During the recent election campaign, eligibility to govern became reduced in Tory political rhetoric to ‘having a plan’. But isn’t central planning a feature of the big, interventionist State, anathema to true blue Conservatives? And what ‘the plan’ was to achieve varied from stopping the boats to defeating Putin to growing the economy, all requiring well planned government action.
The accusation of not having a plan was mainly directed at Sir Keir Starmer, bearer of the ‘Ming vase’ full of policy positions vulnerable to ambush. He had good reason not to, as the French say, ‘vider son sac’ (speak his mind), confide in the public detailed policy priorities and how they would be implemented. Not an ideal exercise of democracy but one necessary for any Party wishing to win a general election. Faced with a right-wing Press and predatory social media, much of it supporting a collapsing ruling Party reduced to false claims and misrepresentation, hardly blameworthy. And perhaps there was an unrevealed plan behind the reticence. We are now half-way through a political dance of the seven veils. We’ve had the debates and interviews, a substantial Manifesto and Kings Speech, some elaboration of the new PM’s headline priorities, Rachel Reeves’ first speech to business leaders as Chancellor of the Exchequer with, shortly, her first speech in office to Parliament. The new government is determined - and has been so for some time - to establish its credibility both nationally and internationally. Something more than pragmatism, the makings of a plan, is appearing. But the big picture and the economic and political philosophy that shapes it, what we arrive at when the 40 pieces of legislation in the King’ speech are put together, and implemented, remains still out of focus. When I turned over Will Hutton’s This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain, Bloomsbury, 2024, to find Sir Keir Starmer’s bonanza of a blurb on the back cover, “a brilliant book.... read it if you haven’t already”, it seemed to promise a sharper focus. And indeed Will Hutton - former Principal of Oxford College, journalist and political economist, a former editor-in-chief of The Observer for which he writes a column - provides both a big picture and a detailed policy analysis. The book gives a coherent intellectual and historical account of the mess we are in, how we got here, and how we might emerge. It looked like a strong contender for what New Labour Mark 2 is all about. The headline formula Hutton applies is “an ethic of socialism with the best of progressive liberalism”. By this he means ‘blending’ the dynamism of the market and the restless energy of capitalism with the values of “fellowship, solidarity, fairness and mutuality”, informing a social contract to protect citizens from the risks of uncontrolled capitalism. Not a bad definition of social democracy or, come to that much of Catholic Social Teaching - though This Time No Mistakes never refers to this body of social thinking. Probably wise in these secular times. Not surprisingly Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1908-1915) in the Liberal “great reforming government” that fought the Tory-dominated House of Lords to create national insurance and an old-age pension prior to the First World War, is an early example of what Hutton calls the politics of balancing the We with the I. Then comes the Christian socialist, Richard Henry Tawney, who influenced much more than Anglican social thinking after the War. Tawney’s friend from Toynbee Hall days (1903), and Liberal hero, was William Beveridge, whose expertise in social insurance was taken up by Atlee’s 1945 Labour government. The other big name amongst the founding fathers of Hutton’s political economy is John Maynard Keynes who bequeathed Keynesian economics and the core belief that government intervention can stabilise economies. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933-1938) which sought to remedy the Great Depression, economic recovery, reform of the financial system and help for the unemployed and impoverished, was profoundly influenced by Keynesian thinking. Hutton describes how Harold Macmillan’s one-nation conservatism, support for the welfare state, his Keynesian approach, mixed economy with some nationalised industries and strong trades unions, represented a retention of a post-war consensus dominated by the thinking of his three heroes. The Conservative belief that the free market, individual freedom and a minimal state is the correct formula for growth stands out in stark contrast Macmillan’s approach which was finally dropped by Margaret Thatcher who wished to counter a ‘culture of dependency’, denounced the idea that people should turn to Government to solve their problems, and for whom there was no such thing as society. “There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first”. Take away Thatcher’s pragmatism, add the last 14 years of government, and we end up with an extreme right-wing version of Toryism and its discontents that almost destroyed the Conservative Party. The second half of This Time No Mistakes, detailing policy prescriptions for reform and how we might escape from the present economic and social crisis, shows an extraordinarily deep grasp of our multiple problems, both financial and social, and the policy work of different Ministries. The wide sweep of Hutton’s proposed reforms and institutional innovations, from restructuring pension funds to incentivising socially purposeful businesses committed to more than benefitting shareholders, makes them impossible to cover within a brief review like this. Just read them. They may well have influenced the thinking of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister and should be the subject of a national conversation. The rub is that most of Hutton’s proposals require funding either from government or private investors perhaps with the former leveraging the latter. The UK’s current debts are eating up government revenue and Starmer is self-limited by tight fiscal restraints to funding small-scale initiatives with maximum impact. Rachel Reeve is already having to find some wriggle-room. Credibility and Stability are the necessary first aims in the Labour plan. Hutton’s comprehensive analysis and prescriptions possibly foreshadow much of what is to come. It looks like being a long haul. See TheArticle 25/07/2024
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Sir Tony Blair’s message to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in the Sunday Times included the following advice: “Avoid vulnerability to wokeism”. During the last decade, within the vocabulary of political abuse, the word ‘Woke’ leaked into the word ‘Left’. This was partly because both words have fluid meanings. But it was also an example of the Right’s skilful manipulation of language. On 13 November 2023 Rishi Sunak appointed Esther McVey, MP for Tatton, Minister without Portfolio, an appointment widely understood as Minister for Culture Wars, rooting out wokeism and pinning it on the Left.
