my mind (and I’m not alone) he’s an exemplar of effective political interviewing, and if I suspect he has opinions I disagree with that’s neither here nor there. John Humphrys, by contrast, inserts his own implicit views about Brexit rather obviously, and that does affect the way he conducts interviews – recent examples include his widely complained about interview with Tony Blair and, most bizarrely, his asking the Swedish Ambassador if Sweden will end up speaking German after Brexit. Humphrys has a particular importance, because he is perhaps the Corporation’s most senior journalist, and Today is an agenda-setting programme, so in a way he is the flagship political interviewer and his conduct has a significant reputational consequence for the BBC.

The second issue about interviews is more structural than personal. Whereas the BBC has some truly excellent journalists specialising in the EU and Brexit – Katya Adler, Adam Fleming and Damian Grammaticus all come to mind– the headline interviews are almost invariably undertaken by generalists. Understandably, they don’t always have enough knowledge to hold interviewees to account on technical issues. To take a basic example, politicians talking – as very many do – about ‘access to the single market’ should always be, but rarely are, taken to task. Everyone has access to the single market, the issue is on what terms. The largely unchallenged use of the term has seriously damaged public understanding, since access is compatible with any and every version of Brexit.

Much the same could be said about persistent confusions on basic issues such as goods vs services, tariffs vs non-tariffs or border control vs freedom of movement. No doubt this is not just a problem for the BBC but it’s notable that, for example, Faisal Islam, Sky’s Political Editor, was able to extract significant new information in an interview with Theresa May last April, precisely because whilst being a generalist (in the sense of covering the full spectrum of politics) he is also very well-versed in the technicalities of Brexit.

It might be said that the issue of specialist knowledge is as relevant for interviewing remainers as it is for Brexiters, and so this doesn’t signify anything for impartiality. But, again, it’s more subtle than that. The Brexiter case is very often that it will be simple, quick and technically easy (e.g. to secure a trade deal) whilst the remainer case is often that it will be difficult, slow and technically complicated. It’s very difficult without specialist knowledge to probe assertions that things will be simple because the interviewer needs to know the complexities to put the counter-case; by contrast, it is fairly easy to probe assertions that things will be complicated since it can be done by putting forward the simplicities as the counter-case. So, in this very subtle way, the high profile set piece interviews are almost invariably easier on Brexiters than remainers.

My overall sense is that what has happened at the BBC, going back over at least the last ten years or so, is that it has been stung (or perhaps worn down) by the very vocal criticism of the anti-EU movement and of the political right more generally. I think that reports alleging liberal-left bias, such as that by the Centre for Policy Studies, relentless accusations of the same charge from the right wing and Eurosceptic press, as well as from insiders such as Andrew Marr, Peter Sissons and, yes, John Humphrys, led it to a kind of ‘liberal guilt’ which has even been described as self-hatred (this as far back as 2006). That sense of a kind of cultural bias

This was the backdrop to the BBC Trust’s impartiality review of 2013, with the UK’s relationship with the EU identified as one key strand for review (the others being religion and ethics, and immigration), and I think that at least since then the BBC has bent over itself backwards to avoid accusations of pro-EU and, in the current landscape, anti-Brexit bias. About time too, its Brexiter critics will say. But there are two problems.

First, the research undertaken for the 2013 review actually showed that the evidence pointed in the other direction, both as regards EU coverage and the other issues, something reflected in the report.

Even so it has led to a need always to compensate for a crime even if it hadn’t actually been committed. So by pushing even a little further away from anything that could be accused of being a pro-EU stance the BBC has actually become more imbalanced.

And the second problem is that, despite doing this, the BBC is still accused of having an anti-Brexit bias reflecting, I think, the fact that for a very vociferous group of people in politics and the media anything other than uncritical cheerleading for Brexit  will be regarded as bias against Brexit.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made against the BBC. I suspect that when historians come to tell the story of Brexit they will conclude that the BBC’s coverage played a part in the outcome of the Referendum and of the subsequent process. I think they will conclude that a combination of liberal guilt that grew out of the climate in the years before the Referendum, and of the misapplication of a certain conception of balance during and after the Referendum, led to a subtle skewing of the news agenda in favour of Brexit and/or against remain.

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Political, Rants&Rambles

Enough with the lies

Is there anyone alive today in the UK who is not absolutely sick to the teeth of brexit, and with no sign of an end, or even the beginning of the end in sight. And yet there is no escape from recurrent lies.

Yet again, Boris Johnson brings out of the cupboard the idea that we can save ourselves £350m a week or £18bn a year once we’re out of the EU and spend that money on the NHS instead.

Yet again, responsible people point out that this is a lie, that there is no truth to the £18bn figure and once again a group of plonkers in on-line forums says, “Yes, but…” and happily repeats the figure as if it were true.

Repeating it doesn’t make it true. Pointing out that people are just telling lies, surely they must know by now that there is no truth to the figure, just seems to make them double down.

They seem to just not understand the numbers, any numbers:

The £5bn rebate is never paid to Brussels ie. of the £18bn gross figure you are mis-quoting, £5bn stays in the UK and is spent (or not) entirely at the discretion of the UK government.

Of the actual payment to the EU, the £13bn net figure paid to Europe, an additional £4.4bn is paid back to the UK in the form of agricultural payments etc.

& also in addition £1.4bn more is paid back to the UK in terms of payments to universities etc in the form of scientific research

& on top of that, the EU pays £1bn in lieu of us paying our foreign aid commitments directly.

The net payment to the EU is around £7-8bn. which fades into insignificance compared to our trade with the EU.

& if people want to talk about trade with the EU versus opening up of supposed trade outside of the EU, then in addition to direct UK-EU trade, people really should take into account the loss of around 70 free trade agreements negotiated by the EU that we disappear when we leave with the likes of Canada, S Korea etc plus the free trade agreements in the pipeline with Japan etc.

None of this is rocket science or even remotely contested.

Why can’t people just cope with the facts as they are rather than telling lies? It is the stupidity that grates most in the end. There is no economic argument for leaving the EU; there just isn’t one to be made.

You could make other (I believe fatuous) arguments around sovereignty and the obviously xenophobic, most likely racist argument against immigration made primarily by people living in areas of low to no immigration.

But there is no economic argument that stands any scrutiny whatsoever. You won – get over it.