#Brexit Betrayal

[pointless-letters]

The word you’re looking for is “radicalised”

[mariacallous]

The Times has a rather odd piece today about Radek Sikorski, the new Polish foreign minister. Headlined “Why Poland’s new foreign minister reminds people of Boris Johnson,” it points out that Radek, like Johnson and indeed David Cameron, went to Oxford and joined the Bullingdon Club.

Well, yes, he did, and thank you for reminding us, but we should not hold that against him because there is one glaring and obvious difference between Boris Johnson and Radek Sikorski. Unlike so many Conservatives and Republicans, Sikorski did not succumb to populism. His return to power in Poland is an optimistic moment as it came as part of the regime change that drove the crank right law and justice party from power.

Sikorski fell out with Johnson over Brexit. He knew perfectly well that Johnson did not believe in leaving the EU because had Johnson had told him as much. But then 2016 rolled along and Johnson realised that Brexit was the cause that could propel him to power.

The story of their relationship is told by Sikorski’s wife Anne Applebaum in her memoir Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, one of the best accounts of the rise of the new right in Europe, the UK and the US I have read.

When I gave it a glowing review in the Observer, a few readers complained. Why was I praising a conservative? I pointed out that her background meant that she understood the extent of the right’s betrayal of free markets and free societies better than any leftist. Give me a compromised insider over a purist outsider any day. The insiders know where the bodies are buried.

Here is what I wrote

Anne Applebaum can look at the wreck of democratic politics and understand it with a completeness few contemporary writers can match. When she asks who sent Britain into the unending Brexit crisis, or inflicted the Trump administration on America, or turned Poland and Hungary into one-party states, she does not need to search press cuttings. Her friends did it, she replies. Or, rather, her former friends. For if they are now embarrassed to have once known her, the feeling is reciprocated.

Applebaum’s latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends, opens with a scene a novelist could steal. On 31 December 1999, Applebaum and her husband, Radosław Sikorski, a minister in Poland’s then centre-right government, threw a party. It was a Millennium Eve housewarming for a manor house in the western Poland they had helped rebuild from ruins. The company of Poles, Brits, Americans and Russians could say that they had rebuilt a ruined world. Unlike the bulk of the left of the age, they had stood up against the Soviet empire and played a part in the fall of a cruel and suffocating tyranny. They had supported free markets, free elections, the rule of law and democracies sticking together in the EU and Nato, because these causes – surely – were the best ways for nations to help their people lead better lives as they faced Russian and Chinese power, Islamism and climate change.

They were young and happy. History’s winners. “At about three in the morning,” Applebaum recalls, “one of the wackier Polish guests pulled a pistol from her handbag and shot blanks into the air out of sheer exuberance.”

Applebaum was at the centre of the overlapping circles of guests. For the Americans, she was a child of the Republican establishment. Her father was a lawyer in Washington DC and she was educated at Yale and Oxford universities. Now her Republican friends are divided between a principled minority, who know that defeating Trump is the only way to save the American constitution, and the rest, who have, to use a word she repeats often, “collaborated” as surely as the east Europeans she studied as a historian collaborated with the invading Soviet forces after 1945.

Even when she was young, you could see the signs of the inquiring spirit that has made her a great historian. She went to work as a freelance journalist in eastern Europe while it was still under Soviet occupation and too drab and secretive a posting for most young reporters. She then made a standard career move and joined the Economist. But it was too dull for her liking and she moved to the Spectator in the early 1990s. The dilettante style of English conservatism charmed her. “These people don’t take themselves seriously and could never do serious harm,” she thought, as she watched Simon Heffer and his colleagues compete to see who could deliver the best Enoch Powell impersonation. She came to know the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriter John O’Sullivan, figures taken with unwarranted seriousness at the time. They had helped east European dissidents struggling against Soviet power in the 1980s and appeared to believe in democracy. Why would she doubt it? How could she foresee that Scruton and O’Sullivan would one day accept honours from Viktor Orbán, as he established a dictatorship in Hungary, whose rigged elections and state-controlled judiciary and media are now not so far away from the communists’ one-party state.

What was life in the English right like then, I asked in a call to her Polish lockdown in that restored manor house in the countryside between Warsaw and the German border. “It was fun,” she said.

It isn’t now.

Her husband knew Boris Johnson. They were both members of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. She assumed that he was as much a liberal internationalist as Sikorski was. When the couple met Johnson for dinner in 2014, she noted his laziness and “all-consuming narcissism”, as well as the undoubted charisma that was to seduce and then ruin his country. In those days, Johnson appeared friendly. He was alarmed by the global challenge to democracy, he told them, and wanted to defend “the culture of freedom and openness and tolerance”. They asked about Europe. “No one serious wants to leave the EU,” he replied, which was true enough as Johnson was to prove when he came out for Brexit.

As for the Poles at the party, they knew Applebaum as a friend who had co-authored a Polish cookbook, and published histories of communism, which never forgot its victims.

Today she is a heretical figure across the right in Europe and America. Many of her guests would damage their careers if they admitted to their new masters they had once broken bread at her table.

Heretics make the best writers. They understand a movement better than outsiders, and can relate its faults because they have seen them close up. Religions can tolerate pagans. They are mere unbelievers who have never known the way, the truth and the light. The heretic has the advantages of the inside trader. She can use her knowledge to expose and betray the faithful. One question always hangs in the air, however: who is betraying whom? Although Applebaum has left the right, and stopped voting Conservative in Britain in 2015 and Republican in the US in 2008, she can make a convincing case that the right betrayed her.