Like so many words, ‘Woke’ migrated from the USA, originating in a call in a 1938 song by folk and blues singer Lead Belly, protesting the conviction of nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape, to ‘stay woke’ to racism. That call to be ‘woke’, awake to the persistence of racism, was powerfully renewed by Black Lives Matter in 2013 after the acquittal of police officer who had fatally shot an unarmed seventeen-year-old African American. In 2020, during protests at the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Black Lives Matter brought some 20 million Americans onto the street. A small number were responsible for looting and a prodigious destruction of property. Protest soon spread to other countries and the word ‘woke’ travelled with them. ‘Left’ as a political identifier has been around a long time. Its meaning has had 250 years to change from signifying the choice of seats in the French National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution to now naming a spectrum of political positions that share commitment to social justice, a fair economy, and internationalism. In short order, ‘Woke’ mutated to become an expletive directed at the ‘Left’ and at an ill-defined ‘elite’ accused of suppressing the common sense and language of ‘ordinary people’. Like a fish bone stuck in the throat, the UK had its Empire as well its slave trade, lodged in its national memory. It did not take long before accusations of woke were made against anyone challenging the normative story of Empire, bringing law and civilisation, or dwelling on the violence of imperial expansion and colonialism. In universities the noise of battle rolled over trimmed lawns and across seminar rooms. Even the National Trust came under fire for starting to provide information about slavery in properties where it was deemed relevant. The political landscape of the Left, of course, had also been changing. The supposed triumph of neo-liberalism after the ending of the Cold War reduced the ambition of the Left to achieving slow incremental change. A rightward slide gained pace as economies stagnated and inequality grew. Susan Neiman in Left Is Not Woke, Polity 2023, makes much of the Left swallowing whole the pessimistic writing of the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault and its impact on woke thinking. Foucault’s critical writings about justice as a chimera and power as the determining reality became key university texts. Moving out beyond the universities, the take-away, Foucault for the masses, was that trying to make things better is most likely to make things worse, feeding into a general loss of hope in progress. Behind any Enlightenment objective truth lay concealed a subtle exercise of power rendering an impoverished majority powerless. There was, of course, a reaction. In the words of the celebrated French economist, Thomas Piketty: “When people are told there is no credible alternative to the socioeconomic organisation and class inequality that exist today, it is not surprising that they invest their hopes in defending their borders and identities instead”. According to Left Is Not Woke, what the Left and woke share is “empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs should be righted”. These are virtuous emotions. But emotions, as Hamlet’s replied when Polonius asked what he was reading, are expressed in “words, words, words”. Or, sometimes, in expressive acts like pulling down statues. And both the woke and their opponents certainly focus on words. In 2015, Benedict Cumberbatch had to make a grovelling public apology because, whilst supporting the cause of black actors, he had used the word ‘coloured’ not black. ‘Action not words’, as the Prime Minister said in his first press conference. As Neiman tartly points out, changing your pronouns in no substitute for changing your society. Virtuous emotions, like empathy, have proved no match for an - excluding - nationalist or ethnic consciousness. The Left absorbed a kind of exclusive collective identity that inadvertently magnified tribalism - Nieman’s word. But anyone’s identity is so much richer and broader than can be captured in a single word such as black, female, Jewish or even French. With the best of intentions, people are lumped together as the marginalized, as victims, rather than as individuals with a range of opinions, tastes, and sentiments. They have every reason to say – as I have once had said to me - “sometimes I just wish I could be me not the Muslim woman with a hijab”. And tragically, we have seen where victimhood as an integral part of Arab/Muslim and Jewish identity can take you in Israel/Palestine. Getting the right balance between the ‘we’ and the ‘I’ for the common good, is as important to the Left as to those neo-liberals who sometimes seem to share some of the Left’s values. Exclusive emphasis on national, ethnic, religious and gender identity, cherished components of diversity, risks forgetting the diversity of individuals’ character, integrity and skills which matter, not least in political life. For every diverse Obama government, not of course without its mistakes, there is an equally diverse Truss Cabinet promoting, in Neiman’s words, “the most extreme Tory policies in living memory”. Cancel culture is an unfortunate consequence of woke in action. Aiming to further the common good through sensitivity to people’s feelings and respect for their dignity, one result has been a damaging climate of self-censorship. But we all need a shared understanding of what and why certain language is offensive, and the difference between unintentional and intentional offense. And we all need to discuss matters that are contentious and sensitive, and not be blackmailed into silence for fear of offending. Each of us belongs to a tribe as well as to so much more. And whatever nationality or origins, whether Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu, male or female, we do, say and write things for many more reasons than being members of a tribe. With a new centre-Left government tackling the grave problems facing the UK - and found in both USA and Europe - what kind of society the Left stands for needs to be explored and discussed without fear. The analysis of Woke, that Neiman bravely attempts, is a good start. See TheArticle 06/07/2024 The word “Growth”, endlessly repeated by politicians during the present election campaign, is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Faith, Growth, but rarely Charity, are the cardinal virtues displayed for the mass media. When all the promises are ‘fully costed” but fall short of balancing, Growth is the shared panacea.
The trouble is growth post-BREXIT, Covid and Putin’s war looks feeble. No politician is reckless enough to explain exactly what they mean by Growth – though there are clues in the “Kick-start Economic Growth” section of the Labour Party Manifesto. Obviously, something organic and getting bigger - not to be mistaken for the magical money tree. Economists created a value they could express as a single figure or how would we all know if the economy, more precisely GDP, (Gross Domestic Product) was getting bigger, smaller or remaining unchanged? Not that there has ever been a clear consensus on what should be included in GDP. We still hang onto something of Margaret Thatcher’s homely simile that the national economy is like a huge domestic budget and managed in the same way. It isn’t. And, incidentally, domestic labour is one of the productive activities that economists leave out of GDP measurements. Were it to be included, the ILO, International Labour Organisation, estimate unpaid domestic work and caring to amount to be 9% of global GDP ($11 trillion) of which women’s domestic labour makes up more than two-thirds or 6.6%. Surprisingly, despite their prominence today, Growth and GDP are a relatively recent concern of economists. The history of Growth as a concept is set out in the opening chapters of Daniel Susskind’s brilliantly accessible Growth: The Reckoning Allen-Lane 2024. It was the economic crisis of the Great Depression (1929-1939) that triggered the search for some simple measurement of economies. During the Second World War the question of what proportion of the overall economy could safely be devoted to war production became pressing. “The American people have learned during the war the measure of their productive capacity’, President Roosevelt triumphantly declared to Congress in January 1945”. And it was not long before measures of Growth expressed as GDP were regarded as important indicators of who was winning the Cold War. Now, as the current election campaign nears the end, Growth has been established as the panacea for national decline. So today we have figures for GDP per capita over time telling us whether there is growth or ‘degrowth’. And because economics dominate our political thinking about what matters, while economists keep at arms’ length other things that matter, which they label as ‘externalities’, public political debate does not engage with questions about the price paid for Growth. Since the industrial revolution, whose origins lie at the end of the 18th century, what is now described as Growth brought unprecedented prosperity to much of the world, Africa is an exception, reducing poverty, dramatically improving education, enabling leaps forward in public health, feeding vastly increased numbers of people. But, looking at the UK – and not only the UK – nearly all these advances are now either stalled or going into reverse. The damage arising from blinkered, ungoverned Growth includes the fast-approaching climate catastrophe caused by carbon emissions, the degradation of our natural environment, the possibility of nuclear holocaust narrowly averted at least twice in the last century, ill-health caused by industrialised food, and growing inequality. The Growth dilemma is never “fully costed” nor raised in the barrage of interviewers’ questions about the economy on radio and TV. Growth as economic panacea remains a deceptive proposition unless its hidden trade-offs are acknowledged, shared with citizens for deliberation, and mitigated by government action. This is not the only message of Susskind’s revealing book, but it is certainly the most important one. Susskind sets Growth within the context of the common good, rather than in short-term party-political la-la-land. He poses fundamental questions about what kind of society in what kind of the world do, we, our children and grandchildren want to live in? Something you might have expected political leaders to talk about. And expected the electorate to want to hear about. Where Growth: The Reckoning is doubly helpful it is in resetting Growth within a discussion of trade-offs, rather than a simple binary argument, more growth or degrowth, and in proposing a direction of travel for social and economic development. Perhaps it is most insightful in its vision of Growth as meaning more than increasing the production of material things - and money- by adding ideas and innovation to the mix and proposing other ends to pursue. Susskind wants to redirect and redefine Growth not get rid of it. He distinguishes this approach from the temptation to insert socially desirable activities into the old, tired model which is yielding diminishing returns. What is considered socially desirable poses moral questions liable to be treated in a technocratic manner or left to market forces. This is not as theoretical as it sounds. As an example, Susskind uses the pool of networked ideas existing at the time of the COVID outbreak in early 2020 in the world of medical research which, with government funding, created COVID vaccines in an extraordinarily short time. And here the moral dimension of this innovation was evident in the failure to supply the global South adequately. Susskind delves more deeply into this terrain with an interesting discussion of intellectual property – the ownership of ideas - “the most important toolbox that societies have to shape the creation and distribution of ideas”. Balancing the costs of Growth, sacrificing one benefit for another, requires the widest possible deliberation and consultation. To achieve Growth Government must provide incentives the necessary means - such as a healthy educated workforce - and an enabling atmosphere. Yes, the other most repetitious campaign word “a plan”. It must include investment in research and development, and in public-private partnerships – which has some positive references in the Labour Manifesto and in James Naughtie’s exceptional exploration of Growth and innovation in The World at One on 23 June. Susskind also calls for citizen involvement in the form of civic assemblies to generate and evaluate new ideas but also to nurture comprehension of what is at stake, as well as support for progressive forms of government intervention. Susskind’s believes in “the innovative genius of humankind”. His book sustains a refreshing balance of ideas, academic analysis and down-to-earth realism drawn from his work in the policy unit at No. 10. The gulf between his book’s clarity, understanding, and vision and the mind-numbing repetition of the word Growth that political leaders, right now, feel obliged to utter under questioning is shocking. Have these six weeks locked in party-political-media inanity been democracy at work? If you don’t think so send this book to whoever gets elected in your constituency. See TheArticle 27/06/2024 I will never forget witnessing the determination and joy in the queues waiting outside South African polling stations on 29 May 1994. I had accompanied former President Kaunda of Zambia to Kwazulu-Natal only days before as an election observer. We feared serious violence between the Zulu nationalist party of Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, Inkatha, and Mandela’s ANC. Buthelezi, originally tasked to build up the ANC in the Zulu heartland, pulled back at the last minute.
