"Your opinion doesn't count because you're thick and you have a common accent": the story of Remain (and Boris Johnson's election)

It is pretty commonplace these days to read or hear an otherwise intelligent person explain how somebody holding an opposing view does so as a result of either being paid to do so or else being brainwashed by the media and advertising. This outlook is doubly common when the otherwise intelligent person considers that the person doing the 'wrongthink' is less well educated. Here's a excellent example from Peter Jukes in a tweet that garnered several hundred likes and retweets:

This is the point. I don’t blame Leave supporters: 30 years of lying by 90% of the press: hundreds millions spent on dark ads by Johnson, Cummings, Banks and Farage, boosted by Putin.

If you voted leave in 2016, you did so because you were brainwashed, lied to and conditioned by the media or by advertising. We see the same argument from public health professionals as they explain that the reason John smokes and Mark is obese is that sinister and manipulative marketing - John and Mary's choices were not real choices, these people (unlike Peter Jukes or the public health people, of course) had no real agency, no free will, they are leaves blown about by the storms of marketing and media.

On the evening of Britain's departure from the EU, somewhat reluctantly, the broadcast media ventured into Parliament Square where several thousand folk were enjoying the moment. There's a little clip that, for those who believe leave voters were hoodwinked, confirms the undoubted thickness and ignorance of leavers. Two women with strong, working class accents are asked by the reporter why they voted to leave. And the answer from both was, albeit not in fancy dan language, right on the money - the vote was about restoring decision-making to the UK parliament where, people felt, they had more chance of affecting those decisions. This, of course, wasn't enough for the reporter who wanted them to say what laws or rules the women would change (hoping, of course, that they'd say something bigoted about immigrants) but they didn't oblige and the reporter moved on.

For our otherwise intelligent person the womens' thick accents and their slightly inarticulate response was enough to confirm that the combination of a "right wing" media, dark money and a number on the side of a bus had led them to vote leave. The women are plainly not intelligent enough to listen to argument, consider the options and make a decision (unlike our otherwise intelligent person).

The idea that the environment in which we live affects the decisions we make isn't either new or wrong. Media and advertising are part of that environment but not the whole of it - if we say that free will is moderated by our social environment, we are not saying that people's decisions are made for them by advertisers or their opinions put in their heads by the media. What our friends and family say, the conversations we have at work or in the check out queue, a thousand interactions that are not controlled by media or advertisers, these things are at least as important - probably more so - than the ads or the news. Why do you buy that particular brand of soap powder? Chances are that it's the brand your Mum uses and the same will go for preferences across a host of products and services.

None of this denies people agency but rather explains how we go about choosing. It's something we don't do in isolation (this also applies to our otherwise intelligent person) but by processing all the information we have received. We place different emphases on these sources, trusting some more than others - I remember a tale told during the recent election where someone reported how their first time voter daughter returned from college saying how the teacher had told them they should vote for Corbyn but, as the tale concluded, that young voter said that she trusted her parent's opinion more than the teacher.

After their defeat in the referendum and, latterly, in December's election, our otherwise intelligent person has expressed the intention to listen to the voters. The problem is that, because those voters are going to say things about being respected, our otherwise intelligent person won't really be listening. After all, the reason they voted the wrong way is because they were manipulated by sinister forces, lied to and exploited by dark forces who don't share their interests. Either than or (and this is more commonly held by our otherwise intelligent person) those voters are just thick and stupid.

So, instead of hearing what those voters are saying ("yes we do want to leave the EU") our otherwise intelligent person listens instead to people like him who have written long analyses of why Labour and/or Remain lost. A two thousand word one in the London Review of Books or a piece by some sociologists at a London university - that'll provide all the evidence our otherwise intelligent person needs, no need to actually listen to what those fat working class women are saying. The BBC did a feature from "the North" by visiting university campuses and talking to people who shared the same outlook, background and worldview as the producers of the programme. It probably didn't help much to broaden anybody's understanding of those people who, in the view of our otherwise intelligent person, voted the wrong way because of dark ads and the right wing media.

The extent to which people who are less articulate (usually, but not always, a consequence of a lower level of formal education) get ignored but our otherwise intelligent person and his friends reveals a degree of intolerance for opinions that are not validated by the in-group. More credence is given to somebody sitting in a book-lined Islington flat who writes about why people in Bassetlaw deserted Labour than an older couple having a drink in a Worksop Wetherspoons. Despite only vaguely knowing the location of Bassetlaw and certainly not knowing anybody who is from Worksop or Retford, our Islington writer gets published in a widely read newspaper or journal while the old couple's opinion, at best, gets (a slightly sneering) fifteen seconds on the local evening news. But then we should remember, as our otherwise intelligent person knows, the writer's opinion is real while the old couple simply reflect the propaganda of that right wing press and those dark ads.

People ask what changed, how the Conservatives and Boris Johnson turned it round and won that victory. What was Dominic Cummings' magic formula? Why? Perhaps, in answering these questions, we should begin with understanding that the biggest change was the decision to ignore the media, to be positive and to offer something believable and tangible to ordinary voters. And because conservatives, and especially leave voting conservatives, had got used to being called thick, xenophobic racists, it was an easy job to make common cause with a load of largely Labour voting leavers who'd experienced the same attacks. If you don't respect people's opinion then you really don't deserve to get people's support.

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As arguments for EU membership go, portraying Britain as a pot of cold baked beans isn't a good one

It takes a particular sort of mindset - that famously self-hating mindset of the English intellectual middle classes - to produce a visual metaphor like this one



This, we're told is Brexit. On the one hand a wonderful collection of foods from across Europe. on the other, cold baked beans. Now I understand the motivation of those who produced this, trapped as they are in the mythology of British food - we don't produce anything edible and that without Europe we'd, well, be stuck eating baked beans. This feeds the "Europe Good, Britain Bad" message that excites a certain type of enthusiast for the UK staying in the EU. And it acts to wind up people like me, a moderate eurosceptic, by displaying Britain as an austere, dreary, uncultured place made better by access to the goodness of Europe.

It's better, think this group of fanatics, to trash the thousands of great British foods so as to make a cheap point about Brexit. At the core of this, however, is the dislike of Britain - especially the English part of Britain - that the intellectual middle class has cultivated. Over there, you know, the roads are better, trains smoother, food better, drinks classier and women prettier. The clothes are better, the language cooler and, let me tell you, there's this little place just off the Rue St Martin that serves divine little pastries and coffee, you don't get that sort of place in England.

Forget about the possible damage done to Britain by Brexit, let's consider instead the actual damage done to Britain, to its image and standing in the world, by generations of smug intellectuals telling us we're a dull, grey little island with nothing to offer (while making sure Jolyon and Miranda get to go to our brilliant public schools, then to the best universities in the world and to live in London, the world's greatest city).

Much of the attacks on people who voted to leave the EU is couched in these terms. Any enthusiasm for things British - let alone English, that really is beyond the pale - is dismissed as the ignorant babbling of stupid people. Snarky little comments are made about how these are uneducated provincial people who wouldn't understand about the sophisticated stuff you only get in grand European capitals. We're all fat ignorant thickos who should just follow the lead of the shiny clever Europeans - a lead that has trashed Greece's economy, is destroying Italy and created a migrant crisis while blaming it on everywhere and everyone else.

I don't know about you but I'm proud of my culture. Not is a "remember the Empire" way but in seeing the bit of the world where I live as a fine place not as cold baked beans. I re-read Roy Porter's 'Enlightenment' recently and was reminded that Britain was, more than almost anywhere, the place where the ideas that shaped modern, liberal Europe were born. And not just the coffee shops of London but the Scottish Enlightenment of Smith and Hume, Birmingham's Lunar Men and the practical, creative engineers of Yorkshire and Lancashire. I'm proud of this contribution to a better world.