In person, Applebaum combines intense concentration with an exuberant delight in human folly. You can be in the middle of a deadly serious conversation and suddenly she will break into a grin as the memory of a politician’s hypocrisy or an incomprehensible stupidity hits her. As the western crisis has deepened, the intensity has come to dominate her writing as she provides urgently needed insights.

You can read thousands of discussions of the “root causes” of what we insipidly call “populism”. The academic studies aren’t all wrong, although too many are suspiciously partial. The left says austerity and inequality caused Brexit and Trump, proving they had always been right to oppose austerity and inequality. The right blames woke politics and excessive immigration, and again you can hear the self-satisfaction in the explanation.

Applebaum offers an overdue corrective. She knows the personal behind the political. She understands that the nationalist counter-revolution did not just happen. Politicians hungry for office, plutocrats wanting the world to obey their commands, second-rate journalists sniffing a chance of recognition after years of obscurity, and Twitter mob-raisers and fake news fraudsters, who find a sadist’s pleasure in humiliating their opponents, propelled causes that would satisfy them.

Applebaum let out a snort that must have been heard for miles around her Polish home when I mentioned the journalist and author David Goodhart’s pro-Brexit formulation that we are living through an uprising by the “people from somewhere” against the “people from nowhere” – a modern variant on the old communist condemnations of “rootless cosmopolitans”, incidentally. It’s a war of one part of the elite against another part of the elite, she says. Brexit was an elite project. “The game was to get everyone to go along with it”. Were all the southern Tories who voted for it a part of the oppressed masses? “And who do you think funded the campaign?”

She is as wary of the commonplace view that supporters of Trump, say, are conformists, who have been brainwashed online or by Fox News. They may be now in some part, but brainwashing does not explain how populist movements begin. Their leaders weren’t from small towns full of abandoned shops and drug-ridden streets. They were metropolitans, with degrees from Oxford in the case of Johnson and Dominic Cummings. The men and women Applebaum knew were not loyal drones but filled with a dark restlessness. They may pose as the tribunes of the common people now but they were members of the intellectual and educated elite willing to launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite.

Populist activists are outsiders only in that they feel insufficiently rewarded. And their opponents should never underestimate what their self-pitying vanity can make them do.

One of Applebaum’s closest Polish friends, the godmother of one of her children, and a guest at the 1999 party, provided her with the most striking example. She moved from being a comfortable but obscure figure to become a celebrated Warsaw hostess and a confidante to Poland’s new rulers. She signalled her break and opened her prospects for advancement with a call to Applebaum within days of the Smolensk air crash of April 2010. She let her know she was adopting a conspiracy theory that would make future friendship impossible.

Outsiders need to take a deep breath before trying to understand it. Among the dead was Lech Kaczyński, the president of Poland, who controlled the rightwing populist party Law and Justice with his twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński. The party has grown to dominate Polish politics, and the supposedly independent courts, media and civil service. The flight recorder showed that the pilot had come in too low in thick fog, and that was an end to it. Jarosław Kaczyński and his underlings insist that the Russians were behind the crash, or that political rivals in Warsaw, including Applebaum’s husband, allowed the president to fly in a faulty plane, or that it was an assassination. Repeating the lie was the price of admission to Law and Justice’s ruling circles and the public sector jobs they controlled. As Applebaum noted in the Atlantic magazine: “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie – it’s to make people fear the liar.” Acknowledge the liar’s power, and your career takes off without the need to pass exams or to display an elementary level of competence.

Other friends from the party showed their fealty to the new order by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories. The darker their fantasies became, the more airtime Polish state broadcasters gave them. “They had not suffered or been ‘left behind’ in any way,” Applebaum says. Yet they happily worked for propaganda sites that targeted her family. Because she is married to a political opponent of Law and Justice, and because she writes critical pieces in the international press, Applebaum, who had faced no racism in Poland until Law and Justice came to power, was turned by the regime’s creatures into the clandestine Jewish coordinator of “anti-Polish activity”.

I once believed you should never let politics destroy a friendship. But that maxim depends on politics not turning into a danger to you and those you love. Applebaum could not stay friends with women who would not protest as the state they supported went for her and husband.

The Anglo-Saxon world is not so different from Poland and Hungary. Britain has handled Covid-19 so disastrously because only servile nobodies, willing to pretend that a no-deal Brexit would not harm the country, could gain admittance to Boris Johnson’s cabinet. As Johnson politicises the public sector, showing “fear of the liar” looks like becoming the best way to secure a job in the higher ranks of the civil service as well. American Republicans have had to go along with every lie Trump has told since his birther slur on Barack Obama. As for breaking friendships, British Jews broke theirs when they watched friends in Labour cheer on Jeremy Corbyn and thought: “If they ever came for me and my family, you would stand by, wouldn’t you?”

Careerism is too glib an explanation for selling out, and Applebaum is too good a historian to offer it. Likewise, bigotry and racial prejudice were never enough on their own to move her friends away from liberal democracy. Among Applebaum’s acquaintances is one of Orbán’s greatest cheerleaders. She has a gay son, but that has not stopped her espousing the cause of a homophobic regime. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News presenter, became one of the earliest supporters of Trump, despite the fact that she has adopted three immigrant children.

