Finally, the Tories are discovering the state can be a force for good

Martin Kettle in The Guardian


 

Illustration by Mitch Blunt


According to WH Auden, all good dramas consist of two contrasting acts: “First, the making of a mistake; then, the discovery that it was a mistake.” A similar corrective arc often also applies in politics. On the issue of the progressive role of the state, the late-20th-century Conservative party made a historic mistake. Now it is struggling with the dawning of discovery.

The single most obvious thing to say about the Tory party in autumn 2018 is that it is split over Brexit. But the significance of the Tory divide on Brexit, and its tendency to dominate all aspects of domestic political coverage, masks another internal argument – one that is more important in terms of the party’s history, and may hold the key to its future too.

This second argument is about the necessary role of government in shaping economic and social policy. One way or another, this is an issue that has woven its way through Conservative history since the late 18th century. Tory leaders from William Pitt the Younger to Theresa May have confronted it. Philip Hammond’s budget this week was a striking embodiment of why the issue is both enduringly important and still politically unresolved.

His budget was not the end of austerity. But it was unquestionably a decisive move away from it. If the austerity doctrine of 2010-18 had still been in full force, the £68bn windfall in government receipts over the next five years announced this week would have been overwhelmingly used to get the finances back in the black by the mid 2020s as planned. Instead, the normally cautious Hammond chose to spend the lot, mainly on the NHS, but also in a cluster of short-term giveaways and to pump another £15bn into the economy next year.

This would not have happened in the previous eight years. It has happened because May is trying to reposition her party more centrally on domestic policy in the aftermath of the Brexit deal she hopes to secure. May herself would probably have gone further this week.

May and Hammond are not trying to “out-Corbyn Corbyn”, as former chancellor George Osborne put it this week in an interview in which he offered a mea culpa on the EU referendum but not on austerity. But they see the need to counter the Labour leader. This was in many respects a holding budget, but it placed anti-austerity options in tax and spending and in the role of government back on to the Tory agenda.

May and Hammond are a bit like a couple circling a roundabout in their car, debating which route to follow, but clear which one they should no longer take.

This is where Auden’s point comes in. Many times in its pre-1975 history, the Conservative party found its way, often against its supporters’ instincts and interests, towards strengthening the role of government in rebalancing the economy in favour of the poor and the moderately waged. From Robert Peel’s reintroduction of peacetime income tax in 1842 onwards, the one-nation tradition was the key to the party’s famous ability to reinvent itself.

The problem the modern Tory party faces is not confined to the unpopularity of austerity. Its roots lie in the period after 1975, when Margaret Thatcher – massively aided by the press – captured the party with her rejection of postwar Keynesianism in favour of an agenda of privatisation, small government, tax cuts and individualism. It won the Tories four successive elections. But it was also massively destructive and divisive.

The Conservatives have not won a decisive general election majority since Thatcher did so in 1987. John Major, David Cameron and May have all led weak governments. In spite of efforts by all three, the party seems unable to move decisively beyond Thatcherism or to reconnect fully with its one-nation past at a time when it is needed. As one senior Tory put it bluntly to me recently: “We will never win a clear majority while we remain in thrall to Margaret Thatcher.”

  Harold Macmillan: many of today’s Conservative MPs relate to his approach. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

Brexit is tightly bound in to this problem. Most ardent Brexiteers are ardent Thatcherites, just as most Thatcherites are Brexiteers. Many of the most threadbare of the Brexit fantasies – those about easy free trade deals, a no-deal break with the EU, Singapore-style deregulation and Britain’s supposedly enhanced standing in the world – contain ghostly echoes of Thatcher.

But the central issue is political economy. In 1938, Harold Macmillan warned the Tory party: “Unless we can continue this peaceful evolution from a free capitalism to planned capitalism, or, it may be, a new synthesis of capitalist and socialist theory, there will be little hope of preserving the civil, democratic and cultural freedoms.” No Tory MP would write in such terms today. But the essence of this warning remains valid on many levels 80 years on.

Today’s party contains more MPs who relate to Macmillan’s approach than you would ever guess from the constant publicity given to the Brexiteers. The most prominent of these is May herself, with her repeated – but unfulfilled – commitment to the section in the 2017 manifesto that said “government can and should be a force for good – and its power should be put squarely at the service of this country’s working people”.

May is not alone. Justine Greening said this week that the Tories should “get into the centre ground” and that they had not properly connected with the public in more than 30 years. George Freeman wrote in September that aspirational professional voters under 45 are rejecting the old politics. “Unless the Conservative party reconnects with them, we risk becoming a rump party of nostalgic nationalists,” he claimed. Nicky Morgan wrote last month that “we cannot secure growth in the 21st century by following a 20th-century model”. Jesse Norman, in his recent book on Adam Smith, writes: “It is easy to forget the central importance of the state in his thought, as protector of the nation, adjudicator and enforcer of justice … provider of public works, infrastructure and local schools, and, yes, as regulator of markets.” Most of the 2010 and 2015 Tory intakes share these instincts.

These MPs do not have identical views. But they all share the crucial recognition that government is, as the US writer Garry Wills puts it, “a necessary good not a necessary evil”. If Labour people tend to be too starry-eyed about government, too many Tories, influenced by Thatcher’s aberrant period of power, tend to be unduly distrustful of it. The public, who depend on good government, do not share either view.

The most interesting current question in British politics is this: what comes after May’s Tories and Corbyn’s Labour? My guess is that a large part of the answer will depend on the road May and Hammond decide to take off the roundabout to which they have belatedly returned this week.

Rudd’s career lays bare the new rules of power: crash around and cash out

The ex-home secretary’s rise and fall is typical of an inexperienced elite that regards ordinary people with contempt writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

At least one consolation remains for Amber Rudd. Drummed out of the Home Office, she can now spend more time in her constituency of Hastings: the same seaside resort she found irresistible because “I wanted to be within two hours of London, and I could see we were going to win it”. Yet Rudd loves her electorate, rhapsodising about some of them as people “who prefer to be on benefits by the seaside … they’re moving down here to have easier access to friends and drugs and drink”.

Relax. I come neither to praise nor to bury Rudd, but to analyse her. Or, rather, to place her in context. What stands out about this latest crash-and-burn is how well it represents the current Westminster elite, even down to the contempt for the poor sods who vote for them.

Rudd exemplifies a political class light on expertise and principle, yet heavy on careerism and happy to ruin lives. All the key traits are here. In a dizzying ascent, she went from rookie MP in 2010 to secretary of state for energy in 2015, before being put in charge of the Home Office the very next year. Lewis Hamilton would kill for such an accelerant, yet it leaves no time to master detail, such as your own department’s targets. Since 2014 Sajid Javid, Rudd’s replacement, has hopped from culture to business to local government, rarely staying in any post for more than a year. Margaret Thatcher kept her cabinet ministers at one department for most of a parliamentary term, but this stepping-stone culture turns urgent national problems – such as police funding and knife crime – into PR firefighting.
Another hallmark of this set is the disposability of its values. Cameron hugs Arctic huskies, then orders aides to “get rid of all the green crap”. As for Rudd, the May cabinet’s big liberal, she vowed to force companies to reveal the numbers of their foreign staff, stoking the embers of racism in a tawdry bid to boost her standing with Tory activists. Praised by Osborne for her “human” touch, she was revealed this week privately moaning about “bed-blocking” in British detention centres.