I'm proud of British food - we've escaped from the idea that it is uniquely bad (it never was but those middle class intellectuals with their creamy French cooking thought it so) and now have as rich and varied a choice of great local food and drinks as anywhere in Europe. Hundreds of different cheeses, better meat than Europe, great beer, some of the best sparkling wines, and shops and markets filled with fresh local produce. But I also love those sneered at working class dishes - parmo, rag pudding, fish and chips, the sausage roll and the steak pasty. Nowhere else has food like this and they are the poorer for not having it.

And yes I like morris dancing, village galas, home made jam and cake, folk songs and vintage tractors. When you fly back into Britain you look down and see that it really is a green and pleasant land, the best mapped, most networked, most accessible green and pleasant land in the world. For the cost of some decent boots, an OS map and a packed lunch you can spend a day tramping over hill an dale, along the rivers and canals enjoying nature in a landscaped shaped by generations of Brits.

So I will continue to get angry at those who belittle my country, who dismiss it as a small island of not much consequence. There's an argument about trade and our relations with those European neighbours - let's have it. But let's not make that argument about British culture, let's not dismiss that culture, our traditions and history as a pot of cold baked beans.

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JFDI (a rant about democracy)

My wife is not a political animal. But for me she would have remained blissfully uninvolved (if not uninterested). Kathryn is cleverer than me - she got to be acquisitions director for a big international publisher which is a tad bigger achievement-wise than my political career - indeed anyone's political career is less valuable than helping create a multi-million pound business with over 250 employees.

Anyway, the Brexit thing. Kathryn voted to leave because the EU is, for all its talk about trade, essentially anti-trade. And she is cross. Not mildly irritated but really cross, almost to the point of incoherence. As she put it "so angry I don't want to talk about it".

Kathryn is not alone. There are thousands of decent people who, in good faith, voted in a referendum and now see the machinations of people - MPs, media, celebrities, rich businessmen - who lost that vote moving us towards not leaving the European Union. This isn't about who is right and wrong - there isn't an objective, evidenced answer to that question especially in a debate so utterly riddled with lies, scare stories and misinformation. No it's about the very essence of why we vote.

If you say to people "this is your decision, the government will implement what you decide" and then spend three years trying not to do what people decided then is it really a surprise that people are angry? There is a lot of nonsense - endless sociological dribble - talked about why people *really* voted to leave but one thing we have discovered...

...most of our members of parliament are duplicitous, self-serving, dissembling, two-faced, preening popinjays with no real interest, despite the smarmy speeches and Twitter feeds written by Uriah Heep, in the people who gave them that well-paid career opportunity down in London.

Why hell should ordinary people vote if, as they now know, most of the MPs they vote for aren't remotely interested in why they cast that vote? Those MPs are interested in that front bench position, in the foreign trips, in the media appearances and, above all, in the goings on within that cosy little club we elected them to.

What to people want? I'll tell you. They want JFDI - JUST. FUCKING. DO. IT.

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Quote of the day - why the EU should be razed to the ground and the earth beneath salted

From Pete North...

"If you want to live in a top down technocracy where politics is reduced to consultative exercises for show, so that we are all free to live obedient little lives with professional politicians closing down ever more freedoms, then the EU is a nice and easy off the shelf answer."

This is the sum of it all really. I commented on a little online video of (mostly) young people marching in Germany over the proposed new EU copyright rules - an example of powerful business and media interests essentially buying protection from emerging forms of communication online.

I appreciate too that our Westminster government is little better and that the manner in which they have emasculated local government leaves it as essentially the agent of central government fiat.

Getting Brexit should be the opportunity to reassert popular control over government - as I wrote at the new year:

So when we leave the EU that should just be the start. The other shibboleths of our state need democratising too - from the House of Lords and the judiciary through the NHS, police and civil service, to the legion of unaccountable local council chief executives, social services directors and planning managers. If you are looking for a 2019 project, this should be that project - Brexit ought to be the launch pad for a renewed democracy. I fear the great and good - those with most to lose from more democracy and more accountability - will do their utmost do make Brexit into a vehicle for less democracy: they should be stopped.

I remain optimistic.

Addendum: from Samizdata...

MEP’s can not create, amend, or reject proposals. They can act as a method of slowing them, requesting changes or rethinks of proposed policies, but if the other (unelected) parts of the EU want to force through a proposal they can just keep pushing it until it gets through in the knowledge that elected MEP’s will not have the power to propose future updates, changes, or abolition of legislation.

The European Commission only has to win once and it can never be repealed without the European Commission wishing it so.

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Why the EU isn't working for ordinary people (Italian version)...

Tim Parks writes about Italy and the problems with its tanking economy and grumpy electorate - and, in doing so, he bashes the EU nail firmly on the head:

There are two logical ways out of this impasse and the irresponsibility and frustration it breeds. One is a move to a genuine political and fiscal union of Europe; the other is a return to increased national autonomy outside the Euro. Present animosities make the first solution unthinkable. There is no appetite for it. Yet the economic power of the markets to punish any move to leave the Euro makes the second solution suicidal; as Greece has shown.

What we can expect, then, is more and more empty rhetoric and clownish behaviour at a national level; more and more people voting in a spirit of defiance, while tacitly accepting that their vote means nothing. It is a system in which you vote for someone because of what they say they would like to do, not what they can actually do. In short, if you don’t rule your country you can’t expect a viable ruling class.

I keep banging on about how the reason for leaving the EU is to allow us - in most areas of life - to govern ourselves, to give us the chance to do the opposite to how Tim Parks describes Italy and elect people because of what they are going to do not for their chasing of rhetorical unicorns.

Earlier today I took part in a brexit debate at Bradford College - my opening remarks were:

I voted to leave because the EU is distant, unaccountable and fundamentally undemocratic. For all the trappings of democracy – flags, anthems, parliaments, five presidents and periodic elections – there’s no way for us – “we the people” as it were – to change who rules us. For me, if we were simply a member of a trade pact, the sort of thing we joined in 1973 (before I could vote), then I’d be arguing to remain a member. But we’re not a member of “just a trade pact” – the EU wants to have a say in how much tax we pay, in consumer choice, in what is taught in schools, and in the organisation of transport, health and welfare. This is not simply a trade pact.

There are down sides to leaving probably including a short-term economic hit but the big gain is that we can begin the long job of restoring trust in government, in saying to those millions who, for probably the first time in their lives, cast a meaningful vote that we hear them and will give them back the some of the control over government that elites in Westminster and Brussels took away.

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My Dad died last year. It seems some remainers are gleeful about this...

Your politics is very troubled if it takes you to a place where you wish your opponents - "the enemy" - dead. Yet this is precisely where we've got to with the Remain side of Brexit:

Enough old leavers will have died and enough young remainers will have come on to the electoral register to turn the dial on what the country thinks about Brexit.

This doesn't come from some little blog but from the UK's leading progressive news platform, The Guardian written by one of its star - and very well paid - columnists, Polly Toynbee. This position - we'll get what we want once all those unpleasant old people in provincial towns have pegged it - it a deeply unpleasant one. It sits alongside the idea - most recently from singer, Jamelia, that old people should have the franchise removed because, y'know, they'll be dead before the effects of their votes are truly felt.