Rather than grab at standard explanations, Applebaum understands that a society based on merit may sound fine if you want to live in a country run by talented people. But what if you are not yourself talented? Since the 1950s, criticisms of meritocracy have become so commonplace they have passed into cliche. Not one I have read or indeed written stops to consider how one-party states represent the anti-meritocratic society in its purest form. Among her friends who became the servants of authoritarian movements, Applebaum sees the consequences of the lust for status among resentful men and women, who believe the old world never gave them their due.

They were privileged by normal standards but nowhere near as privileged as they expected to be. Talking to Applebaum, I imagined a British government abolishing press freedom and the independence of the judiciary and the civil service. I didn’t doubt for a moment that there would be thousands of mediocre journalists, broadcasters, lawyers and administrators who would happily work for the new regime if it pandered to their vanity by giving them the jobs they could never have taken on merit. Hannah Arendt wrote of the communists and fascists that they replaced “first-rate talents” with “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity” was the best guarantee of their loyalty. She might have been talking about contemporary Poland, Britain and America.

“Given the right conditions any society can turn against democracy,” Applebaum says, and explains why better than any modern writer I know. To the political consequences of offended vanity – Why am I not more important? Why does the BBC never call? – a sense of despair is vital. If you believe, like the American right, that godless enemies want to destroy your Christian country, and prove their malice by not giving you the rewards you deserve, or think, like Scruton and the Telegraph crowd of the 1990s, that English culture and history is being thrown in the bin, and you are being chucked away with it, or agree with the supporters of the new tyrants of eastern Europe that a liberal elite is plotting to extinguish your culture by importing Muslim immigrants, and proving its contempt for all that is decent by laughing at you, then any swine will do as long as the swine can stop it. You will pay any price and abandon any principle in the struggle against a demonic enemy.

Shouldn’t she have seen it coming, I ask her. Shouldn’t she have realised that the world she inhabited included authoritarians, who would turn on her and everything she believed in. Typically, instead of huffing, puffing, and trying to pretend she has never been in the wrong, she laughs and admits that she probably should have asked harder questions sooner of her former friends.

Readers should be glad she bided her time. Applebaum can bring a candle into the darkness of the populist right precisely because she stayed on the right for so long. She does not know whether it can be beaten. She’s a journalist not a soothsayer. But I know that if you want to fight it, her writing is an arsenal that stores the sharpest weapons to hand.

[jackoshadows]

Game of Thrones did remind me a lot of British culture and history in terms of Sansa’s xenophobic rants against the Dothraki and Unsullied - who came to help the North from an existential apocalyptic threat and ended up dying in large numbers - being very similar to Brexit Britain.

The othering language used by the Starks - ‘She’s not one of us’. The backstabbing and betrayal of an ally come to help. Brexit was and is as nonsensical as Sansa’s entire ‘Northern independence’ shtick. The way Sansa had no issues feeding the Vale army but complained about feeding the Dothraki and the Unsullied reminds me of the likes of Rees Mogg, Nigel Farage and the UKIP party talking about immigrants and refugees.

And it really is discomforting to realize that a lot of people are fictionally for a UKIP party’s xenophobic hated of others given their rhetoric and support for show Sansa’s actions in GOT. It’s fascinating just in general how easily people fall in anglo-centric/imperialistic/colonial/racist/po-monarchial mindsets when you put a pretty face on the brochure!

ASoIaF on the other hand is fundamentally different to GOT in it’s narrative themes and the story it’s telling with the fight against the allegory for climate change - the Others - being more important than which noble family gets to rule over the Smallfolk. That has consistently been the message of the books.

I’m not an “American First” (and maybe because I read science fiction) I’m a “Terran First”. I’m a human being first. And I have this sympathy for other human beings no matter what side of the giant ice wall they happen to be born on. - GRRM

When dead men come hunting in the night, do you think it matters who sits the Iron Throne?” - Jeor Mormont

Why can't it be both?" Meera reached up to pinch his nose.

"Because they're different," he insisted. "Like night and day, or ice and fire."

"If ice can burn," said Jojen in his solemn voice, "then love and hate can mate. Mountain or marsh, it makes no matter. The land is one." - Jojen Reed

“Are you certain that I have not forgotten some? The ones about the king and his laws, and how we must defend every foot of his land and cling to each ruined castle? How does that part go?” Jon waited for an answer. None came. “I am the shield that guards the realms of men. Those are the words. So tell me, my lord— what are these wildlings, if not men?” - Jon Snow

The shield that guards the realms of men. Ghost nuzzled up against his shoulder, and Jon draped an arm around him. He could smell Horse’s unwashed breeches, the sweet scent Satin combed into his beard, the rank sharp smell of fear, the giant’s overpowering musk. He could hear the beating of his own heart. When he looked across the grove at the woman with her child, the two greybeards, the Hornfoot man with his maimed feet, all he saw was men. - Jon Snow

I also think we need to be consistent and if we are talking about Northern independence or Dornish independence or just the dissolution of the 7 kingdoms from the Iron Throne etc, then these discussions should also include the Iron Islands and Ned Stark/Stannis Baratheon crushing the Greyjoy rebellion and taking Theon Stark as a child hostage so that they would not fight back again. There is no one family or one house in the morally right here. They are ALL feudal lords fighting for power and for their house.

[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

Edwin Hayward

@edwinheyward

(Long - please expand the tweet.)