And when things get sticky, you put your officials in the line of fire. During the Brexit referendum, Osborne revved up the Treasury to generate apocalyptic scenarios about the cost of leaving. While doomsday never came, his tactic caused incalculable damage both to the standing of economists and to the civil service’s reputation for impartiality. Rudd settled for trashing her own officials for their “appalling” treatment of Windrush-era migrants.

None of these traits are entirely new, nor are they the sole preserve of the blue team. At the fag end of Gordon Brown’s government, the sociologist Aeron Davis studied the 49 politicians on both frontbenches. They split readily into two types. An older lot had spent an average of 15 years in business or law or campaigning before going into parliament – then debated and amended and sat on select committees for another nine years before reaching the cabinet.

The younger bunch had pre-Westminster careers that typically came to little more than seven years, often spent at thinktanks or as ministerial advisers. They took a mere three years to vault into cabinet ranks. This isn’t “professionalisation”. It is nothing less than the creation of a new Westminster caste: a group of self-styled leaders with no proof of prowess and nothing in common with their voters. May’s team is stuffed full of them. After conducting more than 350 interviews with frontbench politicians, civil servants, FTSE chief executives and top financiers, Davis has collected his insights in a book. The argument is summed up in its title: Reckless Opportunists.

Davis depicts a political and business elite that can’t be bothered about the collective good or even its own institutions – because it cannot see further than the next job opportunity. In this environment, you promise anything for poll ratings, even if it’s an impossible pledge to get net migration down to the tens of thousands.

Good coverage matters more than a track record – because at the top of modern Britain no one sticks around for too long. Of the 25 permanent secretaries in Whitehall, Davis finds that 11 have been in post less than two years. Company bosses now typically spend less than five years in the top job, down from eight years in 2010. Over that same period, their pay has shot up from 120 times the average salary to 160 times. Bish bash bosh!

There is one field that revels in such short-termism: the City. What emerges from Reckless Opportunists is the degree to which City values have infected the rest of the British elite. Chief executives are judged by how much cash they return to shareholders, even if that means slashing spending on research and investment. Ministers either come from finance (Rudd, Javid) or end up working for it (Osborne and his advisers).

Promise the earth and leave it to the next mug to deliver. Crash around, cash out and move on to the next job. State these new mantras, and you see how Jeremy Corbyn, whatever his other faults, can’t conform to them. You can also see how he poses such a threat to a political-business elite reared on them.

Soon after May moved into No 10, she famously declared: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.” The press wrote it up as her threat to migrants. Yet the more I think about it, the more accurately I believe it describes her own shiny-faced team, her own poisonous politics, her own self-serving elite.

Windrush saga exposes mixed feelings about immigrants like me

Abdulrazak Gurnah in The FT

In 1968, soon after arriving in England from Zanzibar as an 18-year-old student, I was talking with a friend while a radio played in the background. At some point we stopped talking and listened to a man speaking with tremulous passion about the dangers people like me represented for the future of Britain. 

It was Enoch Powell and we were listening to a clip of his “Rivers of Blood” speech. I knew little about British politics and did not know who Powell was. But in the days and weeks that followed, I heard him quoted at me by fellow students and bus conductors, and saw television footage of trade union marches in his support. 

I have lived in Britain for most of the past 50 years and have watched, and participated in, the largely successful struggle to prevent Powell’s lurid prophecies about race war from coming true. But it would be foolish to imagine that all is set fair for the future of Britain and its migrant communities, because every few weeks we are provided with another example of the obstinate survival of antipathy and disregard. The treatment of the children of the “Windrush generation” who moved to the UK from the Caribbean several decades ago is the latest such episode. 

The injustice is so staggering that Theresa May, the prime minister, and Amber Rudd, the home secretary, have been forced to apologise. But the consequences for Caribbean migrants who grew up in Britain of the “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants could hardly have been news to them. 

In 2013, at the instigation of the Home Office, vans emblazoned with the message “Go home or face arrest” drove around parts of London with large immigrant populations. It may not have been intended that the clampdown on illegal immigration would snare such embarrassing prey as children of migrants who spent a lifetime working in the UK; but political expediency required that this small complication be ignored until it went away. That it has not is a result of the work of welfare, legal and political activists to make sure that the abuses against migrants and strangers are kept in plain sight. 

Before the second world war, there was no law to restrict entry or residence in Britain for people who lived in her colonial territories. That is what it meant to be a global empire, and all the millions who were subjects of the British crown were free to come if they wished. There was no need to worry about controlling numbers because, if they became a problem, they were sent back, as happened after the race riots in various British port cities in 1919. In a rush of imperial hubris, the British Nationality Act was passed in 1948 to formalise the right of British colonial subjects to enter and live in the UK. 

If the 1948 law was a desperate recruitment poster for cheap labour disguised as imperial largesse, the purpose of the successively meaner pieces of immigration legislation that began in 1962 was to slow and ultimately stop the arrival of dark-skinned former subjects of the British crown. It continued Britain’s centuries-long prevarication between sanctuary and xenophobia. 

Why has the Windrush saga been so embarrassing for the government? The answer has to do with Britain’s fraught relationship with the Caribbean and a history of racial terror instigated and supervised for centuries by British money and power. Caribbean institutions are still largely modelled on British ones and, until recent disillusioning decades, the Caribbean sense of identity was linked with a connection to the British empire. It is remarkable that this should be so given the brutalities of the plantation economies that prevailed in the Caribbean territories. This is an ambivalence that Caribbean intellectuals have reflected on for more than a century. The most perfunctory browse through the writing of the region will provide examples of its intricate legacy. 

What is now referred to as the Windrush generation was far from homogeneous. It included peasant workers, nurses, teachers, writers and artists. They came in response to the recruitment drive and because they were ambitious for a better life. They are in Britain for the same reasons that all migrants are here. 

In time they brought their children, and those children grew up, were educated and worked all their lives in this country. As any stranger knows, particularly if he or she is black in Europe, it is vital to keep your paperwork in order. What recent events have shown is that not all the children of the Windrush generation did because they were confident that they were at home and had no need to prove their right to be here. It seems they reckoned without the ruthless politics of contemporary Britain, in which xenophobia and hatred do not repel, but instead win votes. 

The Windrush saga has made headlines this week, but it has been going on for months — the bullying letters, the threatening sanctions against employers, the loss of employment, the withdrawal of benefits and healthcare, the detention and expulsion. Bullying in pursuit of bringing down the immigration numbers is never just or humane. But it is wrong to deny these people what are evidently their moral and legal rights. Their contribution to British society and culture has been immense. 

