It was a good-looking march. Britain's new authoritarians take to the streets.

It was a pretty good-looking march. Lots of forty- and fifty-something middle-class men and women flourishing home made banners with witty slogans. We're not sure how many there were - estimates vary from about 20,000 up to half the population and were accompanied by the now familiar moans about how the media were reporting other news (even god-forbid the timely jumping ship of UKIP MP Douglas Carswell) rather than indulging the marchers vanity - but however many turned out they were an attractive bunch. No punks or masked anarchists just 35 year-old civil servants with their faces painted like the EU flags and well-groomed writers who've dragged their seven and eight year old children along.

These are the new authoritarians, the political children of 2016 - Remainers. Looking at the images from yesterday's march I am struck by both the homogeneity of the crowd - for all the talk of diversity it was a very samey looking gathering. And this was also a gathering of the 'haves' not the 'have nots', Harm de Blij's flatearthers rather than the common folk who are happily tied by love and faith to the place they live.

The common theme of the hand-made banners is that somehow a wrong has been done to these people. And, because of this wrong, we should change the principles of democracy to accommodate what they see as right. It's not enough that we had a referendum. It's not enough that Parliament, in accordance with constitutional principles made up yesterday by some judges, voted to allow the advice of that referendum to be taken by the government it advised. No we must have other votes, referendums and debates - a live second-guessing of a delicate negotiation.

At the end of last year I described 2016 as the Year of the Remainer:

Forget about the Brexit voter being the person bringing change to British politics, it's the Remainer. Now we know less about the profile of the Remainer than we do of the Brexiter because nearly all the analysis and opinion-making has been done by those Remainers - they want to understand why we voted to leave and will leave no stone unturned in their search for an appropriate collection of patronisingly dismissive characterisations for leave voters. What we do know is that remain voters and by implication our Remainers are younger, better educated and better paid than average (probably wittier, prettier and sharper dressed too).

What's clear to me about these few thousand remainers - let's call them Remain Ultras - is that they've invented a EU that didn't exist before 23 June 2016. Before then the EU was an unloved institution, almost no-one would dream of painting their face with it's flag without first getting a grant and we only waved that flag because the conditions of that grant required us to do so. Even those people who saw our membership as a good thing would have struggled to muster much enthusiasm for defending the EU itself.

Today all that has changed as our Remain Ultras take to the streets - where they'll be addressed by EU pension-holders like Nick Clegg and Peter Mandelson. Flags are waved, smiling and healthy faces nod at the sage metaphors from these men - cars driving over cliffs are a favourite. The EU is portrayed as a marvellous sugar daddy of an institution, a bastion of democracy, equality and all sorts of other good stuff (including those grants, of course). Then comes the crunch as one of the speakers, yesterday it was David Lammy MP for Tottenham, mentions the D-word:

We’re living in a dictatorship. In democracies people are always allowed to change their minds. Over the coming months and years we will fight.

Nothing out there suggests that any more than a few people have changed their minds about the vote last June. And some of them have come to like Brexit. What Lammy's words tell us, and they could have come from any of those Remain Ultra leaders, is that we cannot afford to see them as figures of fun. They are genuinely a threat to our ideas of liberty, democracy and the right of the people to have a say. As I wrote in December:

These Remainers now represent the shock troops of a new authoritarianism, one that was perhaps there before 2016 but now has been animated - shocked into life like Frankenstein's monster - by the vote to leave in June. Remainers consider themselves as the prototypes for Plato's philosopher kings - wise, knowledgeable, experienced and expert. The natural rulers of a post-democratic state. They will be like Galadriel had she taken the ring:

And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy.

We must resist this authoritarian, anti-democracy message. Above all we should not indulge this bunch of extremists just because they dress well, have a decent hair cut and nice kids.

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The art of the possible - taking a pragmatic approach to trade and Brexit

“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best”

It's fair to say that Bismark was - as were many other 19th century politicians - pretty much a cynic. Or a pragmatist as a spin doctor might put it nowadays. Grand old Otto wasn't alone in this, Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Salisbury all fit the same pattern. And set against them were a bunch of folk who had a vision of that shining city on the hill, a glorious future, an untroubled world - Chartists, socialists, liberals all approached politics as if man was perfectible and the ideological schematic they adhered to need only be implemented for us to reach Utopia.


The bad news is that mankind is not perfectible (something that the god-fearing have always know), human nature is not innately good, and what looks like the solution to life the universe and everything probably isn't.