In the triumphant election that ended apartheid the ANC won nationally with 62% of the vote. In this year’s elections, after thirty years’ unbroken rule, the ANC took only 40 per cent, losing their majority in Parliament. It was a humiliation, inflicted by a disappointed, angry electorate, but also a vindication of South Africa’s democracy. This was a clear verdict on the ANC’s performance in government over the last 15 years, during which corruption has become endemic. Meeting on June 7 to discuss the way forward, the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the ANC decided neither to seek a coalition partner or partners to form a majority government, nor to risk a minority government with a “confidence and supply” arrangement, but instead to propose a Government of National Unity (GNU). In a statesmanlike speech, President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke of the – legislated – 1994 transitional coalition which followed the ANC victory, bringing together under Mandela’s direction future President Thabo Mbeki and former President F.W. De Klerk, to govern until an interim Constitution requiring the allegiance of all political parties was finalised in 1996. The context, easing the transition from apartheid, was radically different from that of today. Though once again the province of KwaZulu-Natal — now led by Jacob Zuma, the corrupt former President, and his new Spear of the Nation Party (uMkhonto weSizwe or MKP), cleverly appropriating the name of the ANC’s former armed wing — is a threat to stability and to any unity government. Ramaphosa described the unity proposal as in the best interests of the people of South Africa, in accordance with the vision of the preamble to the Constitution: to realise the full potential of all citizens and bring material benefits to an unequal and unjust society. It might indeed be best for South Africa, but a GNU is also in the ANC’s interests. All the potential coalition partnerships were highly problematic. The Democratic Alliance (DA), led by Durban-born John Steenhuisen, which took 21% of the vote, is viewed by many as a right-wing party promoting white interests. Then there was Zuma’s MKP, with 14.5% of the vote, promising both to expropriate white-owned land without compensation and to change the Constitution. Thirdly, there was the former ANC youth leader Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), with 9.5%, calling for nationalisation of mines and land expropriation. Both Zuma and Malema are stridently populist, potentially violent, and determined to get rid of Ramaphosa. Any of these partners would have exacerbated divisions within the ANC. Only a Government of National Unity looked feasible. At 82, Zuma has a score to settle with Ramaphosa. He connects with many of the poor and has ten years’ prison on Robben Island with Mandela to his credit. In the 1980s, Zuma was the ruthless head of ANC Intelligence. He took the presidency in a non-violent internal coup against President Thabo Mbeki in 2009. As President, he accumulated power and money through a form of systemic corruption known as “state capture”. Ramaphosa led internal opposition to Zuma, forcing him to resign after a vote of no confidence in February 2018, allowing criminal charges for corruption and contempt of court to go ahead. But Zuma has only served three months in jail. His formation of the MKP in December 2023 heralded a political comeback with overwhelming support from his Zulu political base in Kwazulu-Natal. But just before the 26 May elections, he was banned from standing for Parliament. I have seen Zuma up-close. It was in Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s, when, in the garden of the Rev. Michael Lapsley – who later lost both hands and an eye in a South African letter-bomb, Zuma suddenly emerged from behind a bush. There was something brutal and sinister about him. Frankly, I felt frightened by him — as well Ramaphosa might be. Zuma is a clear and present danger for stability and democracy in South Africa. The ANC has until 18 June to pull together a government. Some 53 political parties contested the 2024 elections; only 6 of them won more than 300,000 votes. Of the three big Parties, only the DA has joined alongside Inkatha and the Patriotic Alliance. The MKP are refusing to join unless Ramaphosa steps down; the EFF is currently saying “we will not share power with the enemy”, though a few months back Malema did say he was open to a coalition with the ANC; and the DA wants to know more about how a Government of National Unity would function. A political minefield. But the wider question is: could a Government of National Unity tackle South Africa’s problems? These include chronic corruption; over 45% youth unemployment; wretched health and educational provision for the poor; serious crime and insecurity. And after 30 years of the ANC, South Africa is top of the world league for inequality. Systemic corruption has crippled the South African economy. André de Ruyter, the honest and competent CEO of the country’s energy provider, ESCOM, was forced out for trying to eliminate the corruption that was causing persistent and prolonged power cuts. After having cyanide slipped into his morning coffee, De Ruyter’s advice to any incoming CEO was not to have a personalised coffee cup. Is Ramaphosa up to it? He is undoubtedly tough and talented — but “squeaky clean” are not the first words that come to mind. In 2020 a mysterious $4 million dollars were stolen from his Phala-Phala farmhouse, a surprising sum to be stuffed inside the sofa. Head of the Student Christian Movement in his Venda High School, frequently detained while a law student, respected leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, brilliant negotiator, successful entrepreneur, skilled navigator of the dangerous shoals within the ANC, Ramaphosa’s biography suggests he has the capacity. But he needs the support of determined, competent and honest ministers to bring about change. Today the 400 members of the National Assembly will be sworn in, pledging to uphold the Constitution. As the ANC now knows, the people of South Africa will punish severely at the ballot-box failure to improve their lives, to provide jobs, and clean the Augean stables. A culture of accountability must be created, and prosecutions made. In a promising appointment, Rev. Frank Chikane, a courageous opponent of the apartheid regime, former General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches and chef de cabinet for President Mbeki, is now the head of the Integrity Commission to achieve this end. But support from the ANC parliamentary party will be essential. Despite multiple obstacles ahead, Ramaphosa with his considerable skills may be able to steer a GNU in the direction of integrity. South Africa’s future government should remember the warning of Amilcar Cabral, poet and pan-Africanist: “Always bear in mind that people are not fighting for ideas.... They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children”. As Trevor Manuel, the – honest and successful — ANC Minister of Finance, 1996-2009, pointedly asked on Radio South Africa’s Midday Report: “Who will hold the feet of the GNU to the fire?” See TheArticle 14/06/2024 You can tell a lot about a country by spending time on its trains. Or, given the frequency of strikes, weekend ‘planned work on the line’, points failure and overhead lines becoming less overhead, by not spending time on its trains.