When it became clear the law had caught the wrong people, someone should have called a halt instead of pressing on with the bullying. As Sentina Bristol, the mother of Dexter, a 57-year-old man born a British subject in Grenada who died after several months of going through this process, observed of the government in a recent interview: “They are intelligent people, they are people of power. We expect better from them.”

An Alternative View - The Gas Attack on Douma, Syria

Robert Fisk in The Independent


This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks – and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world – despite all the doubters – is perfectly genuine.

War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.

As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?

By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the coming weeks.

France, meanwhile, has said it has “proof” chemical weapons were used, and US media have quoted sources saying urine and blood tests showed this too. The WHO has said its partners on the ground treated 500 patients “exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”.

At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they lacked the correct UN permits.

Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars.

So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.

I first drove into Douma as part of an escorted convoy of journalists. But once a boring general had announced outside a wrecked council house “I have no information” – that most helpful rubbish-dump of Arab officialdom – I just walked away. Several other reporters, mostly Syrian, did the same. Even a group of Russian journalists – all in military attire – drifted off.

It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic – “Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.

“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”

Independent Middle East Correspondent Robert Fisk in one of the miles of tunnels hacked beneath Douma by prisoners of Syrian rebels (Yara Ismail)

Oddly, after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find one who showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the Western air attacks. Two actually told me they didn’t know about the connection.

But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma attack.

The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.

Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.

There were food stalls open and a patrol of Russian military policemen – a now optional extra for every Syrian ceasefire – and no-one had even bothered to storm into the forbidding Islamist prison near Martyr’s Square where victims were supposedly beheaded in the basements. The town’s complement of Syrian interior ministry civilian police – who eerily wear military clothes – are watched over by the Russians who may or may not be watched by the civilians. Again, my earnest questions about gas were met with what seemed genuine perplexity. 

How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that “news” in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them. Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy – as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues – and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?

They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Ms May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?

The Skripal affair: a counter view

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

IF one were to anchor a TV programme with the archival revelation that it was Benazir Bhutto who introduced Theresa May’s husband to the future British prime minister at an Oxford reunion ball in 1976, many of us would perhaps happily spend a lot of our precious time glued to the looped and re-looped discussion.

On the other hand, if one were to ask whether Prime Minister May posed a bigger threat to a stable world order than does President Donald Trump it would likely pass for a precipitous canard. This despite that fact that we are ever so often cautioned about the rear view mirror in the car: the objects one sees may be closer at heel than they appear. The warning can be easily applied to international politics.

What we see, or believe we are seeing, can be different from what is afoot. What seems distant or remote could be the trigger for what passes for domestic turbulence. Astute social scientists call it dialectics, whereby everything in the world can be connected with everything else.

Take the poisoning of the double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury or consider the latest chemical attack near Damascus in the rebel-held region of Douma. There are legitimate ways of seeing a link between the two. But the way the avenues of news and information have been dumbed down, it would be a challenge to engage an average citizen in a discussion on what to them would be a distant blip on their mirror, if not an imagination of a foggy mind.

So let us quickly come to the facts at hand, and we can crosscheck them too. It is a fact, after all, as distinct from false news, that Trump was elected US president in November 2016. Wasn’t he? Then his election was soon declared to be the handiwork of Russian agents. Right?

Indeed, Trump continued to annoy the deep state. He wanted to befriend Vladimir Putin and questioned the purpose of Nato. He went a step further. He began to question intelligence reports passed to him or leaked to the public.

Then came Theresa May to the rescue of the deep state with its roots on both sides of the Atlantic. When Trump in his pre-political avatar was misbehaving with women, May was already her country’s home secretary. She held that position from 2010 until she was elevated to lead her party and country in July 2016.

Her tenure as home secretary saw the destruction of Libya and the savage assault on Syria. Even more importantly, she was in the cockpit when the Crimea crisis erupted. And she had a good view of it even if she may have been privately appalled at the less than robust response that Nato was willing to offer Russia.

When she became the first foreign leader to visit President Trump on Jan 26 last year, Ms May was nursing another headache on the tour. And so her round trip to the White House included an equally vital stopover in Turkey on the way back. Leaders of both countries on her itinerary were allies of Nato and both were veering perilously close to Vladimir Putin. In a jiffy, she saw the centuries-old British policy of garrotting Russia slipping under her feet.

The mirror on the driver’s side may be telling us to watch out for Donald Trump, who everyone, including most Americans, agrees is speeding ahead rather recklessly on an uncharted trajectory. The mirror on the other side though is showing us a blip, and in a lane where it shouldn’t be. As far as the naked eye can see, the more threatening blip looks like Theresa May. Stated bluntly, Trump may be a decoy.

Double agent Sergei Skripal was swapped by Russia with the US in 2010 and sent for safekeeping to UK. There are some questions about his illness the Russians have asked, including the question: what purpose could it serve to bump off a used- up Russian double agent on the eve of a presidential election, or just ahead of the World Cup that Russia will be hosting? There can be a legitimate suspicion that Skripal and, unwittingly, his daughter fell victim to a strike by someone whose cover Skripal had blown.

But we could also ask, on the other hand, whether it is impossible for another country to replicate the poison that one country has manufactured. The question holds the key when the other side claims to know what that poison is. In other words they have the substance or can produce it to develop an antidote or, why not, to keep it in store for a useful false flag attack. This is not how it happened. This is how some questions come to mind.

A poor scientist died of smallpox in England, after all, when a laboratory accidently released the virus in 1978. The cause of Janet Parker’s infection sent shockwaves through the medical profession. It was reportedly accepted at the time that the virus had travelled through an air duct connecting a smallpox lab with Janet’s office directly above.

To assert that both attacks — in Salisbury and in Douma — can be blamed on Russia, is to state the obvious. A more involved discussion could look at the rise of John Bolton as the new national security adviser to Trump. He has advocated war with Iran, and the alleged Syrian chemical attack may tie up with that objective, as a ruse.

But why has Trump changed his tune on Russia? Has the deep state got the goods on him, in a manner of speaking? If so, Theresa May should have a better grip on the narrative. It was a former British agent in Moscow, after all, whose report is said to have brought the president of the United States to his senses, if that is the word.

Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.

The government audit shows racism can be endemic even in the absence of racists


Trevor Phillips in The Financial Times


If Theresa May’s challenge to her own government on race equality does nothing else, it should take some of the terror out of talking about racial difference. Her government’s compendium of data about ethnic minorities’ experience across 130 public service areas, published this week, confronts us with a baffling puzzle: in a society demonstrably more open-minded than a generation ago, why do race and ethnicity remain such powerful pointers to an individual’s place in society?

You do not have to be a specialist in race relations to know that your doctor is more likely to be a Sikh than a Somali. Most of us can see that people from certain backgrounds — South Asians, Chinese — are more likely than others — African Caribbeans, Pakistani Muslims — to wind up as chief financial officers of big companies.

Sir John Parker, in a review that concluded this week, called out the paucity of non-white leaders in Britain’s top companies, confirming what most business leaders know: there are many available candidates but black and brown faces still do not turn up in the boardroom — except perhaps when they come to clean.