Elsewhere:



Now the person who did this unthinkingly unpleasant site has taken it down claiming that he didn't mean to be nasty to people who are dying (they aren't, of course, all nasty old brexity people) or to the families of people who lost close relatives since the referendum. As far as I know, my Dad voted to leave and he died last year making him one of Polly and her pals gleeful statistics. I miss his wit and wisdom, things gained from a long life including 35 years as a local councillor - the idea that his views and opinions shouldn't have counted because he was at the end of his life is a truly unpleasant and undemocratic idea.

The people putting forward the idea that people dying is something to be celebrated because it suits their political positions demographics consider themselves to be intelligent, moderate, caring people. What these views show is that, in some respects, they are far more dangerous and damaging for our liberty and democracy than the UK's handful of right wing thugs - we sort of expect violent language from the latter but when establishment figures with columns in national newspapers start on the same line, unchallenged by editors or the wider media, alarm bells should ring. Old people are not an inconvenience but part of our society - wishing them dead because you think they might vote the wrong way is repulsive.

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No leadership, childishness and deception - how MPs are destroying the trust that's central to democracy

Trust. That's it, the central, essential requirement for democracy to work. People have to trust that their friends and neighbours will behave responsibly and that the people who we send to parliament as our representatives will do, more or less, what they said they'll do. I know, I know, I can hear you: "Simon, what are you drinking, people never trust politicians...": or words to that effect. I suspect, however, that this probably ain't so - there's always been a loud minority who thought politicians were selfish, on the take, charlatans but most people, if they ever gave the matter thought, saw politicians as grand but essentially decent folk.

Yesterday I concluded that we're pretty close to the point where this trust, always a fragile thing, collapses. Three things led me there - watching "Brexit: the uncivil war", seeing interviews with Harlow residents on Sky News and reading Dominic Grieves 2017 election statement. And before we start this isn't about Brexit right or wrong but about whether the people feel able to affect change in a democracy - can trust those they elect to respect how they vote.

I won't go into a whole review of "Brexit: the uncivil war" - suffice it to say that I enjoyed it but felt it was (other than a truly dire scene supposedly set in Jaywick - it's always Jaywick isn't it) too focused on the battle between teams of Westminster insiders rather than on an amazing campaign mostly conducted by regular voters without reference to politicians. It was also spoiled by a silly bit of text at the end suggesting the leave campaign did something evil and malign (it didn't).

Anyway, the important bit isn't the accuracy or otherwise of the drama but the final minutes set in a future inquiry where Dominic Cummings played by Benedict Cumberbatch rants about how nobody had the intelligence, initiative or aspiration to take hold of the 2016 vote and shape it into a real change for Britain. The Cummings character, close to camera, says that a vote to change how we did politics was seen as just something to be managed within the existing political culture. Politicians - leave and remain - were unable to grasp that voters, including scruffy ones in ramshackle shacks by the Essex seaside, were telling us the way we do politics needs to change and that maybe we'd get better government if we paid them some actual attention.

Meanwhile, Sky News had toddled off to Harlow - Essex again as it's not too inconvenient as they can get back to West London to take Jocasta to dance class - where they did vox pops with voters. Sophie Ridge, the presenter, shared clips on social media and these told the same tale as we heard from that end piece in "Brexit: the uncivil war". Politicians are useless buffoons, they need to get on with the job and stop behaving like children. And (trust me on this one) this sentiment is repeated everywhere by leave and remain voters alike. It's accompanied by a growing view that, not only will Brexit not happen but that people will have less power in future because they had the audacity to vote for something their lords and masters didn't want.

Yet despite this, MPs have, time and time again, voted (by slim majorities admittedly) to stop any resolution to Brexit that didn't conform to their view - incidentally, given they are mostly remain supporters, a view that is directly contradictory to the way the majority of the people voted. Every possible variant of legal and procedural sophistry has been employed, all with the intent of stopping the government from implementing the result of the 2016 referendum. And this brings me to the third thing from yesterday because it features Dominic Grieve, one of the leading confounders of that democratic vote in June 2016. There are plenty of others to choose from but I happened to read what Grieve had said to his electorate in the 2017 General Election - here's a chunk:

As someone who has always advocated a close relationship between the UK and the European Union, I accept the result of the 2016 Referendum. I therefore strongly support the Prime Minister’s determination to secure a negotiated arrangement for leaving the EU and for forging a new trading relationship for the future, providing certainty for trade and business whilst giving us control of migration and releasing us from the direct effect of EU Law. I also believe that the people of our country will benefit from a close continuing relationship with a strong EU and I will work to help build these important links for our future. I very much hope, therefore, that the Prime Minister will be able to achieve something close to the goals she set out in her speech at Lancaster House in February.

I challenge anyone to find in this, or indeed in the rest of Grieve's message, anything that justifies how he has behaved in parliament since that election. The address in question - especially given how clear the Conservative manifesto was on the matter - is a colossal act of deception because, as subsequent events have shown, Grieve had every intention of spending the forthcoming parliament manipulating rules and procedures to try and prevent Brexit.

These three examples all speak to the relationship between the electorate and their representatives with the public justifiably exasperated by what's gone on, irritated by the childishness of MPs (and their friends in the mainstream media) and desperate for somebody to grasp the opportunity of reframing the relationship between voter and politician in favour of the voter and away from the tribal elites in the Westminster bubble.

As I said at the start, trust is central to democracy. It seems that, unless something dramatic happens pretty soon, politicians in Westminster, by repeatedly ignoring voters concerns and interests, will finally have lost the last vestiges of respect as well as the public's trust. What will happen at this point isn't clear - I'm not expecting thousands to take to the streets as they have in France but I do expect a new sort of politician - blunt, cynical and populist - to arrive. And the first place they'll arrive is in local Conservative associations.

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The thing about trade is nearly everyone is wrong...

It is imports that matter and tariffs are just a tax on imports (meaning people are less well of):

When highly visible and politically influential producers believe themselves to lose sales because of some foreign-government’s trade practice, they complain to their home government, which then confronts the foreign government. The home government acts like a combined consigliere and hit-man for the complaining producers. But this hit-man’s immediate targets are home-country consumers and politically invisible home-country producers. That is, this hit-man – by raising tariffs – inflicts hurt on his and the complaining-producers’ fellow citizens. And this hit-man promises to ramp-up the hurt that he inflicts on his fellow citizens until the foreign government stops inflicting identical hurt on its citizens.

Of course it would be nice if foreign places stopped taxing their citizens for having the audacity to buy foreign products but it really is less important than us stopping taxing our citizens for buying stuff not made in the UK. Don Boudreaux's analogy above is a good one but a better one is here.

We are stuck in a world - that of David Cameron's "Global race" - where trade is seen as a zero sum game and where, if we don;t do these things to ourselves, some other country will "win". Worse still, trade is seen as something that is gifted to us by a benign government rather than a right removed from us by the powerful. This is the language of the "trade deal" where two or more governments agree not to interfere quite so much in the private arrangements of their citizens on a equal basis ("we won't make our people more poor if you agree not to make your people more poor").

Government's job isn't to manage the process of trade but rather to ensure that it is conducted fairly, that contracts are honoured and goods are safe. And the place to start (we can start doing this in the UK on 30th March) is by abolishing all the unnecessary tariffs - those taxes on the private choices of our citizens.


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We must stop 2019 being the year of the antidemocrats - delivering Brexit is only the start

"There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands." Plato

It begins.