If you complete the IT assault course devised by Interrail and buy a rail pass and reservations, Deutsche Bahn is a good case study. And you may conclude Britain’s rail network is not so bad after all. Germans will tell you they manage travel on their train services by having only two expectations: delays or cancellations. That might tell you that Germany is far from booming, with implications for Europe. Though Germany with a GDP of over $4 trillion remains amongst the four to five largest economies in the world, the ‘German economic miracle’ of the 1950s is history. In the first quarter of 2024, German economic growth (GDP) was only 0.3% above its pre-pre-pandemic level – compared with UK, 1.7%, the Eurozone 3.4% and the USA, 8.7%. Though the jolly crowds in Berlin along the Spree on a Saturday night around Friedrichstrasse station show no sign of a decline in the ‘hospitality industry’. But almost half of German GDP comes from exports while the figure for the UK is only 29%. In both economies services are dominant making up 70% of German export revenue and 80% of British export revenue. Germany has characteristic economic problems. After the 2008 global banking crisis, Germany and China found that their economies were complementary. From 2009 China became a major trading partner for Germany - accounting for 40% of Volkswagen’s sales. With its competitive exchange rate, German exports to China rose from £44 billion to a peak of £105 billion in 2021, double that of British, French and Italian exports to China combined. Meanwhile China had progressively become more an economic competitor to Germany than a partner. Today, with China carrying a debt to GDP ratio of 287%, and with growth flagging, economic crisis looms. While investing in China, German business at home is making redundancies in those productive areas where it is outcompeted by China. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel – brought up in a strongly Lutheran East German family - took the decision to accept some half a million Syrian refugees, creating a total of one million asylum seekers and economic migrants admitted that year. This morally laudable but politically risky decision became a contributory factor to the doubling of membership, since its April 2013 founding, of the right-wing populist Party, the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland. AfD supports anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-EU policies, and climate change denial. Unlike Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy Party, it does a poor job of countering accusations of harbouring fascist sympathisers and ideologues. Its leading candidate in the imminent EU elections, the MEP Maximilian Krah, was forced to end his campaign last week after telling an Italian newspaper that the Nazi SS were not all criminals. “I won’t say that [someone] was automatically a criminal because he wore the wrong uniform”, he told the Financial Times. AfD is polling at 17% in forthcoming EU elections and, in 2017, gained a maximum 12.6% of the vote in Federal elections, dropping to 10.3% in 2021 (Reform, to the right of the Conservative Party in the UK, is currently polling at 11%). AfD has significant support in only 5 of Germany’s 16 länder (federal states) all within the former communist East Germany, the DDR: Thuringia, Saxony, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and the eastern side of Berlin. But a complex electoral arrangement gives it 77 out of the 734 seats in the Bundestag (Federal Parliament). Try, as the Bundesrepublik might, and at great cost, after forty years of communism to “level up” the former DDR in a unified Germany post-1990, social tensions and the drabness of the many blocks of flats in the east of the city centre remain. To really feel the abiding legacy of the DDR, visit its sinister, cruel and slightly mad heart: Haus 1, 20 Normannenstrasse, the Stasi Museum, sitting in the Stasi’s original, extensive campus. Its files on 5.6 million people spied on, it was calculated, would stretch 69 miles end to end. In the last Federal elections, on the east side of the city, the old ‘Stasiland’, the AfD won 20.5% of the vote while on the west side the percentage was 8.5%. Yet Angela Merkel had followed up her 2015 decision on immigration with a remarkably successful integration policy. And an aging Germany needed more workers. I was surprised to find a full congregation at an English mass in the St. Thomas Aquinas Centre, Germany’s Roman Catholic HQ in Berlin: predominantly under 40, nearly half of African origin and apparently, if a few conversations were indicative, working in a range of different - some professional - jobs. As Timothy Garton Ash suggests in “Big Germany, What Now?” 23 May 2024 New York of Books, Angela Merkel’s decision with the most serious lasting consequences was her precipitous decommissioning of Germany’s nuclear power stations after the Japanese disaster at Fukushima in 2011. In consequence, Germany became dependent on Russia’s fossil fuels for energy; “by 2020, a staggering 55% of its gas, 34% of its oil and 57% of its hard coal came from Russia”. This did not mean that the current Chancellor Olaf Scholz is trapped into supporting Putin. Germany is second only to the USA in support for Ukraine, some £23 billion in economic and military aid provided, but closely following the US, gradually less reluctant to send President Zelensky the sophisticated and powerful weaponry he seeks. Germany is arguably, and will remain, the most important member of the European Union- though in the light of Putin’s imperialist threat to Europe, Margaret Thatcher’s fears of German dominance of the European Union seem in retrospect particularly misguided. Socialist student peace activist, dubbed a peace Chancellor (Friedenskanzler) in the German press, cautious Social Democrat performing a balancing act nationally between clashing values, Olaf Scholz may prove to be a transitional leader. But like Sir Keir Starmer who looks to be facing even worse economic pressures, Scholz, a former lawyer specialising in labour law, shows a similar lawyer’s caution needed in perilous times. Britain and Germany both share the recent experience of economic crisis. There is a real possibility that Starmer, as a future Prime Minister, and Scholz, if re-elected in next year’s Federal elections, will prove effective allies. Meanwhile, we need to re-appraise Germany, its problems, dilemmas and role in the EU, sympathetically. The old trope that like Mussolini ‘the Germans make the trains run on time’ just isn’t true. But the British and the Germans are kindred spirits who have much in common and need one another more than either nation realises. See TheArticle 27/05/2024 For months since October 2023 Netanyahu defied the USA. Around the world, large demonstrations protested Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, faring no better. Now the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, the nearest we have to a global judiciary, has intervened.