White Britons remain cautious about making such observations, for fear of being held personal responsible for racial inequalities. People of colour stay silent because nobody wants to sound like a grievance-monger. The race audit could be the best chance in years to break the silence.

Ministers have anticipated the charge of stirring up minority resentment by releasing a flood of data, some of which show that whites too can be at a disadvantage. White boys, for example, are far less likely to get in to a good university than the proverbial hijab-wearing Bangladeshi-heritage girl. By acknowledging that some differences might turn out to be intractable, Mrs May’s injunction that disparities should either be explained or eliminated could encourage a more open debate.

Some critics suggest that the audit will undermine minorities’ faith in public services. This underestimates the common sense of most people of colour. We do not live to complain about racism. On the contrary, we factor it into our daily lives, shrugging off discourtesies. But forbearance should not be confused with compliance. The data show that people of colour are right to have low expectations of their treatment by the healthcare system, the police or the courts. Their resentment should not be a surprise.

The audit is far from complete. Crucially, it tells us nothing about the UK’s most important economic issue — low productivity. Yet race relations can have a profound impact on the workplace.

A US survey shows that more than a third of white-collar employees think discussing race is off limits in the office, even though staff of all races think it affects their prospects. Blacks and Latinos believe their ethnicity holds them back; whites fear a word out of place will torpedo their careers. Annual appraisals have become stilted affairs: white bosses worry that too critical an assessment will land them in the dock for bigotry. Poor performance goes unchallenged and mediocrity protected.

The data released this week have all been available before. But together they could revolutionise our understanding of racism. Since the 1999 Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, the official doctrine has been that pretty much everyone everywhere was wrapped up in a racist conspiracy, even if they did not know it.

If that is true, how can we explain the fact that every measure of racial hostility has declined steadily over the past 40 years but there has been no corresponding fall in racial disadvantage? The answer is that most racial disadvantage is not the product of individual attitudes. Even if we were to adopt the widest definition of a racial incident, including online insults, and attribute every one of those acts to a prejudiced white person, it remains statistically demonstrable that the average person of colour will encounter such hostility once in their lifetime — not enough to produce the persistent patterns revealed by the audit.

So if Britons are individually better people what is preventing us becoming a better nation? Part of the answer is inertia: racial patterns we inherited and have not dealt with effectively. An example would be ethnic segregation in cities, baked into the geography because of settlement patterns generations ago.

A new source of racial disparities stems from what may be called techno-racism. Online decision systems use apparently neutral data: names, addresses, place of education. But these data carry racial markers that machines can read as reasons to reject minority applications for jobs, loans or insurance. In the US, companies are rewriting mortgage-lending programmes, having seen fines in excess of $100m for discriminating against African-American borrowers. Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.

Mrs May says that government departments will have “nowhere to hide” in future. Unfortunately, her own privacy legislation will protect ministers from scrutiny. Data protection means that neither public bodies nor private corporations are allowed to keep ethnic data about individuals. A prime ministerial decision to allow companies, particularly recruitment firms, to hold ethnic data could be transformative.

Mrs May’s audit has opened a Pandora’s box. But when the first woman in the legend unleashed evils on humanity, Hope sat gleaming at the bottom. Our modern Pandora, lifting the lid on racism, is betting the facts may be the best way to solve our most toxic social problem. In this, at least, she has to be right.

The six Brexit traps that will defeat Theresa May

Yanis Varoufakis


“It’s yours against mine.” That’s how Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, put it to me during our first encounter in early 2015 – referring to our respective democratic mandates.

A little more than two years later, Theresa May is trying to arm herself with a clear democratic mandate ostensibly to bolster her negotiating position with European powerbrokers – including Schäuble – and to deliver the optimal Brexit deal.

Already, the Brussels-based commentariat are drawing parallels: “Brits fallen for Greek fallacy that domestic vote gives you stronger position in Brussels. Other countries have voters too,” tweeted Duncan Robinson, Brussels correspondent of the Financial Times. “Yep,” tweeted back Miguel Roig, the Brussels correspondent of Spanish financial daily Expansión. “Varoufakis’ big miscalculation was to think that he was the only one in the Eurogroup with a democratic mandate.”

In truth, Brussels is a democracy-free zone. From the EU’s inception in 1950, Brussels became the seat of a bureaucracy administering a heavy industry cartel, vested with unprecedented law-making capacities. Even though the EU has evolved a great deal since, and acquired many of the trappings of a confederacy, it remains in the nature of the beast to treat the will of electorates as a nuisance that must be, somehow, negated. The whole point of the EU’s inter-governmental organisation was to ensure that only by a rare historical accident would democratic mandates converge and, when they did, never restrain the exercise of power in Brussels.
In June 2016, Britain voted, for better or for worse, for Brexit. May suddenly metamorphosed from a soft remainer to a hard Brexiteer. In so doing she is about to fall prey to an EU that will frustrate and defeat her, pushing her into either a humiliating climb-down or a universally disadvantageous outcome. When the Brussels-based group-thinking commentariat accuse Britain’s prime minister, without a shred of evidence, of overestimating the importance of a strong mandate, we need to take notice, for it reveals the determination of the EU establishment to get its way, as it did when I arrived on its doorstep, equipped with my mandate.

When I first went to Brussels and Berlin, as Greece’s freshly elected finance minister, I brought with me a deep appreciation of the clash of mandates. I said as much in a joint press conference with Schäuble in 2015, pledging that my proposals for an agreement between Greece and the EU would be “aimed not at the interest of the average Greek but at the interest of the average European”. A few days later, in my maiden speech at the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, I argued: “We must respect established treaties and processes without crushing the fragile flower of democracy with the sledgehammer that takes the form of statements such as ‘Elections do not change anything’.” May will, I presume, go to Brussels with a similar appreciation.

When Schäuble welcomed me with his “it is my mandate against yours” doctrine, he was honouring a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them. Like all dangerous hypotheses, it is founded on an obvious truth: the voters of one country cannot give their representative a mandate to impose upon other governments conditions that the latter have no mandate, from their own electorate, to accept. But, while this is a truism, its incessant repetition by Brussels functionaries and political powerbrokers, such as Angela Merkel and Schäuble himself, is intended to convert it surreptitiously into a very different notion: no voters in any country can empower their government to oppose Brussels.


There is a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them

For all their concerns with rules, treaties, processes, competitiveness, freedom of movement, terrorism etc, only one prospect truly terrifies the EU’s deep establishment: democracy. They speak in its name to exorcise it, and suppress it by six innovative tactics, as May is about to discover.

Time to listen in, Theresa. Photograph: Russell Cheyne/Reuters

The EU runaround 

Henry Kissinger famously quipped that when he wanted to consult Europe, he did not know whom to call. In my case it was worse. Any attempt to enter into a meaningful discussion with Schäuble was blocked by his insistence that I “go to Brussels” instead. Once in Brussels, I soon discovered that the commission was so divided as to make discussions futile. In private talks, Commissioner Moscovici would agree readily and with considerable enthusiasm with my proposals. But then his deputy in the so-called Eurogroup Working Group, Declan Costello, would reject all these ideas out of hand.