"There are only a few weeks left now for the vast, sensible majority in the Commons to acknowledge that voters were wrong" Matthew Parris

I picked this one but it could have been any one of a hundred recent examples - not just in the UK but across the world: intelligent, educated, wise people saying that you can't trust voters or that voters are wrong. Each time this happens the advocates of a philosopher monarchy are reminded that it's this idea that drives the terrible populism (or, if you prefer, democracy) that Plato's latter day fan boys despise.

The most worrying thing about politics today is this belief that only educated people can be trusted to get things right. In the year when we in Britain marked the centenary of millions of our working class being given the vote, the narrative of elite political discourse has become ever more opposed to the ideas signalled by extension of the franchise. In case we forget, the central belief that led to a wider franchise was that not only can we trust the people but it is right to do so. We should also remember, while we're doing this, that the wider franchise not only meant we had a Labour government enacting all the things moderate centrist folk like but (given the absolute nonsense talked about the Northern Ireland border) probably led to Irish independence too.

The depressing thing about all this is that it is only going to get worse - 'despite Brexit' as the phrase goes. Indeed, it worries me that the response to us leaving on 29th March 2019 from putative philosopher kings with columns in the Times or the Guardian will be to double down on "don't trust the people" and to argue for more limits to democracy so such a terrible thing doesn't happen ever again. This tendency will be accompanied by faux-populism - everything from appointing a "waste food tsar" and banning plastic from schools through to stern lectures about diet becoming taxes and bans on anything affordable that has any actual taste. Plus an endlessly repeated patronising mantra - "stupid voters got it wrong, stupid voters got it wrong".

At the heart of all this are two linked beliefs - first, that most people (not you and I, obviously but most people) are too stupid to make the right choices; second that there is an absolutely right choice and it can be determined by looking at the evidence. Now it's plain that we all (not you, I know, but exceptions prove the rule) make stupid choices from time to time, it's part of the human condition and it's also true that looking at evidence helps to make better choices. But this doesn't mean that you can eliminate "stupid" choices or that the evidence you have will necessarily lead to a better choice.

But this sort of view - clever people will make policies and impose them on thickos for their own good - is the essence of Plato's philosopher kings thesis. And indeed the core premise for things like "United for Change" the new 'centrist' party that may or may not sweep everything before it:

United for Change, founded by the millionaire entrepreneur Simon Franks, wants to create a “true grassroots movement” that will practise politics without tribalism, confrontation, “yelling and finger pointing”.

The party has been developed in secret for almost two years by businesspeople and political donors who want to take advantage of anti-political sentiment in Britain.

We're told by Franks that we'll be getting policies drawn up by experts - doubtless to be promoted by eager salesfolk (or an "army of volunteers"):

We want to craft a commonsense policy agenda that’s informed by those with real experience and expertise. That’s why we’ve created a structure to allow experts, academics and experienced practitioners to contribute.

Now while this is a project (secret because they're "putting substance before style") from one wealthy bloke, it reflects the reality of where our politics is headed. Not that democracy will be abolished or the franchise limited but rather that, in the manner of the EU, complicated pseudo-democratic structures will be put in place to give the illusion that leaders are elected and decisions are democratic. Alongside all this the real leaders (or "senior leaders" as we now call them) will carry on in their appointed and unaccountable world - the police, NHS, social services and transport will be managed in a supposedly businesslike manner by boards of wise folk who aren't actually accountable to anyone.

The irony in all of this is that, in Britain, only the loopier parts of our politics understands just how the current system threatens democracy - a few of the Corbynistas (when they're not pretending to be communists) and the libertarian parts of the pro-Brexit right understand that the Brexit vote was about saving democracy. That vote - and the vote for Trump, Salvini or any of the other left and right wing populists - wasn't a cry of pain but a call for action. And the action we want is a restoration of democracy, accountability and the idea that, when all it said and done, we (The People) can kick out any philosopher kings before their self-importance and sense of righteousness gets too much.

So when we leave the EU that should just be the start. The other shibboleths of our state need democratising too - from the House of Lords and the judiciary through the NHS, police and civil service, to the legion of unaccountable local council chief executives, social services directors and planning managers. If you are looking for a 2019 project, this should be that project - Brexit ought to be the launch pad for a renewed democracy. I fear the great and good - those with most to lose from more democracy and more accountability - will do their utmost do make Brexit into a vehicle for less democracy: they should be stopped.
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Matthew d'Ancona is the bigot, not me

One time cameronista now born again as a righteous Guardian writer, Matthew d'Ancona has written one of those lazy journalist articles about how those people who voted to leave the EU back in 2016 are bigots and, anyway, were manipulated (one unpleasant chap on Twitter called it 'gaslighted') into that vote by a sinister elite. d'Ancona's contention is two-fold - firstly that wanting to control immigration is ipso facto bigoted and that marginal advances in economic prosperity are enough to justify the undermining of culture and community. It is the very essence of the Remainer case that economic advancement is everything and that "the most important metric was economic prosperity".

The problem, and in different guises this is repeated again and again across Europe, is that the public simply don't see it that way. Indeed, many people remain convinced (the evidence supports them poorly here) that immigration is economically damaging - they'll point to the lack of affordable homes, the waiting lists at hospitals, the over-subscribed primary schools and the persistent low pay in unskilled and semi-skilled manual jobs. It's not enough to exclaim how the NHS depend on immigrant labour or is needed for "...affordable decorators..." or "...your Tesco and Amazon deliveries arriving on time." Out there in the real world away from d'Ancona's wealthy internationalist bubble people do their own decorating and don't see a job delivering parcels as something requiring cheap imported labour but rather as a job their son, nephew or neighbour might be doing.

It is this outlook, a sort of sniffy dismissal of jobs like cleaning hospital loos, delivering parcels and mopping floors as things only foreigners can do because we're all doing much grander things, that defines d'Ancona and his fellow Guardian elite as bigots. It's one with the equally common - I call it "Naomi Kline Snobbery" - view that, while posh clever folk who support progressive causes are immune, those common sorts are manipulated by big business and advertising into the terrible "consumerist" world. And by consumption they don't mean uplifting (and over-priced) novels, avant garde theatre or lovely evenings with friends in that brilliant little restaurant just off the common. No we mean very big plastic toys, McDonalds, discounted boxes of Stella and multi-packs of own brand crisps. It means shopping at Aldi - not to ironically buy cheap wine because a review told you to - but because week-on-week the basket is cheaper.

This bigotry is the bigotry that likes minimum unit pricing for booze (it won't affect folk like d'Ancona of course just common people), vaping bans ('well it's a bit naff, isn't it') and sugar taxes ('we have to think of the children'). The argument is that people don't know any better or they're conned by "Big Booze" or "Big Sugar" or "Big Food" or it's for their own good. But in the core of this belief - and it's the same as dismissing concerns about immigration as bigotry - is the idea that the sort of working class, provincial, horny-handed people that voted to leave the EU cannot be trusted to make decisions without the guiding hand of Matthew d'Ancona and his friends - more intelligent, more worldly-wise, better informed. And, course, these Philosopher Kings won't make decisions in their own self-interest, they are above all that, they read the Guardian for heaven's sake!

Some leavers are bigots, just as some Guardian readers think about the lives of people outside the charmed circle of wealthy, London-based progressive life. But in both cases it's a minority. It seems to me - as a leaver who is largely pro-immigration, supports free trade and would just like the option, and a means, to kick the bastards running Europe out - that, far from Brexiteers being bigots, the real bigots here are those progressive, Remainer, pseudo-centrist, selfish, short-termist, judgemental, know-all people like Matthew d'Ancona.

....