1. The Tories will keep on wrecking things faster and faster as the GE approaches. They'll act like irresponsible teenagers who know they don't have to clean up in the morning after a wild drunken binge.

Why?

A) It's their last chance to firehose cash at their friends and cronies.

B) It's an opportunity to further feather their own nests before they're out of office.

C) It stuffs Labour even more - we'll return to this soon enough.

D) The more chaos they cause and the more scandals they trigger, the less chance there is of any one case of wrongdoing being investigated.

From a Tory POV, the best stuff to break is anything that's unfixable. For instance, the closure of all train ticket offices. Once those have been turned into coffee concessions and the staff fired or moved elsewhere, both the facilities and the expertise will be gone for good.

2. Regardless of actual policies, Labour will win the GE on a desperate tide of people wanting to Get The Tories out. However (and this will prove vital later) their future freedom to manoevre will be severely limited by the bright red lines they've been laying down on stuff like Brexit.

Related aside: Remember, the losing party has a blank slate. The electorate thumbed their noses at the manifesto, so they have total freedom to bin it. ("Nobody liked what we had to offer, so we need to do something different.") But this isn't true of the winning party. Even though pledges do get broken and manifesto commitments forgotten, they are still constrained by what they promised to win office.

3. Labour will start trying to fix the stuff the Tories broke. It will prove very expensive. Mending stuff is always more expensive than breaking it. It will be slow going too. And Labour will be trapped by the need to be "fiscally responsible" in a way the Tories never would, because our mainly RW media is waiting to tear them a new one if they spend as much as a single brass penny without accounting for where it came from.

Related aside 2: Is the political playing field level when it comes to British media? Absolutely not. It's totally unfair. But this is a known known, so Labour have to find ways to win - and win repeatedly - despite being hobbled by the press.

4. Labour will try to Make Brexit Work. The RW tabloids will tear bigger strips off them than usual, painting even minor concessions as a Great Betrayal. (If you're not paying attention, you need to realise that the tabloids pillory Labour every. single. day. So this will be a ramping up rather than a different attitude.)

Related aside 3: Since anything Labour does to "undo Brexit" will be portrayed as a betrayal, no matter how insignificant, they might as well take huge lumbering steps rather than teeny tiny ones. It won't make the tabloids more rabid than they're inevitably going to be.

5. Make Brexit Work won't. Work, that is. You might as well try and put the toothpaste back in the tube after you brushed your teeth with it. Brexit is inherently unworkable by its very nature. The small improvements won't be nearly enough for Rejoiners, will infuriate still-Leavers, and will barely move the dial on Britain's Brexit problems.

Related aside 4: Young voters who came of voting age since the referendum already break 86/14 in favour of Rejoin. By the time we get through a first Labour term, anyone under 32 will be overwhelmingly keen to re-enter the EU.

6. Meanwhile, Labour will also have to spend more and more and more to keep stuff from literally falling apart. Think sewers, water pipes, collapsing schools, crumbling hospitals. The legacy of Tory underinvestment has played havoc with already fragile infrastructure. Again, stern questions will be asked about where the money is coming from.

7. The rump of the Tory party, whatever's left after the GE wipeout, will sit on the sidelines laughing and jeering. "Typical Labour. Always spending money they don't have." They will point to every single broken thing, claiming they're all Labour's fault - and the RW media will amplify the message.

8. If they're very lucky, Labour will go into the GE-after-next with the overall situation in Britain slightly better than when they took office. We'll only be knee-deep in metaphoric (and maybe literal) sewage, rather than thigh-deep.

9. The Tories and RW press will continue their tag-teaming attacks. ("Same old Labour. Can't be trusted with the economy. Can't get anything working. Can't even fix Brexit, despite all their lofty promises.)

10. GE2: Electric Boogaloo.

Labour are stuck. The taunts about their flagship Make Brexit Work policy hit home - because they're true. And that lubricates the way for all the other lies the Tories and the RW media are spinning about them to slip down like honey.

If Labour pivot towards SM/CU/Rejoin to try to win GE2, they might as well tattoo "we wasted the last 5 years and prolonged the damage because we didn't know what the hell we were doing" on their foreheads. They may pivot anyway, because the alternative is even worse. This is where those bright red lines (remember them?) will come back to bite them in the fundament so hard, they won't be able to sit down for a month. The press will scream "U-turn" and again it will be absolutely true: a U-turn so big, it's visible from the Moon.

Related aside 5: There's no Get the Tories Out vote in GE2. Why? Because they're already out. The impetus to keep them out won't win over disgruntled voters who already lent their votes to Labour once with gritted teeth, despite Labour not doing what they wanted on things like Brexit and PR.

11. Labour lose GE2. A one-term wonder, and they're done. The Tories do what they do best: they blame all Britain's ills on Labour, and start wrecking the country afresh with a clean slate. Heck, they're still bleating about the "No money left" letter today, so we know exactly how this stuff plays out.

Related aside 6: From the standpoint of history, being PM is perhaps 100x more important than being Leader of the Opposition. A place in posterity for eternity is the grand prize that even very rich people can't buy (though their wealth can certainly help towards attaining it). So Keir Starmer won't be nearly as disappointed as you might imagine. If he makes it a full term, that's already longer than May, Johnson, Truss (!) and Sunak managed. His standing is assured. Put another way: his incentives are not our incentives.