The uninitiated may be excused for thinking that this EU runaround is the result of incompetence. While there is an element of truth in this, it would be the wrong diagnosis. The runaround is a systemic means of control over uppity governments. A prime minister, or a finance minister, who wants to table proposals that the deep establishment of the EU dislike is simply denied the name of the person to speak to or the definitive telephone number to call. As for its apparatchiks, the EU runaround is essential to their personal status and power.

Picking opponents

From my first Eurogroup, its president, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, began an intensive campaign to bypass me altogether. He would phone Alexis Tsipras, my prime minister, directly – even visiting him in his hotel room in Brussels. By hinting at a softer stance if Tsipras agreed to spare him from having to deal with me, Dijsselbloem succeeded in weakening my position in the Eurogroup – to the detriment, primarily, of Tsipras.

The Swedish national anthem routine

On the assumption that good ideas encourage fruitful dialogue and can be the solvents of impasse, my team and I worked hard to put forward proposals based on serious econometric work and sound economic analysis. Once these had been tested on some of the highest authorities in their fields, from Wall Street and the City to top-notch academics, I would take them to Greece’s creditors in Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt. Then I would sit back and observe a symphony of blank stares. It was as if I had not spoken, as if there was no document in front of them. It would be evident from their body language that they denied the very existence of the pieces of paper I had placed before them. Their responses, when they came, would be perfectly independent of anything I had said. I might as well have been singing the Swedish national anthem. It would have made no difference.

The Penelope ruse

Delaying tactics are always used by the side that considers the ticking clock its ally. In Homer, Odysseus’ faithful wife, Penelope, fends off aggressive suitors in her husband’s absence by telling them that she will announce whom among them she will marry only after she has completed weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father. During the day she would weave incessantly but at night she would undo her work by pulling on a loose string.

In my negotiations in Brussels, the EU’s Penelope ruse consisted, primarily, of endless requests for data, for fact-finding missions to Athens, for information about every bank account held by every public organisation or company. And when they got the data, like the good Penelope, they would spend all night undoing the spreadsheets that they had put together during the day.

Truth reversal

While practising the Swedish national anthem and Penelope ruse tactics, the Brussels establishment utilised tweets, leaks and a campaign of disinformation involving key nodes in the Brussels media network to spread the word that I was the one wasting time, arriving at meetings empty-handed; either with no proposals at all or with proposals that lacked quantification, consisting only of empty ideological rhetoric.

Sequencing

The prerequisite for Greece’s recovery was, and remains, meaningful debt relief. No debt relief meant no future for us. My mandate was to negotiate, therefore, a sensible debt restructure. If the EU was prepared to do this, so as to get as much of their money back as possible, I was also prepared for major compromises. But this would require a comprehensive deal. But, no, Brussels and Berlin insisted that, first, I commit to the compromises they wanted and then, much later, we could begin negotiations on debt relief. The point-blank refusal to negotiate on both at once is, I am sure, a colossal frustration awaiting May when she seeks to compromise on the terms of the divorce in exchange for longer-term free trade arrangements.

So what can Theresa May do?

The only way May could secure a good deal for the UK would be by diffusing the EU’s spoiling tactics, while still respecting the Burkean Brexiteers’ strongest argument, the imperative of restoring sovereignty to the House of Commons. And the only way of doing this would be to avoid all negotiations by requesting from Brussels a Norway-style, off-the-shelf arrangement for a period of, say, seven years.

The benefits from such a request would be twofold: first, Eurocrats and Europhiles would have no basis for denying Britain such an arrangement. (Moreover, Schäuble, Merkel and sundry would be relieved that the ball is thrown into their successors’ court seven years down the track.) Second, it would make the House of Commons sovereign again by empowering it to debate and decide upon in the fullness of time, and without the stress of a ticking clock, Britain’s long-tem relationship with Europe.

The fact that May has opted for a Brexit negotiation that will immediately activate the EU’s worst instincts and tactics, for petty party-political reasons that ultimately have everything to do with her own power and nothing to do with Britain’s optimal agreement with the EU, means only one thing: she does not deserve the mandate that Brussels is keen to neutralise.

Of course Theresa May offers stability – just look at her unchanging positions on Brexit and general elections

Mark Steel in The Independent


The Conservative slogan for the election is “Strong and stable”. Because that’s the main thing we want from a government, strength and stability, like you get with Vladimir Putin.

Only idiots get obsessed with the details of what their leaders are strong and stable about, because the important thing is they’re strong while they’re doing it, and they keep doing it even if it’s insane.

Jeremy Corbyn should prove he can match their stability by burning down a public building at precisely half past nine every morning, and display his strength by punching people in the face as they run out the door screaming.

But this would barely touch the Government’s record of strength and stability. For example, every year since they took over in 2010, there has been a rise in the numbers dependent on food banks, going up every year, nice and stable, not haphazardly up one year and down the next so you don’t know where you stand. And weak governments might see hungry kids and feel a pang of conscience, but not this lot because they’re like sodding Iron Man.

George Osborne was so stable he missed every target he set, not just a few or 80 per cent, but every single one because business needs predictability, and when Osborne announced a target, our wealth creators could guarantee he’d come nowhere near it.

I expect they’ll also refer every day to their universal credit scheme, which is five years behind schedule and cost £16bn. You have to be strong to lose that amount and not care. Weak people would get to £3-4bn and think “Oh dear, maybe we should stop”, but not if you’re strong and stable.

The current Chancellor is nearly as impressive. After the Tories promised that under no circumstances would they raise National Insurance, Philip Hammond then raised National Insurance and cancelled raising it a few days later as it was so unpopular, exuding the sort of strength and stability that puts you in mind of Churchill.

Boris Johnson has exhibited the same values, displaying why we can trust him to stand up to dictators such as Syria’s President Assad. After one of Assad’s military victories, Boris wrote: “I cannot conceal my elation as the news comes in from Palmyra and it is reported that the Syrian army is genuinely back in control of the entire Unesco site… any sane person should feel a sense of satisfaction at what Assad’s troops have accomplished”, in an article headlined: “Bravo for Assad – he is a vile tyrant but he has saved Palmyra from [Isis]”.

Since then, the Foreign Secretary has steadfastly stuck with maximum stability to this view, with only the mildest amendment such as: “We must bomb Assad immediately; no sane person could ever wish him to control anything unless they’re a communist terrorist mugwump.”

What a model of stability, because most military experts agree it doesn’t really matter which side you’re on in a war, as long as you don’t compromise your strength or stability by not being in the war at all.

Then there was the Prime Minister’s line on not having an election, from which she hasn’t wavered one bit, and her insistence that we had to remain in the EU, which she’s adjusted a tiny bit to insisting we can only thrive outside the EU, but always either inside or outside, and never once has she suggested we must be somewhere else such as a split in the cosmos consisting of dark antimatter in which we can be both in and out of the EU due to time and space being governed by the European Court of Human Rights.

Thankfully the Labour Party is standing up to Conservative arguments with a dynamic campaign in which they explain how miserable everyone is.