On 29 December 2023 South Africa filed an “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v Israel)”, bringing a case to the ICJ based on allegations of acts of genocide by Israel in its war against Hamas. "It is important," the submission reads, "to place the acts of genocide in the broader context of Israel's conduct towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long apartheid, its 56-year-long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza, including the serious and ongoing violations of international law associated therewith, including grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity." In the charged atmosphere created by Hamas’ massive human rights violations while attacking Israel, 1,400 mostly civilian deaths and the taking of 224 hostages, followed by Israel killing over 30,000 Palestinians believed also to be disproportionately civilians in the destruction of Gaza, it is hard to overestimate the reverberations of such allegations. But why South Africa? First some historical context. The ICJ was formed at the first session of UN General-Assembly and Security Council in April 1946 when genocide was recognised as a crime in international law. This was a product of the Nuremberg trials and a reaction to the Shoah, the holocaust. In 1948, genocide was carefully defined within the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). Both the horrendous massacres accompanying independence and partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the migration of 14-18 million people, and the expulsions of Arabs accompanying the creation of the State of Israel, the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic), were consequences of abrupt withdrawals of British imperial authority. During the same period, Afrikaner nationalists took power in South Africa. Any story of a steady, linear progress towards stable, co-operative nation states is inherently implausible. After independence of the Portuguese colonies and Zimbabwe in the 1970s and 1980s, apartheid South Africa and the Israel-Palestine conflicts were left unresolved, unfinished business. Negotiations within South Africa, resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the accumulated impact of sanctions, brought apartheid to an end in 1994. It was possible to imagine the Oslo Accords (negotiated between 1993-1995) as a similar breakthrough, drawing a line under conflicts between contending – ethnic – nationalisms. A Whig history of the decline of imperialism and settler colonialism leaving nationalism triumphant doesn’t convince. For example, the Kurdish population, somewhere between 30-45 million, greater than three-quarters of the UN’s member states, spread as minorities between Turkey (16%), Iraq, Iran and Syria, achieved no such denouement. Back to the ongoing court drama in the Hague. Hearings at the ICJ (mandated by the UN to litigate between States not to be confused with the International Criminal Court, founded in 1998, to prosecute individuals) are presided over by 15 experienced judges drawn from 15 different countries. Ruling on the December 2023 South African application, the 15 included allies of Israel, the USA, Germany, France, and Australia alongside South Africa’s fellow BRICS countries India, China, Russia and Brazil. Two extra judges were added for this contentious case: South Africa’s Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke and the former Chief President of Israel’s Supreme Court, Aharon Barak. The very recently retired President of ICJ who presided over the first hearing, Joan Donoghue, a former foreign policy adviser to President Obama, has explained that the court – almost unanimously - concluded that South Africa had a right to present their claim to the court and the Palestinians had a “plausible right to be protected from genocide’” After weighing the evidence, the ICJ found a risk of “irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide”. Hence several provisional orders made by the court to the Israeli government directed at such protection. Donoghue emphasised that the ICJ had yet to rule on the plausibility of the South African claim that genocide was taking place. A Ugandan, Julia Sebutinde, the current ICJ Vice-President, was alone in sharing some of Israeli Judge Barak’s dissenting opinions. The very day the ICJ, a UN body, delivered its first ruling on South Africa’s application, 26 January, Israel alleged that 12 employees of the UN Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA) had participated in the Hamas attacks of 7 October. South Africa made a further court application on 6 March this year in response to the deteriorating conditions in Gaza, stating that the Palestinians were “no longer facing only a risk of famine but that famine was setting in”. On 23 March, the court ruled that further urgent measures were required of South Africa, particularly that the military unblock, and permit immediate distribution, of humanitarian aid “in full cooperation with the United Nations”. The distinctions made by the court are subtle, but none of their judgements suggest that South Africa’s formulation of their case was unreasonable, politically prejudiced, improper or antisemitic. Because of the constraints on journalists, disinformation, and ‘the fog of war’, the clarity of juridical thinking and observation, not of course infallible, is particularly valuable. The court commendably saw the war in Gaza through the lens of law meant to protect human rights. South Africa received no standing ovation from the US Congress. During apartheid, of course, Israel offered close military and intelligence cooperation to the South African regime. This included in the 1970s joint action in Angola. Investigative journalists and the CIA both provided evidence of shared testing of a nuclear weapon in the southern Indian ocean. In return for its support Israel got uranium ‘yellow cake’ from South Africa’s then South-West African colony, now Namibia. Unsurprisingly, there was no love lost between the ANC, today’s South African governing Party, and the Israeli State. But South Africa’s approach to the ICJ seems motivated chiefly by empathy with Palestinians in what their legal submission called the State of Israel’s “75-year-long year apartheid”. Nelson Mandela’s words at a 1997 solidarity event in Pretoria set a distinctive tone: “The temptation in our situation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine to a state of their own. We can easily be enticed to read reconciliation and fairness as meaning parity between justice and injustice. Having achieved our own freedom, we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others face.... But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians...” Mandela tellingly did not describe Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians as ‘apartheid’. Instead, he talked simply about “the recognition that injustice and gross human rights violations were being perpetrated in Palestine”. This is clearly the problematic adopted by the ICJ court and could motivate the ICC to act against individual Israeli leaders. As Mandela’ speech also suggests, the unfinished business of the 1980s is about peoples obtaining freedom for self-determination and statehood. This is what linked Mandela’s South Africa and Palestine in solidarity then, and still does today. See TheArticle 08/05/2024 Rishi Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill, banning sales to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, is passing through Parliament. Cake Tsarina Prue Leith proved herself again, on BBC’s Today programme last week, as a popular champion of government intervention to protect – young - consumers from forming bad habits. ‘Government intervention’, though, is a weak substitute for that highly charged slogan ‘the Nanny State’. Words lose or gather power in politics. The Nanny State has become shorthand for Big Government, thus the enemy for all true libertarians.