12. Another ruinous decade or so of Tory rule. (We know how hard it is for Labour to win. They need the Tories to mess up so badly that a tide of outrage carries them over the finish line. That tide is unlikely to rise again over a term dominated by constant reminders of "Labour's failings" playing out 24/7 in the RW press and on RW TV and radio.)

Deep breath. Have a coffee and a biscuit. You've earned them. We've seen the problem. Now it's time to tackle the solution.

Scroll back up through the scenario above. Notice how Brexit runs through it, like a vein pumping poison.

That's why Labour need to change their fundamental attitude towards Brexit, and they need to do it now - not just before the GE.

Stop ruling things out. Not saying you won't do something isn't the same as saying you will do it. Read the previous sentence a few times - it does make sense. Think along the lines of "Labour will do whatever it takes to mitigate the damage Brexit is causing Britain". The actual message can be polished by the pros. It's the intent that matters. Without the red lines on SM/CU/Rejoin, anything becomes possible.

By making the change now, it blunts the moaning in the media. Why? Because it dilutes the impact of the u-turn over a year or more, rather than concentrating it into the last month of intense scrutiny just before the GE.

The other vital ingredient is PR.

Simply put, PR is the only hope we have of achieving any sort of long-term stability.

Why? Because many of the problems Britain faces will take 2, 3, 4+ election cycles to fix. And they need fixing. But the only conceivable way of unlocking the time to fix them is to form long-term partnerships in the national interest. In other words, PR.

PR rids us of the short-termism mindset that has dragged Britain down for decades. Though the exact balance in Parliament will change from GE to GE, even under PR, a coalition will almost certain be possible without involving the Tories or other RW parties. It is better to have a share of power forever than absolute power for a few years before the other lot come in and undo everything you worked towards.

Related aside 7: Don't think of GEs in terms of a 5-year cycle. When the party in power changes, their first year is spent trying to pick through the mess and understand what's going on. And the final year of every 5-year cycle is focused on the next GE. So there are really only ever 4 (and more often 3) years of actual governing possible under FPTP in every 5-year election cycle.

Summary: Labour needs to adopt a completely different attitude to Brexit (stop ruling stuff out, and make the change now) and move to introduce PR.

Phew, we're very nearly done. Congratulations on making it this far.

In parting: You may disagree with what you just read. You probably will. But please take a big step back and evaluate whether your disagreement is because it's just too horrible to think about the real world in the stark terms I painted above. Also, please consider whether your support for a particular party is blinding you to the reality of what they can hope to achieve in a short 5-year (really 3) period in office.

Thanks for your interest, and have a great day.

By @edwinheyward

(P.S. If you found the above interesting, please RT to share this with others.)

[hjohn3]

Quiet Radicals or Fiscal Fools? The Dilemma of Starmer’s Labour

‘Consistency is all we ask… give us this day our daily mask’ - Tom Stoppard

Splits by Blower. Source: X

By Honest John

IT HAS become a political truism to describe Keir Starmer’s Labour as opaque, vision-free, untrustworthy and craven. It is not particularly hard to see why. Ever since standing on a Corbyn-lite platform in order to win the Labour Party leadership in 2020, Starmer’s tenure has been characterised by “ditching”, “diluting”, “rowing back” and “moving beyond” pledge after pledge, commitment after commitment. Cleaving to Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rule, committing Labour to have brought down public debt relative to income by the end of its first term in office, Labour appears to have made fiscal rectitude a financial fetish - a “reassurance” to presumed Tory voters tempted to switch to Labour at the general election, that the party won’t trash the economy by embarking on an unfunded spending spree when in office. In the minds of many of the leadership’s critics however, this iron discipline has so constrained the party’s room for manoeuvre that it will, on paper at least, be instituting £20bn of public spending cuts in its first year in office, given its commitment to maintain Conservative spending plans. Ignoring opinion polls which indicate Labour is on track for a majority of 1997 proportions, the leadership seem determined to promise nothing whatsoever, while also claiming to be a transformational government when in office. For many on the left, this is simply not good enough: after 14 years of Tory social vandalism, with the very infrastructure of the country apparently on the point of collapse, implied promises to maintain Jeremy Hunt’s Austerity 2.0 is a betrayal of voters who look set to give Labour its first majority in nearly 20 years and are hoping for meaningful change from the dead end into which Toryism has driven the country. Many leftists now openly espouse the view that Labour and the Conservatives are essentially the same: both are neo-liberal entities committed to a deregulated, low-wage and low-tax economy, whose political platforms consist of tinkering at best with the marketised state established by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

To test the veracity of this despairing conclusion, most eye-catchingly articulated by journalist Owen Jones who, having very publicly left the Labour Party, is now intending to campaign actively against Labour MPs and candidates at the general election, we need to focus not on Labour’s dropped commitments, but on what remains of its policy offer and set that against the requirements of the fiscal rule. Will Labour, like New Labour, who became rather more left wing in office, surprise its critics and reveal itself to be a government of quiet radicals, or will it indeed apply its self-imposed fiscal strait jacket literally, and so box itself in, that transformational change will be impossible? Will Starmer’s Labour ultimately be viewed by history as a fiscally foolish government, that maintained the miserablist legacy of Sunak and Hunt and achieved nothing of worth in a brief and embarrassingly short period in power?