The next party political broadcast will consist of Labour leaders walking through a shopping centre in Wolverhampton, pointing at people and saying: “Look at that bloke – utterly crestfallen. That’s a Tory government for you.”

It feels as if most people have already switched off in this election, so Labour’s best hope could be to answer questions by talking about an entirely different issue. So when Diane Abbott is asked whether Labour’s plans for education have been properly costed, she says, “I’m not sure. But I’ve been reading about koala bears. Did you know they’re not bears at all but marsupials, closer to the kangaroo?”

It doesn’t help that, as in any election, the Conservatives have much greater resources. If we lived in a proper democracy, these would be evened up.

Each newspaper would have to support a different party for each election, so The Daily Telegraph might support the Greens. And the letters column would read: “Dear Sir; with regard to current controversies concerning the use of television replays in Test match cricket, which jeopardise the ultimate authority of the umpire and therefore threaten the rule of law itself, it occurs to me the most sensible way to resolve these matters might be to renationalise the railways and install 40,000 wind turbines round Sussex. Yours sincerely, Sir Bartholomew Clutterbuck.”  

And if a wealthy businessman has money to donate to a party, the one it went to would be decided by lottery. So if Lord Bamford wants to contribute to society, he hands over £1m, then is thrilled to learn it’s gone to the Maoist Rastafarian Ban Fishing on Sundays Alliance.

The Conservatives would be delighted to give money to Maoists, because Mao was always strong and stable. You didn’t get him calling off a Great Leap Forward because he was offended by being called a mugwump. General Franco, Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini – these are the strong and stable models to aspire to, not these weedy liberal Gandhi types, though Nelson Mandela might qualify as a figure of stability, as he kept to pretty much the same routine for 27 years.

Crush the saboteurs! How hard-Brexit rhetoric turned Leninist

Steven Poole in The Guardian

Hatred of dissent, it seems, is the new normal in British politics. “Crush the saboteurs,” screamed the Daily Mail, announcing Theresa May’s calling of a snap election. “Crush pro-EU saboteurs, PM,” advised the Sun for good measure. But what exactly are saboteurs and how should we crush them? 

Surprisingly, the language of hard-Brexit Tory supporters is now that of the Russian Revolution. In 1918, the Bolsheviks dissolved Russia’s democractically elected constituent assembly on the grounds that it was a front for the bourgeois counter-revolution. “All power to the Soviets!” Lenin declared. “We shall crush the saboteurs.” For a while, it had seemed as though neo-Soviet rhetoric was the preserve of squabbling factions within the Labour party, with both Corbyn and his opponents accused of organising “purges”. But since three judges defending the rights of the British people were denounced in the rightwing press last autumn as “enemies of the people”, it appears to have become the de facto mode of political argument on left and right. Supporters of the two main parties are complicit in creating an ambient political atmosphere of paranoid permanent revolution. (Rather sweetly, the Mail devoted pages two and three on 19 April to a Soviet-style heroic-agriculture tribute to a British farmer who insists on ploughing his field with horses, which is just as well, since he probably won’t be able to afford a tractor, post-Brexit.)

The political saboteurs Lenin complained of were alleged conspirators, working behind the scenes to ruin his virtuous plans, but the word actually originates in the language of industrial disputes. “Saboteur” and “sabotage” are of French origin, and a popular etymology relates them to “sabots”, the wooden clogs that Luddite workers supposedly threw into machines to break them. Whether or not that is true, the verb “saboter”, meaning to deliberately mess something up, came to be used in the late 19th century by anarchist thinkers, and “sabotage” appeared in English in 1910 to describe the destructive actions of French railway strikers.

The word’s origins in the struggle between workers and capital, then, makes it an appropriate term for enemies of the modern Conservative party in particular. (Home counties Tories, of course, are especially likely to disdain people thus characterised, given their historic battles with “hunt saboteurs”.) And it is no doubt thrilling for well-lunched tabloid editors to dream of “crushing” people they wouldn’t dare pick a physical fight with in person. But Theresa May did not call anyone a saboteur, so perhaps this is all just an unfortunate case of macho projection.

Yet May’s speech announcing the election was, paradoxically, profoundly anti-democratic. “At this moment of enormous national significance, there should be unity here in Westminster, but instead there is division,” she complained. “The country is coming together, but Westminster is not.” This rather charmingly combined a totally made-up fact (the country is coming together) with a bizarre whine that parliamentary democracy is functioning as it should. Any persistent total unity in an elected assembly, after all, would signal that it had been hijacked by a fascist. If there were no “division” in Westminster, we would find ourselves in a de facto one-party state, in which the wisdom of the dear leader is all – a vision of “strong leadership” at which Vladimir Putin would nod sagely.
May’s contempt for the democratic functioning of government neatly mirrors Lenin’s own nearly a century ago, when he asserted that the workers’ councils were better than any democratically elected body: “The Soviets, being revolutionary organisations of all the people, of course became immeasurably superior to all the parliaments in the world.”

In Theresa May’s implicit view, too, superior to all the parliaments in the world would be a British establishment that offered zero obstacles to her “getting on with the job” of delivering what she considers best for the British people (whatever that turns out to be, since apparently no one needs to know right now). In May’s habitual way of phrasing things, the normal workings of parliament – in which MPs and members of the Lords may disagree with a government’s plans – are nothing but “playing politics” or “political game-playing” which must not be allowed to continue lest it cause “damaging uncertainty and instability”. To cast disagreement as game-playing is to characterise dissent as fundamentally unserious, and to bring the very idea of politics into disrepute.

And so, despite her disavowal of the term, the tabloid characterisation of May’s plan as one of crushing the “saboteurs” does not seem inaccurate. Indeed, the recent finale of the TV drama Homeland, which saw the newly elected president Elizabeth Keane holed up in the Oval Office ordering arrests of senators and congressmen, now looks as relevant to British as to American politics. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you are a paranoid aspiring autocrat, everyone is a potential saboteur.

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith invents the heroic historical figure Comrade Ogilvy, who had “no aim in life except the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals, and traitors generally”. Theresa May’s world, too, seems to have shrunk to one in which the greatest enemies are the enemies within and democracy must be democratically eliminated for the good of the people.

Faith still a potent presence in Western politics

Harriet Sherwood in The Guardian

Faith remains a potent presence at the highest level of UK politics despite a growing proportion of the country’s population defining themselves as non-religious, according to the author of a new book examining the faith of prominent politicians.

Nick Spencer, research director of the Theos thinktank and the lead author of The Mighty and the Almighty: How Political Leaders Do God, uses the example that all but one of Britain’s six prime ministers in the past four decades have been practising Christians to make his point.

The book examines the faith of 24 prominent politicians, mostly in Europe, the US and Australia, since 1979. “The presence and prevalence of Christian leaders, not least in some of the world’s most secular, plural and ‘modern’ countries, remains noteworthy. The idea that ‘secularisation’ would purge politics of religious commitment is surely misguided,” it concludes. 

It includes “theo-political biographies” of Theresa May, an Anglican vicar’s daughter who has spoken publicly about her Christianity since taking office last July, and her predecessors David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. Only John Major is absent from the post-1979 lineup.