Libertarians are good at inventing slogans used to ridicule policy or practice especially of active government. Remember ‘Health & Safety gone mad’: ha, ha, ha. That one worked well until the Grenfell Tower tragedy. But combatting morbidity due to unhealthy food has yet to have its seat-belt moment. The Nanny State taunt is now working against the creation of an effective national food strategy. Former Cabinet Minister, IaIn Macleod, coined the term writing in The Spectator, 3 December 1965. “In my occasional appearances as a poor man's Peter Simple I fire salvos in the direction of what I call the Nanny State. Mr. Fraser is, although you wouldn't think it, the Minister of Transport [in Harold Wilson’s first government]. He has come forward with the perishing nonsense of a plan for a 70 mph speed limit even on motorways [sic]”. This controversy over motorway limits is forgotten but Nanny State is now wheeled out for food regulation. But why does it resonate so well? The old-fashioned nanny, traditionally a disciplinarian, supervised children’s meals. The understood message is that the Big State treats us as children. Maybe also a covert swipe at the hated ‘metropolitan elites’, with their modern nannies and leanings towards vegetarianism. But given the libertarian ideology of choice, how much is healthy eating a matter of genuine choice? The individual is battling against the influence of the food companies who control the food business, led by the Swiss-based Nestle SA - whose 2022 revenue was $99 billion. Health messages are understood but consumers contend with clever advertising and packaging of food containing too much fat, sugar and salt, all designed by experts to tempt our taste buds. Parents sheep-doggedly try to manoeuvre their offspring past enticing arrays of sweeties and chocolates to reach the supermarket check-out. And responding partly to the changed role of women, the big food companies offer a fast and relatively cheap substitute for home cooking after an exhausting day’s work. How free does that make free choice? A 2023 study by Cancer Research UK produced some frightening figures. Body Mass Index (BMI) is calculated by weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared. Using this measure, by 2040, 71% of British people are predicted to be overweight (compared to 64% today). And of these 36% - 21 million people – will suffer from the complex, chronic disease of obesity defined as a BMI over 30. The consequences of this for future prevalence of cancers and diabetes are disturbing. Currently the NHS spends £10 billion, 10% of its budget, on treating diabetes. There is no chance that the National Health Service will be able to cope with millions moe diabetics. And in the words of the respected social welfare expert, Baroness Louise Casey, “the less well-off you are the more likely you are to be prey to unhealthy food”. Healthy politics – healthy in all senses - is about working for the common good. Catholic social teaching has a definition: “the totality of social conditions allowing persons to achieve their communal and individual fulfilment”. The concept of subsidiarity entered Catholic social thinking in the 19th century as a feature of the common good. As the former EU Commission President Jacques Delors, a devout Catholic, pointed out in a 2009 interview, the term subsidiarity came originally from a Calvinist principle of Church order in the 17th century: the lower Church unit of association took precedence over the higher. Subsidiarity took on new relevance supporting resistance from civil society against the all-controlling totalitarian and military dictatorships of the 20th. century. The Nanny State slogan might garner some support from a crude understanding of ‘subsidiarity’ championed by the UK in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty which established the EU. During the internal debates of the EU, the principle of subsidiarity became used to define the - contested - roles of member states in relation to the EU ‘central government’, the European Commission. Today it best expresses support for the life of local communities, particularly ‘in case of need’, implying approval of ‘enabling government’. The higher units of subsidiarity now include not just governments but multi-national corporations and supermarket chains. The creation of a strategy prioritising health and the environment must consider the interacting dynamics of all. In a situation of intense competition, lest their competitors undercut them, none of the food giants can risk unilaterally eliminating or radically reducing unhealthy ingredients. Government taxation of the content of unhealthy foods and drinks provides an - enforced - level playing field open to change. A sugar tax on soft drinks introduced in 2018, called the Soft Drinks Industrial Levy (SDIL), has reduced children’s sugar intake but not enough. Commissioned by the Department of Education, in 2013, restauranteurs Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent produced a pioneering School Food Plan. Initially its vision of ‘flavourful, fresh food served by friendly fulfilled cooks in financially sound school kitchens’ caused widespread excitement. The vision faded under government austerity. Dimbleby’s 2021 National Food Strategy: The Plan, also commissioned by government, sets out a reasoned and well-researched way forward for food and farming. He proposes, for example, a ‘Sugar and Salt Reformulation Tax’, £3 per kilogram of sugar and £6 per kilogram of salt ‘for use in processed foods or in restaurants and businesses’. But taxation remains a toxic word even within the context of preventative action acceptable to food companies. Sir Keir Starmer has promised not to introduce further sugar or salt taxes while saying he would ban junk food advertising before the watershed. Government promised to respond to The Plan with a White Paper. Instead, they produced a 13 June 2022 policy paper widely criticised not least by Dimbleby himself. The paper gives the impression of providing a comprehensive national strategy while largely avoiding significant interventions - such as taxing offending ingredients. An advertising watershed for children will only be implemented after 1 October 2025 and non-removal of sweetie chicanes in supermarkets is disregarded without penalty. Often when confronting contemporary problems, the defensive political response to criticism is what’s the alternative? But there is an alternative. Implement more of Dimbleby’s strategy. In the words of Prue Leith in 2022: "There is so much to celebrate about our food, but we do need to act urgently to protect our health and that of the environment. The Plan is compelling and overdue. If the Government adopts it, we will, at last, be putting our food system on the right path to health and prosperity” - and saving our NHS. We are still waiting. Can today’s right-wing back benchers really imagine that government interventions to help people stop harming themselves and their children lead us towards Xi Jinping’s dystopian State? From their entrenched opposition to banning advertising unhealthy food and drinks directed at children, you might think so. The libertarian Right using their clever slogans and ideology are endangering our health and environment. They should be seen for what they are: dangerous ideologues. See TheArticle 25/04/2024 Joan Girling grew up near the Suffolk coast with its little terns, barn owls, harebells, ladies bedstraw, sedums, blue butterflies and acid grassland. There was no nuclear power station. “It was perfect, a nature lover’s paradise”, she told me.
In 1959, Joan’s father faced with compulsory purchase was forced to sell off a corner of their front garden with its large pond full of water lilies and wildlife. It was to make way for workers’ traffic to the site of Sizewell A, a nuclear power station, today a great, ugly, Stalinist-looking excrescence looming above the sea-shore. Her grandmother who lived next door watched as they filled in the pond. “The worst part was to hear my grandma crying. I remember it as if it was yesterday”. In the late 1980s it all happened again: Sizewell B. This time Joan moved house with her family to escape construction traffic. From 1993-2005 she served on Suffolk County Council. Fifteen years ago, Joan Girling became a founding and deeply dedicated member of Community against Nuclear Expansion later renamed Together Against Sizewell C (TASC). The human and environmental costs ought not be underestimated. The disruption and destruction accompanying years of building accounts for the level and persistence of local protest. Stop Sizewell C, originally a parish of Theberton and Eastbridge action group, alongside the local Friends of the Earth, joined TASC in a long-running legal campaign. Crowd financing helped fund three rounds of court action seeking judicial review of the Sizewell C project. The last challenged the Business Secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng’s, 2022 Development Consent Order giving the green light to start construction. Kwateng rejected the Planning Inspectorate’s conclusion (part of the process required by the 2008 Planning Act) that in the absence of an assessed, permanent, potable water supply for the project, “the case for the grant of development consent is not yet made”. Sizewell C will be forced to use a desalination plant during construction. The Court of Appeal found for the government in December 2023. The construction of Sizewell C means heavy truck traffic. New roads, a large park and ride facility, as well as a railway branch line, will have a major impact over a large area much of it designated by Natural England - sponsored incidentally by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) - as a Suffolk Coast and Heaths National Landscape (formerly Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). A small bite comes out of reed beds and marsh land declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The new reactors will lie right next to Minsmere, a popular RSPB reserve where the drain-pipe boom of the bittern can be heard. Building Sizewell B will blight tourism for two decades but boost other aspects of the local economy. But before dismissing protest as Nimby-ism (Not in My Back Yard) it is as well to evaluate what lies in the backyard. Sizewell C planning first saw the light of day under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 2007-2010, when coastal Suffolk was selected alongside other sites with existing nuclear reactors The initial choice of investors, EDF (Electricité de France) and a Chinese Company CGN, was almost as contentious as the choice of site. In 2009 EDF, 85% French government owned, bought British Energy, the UK’s largest electricity energy-generating company. By 2019 EDF was over 50 billion Euros in debt and its share price had dropped from 42 to 10 Euros. The company was re-nationalised in 2023. EDF’s track-record building two reactors at Hinkley Point, Somerset, does not inspire confidence that all manner of things will be well at Sizewell C. Building of the EDF’s first Hinkley Point reactor began in March 2017 but is unlikely to be completed before 2030 at a cost of possibly £47 billion (the initial estimate in 2016 was £18 billion). Actual construction of a reactor starts usually after three years of preparatory work once a Final Investment Decision (FID) is