If Labour do win the next general election, it will be in no small part to the sudden and visible collapse in public services: the chickens of 14 years of austerity coming home to roost, and bringing the whole hen house of the Thatcherite model tumbling down with them. For clear, existential, reasons, it is the state of the NHS that most concerns the public. The failure of the Boris Johnson government to deliver the funding dividend to the health service supposedly made possible by Brexit, is viewed as a grievous betrayal by many who voted Tory in 2019. The frustration of an exponential increase in mean waiting time for elective procedures combined with a horror at ambulances not turning up in time to save lives, has destroyed the public’s faith, carefully curated by David Cameron in his austerity messaging to “protect” the NHS, that the Tories can be trusted to do anything other than preside over serial neglect when it comes to health services. The King’s Fund estimates the NHS needs an annual increase in funding of 3.3% (approximately £5bn per annum) just to stay still. Labour’s fiscal rule would appear to rule out any such increase, and yet the party is committed to funding two million additional elective and diagnostic procedures in its first year in government; 700,000 additional dental appointments, 8,500 additional mental practitioners, to be recruited in the course of its first term and a doubling of CT and MR imaging capacity as well as, more controversially, expanding elective surgical capacity by utilising private hospitals. If enacted, this would represent the biggest expansion in healthcare provision since 2000, and given its targeting and lack of obsession with structures and internal markets that wasted so much of the additional funding associated with Blair’s NHS Plan, it could make a material difference to elective waiting lists in relative short order. There is dispiritingly little being said by Labour about the need to rectify the catastrophic defunding of social and community care in the austerity years, which is the root cause of crowded A&E Departments, blocked beds and delayed ambulances, but despite this glaring omission, the Labour health offer is not insubstantial.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment to Labour supporters hoping for radical change after the election was Labour’s dropping of its commitment to fund fully its Green Prosperity Plan. The Plan was the pivot on which so much transformational change hung and, dropped because the right wing press had turned the £29bn per annum required to fund it into an attack line, the heart seemed to have been ripped out of the Starmer project for little discernible political gain. Nonetheles, Labour remain committed to £24bn spend on green energy in the course of the Parliament, in stark contrast to Sunak’s witless defunding of Tory net zero commitments in his frantic search for a culture war he might actually win, and to the establishment of Great British Energy, a publicly owned research and provision company which would represent the UK’s first venture into public ownership since the 1970s. What has also survived is the Corbynite policy of establishing a National Wealth Fund, something that looks suspiciously like a Keynesian vehicle to attract and direct inward investment, and quite possibly the engine for genuine attempts to “level up” the deindustrialised towns and communities of England and Wales. Hardly the stuff of neoliberal orthodoxy.

Then there is Labour’s New Deal For Working People - a commitment to increase the Living Wage, legislate for fair pay, ban zero hour contracts and the oppressive tactic of “hire and rehire” utilised by unscrupulous employers, and even a hint that the most restrictive trade union laws in Europe might be revisited. This would represent the biggest rebalancing of the economy in favour of workers since New Labour’s introduction of the Minimum Wage. Taken with Labour’s plans to introduce an Industrial Strategy Council, and its stated intention to devolve decision making powers for the English regions to the Mayoralties, we may see the beginning of post-Brexit active management of the economy by the state. The commitment to a Wilsonian programme of affordable house building is at piece with this, an ambitious attempt to rebalance the housing market whose artificial pumping up of asset prices has been a boon to the better off. If we throw in some class war tit bits like ending charitable status for public schools, getting rid of the hereditary peers and clamping down on tax evasion, we have the contours of a very recognisably Labour administration, to the left of New Labour and streets away from the libertarian chaos of Tory Britain. An emerging government perhaps of quiet radicals.

And yet - there remains that wretched fiscal rule, which Reeves and Labour spokespeople mention every other sentence. Taken at face value, if maintained and implemented, little of Labour’s health or remaining green energy proposals would survive; furthermore the chances of the “iron chancellor” allowing the sort of regional fiscal independence that would make devolved powers worth having to the Mayors and local government, look remote at best while the rule remains in place. Whenever faced with the illogicality of this position, Reeves and her acolytes parrot the mantra that public services will be funded by “growth” while being unable to point to a single Labour policy that will stimulate that growth. The fact of the matter is that Labour’s current offer is dishonest. Labour in power, on the basis of its current policies, can indeed be a genuinely innovative government of renewed social democracy. On the other hand, it can equally be a faithful curator of a busted economic system whose “rules” remain defined by the money markets, neo-liberal economists and the right wing press, but it cannot be both. As Tom Stoppard memorably had his characters complain in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, sooner or later, the opportunistic masks have to stop being replaced and consistency of offer will have to be achieved.

Quiet radicals or fiscal fools? As scrutiny of Labour as a government-in-waiting in the last seven months before a General Ellection increases and these questions become more and more focused, the ever-opaque Keir Starmer may find himself forced to make up his mind.

14th April 2024

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

Starmer promises continued austerity during speech to unions representing exploited workers

Multi-millionaire Keir Starmer’s speech to the TUC today was marked by a bizarre claim that his own sister is a care worker doing 14-hour days and struggling every week – Yes, every week’ – to ‘make ends meet’.

But it also contained a shameless and hardly-disguised shout-out to billionaires and corporations to tell them not to worry, Starmer and his party are no threat to their interests

The message has already been thoroughly flagged by various comments from Starmer and his drones, but today he put the icing on the cake.