Age of Madness - prosecuting Boris and other tales from the Brexit front

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

So it is with, it seems, almost everything about our ongoing debate about leaving the EU. This madness appears to have spread throughout the land, a plague of conspiracy theory, offence, insult and obsession. Formerly cheery folk are become monomaniacal advocates of Remain or Brexit, prepared to cast friendships, work and community into the pit rather than admit they might just be over-egging the whole thing just a tad.

Over on the leave side there's a host of people casting those who think otherwise as traitors, quislings and paid lackeys of foreign billionaires. The attempt to find a way through the tangled mass of Brexit options is variously described as a betrayal or a sell out and any deal not conforming to the unwritten gospel of One True Brexit serves only to make us a vassal state, a colony trapped forever in the evil EU web. Some are even ready to countenance staying in the EU if the arrangements of our leaving do not meet the requirements of that One True Brexit.

Not to be outdone, indeed to maintain their lead in spittle-flecked, swivel-eyed lunacy, the Remain Ultras have found a new stupidity - they're going to sue Boris Johnson because the words on the side of a bus might not have been entirely accurate. And people - folk with good jobs and money to spare - have given these numpties the cash to take this action:

On Saturday 17th November, Boris Johnson MP was notified of private prosecutor Marcus J Ball’s intention to bring a private prosecution case against him. The case is in accordance with section 6(1) of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, for the alleged offence of misconduct in public office.

Mr Ball has instructed Bankside Commercial to bring on his behalf, the private prosecution against Mr Johnson MP.

Bankside Commercial has retained the services of three barristers from Church Court Chambers: Mr Lewis Power QC, Colin Witcher and Anthony Eskander.

The alleged offence of misconduct in public office arises from statements made and or endorsed by Boris Johnson MP in his capacity as an MP and Mayor of London prior to and following the EU Referendum concerning the cost of EU Membership. Mr Ball alleges that the claim that the UK ‘sends £350 million a week to the EU’ was knowingly false.

Also, that Mr Johnson made or endorsed these statements with the intention of persuading the British Public to vote Leave in the EU Referendum.

Over £100,000 has been raised to conduct this deranged plan with more than 3000 people contributing. The lead numpty, Marcus Ball, says that they'll need half a million quid. To achieve what exactly? Apparently the contested claim about how much goes to the EU (and if you hark back to the referendum campaign, you'll recall it was contested - vigorously) represents "misconduct in public office" because Boris knew it was wrong. How on earth a person, regardless of their day job, conducting a political campaign can be described as acting "in public office" defeats me but more importantly, even if these idiots win their case, there's no chance of this changing what the outcome or direction of the Brexit process (an increasing occult enterprise).

When this is set alongside Lord Adonis accusing the FT of selling out to Japanese corporate interests and The Observer's ever weirder conspiracy theories about "dark money" and "secret webs", it's clear that people have taken almost complete leave of their senses. Add in a different bunch who are now saying that the Prime Minister's (slightly sub-optimal) attempt to craft something from the fog of Brexit is BRINO - "Brexit in Name Only" - and proves it's a Remainer conspiracy to keep us trapped forever in the EU's web. We truly are in a time of madness - "quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat"


….

Was the Brexit vote a call for more accountable, less distant - even local - government?

Sociologist Geert Hofstede, as part of his work looking at the different dimensions of culture, created the idea of 'power distance' - “the extent to which the less powerful members of organisations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” Because people feel - physically or psychologically - a long way from where the decisions about their lives are made they become less engaged and involved. This may well explain why, in most developed world democracies, voter turnout rises as social class rises - and this difference has been growing:

In the 1987 general election, for example, the turnout rate for the poorest income group was 4% lower than for the wealthiest. By 2010 the gap had grown to a staggering 23 points.

While 'I can't be bothered' or 'I don't understand politics' might be the sort of explanation we get when we canvass non-voters from lower social classes, it is likely that people in these classes no longer feel that their voting makes much difference to what the government does once it's ensconced in nice warm offices down in London. More importantly, other than that periodic opportunity to vote, people feel unable to influence government in its process of decision-making on things that affect them.

If we look at the levels of government, from the parish council up to the EU and other international bodies, it seems more likely that people (and in particular people from lower social classes) are able to influence the decisions of their parish council far more than they are the decisions of the European Union's Commission and Parliament. Those people can and do organise to go to the parish council, a body filled with people much more like them than higher tier levels of government, and argue for a particular course of action. And, more importantly, see that course of action enacted.

The problem in England is that fewer and fewer decisions affecting people (and especially working class people) are made in places close enough to those people for their voice to be worth expressing. So people don't bother. Worse still, since the national decision is necessarily broad brush, the minutiae of how that decision is implemented in a given place are discussed by bureaucrats without reference to the voters these minutiae impact.

Since democracy is as much about how accountable decision-makers feel as it is about how many people vote, the systems we have at national and supra-national levels act to exclude people. Decisions are made about what's taught in schools, about how money for health care is distributed, about where houses should be built - a myriad of things that affect us directly - without the public having the means to contribute or, more importantly, for the decision-makers to feel in any way accountable to that public.

The answer is, of course, making politics more local, not just in homage to Tip O'Neill's maxim that 'all politics is local', but because local decision-making is more accessible and therefore more accountable. This probably makes it better decision-making and it certainly means the politicians can't hide behind layers of Kafka-esque bureaucracy when confronted with their dafter decisions. As Tim Worstall put it (in explaining one reason why Denmark works so well as a culture):

Instead they have what I call the Bjorn's Beer Effect. You're in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy.

So, if you're looking for ways to improve English government perhaps, instead of moving decisions ever further up the tiers of government, we should do the opposite and move decisions down to the most local level possible. The EU called this 'subsidiarity', spoke at great length about it, then proceeded to ignore it in favour of ever more 'harmonisation' (bureaucrat speak for what the Daily Mail calls the "postcode lottery"). If you're looking for reasons why those disengaged lower social class voters turned out to vote in the Brexit referendum, the fact they felt - perhaps for the first time - that they were actually involved in making an important decision might be a big reason. And, although the stated reasons for voting to leave are many and varied, the fact that the EU is distant, complicated and (in the terms we've discussed) essentially unaccountable sits at the heart of people's choice. "Taking back control" isn't about sovereignty or the UK parliament, it should be a call for us to get decisions about peoples' lives right back down to where those people have a fighting chance of influencing what's decided.


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Why a 'hard' Brexit won't work (despite being right on nearly everything about trade theory)

Probably the most important single insight that an introductory course can convey about international economics is that it does not change the basics: trade is just another economic activity, subject to the same principles as anything else.

If you're going to write about trade (and don't want to start with David Riccardo) then Paul Krugman, who got his Nobel Prize for writing about trade, is as good a place as any to start. And Krugman's opening point is that international boundaries don't change the fundamentals of economic theory. There is no essential (economic) difference between me buying something from Basingstoke and me buying something from Beijing. As far as theory is concerned, therefore, making this comparison practically as well as theoretically true should be the point of trade policy. Any other approach would be against the interests of the buyer (and, therefore, by extension favouring the interests of the seller) and bad for the economy.

The problem with trade is that, as they say on Facebook, it's complicated. It's not complicated because Krugman is wrong, it's complicated because sellers - producers - in various nation states and groups of nation states have persuaded their government (quite often - as with US sugar producers - through the extensive use of cash money as a persuader) that their particular business is peculiar and it will not benefit consumers to have access to all the world's production of that good or service. These persuasive folk have spun the point of trade 180 degrees - it's all about national competition, a global race as David Cameron kept telling us. Britain is competing with China and India and the USA and Mexico - we must back our producers even if it means ordinary Brits having to pay more for stuff. Here's Krugman again:

After all, the rhetoric of competitiveness, the view that, in the words of President Clinton, each nation is “like a big corporation competing in the global marketplace”, has become pervasive among opinion leaders throughout the world. People who believe themselves to be sophisticated about the subject take it for granted that the economic problem facing any modern nation is essentially one of competing on world markets, that the United States and Japan are competitors in the same sense that Coca-Cola competes with Pepsi, and are unaware that anyone might seriously question that proposition.