issued indicating that financing for the entire project looks assured. FID for Sizewell C remains ‘expected’ by the end of this year. Professor Stephen Thomas of Greenwich University Business School estimates the length of time from inception to first commercial power production of nuclear power stations worldwide at between 15-20 years. Given the pace of climate change, that is too long to wait. Geopolitics put paid to Chinese part ownership in Sizewell C; CGN’s stake was bought out by the UK government in 2022. Nuclear power is costly. Government, now the majority shareholder in the project, turned to what is called the Regulated Asset-based (RAB) model, an array of investors, in a bid to attract pension funds. But this has not been successful. It is now wooing investors such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the UK electricity company Centrica. Professor Thomas’ optimistic estimate of cost for 13 years of Sizewell C construction is £26.3 billion and his pessimistic, some would say realistic, estimate for 17 years, £43.8 billion. Just too costly. No-one knows what international energy prices will be when the reactors start up - thus creating a very wide margin of risk. RAB offers possibilities for the government to reward potential investors. In Thomas’ words: “First, because the risks will fall on consumers and taxpayers, the project would be seen by financiers as low risk to them and would attract a low interest rate. Second, the finance charges [and these would be significant] would effectively be paid by consumers as a surcharge on their bills payable from the date of FID to completion of the plant”. There are alternative sources of energy. In the past fifty years, the cost of renewables has gone down, real nuclear costs have only ever gone up. But Shell expects to make 15% profit on investment in oil and gas against 5-8% returns from renewables. This is one reason for the continuing investment in new fossil fuel extraction and faltering financing of the realistic option for meeting carbon emission reduction targets; solar panels and wind turbines. Government colludes with energy companies and investors seeking to be as risk-free as possible, with their decisions and actions critical for mitigating climate change, based on profit taking at the expense of the citizen/consumer. Windfarms, for example off Lowestoft with one hundred turbines serving 630,000 homes, take after a preparatory phase, 2-3 years for construction offshore, longer for a larger windfarm under more difficult conditions. Their coastal infrastructure needs to be kept to a minimum, ideally with an offshore grid and subsea cables. With the kind of money made available for nuclear reactors, the energy-storage problem – caused by variable wind - is soluble. Renewables do not take 15 years to become operational, nor have an unmanageable afterlife: the disposal of highly radioactive material. Meanwhile access roads are being cut through nearby countryside, and the government has found £2.5 billion for the Sizewell C preparatory pot. Five years ago, it was estimated 37.5% of the world’s carbon emissions came from electricity generation. There is now urgent need for low carbon electricity-generating infrastructure. Government is obsessed with nuclear power stations as a solution. But they are too late. As Professor Thomas put it to me in conversation: “In an emergency you don’t choose the slowest and riskiest option”. See TheArticle 13/04/2024 Conservative politicians attribute our parlous economic situation to the cost of COVID and the inflated price of oil and gas due to the war in Ukraine. The barmy budgeting of Liz Truss and her malfortuné Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, sometimes get a mention, a cautionary tale of self-destruction. As for the third of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the word BREXIT shall never pass the lips of a government minister.
How should we describe this omission? Google to the rescue: an English version of the South Italian word Omerta, a “code of silence and code of honour and conduct that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders” - usually associated with the Mafia. Ministers and MPs know a great deal about the impact of BREXIT - hence Omerta. The UK Department of Trade and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy like the European Commission are all clients of Cambridge Econometrics. In a report commissioned by the Mayor of London and published in January 2024, Cambridge Econometrics estimates that we lost 2 million jobs due to BREXIT, and that in 2023 the average person was nearly £2,000 worse off (Londoners by £3,400) than had the Referendum gone the other way. Goldman Sachs’ 2024 report “The Structure and Cyclical Costs of Brexit”, puts the economic loss caused by BREXIT at between 4-8% of GDP and concludes that since the Referendum Britain “significantly underperformed other advanced economies”. Both reports, complex calculations, emphasise the impact on trade and investment. The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), an independent public body funded by the Treasury, analyses our public finances and produces bi-annual economic forecasts intended to guide Government’s economic policy - so heeded by Prime Ministers, except of course Liz Truss. It broadly supports the conclusions of Cambridge Econometrics and Goldman Sachs. Rishi Sunak is well aware of the extent of BREXIT damage. In 2016, David Cameron, believing he would win the Referendum, turned a complex issue into a binary choice. No rules were established to govern the conduct of the ensuing campaigns, nor the information provided the electorate. Voters need accurate, relevant information to make informed political choices. Voters making a huge decision by direct democracy were lied to and disinformed in a campaign led by charismatic but unscrupulous men. The public did not necessarily believe their lies or the battle-bus promise of “£350 million sent per week to the EU” being returned to the NHS, but such disinformation served to dramatically and divisively raise awareness of the Leave campaign. Thanks to the nurturing of division and hostility, any empathy for the thinking and feelings of people on the other side of the argument could not get a look-in. ‘A shared framework for containing conflicting aims’ created by ‘good faith compromise’, ‘positive sum’ agreements and brokered bargains, appear in Brook Manville and Josiah Ober’s The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, Princeton & Oxford University Press 2023, as important ingredients in any functioning democracy. They offer a simple definition: the pithy “No boss – except one another”, but there is no discussion of how this is best achieved by direct or representative democracy. It is a stretch to describe the BREXIT referendum, conducted in a climate of disinformation and lies, the subsequent negotiations and the unlawful proroguing of Parliament, in these terms. Their consequences were the reverse of what Aristotle called ‘civic friendship’, seen by the two authors as sustaining democracy. OMERTA about Brexit is part of a wider government Omerta about the damage done to our political culture with its unwritten but well understood values and codes of conduct. It is important, though counter-intuitive, to recognise the erosion of democracy added to by the 2016 Referendum with its compelling slogan ‘Take Back Control’. The quantifiable economic consequences of BREXIT are not the only ones to contend with; there is also the absolutist mindset encouraged by the binary referendum choice, in versus out, pervading public attitudes. The gradual nibbling away of the mainstays of a democratic culture has done nothing to improve voter turn-out. Youth are giving up on their fundamental civil right to vote, to sack the government and install another, to put into practice – Manville and Ober’s - “no boss except one another”. In addition, many people are responding to continuous grim reports on radio and TV with ‘news avoidance’ that further encourages a “they’re all the same” rejection of political participation. The 2022 Electoral Reform Act directly affects turn-out and not only in general elections. The Bill abolished the supplementary (second choice) vote and made mayoral elections first past the post, favouring the Conservative Party. Voters not showing photographic voter ID are turned away, an imported form of voter suppression, part of the US Republican electoral playbook known to disadvantage youth, ethnic minorities and poorer voters. In the 2019 general election - before this requirement - 33 alleged impersonations with 9 convictions came to light - amongst 32 million people who voted. A 2023 You-Gov poll found one in four voters were unaware of the new requirement. In last year’s local elections, according to the Electoral Commission, some 4% of eligible voters said they didn’t vote because of the new regulations. Voters in a democracy need obstacles to voting removed not inserted on spurious grounds. Electoral campaigning can, and is, used as an opportunity for the destruction of ‘civic friendship’ by gas-lighting and the flagrant untruths of attack ads. In support of the Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, a video purporting to reveal panic on the London Underground appeared on X (Twitter). It turned out to be filmed in Penn station, New York. “Gripped by the tendrils of rising crime” Londoners were staying at home said the voiceover. Picture of empty street. The fake ‘evidence’ from the USA was taken down but the fake assertions about citizens’ safety in London stayed in. The Greater London area with 9.75 million people will have more crimes (for example than greater Glasgow, 1.7 million, to which London is sometimes compared), more bins to empty, more air pollution to be cut. As Ministers know, meaningful crime statistics are based on size of population. In the real world, the crime rate in London is below the national average. There is danger that such American-style attack ads have infected the Labour Party. Their on-line ad a year ago asked: “Do you think adults convicted of assaulting children should go to prison”, and answered, “Rishi Sunak Doesn’t”. Shocked Shadow Ministers and Party members protested. Sir Keir Starmer had a torrid time on Sky News trying to limit the fall-out. The truth is such ads are widely shared and read by millions creating serious temptation for politicians who find that honesty and truth-telling disadvantage them. We’ve got several more months campaigning to endure. Omerta, disinformation and voter suppression are poisoning our political culture. Together they preclude acknowledging and learning from experience. This is not how democracy survives. This is not how to heal domestic divisions nor counter the rise of threatening authoritarian regimes opposed to democratic values. You don’t have to read The Civic Bargain to figure that out. See TheArticle 02/04/2024 It is difficult to find the right word to describe the current practice of our national government. Grand announcements of virtuous intentions fall far short of expectations or are just not carried out. Much saying and promising one thing and doing another. Google’s definition of duplicity: “the belying of one’s true intentions by deceptive words or actions” fits best. Here are just two examples of our duplicitous government at work.