Jeremy Corbyn already won the argument on austerity, with even Tory voters supporting ideas of renationalisation, investment and the reconstruction of our social safety net – and was defeated only because of the Brexit betrayal of Starmer and his allies and sabotage by right-wing Labour staff.

Now Keir Starmer is frantically trying to unwin that argument and assure the obscenely rich and those exploiting us that they needn’t fight against him getting into Downing Street – because he has every intention of maintaining business as usual, no matter the cost or hardship to the many.

[skippyv20]

What people fail to recognise is that brexit was marketed as something that it never became. People aren’t anti immigration as such, but more anti illegal immigration where showing up gets you a hotel room, bumped to the top of the council housing list, benefits, and virtually no accountability whereas people who’ve emigrated here legally (like mine and many others parents/grand/greats etc.) and worked for everything being entitled to nothing and still facing genuine discrimination (no dogs/blacks/Irish, my mother was paid less than her white colleagues for the same job, my father when promoted in his work was told “I’m not going to be managed by a black man” and yes this was in the 70&80s), feel a reasonable sense of betrayal as do those born here who are repeatedly overlooked by the system, living in coastal towns and cathedral cities with a sudden influx of men in particular who have a dim and predatory view of western culture and treat young women like meat, why isn’t there more outrage about the rapes happening? There seems to be some fear of calling this BS out, and Brexit was sadly poorly marketed, messy, and should’ve been more provisional for those who aren’t part of the criminal underworld. I’m a remainer for my own reasons but I can see and understand why some voted to leave (don’t get me wrong there’s a lot of racism embedded in some leave voting perspectives however they aren’t the only perspective). Our government has for some reason allowed this country to become the worlds safe haven…there are many other safe countries but we’ve been betrayed by a greedy government and misguided social justice types who want to save all the “innocent fleeing persecution” from the Middle East and Europe which simply isn’t the case. Brexit and Megzit have no correlation, this was about Europe and her unwavering influx of a very negatively impactful minority of people (drugs, money laundering, people trafficking, etc.) who unfortunately have tarnished the reputation of decent normal Europeans who just want to work and live and likely escape poverty in their own country because the infrastructure simply isn’t there, makes you wonder why so many left and continue to leave their countries in droves for a better life because there’s simply nothing at home for them which is sad, and the sign of a larger problem. Brexit was poorly designed and badly executed and has nothing to do with RMM, it’s pathetic to watch every little thing now be seen as anti this or that or somehow prejudice. We have racism in this country, and intolerance, always have and likely always will. However it’s not from the majority of citizens, and for some people their intolerance comes from a place of deep resentment for being overlooked, underfunded, and sidelined by their government, it’s bound to create resentment and feelings of anti immigration when you see the massive problems arising from a small number of people and our government is literally funding it. Why? That’s the key question here. Because our politicians and wealthy elite will never have to live amongst the people they are blindly giving a privileged life to, it just doesn’t make sense. Again, why? And lastly, Rachel, brexit never was and never will be about you. Change the record.

Thank you! Excellent post!❤️

[ailsacraigfannishness]

Happy Monday

In no particular order:

Had a revelation about the male lead of my WWII novel; ultimately he'll suffer a betrayal as devastating as Obi-Wan did, but the novel is his origin story. This poor guy.

If you like the Smiths, Rick Astley + Blossoms performing *an entire set* of their songs at Glastonbury is a revelation.

My period showed up randomly and I have so much rage.

Marching with work at London Pride this weekend and in classic disaster bisexual fashion, I only just ordered some bits and bobs from Etsy, half of which will undoubtedly get stuck in customs because Brexit.

But hey, at least I'm leaning in to the chaos.

[epitome-the-burnkid-viii]

🧩The good, bad, weird, & wild! Fortified with music & movies!!!📺 Welcome to the 🎱#youtuberecommendedchronicles🔮 Come find my shows #SupplementalBroadcast & #PanPanenPiousPropheticPonderings on YouTube & Rumble!🎟️ #CurrentEvents #History #TheGreatResist #Philosophy #TheGreatAwakening 🤙🏽

[thefree-online]

Send a clear message to the UK State on Thursday:DON’T VOTE.

Oh what a difference fifteen years makes. What did Dave ‘Plank’ Camerlot want in 2009? He wanted change.Yes!! What is Steer Calmer selling in 2024? Change. And that’s it. Crammed into those fifteen years 0f the Ukraine cease-fire betrayals, the attempts to scuttle Brexit, the bioweapon scandals surounding Biden and Zelenskyy, the Covid 19 virus […]Send a clear message to the UK State on…

[3lub]

Starmer launches Labour's manifesto, Brexit betrayal and will Farage uni...

[mariacallous]

Eight years ago Ruaridh Hanna was so staunchly opposed to Scottish independence that he celebrated wildly when the referendum results came in.

The 28-year-old, from Inverness, had been part of the campaign for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom back in 2014.

But fast forward to the present and he has come full circle.

Now a paid-up member of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Hanna represents a segment of no-to-yes voters that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon hopes will tip the balance in any future referendum on independence.

So what made him switch?

Hanna tells Euronews that after Scots rejected independence by 55.3% to 44.7%, people were "cautiously optimistic" about London's promises of further devolution, which would have given Edinburgh more autonomy within the UK. 

But, he claims, “Westminster started wheeling all that back" and that eventually "nothing happened at all”.

“I go so far as to call it a betrayal,” he said, claiming that the powers which had been transferred to Scotland were only “surface changes”.