Again, Krugman is right - the point of trade is imports, the stuff us consumers buy, not exports. For sure we need the exports so we can pay for the imports but if we're running a gap in favour of exports then this is simply money that UK consumers would otherwise have spent on buying stuff (this is one reason why China becoming a net importer of goods sometime in the next decade or so is a very significant event - we'll need to find a new set of folk to buy stuff off). So when you hear that familiar Brexit Ultra argument, "they export more to us than we do to them so they need us more", smile sweetly because they've entirely missed the whole point of trade.

The problem, however, is that this position on trade utterly dominates debate - far from us seeking a trade policy that makes buying from Peshawar more like buying from Penge, we seek instead a policy that ossifies difficulties in exchange by pretending that international trade follows a different set of economic rules (or, more to the point, a set of rules defined without reference to economic theory by lawyers and bureaucrats, often at the behest of well-connected lobbies for business interests) to national trade. Here Scott Sumner sums up all this:

Over the past 200 years, debates about trade have occurred on two levels. Academics insist that unilateral free trade is the best option. However the “very serious people” (VSP) who conduct real world trade negotiations act as if open markets are a “concession”. They act as if we were doing other countries a favor by letting them export goods to our market. They view the academic perspective as hopelessly idealistic, even as the VSPs have worked hard to gradually move the world toward the same goal of freer trade, one agreement at a time.

Sumner goes on to say that the VSPs' chickens are returning to roost as first Trump then the EU succumb to managed trade - mercantilist - arguments. The most striking thing about the Brexit debate isn't its economic illiteracy (on both sides) but rather that, in the real world, neither side seems remotely interested in open markets. Indeed many of the arguments should have been put to bed while Wellington's boot was used to describe the oppression of the Corn Laws. Trade is only possible because of incredibly complicated sets of rules contained in huge tomes that only a few are able to understand. It's sad that governments - because of the effectiveness of business lobbies and the delusion of competition between nations - have created the situation where this sclerotic, rules-bound system makes it possible that a willing buyer in the UK is unable to get her goods from a willing seller in France (or for that matter The Phillipines). Anyone who thinks such a system is a good idea is, in my view, the worst sort of deluded fool. And, you'd hope that intelligent people would be trying to make sure such a system didn't come to pass.

It is, depressingly, what we've got. And the lawyers and bureaucrats aren't about to let something like 200 years of solid evidence backing up the best of economic theory get in the way of their lovely rules (there's a whole new can filled with self-interested worms right here). So the job isn't served by doing the right thing in terms of the evidence (more free trade, more open markets, lower tariffs, fewer regulations) but by making sure that, in the case of Brexit, the UK can leave the EU without a bunch of rules merchants crashing our economy simply out of spite. This is the only reason why a "no deal" option should be avoided - international trade still operates in an essentially mercantilist manner with the interests of producers sat round the table alongside the lawyers and bureaucrats and this means any settlement will, wrongly, be concluded on the basis of 'competitiveness', 'export' and 'protection' rather than in the interests of consumers.

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Vote Leave's "sophisticated" campaign was the Internet age equivalent of junk mailing

Back in the day we had two sorts of client - ones who paid lip service to the idea of targeted marketing and those who tried to use targeting to improve results. The former - typically financial services businesses of one sort or another - were great clients as what they really wanted to do was shove out their sales message through every available direct marketing medium regardless of any nuanced assessment of responsiveness. Mostly this is because the levels of response that made credit card applications, investment bonds and mortgages cost-effective was very low. This is (for those who remember back then) why everyone got so royally pissed off with the likes of American Express - except us direct marketers, we were making lots of lovely print margin for churning out essentially untargeted material.

The second bunch were much more difficult as conversion to sales, cost per response, cost per new order and so forth really mattered. They used agencies like us because we were (or so we said) at the cutting edge of sophisticated targeting making use of databases, expert systems, geodemographics, psychographics and other of the assorted computer dark arts. We used all those tricks, tests and personalised gimmicks - "Yes, SIMON COOKE, you could already have won FIFTY THOUSAND POUNDS in our preselected prize draw..." - we were the Red Sparrows of marketing. Today we'd probably have strangely coloured hair but back then we were more Mad Men in our dress style.

Recently a bunch of people who, it seems, hadn't realised that careful, targeted marketing doesn't require Facebook, have discovered that those databases, expert systems, geodemographics and psychometrics really do exist and have been used to target advertising by political campaigners. Indeed, today's marketing Red Sparrows have cluttered up UK and US airwaves - besplendid in their best red hair - spinning the same bollocks we were spinning back in 1992. Carefully selected statistics - "using geodemographic targeting has been shown to lift response rate by up to 150%" (from nearly nothing to very slightly more than nearly nothing) - are wheeled out wrapped in words that probably mean little in this context but sound good - algorithm, profiling, psychology. Add to this how we continue to believe Vance Packard's nonsense about secret and hidden techniques used by marketers to trick us into buying stuff we don't want to buy, and you've a recipe for otherwise intelligent people believing that somehow the Brexit vote was all down to this occult science rather than a whole load of people, for whatever reason, really not liking the European Union very much.

What's come out now is some of the detail of Vote Leave's targeted advertising. And, it seems that Vote Leave - led by a man who tells us Marvin's brain is tiny next to his - were the sort of client we loved. The supposedly sophisticated targeting based on cunning psychology and profiling turns out to be broad brush targeting - "older men", "women", "middle aged people" and so forth. Here's a journalist completely failing to understand the entire point of marketing but, in doing so, revealing how simplistic Vote Leave's targeting was:









There's more but this will do. We were told - stern, questioning MPs interrogated visiting "experts" to ascertain this - that the Brexit campaign was uniquely cunning and sophisticated to the point of being sinister. Yet the truth is that they used the same level of targeting sophistication as Amex did in 1992 - not very much at all. This isn't to say that Vote Leave's online advertising didn't work but what's clear from this revelation is that it wasn't targeted at any level below the sort of broad brush demographics - men, women, old, young - that were used to target TV ads in the age of mass marketing. To put it another way, Vote Leave spent a lot of money flooding facebook with ads in the same manner that Amex leaflets flooded through your letter box back in the early 1990s. It wasn't sophisticated at all - for all the talk of physicists - it was the Internet age version of junk mailing, essentially spam.

...

So there isn't a Brexit Dividend? (Or maybe there is...)

The decision to announce a huge bus-driven bung to the NHS has resulted less in a debate as to whether this is a good idea, if it's too much or too little cash, or cynical politics than one about whether there is (or isn't) a Brexit Dividend.

Seems to me there are three ways of looking at this question.

1. We pay over a significant sum to the European Union. For the sake of argument, let's call it £350m per week. When we leave the EU, we won't be paying over this sum of money so it stands to reason that money is available to spend on other priorities like the NHS. The only question that follows from this gives us the second way of looking at this issue.