When David Cameron was Prime Minister, he made a commitment in 2013, a time of austerity, to annual spending of 0.7% of GDI (Gross Domestic Income) on International Development. Aid which enhanced Britain’s position in the world and brought vital help to the poorest. In November 2020 Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak reneged on that promise reducing spending “temporarily” to 0.5% of GDI. Now, within the amalgamated Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office presided over by the same David Cameron, now a peer, more than a third of that reduced international aid budget is spent inside the UK. In 2022-2023, Britain spent £3.6 billion on asylum seekers, 29% of the international aid budget, mainly the cost of hotel accommodation – currently running at £8 million a day. And, of course, there is the estimated £600 million earmarked for the crowd-pleasing plan to send some 300 people who arrived here in small boats to Rwanda. “We have seen a shocking increase in disruption and criminality...the world's most successful multi-ethnic multi-faith democracy is being deliberately undermined”. Anyone listening to Rishi Sunak’s 1st March podium address to the nation might have imagined the Prime Minister was reacting to something comparable to the devastating terrorist attacks of 2017. But no. Sunak was alarmed by the largely peaceful demonstrations in support of a ceasefire in Gaza and the rise in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since October 7th. Of course they should be taken seriously. Terrorist threats have risen. But Britain remains at the ‘substantial’ (likely) rather than severe (very likely) threat level determined by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) and MI5. On 14 March Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, appeared in Parliament in the improbable role of an Old Testament prophet preaching healing of divisions in society and warning against ‘Islamism’ as a ‘totalitarian ideology’. He offered a new definition of extremism: “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance” which aimed to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” or “undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights” and to “intentionally create a permissive environment” for others to achieve the above aims. Gove went on to suggest a short-list of organisations of concern which would henceforth be shunned by the Home Office and receive no public funding. Organisations can change over time. Gove’s list will require regular reassessment. None on his present list had ever received public funds from Government and all had been shunned by the Home Office for many years. A brazen performance. Business as usual dressed up as change, inaction sounding like a dramatic demarche. Except that we have a new definition of extremism which Church leaders and others worry could disproportionately affect Muslims and curtail freedom of speech. Whilst ‘Islamism’ was named as a threatening ideology Gove made do with Neo-Nazi for his example of right-wing extremism. So let us pass over the inconvenient thought that some of the less poisonous though more influential right-wing extremism has emerged from within the Tory Party. Just as ISIS was reaching the height of its power in 2014-2015, and we were learning about the horrors of Jihadi John and his team of executioners, I was working on the dynamics of religious extremism. Shamima Begum, aged only 15, running away with her two school friends to join the self-declared Caliphate, embodied a far greater and more mystifying threat to society than today’s largely political divisions. What on earth did these children think they were doing? What were the psychological and ideological causes? And how do you change a permissive environment which allows perverse ideas to inspire irrevocable action? In the case of the girls leading to marriage to jihadists and some degree of complicity in their brutality? Safeguarding vulnerable people, challenging the ideas behind, and countering, terrorism, reversing radicalisation are the aims of the national Prevent programme initiated some twenty years ago. The behaviour to be combatted was then defined as “vocal or active opposition to British fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. The seven dead of the 2017 London Bridge attack and the 26 who died at the hands of a suicide bomber in the Manchester Arena the same year, showed how such a mindset could – not inevitably would- trigger actual murderous jihadist violence and underlined the importance of Prevent. Prevent issues, and updates, extensive guidelines intended to help public bodies, Local Authorities, teachers and parents understand their statutory duty to be alert to and report people showing indications of extremism, and when to make a referral for further investigation which might be followed up by mentoring. Prevent has been overwhelmed by the number of referrals, only a fraction of which go forward. By 2021 more than half of referrals involved extremist right-wing behaviour and attitudes. Views about Prevent are highly politicised; it is caught between fire from both the right and from Muslim communities. In January 2021 the Government commissioned a review of Prevent headed by the former head of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross. The review was boycotted by many Muslim organisations and rejected by Amnesty International on grounds of Shawcross’s alleged bias and remarks he had made which were considered anti-Muslim. Some of the report’s 34 recommendations such as expanding the Prevent duty to immigration and job centres, and questioning the consistency between the treatment of Islamic and right-wing extremist referrals, proved contentious. Islamic values do need to be disentangled from what is called Islamist ideology. But in general, the label Islamism is far too catch-all and left undefined or refers simply to seeking an ‘Islamic state with shari’a law’. So, it can include everything from ISIS executioners to the peaceful and pious Muslim Brotherhood supporters, protesting after General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi's July 2013 coup toppled an elected Egyptian government, gunned down amongst the 900 massacred by police. Is the wish to have a government imbued with Islamic values, even if it is the result of a non-violent, incremental, democratic process, to be labelled Islamism? Currently, in a predominantly secular society, probably the answer is yes. All the recent talk about Islamism, though, was intended to cast Sunak and Gove as statesmen, responsible custodians of law and order, protectors against an extremist threat, unifying the nation, rousing the Red Wall constituencies. But it came across as a carefully contrived contribution to the culture wars. Meanwhile behind the scenes – at least until Mayor Sadiq Khan pointed it out – the Home Office was cutting the annual funding for Prevent in London by two-thirds from £6.1 million in December 2019 to £2 million after April 2025. Words do not trump reality. And what you hear is not what you get. Call it duplicity, call it deceit. It is no way to govern. See TheArticle 18/03/2024 |
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