Following the 2014 No Vote, the 2016 Scotland Act gave Edinburgh more say over its income tax, welfare, railways and oil and gas activity, with then Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael saying the UK had "kept its end of [the] historic bargain."

However, despite pledging "extensive new powers" for Scotland, Westminster still controls some 70% of the country's taxation and 85% of its welfare spending, according to the SNP.

‘I am a European first and foremost’

But Hanna is far from the only one. 

In fact, polls show that support for independence has steadily narrowed since 2014, with many no voters or abstainers now wanting to cut their country's 314-year union with England.  

Another “big wake-up call” for Scots was the UK’s 2016 referendum on whether to leave the European Union.

Unlike in England and Wales which produced strong majorities in favour of withdrawing from the bloc, 62% of Scots voted in favour of remaining.

“Scotland clearly wanted to remain in the EU but it has been dragged out against our will,” said Hanna, claiming the decision had created staffing shortages and severely damaged the Scottish economy.

The economic impact of Brexit is disputed, with others arguing that the Coronvarius pandemic and Ukraine war are also damaging the UK economy.

Apart from economics, some Scots' “European identities” had influenced their decision to switch sides.

In 2014, John Craig, 25, voted no to independence, over concerns that leaving the UK would result in Scotland dropping out of the EU.

Soon to become a student at the time, he was particularly worried about losing the opportunity to study abroad as part of the EU’s ERASMUS exchange programme.

When the UK left the bloc, which terminated the European study abroad programme, Craig was unable to go and study in the Netherlands and Germany, as he had planned.

“I changed my mind mostly because of Brexit,” he said. “From that point on, I thought to myself: 'I just don't want to do this anymore. Why am I letting all this happen in my name?'”

“If we have the opportunity to vote again I would vote for independence one hundred per cent,” he added.

Craig, now a classical musician, said he was saddened by the “loss of cultural exchange” because of Brexit.

“We are losing out on all of this cultural enrichment,” he said. “It is incredibly upsetting for me to watch.”

Although some EU officials have said an independent Scotland would be welcomed into the bloc, Edinburgh could have to wait up to 10 years to re-join and the decision would “inevitably” lead to the emergence of a hard border with England, according to an Insitute for Government study.

‘UK government is morally reprehensible’

A previous “scandal-ridden government” in Westminster also pushed Scots away from the UK.

Glaswegian Cher MacDougall, a 55-year-old full-time carer, once described herself as a “soft unionist”, though she became an avid supporter of independence, partially due to the UK’s last prime minister.

“I have never seen a government so utterly morally reprehensible,” she said in July. 

“I can't believe what I am seeing,” she added. "They get worse every day."

MacDougall made these comments when ex-PM Boris Johnson was in power. He resigned in July 2022 after his Conservative government was rocked by several scandals, involving drunken parties at Downing Street while the country was in COVID lockdowns.

MacDougall, whose parents immigrated to the UK, disapproved of several recent government policies, especially the temporarily-blocked plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Yet she was also worried about Westminister's stance on the proposed second referendum, which Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon plans to hold next year.

“This is a union, not a hostage situation,” said MacDougall. “If we want to have independence, we should be able to make our own decisions.”

Sturgeon has earmarked 19 October 2023 as the date when she wants to hold a second vote, although London has so far ruled it out. 

In August, UK PM Liz Truss said she would "never, ever" allow the UK to be split up. 

‘Look at where the UK is going’

All of the interviewees agreed that independence now seemed “less of a risk” because of the political developments in the UK over the last seven years.

Explaining his decision to initially vote no, Hanna said: “In 2014, there was a sense of security [in staying in the UK]. Sticking with the status quo felt like the safest thing to do. Independence was very much of an unknown.”

While recognising that these risks still existed, he claimed that Brexit and the current political conditions in the UK had changed his cost-benefit calculation.

“When I was campaigning, people used to ask me can Scotland afford to be independent? I think the question we should be asking is can Scotland afford to be dependent?”

Polling on whether Scotland would vote to leave the UK in a second referendum repeatedly shows a marginal lead for the "no" camp, though this gap has narrowed significantly over the years. 

In a Savanta ComRes poll from October, 45% of Scots would now say yes to independence, with 46% against and 8% undecided.

The Conservatives and Scottish Conservatives have both been approached for comment.

[novumtimes]

Brexit live updates: David Cameron to be grilled over Gibraltar deal amid anger over border plan

Brexit betrayal: David Cameron set to sell Gibraltar out in EU ‘capitulation’ Sign up to our free Brexit and beyond email for the latest headlines on what Brexit is meaning for the UK Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight Foreign secretary David Cameron is set to give evidence to MPs and members of the Commons European scrutiny over the planned treaty for Gibraltar. Both…

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Brexiteers Vowed to ‘Take Back Control’ of U.K. Borders. What Happened? by Mark Landler

By Mark Landler Record numbers of legal immigrants came to Britain from outside the E.U. in recent years. Some on the right call that a “Brexit betrayal.” Published: December 23, 2023 at 12:01AM from NYT World https://ift.tt/5j2THtk via IFTTT

[businesspr]

Brexiteers Vowed to ‘Take Back Control’ of U.K. Borders. What Happened?

Record numbers of legal immigrants came to Britain from outside the E.U. in recent years. Some on the right call that a “Brexit betrayal.” source https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/world/europe/uk-brexit-migration-sunak.html