2. Yes we won't be sending that £350m each week to Brussels but, after Brexit, we won't have all that money to bung at the NHS. In the short term there will be transitional costs, we have to consider what, if anything, replaces the agriculture subsidies, the regional development grants, and the social policy money. We also have a border to staff up, a trade department to run and ongoing costs where we decide to buy into EU programmes like Erasmus. In the short run - maybe five to ten years - there simply won't be a Brexit Dividend. It all makes some sort of sense - unlike the third argument.

3. There'll be no Brexit Dividend because government revenues will be lower as a result of Brexit. Now, leaving aside that this implies an actual decline in GDP rather than a drop in GDP growth, the truth about this argument is that it can't be refuted as it is based on the comparison of an educated guess - 'growth will be X post-Brexit' - and an actual number - 'GDP growth was X'. The problem is that the forecasters, for all their big machines and grand degree, are always wrong. And, during the debate around Brexit, have always been wrong in direction of doom and gloom. This argument can be set out simply as "we said, on very little basis or evidence, that we'd have £110 for every £100 we had back than, we've only £105 so therefore we're worse off." It isn't a good argument.

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For all the (mostly self-appointed) Brexit experts - no-one's listening

People aren't listening to politicians. Or for that matter to newspaper columnists, BBC political reporters, think tank intellectuals, campaigners, and activist university professors. Twitter may be filled with the wit and wisdom of our political debate but nineteen out of twenty people are looking somewhere else. And when we get all huffy and tell them they're stupid for not paying attention they look back at us and tell us - rightly - that we're boring and they're not interested.

I've never watched Love Island but it's hard to avoid it as, on its start, social media explodes with comment, caricature and judgemental tutting. The current crop of attractive but slightly vacuous women on the show had a conversation (more a couple of comments really) about Brexit that has given political Twitter palpitations - from right across the spectrum of opinion this slightly gormless interaction is used to show that the sort of person who goes on Love Island is thick and, for some, that these are the sort of people who voted to leave. It is a veritable festival of snobbery and "OMG how could anyone know so little about Brexit" commentary.

For me it's a reminder that, for most people Brexit is a bit of a sideshow and they really don't see how the different options for leaving, not leaving, half leaving or leaving later are going to make much difference to their lives. We might be fretting over hard or soft, poached or scrambled Brexit, pouring over the latest Westminster bubble gossip, hanging on the words of our favourite pundit, posting coruscating Tweets exposing the idiocy of ministers, but the rest of humanity - normal people - would rather talk about things that matter in their actual lives right now (jobs, love life, football, paying the mortgage, schools and where they'll buy underwear when the local M&S closes).

It's not that people don't think Brexit is important - all the important people have been telling them every day just how really really important Brexit is, after all - but rather that folk can hold that something is important without thinking that spending time fidgeting over the details is a good use of that time. Does anyone think that me knowing the difference between the EEA/EFTA option, the Swiss solution, customs unions and intelligent borders is going to change much about the manner in which the decision is made? So why should I fuss and worry about these details when there are things I can influence, can change and which are directly relevant to my life right now.

It's not a revelation that people aren't paying attention to politics - pollsters have been telling us this for ages - but rather a realisation that politicians and political pundits aren't paying attention either. We carry on deluding ourselves that the great British public (or indeed American, Australian or French public) care about our political obsessions when the truth is that these things whoosh by them like so much white noise. I consider this to be a good thing - politics in a liberal democracy should be less important - but I suspect that the folk inside the bubble or with their noses pressed against that bubble begging for entry will carry on believing they're so much better because they 'understand'. Not like those girls in the Love Island sunshine. Me, I've a feeling those girls have it about right and, whatever, no-one is listening because they've more important things to worry about.

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Thoughts on The Negotiation...

I've no idea what the final outcome will be in The Negotiation and I'm not sufficiently informed or expert for any speculation to be of much value. I thought, however, I'd make some observations about The Negotiation itself and why it is extremely challenging. Plus why I think the UK government is making a fairly decent fist of the process, even though I would not have adopted the approach they have chosen.

When you or I undertake a negotiation it's normally a pretty straightforward affair even when it involves a significant deal like buying a house. Back when my better and wiser half was negotiating multi-million pound business deals, it was still pretty clear who were the parties involved, information was secure, and the process was conducted with a sense of goodwill and positive intent. None of this applies for The Negotiation.

Let's review.

In simple terms the UK government is negotiating with the EU commission but is doing so on the understanding that any deal is subject to approval by others (British parliament, European parliament, etc, etc.). But the UK government also has to deal with:

An active and well-connected campaign for the negotiation to fail supported by just about every broadcaster and broadsheet newspaper

An opposition party committed to disrupting the process and, it seems, working at least partly in cahoots with the other side in The Negotiation - while offering no strategy of its own

As repeated leaks demonstrate, a civil service that includes people who want the process to collapse

A group within the governing party that is seeking to undermine negotiations either for reasons of supposed principle or, just as commonly, personal ambition

Another party group seeking an impractical resolution that doesn't reflect the realities of the situation or represent UK interests

Direction or attempted direction from parliament, courts and 'expert opinion' that sets out alternative approaches - not in the interests of resolution but for reasons of disruption

A persistent narrative of failure from the media, politicians and commentators - nothing works, all is chaos nothing is right

Non-participant governments (Ireland, Spain) seeking to meet domestic political imperatives through pressure on EU party to negotiations

In this context it's quite remarkable that the UK government has stuck to the basis of its position as set out by the Prime Minister in her speech to Conservative Party Conference in October 2016 - leave the EU including the customs union and single market, negotiate a trade deal with the EU27 that (in the context of leaving) best reflects the interests of British business, industry and consumers.

The UK government may be mistaken in its approach, I'm not qualified to say one way or another, but to say it is unclear, chaotic or confused is simply rubbish. What's unclear, chaotic and confusing is all the chaff, cantreps and tripwires constructed by the list of people in the UK wanting The Negotiation to fail. Plus a constant barrage of negative misinformation from a - mostly ill-informed and partisan - commentariat that wants to paint Britain as useless, the government as incompetent and the whole process as some sort of existential threat to human civilisation.

I may be in a minority of one here but I think, given the unprecedented complexity caused by those who want The Negotiation to fail, the UK government is doing as good a job as can be expected.

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Trust the people (but only the smart, well-educated, urbane ones)

Some of you will have had the dubious pleasure of seeing broadcaster Terry Christian on the BBC's Question Time programme. Mr Christian is an ardent enthusiast for the UK remaining a member of the European Union and, in broad summary, considers everyone who doesn't agree with him to be imbeciles. One of our intrepid broadcaster's shticks is to chatter about how the Brexit vote was cooked up by (anonymous) very rich people who then conned the working class. In simple terms, Mr Christian believes that the working class are too stupid to be allowed out in public with something as explosive as a vote.

This belief that ordinary people do not have agency - can't be trusted to make decisions about their lives - is widespread. Here's a chunk from a post at Tom Paine's blog talking about an academic psychologist from UCL's Centre for Behaviour Change:

He doesn’t mean to be a monster and I don’t want to see him as one, but in his presence my blood ran cold. I was afraid of him. I was even more afraid of the way the earnest folk in the room laughed as he joked about the unintended consequences of various programmes to clean up the act of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed, I realised that I might be the only one there who included himself in the category of “the people” to be shaped as opposed to the smug elite doing the shaping.

What we have here is an entire research centre - indeed something close to a whole academic discipline - dedicated to the idea that people should be stopped from making (what the academics consider to be) bad choices. These are, as Tom Paine observed, nice people - smart, well-educated, urbane, the very sorts you'd want your son or daughter to marry. The problem is that they believe they know better than you do and, they argue, have the research to prove this. They also believe that, because they know better than you do, you should be prevented from making a choice that the smart, well-educated and urbane don't approve.