Spencer writes that May is a “politician with strong views rather than a strong ideology, and those views were seemingly shaped by her Christian upbringing and faith. That Christianity gives her, in her own words, ‘a moral backing to what I do, and I would hope that the decisions I take are taken on the basis of my faith’.”

May told Desert Island Discs in 2014 that Christianity had helped to frame her thinking but it was “right that we don’t flaunt these things here in British politics”. According to Spencer, “in this regard at very least, May practises what she preaches”.

However, the prime minister’s apparent reticence did not stop her lambasting Cadbury’s and the National Trust this month over their supposed downgrading of the word Easter in promotional materials and packaging.

Elsewhere, the book looks at five US presidents – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – five European leaders, three Australian prime ministers and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Five leaders from other countries – including Nelson Mandela – complete the list.

The “great secular hope” was that religion would fade out of the political landscape, Spencer writes. But “the last 40 years have turned out somewhat different”, with the emergence of political Islam, the strength of Catholicism in central and south America and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the global south.

Even in the west, “Christian political leaders have hardly become less prominent over recent decades, and may, in fact, have become more so,” he says.

But Spencer told the Guardian: “There is no one size fits all, politically. You don’t find them clustering on the political spectrum.”

At the rightwing end were Thatcher and Reagan. At the other was Fernando Lugo, the president of Paraguay between 2008 and 2012, a prominent Catholic “bishop of the poor”, liberation theologist and part of a wave of leftwing leaders in Latin America.

There were also significant differences in the political contexts in which Christian politicians were operating, Spencer said. “There are places where you stand to make a lot of political capital by talking about your faith – such as the US or Russia.

“But in countries like the UK, Australia, Germany, France, where electorates are hyper-sceptical, politicians stand to lose political capital. No politician in the UK or France talks about their faith in order to win over the electorate.”

 Tony Blair in 2001. Photograph: Jonathan Evans/Reuters

Blair’s communications chief Alastair Campbell famously warned a television interviewer against asking the then prime minister about his faith, saying: “We don’t do God.” He believed the British public was instinctively distrustful of religiously-minded politicians.

After he left Downing Street, Blair spoke of the difficulties of talking about “religious faith in our political system. If you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ‘yes, that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.”

Although Blair’s faith reportedly shaped all his key policy decisions in office, the same was not true of all politicians, said Spencer. “There are some politicians for whom faith has shaped politics, and others for whom you can be more confident that politics are shaping faith. Trump is an example of that,” he said.

According to the chapter on Trump – a late addition to the book – the president “is not known for his interest in theology, the church or religion. His statements about faith, not least his own faith, have been infrequent and vague. And yet, Trump is insistent that he believes in God, loves the Bible and has a good relationship with the church … Simply to dismiss Trump’s faith talk would be to dismiss Trump, and 2016 showed that that is a mistake”.


Leaders’ faith

Theresa May Daughter of an Anglican vicar, the British prime minister goes to church most Sundays and has said her Christian faith is “part of who I am and therefore how I approach things ... [it] helps to frame my thinking and my approach”.

Vladimir Putin The Russian president has increasingly presented himself as a man of serious personal faith, which some suggest is connected to a nationalist agenda. He reportedly prays daily in a small Orthodox chapel next to the presidential office.

Angela Merkel The German chancellor is a serious Christian believer but one whose faith is very private. “I am a member of the evangelical church. I believe in God and religion is also my constant companion, and has been for the whole of my life,” she told an interviewer in 2012.

Fernando Lugo The former president of Paraguay was also a prominent Catholic bishop, a champion of the poor and a leading advocate of liberation theology. He urged “defending the gospel values of truth against so many lies, justice against so much injustice, and peace against so much violence”.

Viktor Orbán A relatively recent convert to faith, the Hungarian prime minister frequently invokes the need to defend “Christian Europe” against Muslim migrants. “Christianity is not only a religion, but is also a culture on which we have built a whole civilisation,” he said in 2014.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf The president of Liberia and a Nobel peace laureate, Sirleaf was brought up in a devout family and has frequently appealed for “God’s help and guidance” during her 10 years as head of state. In a 2010 speech, she described religion and spirituality as “the cornerstone of hope, faith and love for all peoples and races”.

Theresa May is dragging the UK under. This time Scotland must cut the rope

George Monbiot in The Guardian

Here is the question the people of Scotland will face in the next independence referendum: when England falls out of the boat like a block of concrete, do you want your foot tied to it?

It would be foolish to deny that there are risks in leaving the United Kingdom. Scotland’s economy is weak, not least because it has failed to wean itself off North Sea oil. There are major questions, not yet resolved, about the currency it would use; its trading relationship with the rump of the UK; and its association with the European Union, which it’s likely to try to rejoin.

But the risks of staying are as great or greater. Ministers are already trying to reconcile us to the possibility of falling out of the EU without a deal. If this happens, Britain would be the only one of the G20 nations without special access to EU trade – “a very destructive outcome leading to mutually assured damage for the EU and the UK”, according to the Commons foreign affairs committee. As the government has a weak hand, an obsession with past glories and an apparent yearning for a heroic gesture of self-destruction, this is not an unlikely result.

On the eve of the first independence referendum, in September 2014, David Cameron exhorted the people of Scotland to ask themselves: “Will my family and I truly be better off by going it alone? Will we really be more safe and secure?” Thanks to his machinations, the probable answer is now: yes.

In admonishing Scotland for seeking to protect itself from this chaos, the government applies a simple rule: whatever you say about Britain’s relationship with Europe, say the opposite about Scotland’s relationship with Britain.

In her speech to the Scottish Conservatives’ spring conference, Theresa May observed that “one of the driving forces behind the union’s creation was the remorseless logic that greater economic strength and security come from being united”. She was talking about the UK, but the same remorseless logic applies to the EU. In this case, however, she believes that our strength and security will be enhanced by leaving. “Politics is not a game, and government is not a platform from which to pursue constitutional obsessions,” she stormed – to which you can only assent.

A Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, Jamie Greene, complains that a new referendum “would force people to vote blind on the biggest political decision a country could face. That is utterly irresponsible.” This reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Before the last Scottish referendum, when the polls suggested that Scotland might choose independence, Boris Johnson, then London mayor, warned that “we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country … No one has thought any of this through.” Now, as foreign secretary, he assures us that “we would be perfectly OK” if Britain leaves the EU without a deal.

  Independence supporters gather in Glasgow’s George Square after Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second referendum.

The frantic attempts by government and press to delegitimise the decision by the Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to call for a second independence vote fall flat. Her party’s manifesto for the last Scottish election gives her an evident mandate: it would hold another referendum “if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will”.

Contrast this with May’s position. She has no mandate, from either the general election or the referendum, for leaving the single market and the European customs union. Her intransigence over these issues bends the Conservative manifesto’s pledge to “strengthen and improve devolution for each part of our United Kingdom”.

Her failure to consult the governments of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland before unilaterally deciding that the UK would leave the single market, and her refusal to respond to the paper the Scottish government produced exploring possible options for a continued engagement with the EU after Brexit testify to a relationship characterised by paternalism and contempt.

You can see the same attitude in the London-based newspapers. As the last referendum approached, they treated Scotland like an ungrateful servant. “What spoilt, selfish, childlike fools those Scots are … They simply don’t have a clue how lucky they are,” Melanie Reid sniffed in the Times. Now the charge is scheming opportunism. “We hope the Scottish people call Sturgeon out for her cynical, self-interested game-playing,” rages the Sun’s English edition. If you want to know what cynical, self-interested game-playing looks like, read the Sun’s Scottish edition. It says the opposite, contrasting the risks of independence with “the stick-on certainty of decades of Tory rule with nothing to soften it”, if Scotland remains within the UK.

Whenever I visit Scotland, I’m reminded that Britain is politically dead from the neck down. South of the border, we tolerate repeated assaults on the commonweal. As the self-hating state destroys its own power to distribute wealth, support public services and protect the NHS from ruin; as it rips up the rules protecting workers, the living world, our food, water and the very air we breathe; as disabled people are pushed off a cliff and poor people are evicted from their homes, we stand and stare. As the trade minister colludes with the dark money network on both sides of the Atlantic, threatening much that remains, we shake our heads then turn away.

Sure, there are some protests. There is plenty of dissent on social media; but our response is pathetic in comparison with the scale of what we face. The Labour opposition is divided, directionless and currently completely useless. But north of the border politics is everywhere, charged with hope, anger and a fierce desire for change. Again and again, this change is thwarted by the dead weight of Westminster. Who would remain tethered to this block, especially as the boat begins to list?

Scotland could wait to find out what happens after Brexit, though it is hard to see any likely outcome other than more of this and worse. Or it could cut the rope, pull itself back into the boat, and sail towards a hopeful if uncertain future. I know which option I would take.

Who will the Brexiteers blame when the milk and honey fails to flow?

Rafael Behr in The Guardian


There is a question that was never put to the leaders of the campaign for Brexit and has not, as far as I’m aware, been put to the prime minister since her conversion to the cause. It is this: what will you do on the morning of formal separation from the EU that you could not have done the day before?

What restored freedom, what action hitherto proscribed by the tyrannical bureaucrats of Brussels, will you indulge as the sparkling English wine is uncorked? Bend a banana, perhaps. Or catch the Eurostar to Paris and savour the sensation of no longer having the automatic right to work there. Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy! … Bliss it will be in that dawn to be alive. Right?

Brexit enthusiasts will complain that my question is unfair. Objections to EU membership were all about democracy, sovereignty and long-term economic opportunity: not pleasures that can be consumed overnight. And while that might be so, it is also true that people tend to vote for things in expectation of tangible benefits. A weekly dividend of £350m for the NHS, for example. So the unlikelihood of quick gratification for leave voters is a problem.

Theresa May identifies a deeper imperative to Brexit than was written on the referendum ballot paper. She hears a collective cry of rage against the economic and political status quo, requiring radical change on multiple fronts. So, in parallel with the prime minister’s plan for a “clean break” from the rest of Europe, Downing Street is thinking of ways to address grievances that generated demand for Brexit in the first place: stagnant wages; anxiety that living standards have peaked and that the next generation is being shafted; the demoralising experience of working all hours without saving a penny.

Government thinking on these issues has so far yielded a modest harvest. Last week’s housing white paper was meant to address a chronic shortage of homes by nudging councils towards quicker approval of new developments. Last month saw the launch of an industrial strategy, embracing state activism to nurture growth in under-resourced sectors and neglected regions. Last year May appointed Matthew Taylor, formerly head of Tony Blair’s policy unit, to lead a review into modern employment practices – the decline of the stable, rewarding full-time career and its replacement by poorly paid, insecure casual servitude.

‘Ed Miliband’s focus on the squeezed middle anticipated Theresa May’s promise to help those who are just-about-managing.’ Photograph: Alamy
A notable feature of this non-Brexit agenda is how closely it tracks arguments made by Ed Miliband in the last parliament. The former Labour leader had a whole thesis about the structural failings of British capitalism and how it corroded people’s confidence in the future, leaving them anxious and angry. His focus on the “squeezed middle” anticipated May’s promise to help those who are “just-about-managing”. Miliband’s calls for state intervention in failing markets were derided by the Tories as socialist delusion at the time, but he opened rhetorical doors through which May is now tentatively stepping. Last week’s housing paper even used a forgotten policy that Labour had launched in 2013 – a “Use it or lose it” threat to developers who hoard land without building on it.

 

Meanwhile, Downing Street has taken a close interest in the commission on economic justice set up by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a thinktank that provided regular policymaking services for Labour in the days before its capture by Corbynism. The commission was recently invited to give a presentation to May’s leading policy advisers inside No 10.

Were it not for Brexit’s domination of political debate, May’s eschewal of conventional left-right dividing lines – her willingness to jettison Thatcherite orthodoxies – might have attracted more notice. But then, as the old Yiddish saying goes, if my granny had balls she’d be my grandpa. The idea that there is some parallel realm of politics that May can develop and for which she will be remembered alongside her EU negotiation is delusional. Timid little steps on housing, industrial strategy and job security are not going to get the prime minister to the promised land of fairness and opportunity in time for Brexit day. And she insists on a diversion to set up more grammar schools along the way, despite nearly every expert in the field warning that educational selection closes more avenues to social mobility than it opens.


Someone will have to level with the country. The dawn of Brexit promises no freedom that wasn’t there the day before

Even on immigration the government cannot meet expectations raised by the leave campaign. There will still be new people arriving because businesses will insist on a capacity to hire from abroad. Millions who arrived in Britain over recent decades, and their children born as British citizens, will stay because the country is their home. Even the most draconian border regime cannot restore the ethnic homogeneity for which some nostalgic Brexiteers pine.

At some point someone is going to have to level with the country. Much of what leave voters were promised is unavailable because the EU was never responsible for a lot of things that made them angry. The dawn of Brexit promises no significant freedom or opportunity that wasn’t there the day before. It isn’t a message that ex-remainers can deliver, for all the reasons that scuppered their campaign last year. It sounded patronising before the referendum and the tone isn’t improved by bitterness in defeat.

None of the original leave campaigners will dare admit their dishonesty in making Brussels the scapegoat for every conceivable social and economic ill. There is no point expecting Boris Johnson or Michael Gove to embark on a self-critical journey of public-expectation management. Far more likely they will be drawn deeper into the old lie: someone must be held responsible when Brexit does not unblock the sluices of wealth and opportunity; when the milk and honey refuse to flow. The obvious candidates are foreigners and fifth columnists – EU governments that negotiate in bad faith; alien interlopers who drain public services; unpatriotic “remoaners” talking the country down.

The question then is whether the prime minister will go along with that game. She has managed so far to sustain the pretence that dealing with the failure of Britain’s economy to share its bounties fairly and quitting the EU are kind of the same thing. If it turns out that they aren’t, and one ambition obstructs the other, who will she blame?