It is odd that, at a time when we celebrate the widening of the franchise in 1918, a whole bunch of people are putting serious effort into removing choice, freedom and agency from people. The Brexit vote, for many of the smart, well-educated and urbane, has been the tipping point as they rush headlong away from the idea of democracy (while bizarrely trying to pretend that a polity where voting can't change the people in charge is a democracy) or at least from the thought that ruddy-faced older folk - gammon is the term our smart folk use - from slightly tatty northern towns should have a say in what happens.

The result is illustrated by the BBC - home to lots of those smart, well-educated and urbane folk - 'debating' the proposal from one of their number that old people shouldn't be allowed to vote:




How dare people say they won't vote for politicians who ignore their interests!

There are two things going on here but both of them reflect a new version of Plato's philosopher kings - a superior cadre of leaders who are intelligent enough to direct society. In the case of behaviour - poor lifestyle choices, for example - these overlords want, in the manner of Brave New World, to make you have a (long) life of unstressed, bovine contentment and this requires them to direct the choices of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed.

With democracy - whether you're Terry Christian saying working class folk were conned or Jeremy Paxman suggesting old folk hold politicians to ransom - the problem is that people have started making electoral choices that our Philosopher Kings don't agree with. The only way out of this is to either have less democracy or else to limit the way in which democracy operates most obviously by limiting the franchise. Following the referendum there was a great deal of chatter (from those who didn't like the result mainly) about how this shows how referendums are a really awful idea and we should stop having them. We elect politicians (nearly all smart, well-educated and urbane Philosopher Kings) and they should make all the important decisions so as not to cause upset or headaches among the masses.

Part of the problem is that the smart, well-educated and urbane simply don't ever get near to the lives of most people - they live in a snobby world where no-one goes to McDonalds (junk food is bad and unhealthy) except, it seems, by accident:

I was at a workshop on Friday, and whilst driving back home, I stopped off at one of their restaurants in a service station. I'll put this comment upfront, especially given that I work in Public Health; I am not advocating fast food consumption. The options available in service stations are rather poor, especially when looking for hot food (I have found a way around this which I'll mention at the end!). What caught my attention though was the way in which McDonald's understand how to influence behaviour, strategies that we could look at when working in Public Health...But they also understand - in very fine detail - how their systems work, how each component part operates, and how these parts can be refined to maximise efficiency.

For the smart, well-educated and urbane, McDonalds is the enemy - despite (or maybe because) the ubiquitous hamburger chain serves about 3.5 million customers every day in the UK. McDonalds and its franchisees know far more about the ordinary folk of Britain than most academics - this is because it really matters to them as a business, getting the detail right means happy customers. The problem is that our visiting academic doesn't see a great business delivering good food to happy customers. Like Terry Christian with Brexit voters, our academic sees wrongness, exploitation, manipulation - a con. How dare ordinary people make such bad choices and, worse, be happy doing so.

What the Brexit vote uncovered and Corbyn's surge confirmed is that the smart, well-educated and urbane people aren't really all that keen on democracy. They're very keen on votes but these orchestrated events should be like electing the supreme soviet - everyone gets a vote, we're really excited about voting, there are campaigns, speeches, debates but in the end nothing much changes. Democracy should entail the possibility of - people should be able to hope for - a change in the rulers but this doesn't suit the courtiers.

At the core of this is this belief that people (other people who aren't part of your smart, well-educated and urbane circle) don't know what's good for them. These folk are the living embodiment of Douglas Jay's unintentionally honest comment back in 1937:

"...in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves".

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"You're fat and your food's a joke" - elite attitudes to out-of-town dinners

So you head off to the big city from rural America. Anything is better than the dull world of backwoods Indiana - you even write a screed saying how dreadful the old place was. And then you find out what people in the shiny city think of folk from your backwood:

Friends at work one day called her over to ask about Cracker Barrel. “It’s just like a chain restaurant we go to treat ourselves,” Ms. Cronkhite said.

A co-worker jumped in: “It’s this really white-trash restaurant that overweight Midwesterners go to.”

Then came the invitation to join some friends at Butter. The San Francisco bar is decorated as a sendup of rural white America, complete with the front end of a Winnebago RV. The menu included such cocktails as the Whitetrash Driver, vodka and SunnyD; Bitchin’ Camaro, spiced rum and Dr Pepper; and After School Special, vodka and grape soda.

“It was, all of the sudden, in my face,” Ms. Cronkhite said. “Things at home we thought were nice or parts of our culture were treated with open scorn and disdain and like a joke.”

This attitude is commonplace (and not new either) - here's Aesop from about 600BC:

A country mouse invited his cousin who lived in the city to come visit him. The city mouse was so disappointed with the sparse meal which was nothing more than a few kernels of corn and a couple of dried berries.

The disdain of city dwellers for the culinary choices of folk from the sticks is reciprocated but there's still a tendency to see those upcountry, working class dishes as an ironic joke, something a bit naff or, worst of all, unhealthy, unpleasant muck. There is a snooty distaste from our metropolitan elite for Wetherspoons, Harvester and other pub eateries selling Sunday lunches, cheap steaks and jumbo fish all washed down with beer, cheap white wine and Coca-Cola. We're better than that is the tone and you're fat is the message.

To some in that metropolitan elite all this is just a bit "Brexit-y" - scotch eggs, corned beef, cheap lager, sandwich spread, spam, value baked beans and, of course, salad cream:




It's not, however, about Brexit just that leaving the EU acts as a sort of conduit for some of that snobbish disdain - typified by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown using 'shops filled with pie and chips' as a sort of anti-Brexit dog whistle, a position so snobbish that Iain Martin's conclusion is the best antidote:

This shows that Vote Leave missed a trick in June 2016. If they had promised on the side of their bus that Britain post-Brexit would have “shops full of pies” I suspect that Leave would have won the EU referendum by a bigger margin. If chips were also provided, it would have been a landslide among British men.

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We weren't members of the EU back then....

I've always found that, among arguments against Brexit, the one that says 'Britain has historic links to Europe' the most bizarre. Here's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown lecturing us about it (but don't pay too close attention to the facts as they're a tad dodgy):

London was built by Romans when they occupied and controlled the land. Vikings settled in England in AD 373. By the 13th century, our market towns bustled with French, Venetian, Flemish buyers and sellers.

Dutch and German brewers supplied beer to Brits. The Black plague of 1348 killed almost a third of Britain’s population and Europeans flooded in to fill labour shortages.

Do most Brexiters realise that despised and persecuted French protestant refugees helped set up the Bank of England? Or that in the Tudor and Stuart periods, European artisans, scientists, artists and inventors settled in England? Several members of the Royal College of Physicians were German; Austrians taught at Oxford and Cambridge, the father of the great engineer Isambard Brunel was French and so on and on.

We could, of course, go on to note the contribution of that Englishman, Alcuin to the court of Charles the Great, how Byron, Shelley and others traipsed around Italy and Greece having a fine old time while writing the occasional poem, and the tales of many merchants, soldiers and scientists.

But that's missing the point. All this stuff - the trade with Europe, the foreigners who came to live in London, the high end tourism of the Grand Tour - took place without us needing to be welded into the iron lung of the EU. We managed all this collaboration, co-operation and trade without any blocs, pseudo-democracy and officious regulation.

There are arguments for and against us leaving the EU but citing stuff that happened hundreds of years before it even existed (and where the idea of European unity consisted of one or other megalomaniac dragging armies across the continent) really isn't a good one.

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