So that's the end of it? We can dismiss ideology as simply the domain of Toryboys, Marxists and Libertarians can we? Get a solid broad-bottomed coalition of people who stress the practical, who are focused on action rather than thinking? Perhaps not for, in doing this, we abolish strategy in favour of a cavalcade of beautifully spun tactics - "what matters is what works", Tony Blair famously said without thinking about or defining what he meant by "works".


It seems to me that there are three possible responses to our vote to leave the European Union:

1. Ignore it and stay in

2. Implement some sort of Utopian dream of UK independence

3. Be pragmatic and practical - apply Bismark's dictum


One and two above are essentially ideological responses. I know that the Remainers want you to believe that they are somehow saving Britain from thick, stupid, xenophobic voters (and thereby saving 'law and democracy' from the 'extreme right'). There is no talking with such people since their position is immutable and absolutist - the referendum was 'advisory', parliament must 'vote', we need a second, presumably advisory, referendum, the law trumps democracy, and leaving is far to complicated. All of this is entirely ideological.


For the Brexit Absolutists there's a different obsession intended to rescue Britain from the arrogant, elitist, out-of-touch, anti-democratic establishment. As with the Remainers, there's no talking with such folk - Britain is full, Brexit means having nothing at all to do with the EU, problems in the NHS, social care and education are down to immigration, and we shouldn't wait but should leave now by repealing the 1972 European Communities Act.


One of the things that both Remainers and Brexit Ultras talk a lot about is trade. In the case of the former, we apparently had no trade at all with anywhere in Europe prior to 1972 and trade is entirely down to the granting of permissions by governments. The Brexit Ultras are divided on this between those who want a smaller, UK-only version of the EU's protectionist model and those who sign up to the 'Go Global' idea and talk a lot about free trade.

Now some people think all this talk of free trade is an ideological obsession bordering on a cult - introduce free trade and, alakazam, all will be well and everyone will be rich. And the logic of economic theory tells us these cultists are right - here's Don Boudreaux:

Put differently, the only economic reason for trade is that each of us produces some goods or services at costs lower than the costs that our trading partners would incur to produce those same goods or services. That is, each of us has a comparative advantage in supplying the goods or services that we sell to others, and a comparative disadvantage in supplying each of the many goods and services that we buy from others.

Any barriers placed by governments in the way of allowing this trade to happen - borders, tariffs, regulations and so forth - make that trade less likely and us all poorer (in purely economic terms). So when Brexit Ultras like John Redwood or Tim Worstall argue for absolute free trade they are doing so on the basis of a robust base of evidence. More open trade does make us all better off so, logic tells us, absolutely free trade is ideal since that would give the greatest chance of all being richer:

Edwards notes that past studies have suggested that countries that are more open to the rest of the world are better able to absorb the rapid technological advances of leading nations. If the costs of technological imitation are lower than the costs of internally developed innovations, then a poorer country will grow faster than a more developed one. This faster rate of growth will continue so long as that country remains open to capturing new ideas until, at some point, an equilibrium is reached and the rate of growth slows.

Edwards uses a new comparative dataset for 93 countries to analyze the relationship between openness and total factor productivity (TFP) growth. He notes that past limitations in appropriate comparative measures of openness have left studies on the relationship between openness and productivity open to question. To bolster his case, he uses nine alternative indexes of trade policy.

Edwards finds that more open countries indeed have experienced faster productivity growth, and that result holds true no matter which openness index he uses. He further finds that his results are not specific to a certain period, but apply generally throughout the decades 1960 to 1990.

One of the ironies the we can take from this fact is that the Brexit Ultras and Remainers are using the exact same argument on trade but coming to different conclusions. The latter tell us the UK will be poorer because we will leave the single market and lose the benefits of more open trade across the EU. And they are probably right. For the former, the EU is protectionist and leaving opens up new markets and new opportunities in fast growing parts of the world. Again they are probably right.


Indeed, it is true to say that the pragmatists - those seeking to find a way of squaring the circle implicit in the ideological positions of Remainers and Brexit Ultras - are supporting solutions that are less (in pure terms) economically advantageous. As ever the answer is that, even if we just use Adam Smith as our economics source book, the argument is not really rooted in classical liberal absolutism but is rather more subtle:

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

We are, Smith says, protectionists by preference so it isn't necessary for us to be made protectionists through fiat. The local preference that opponents of free market liberalism claim to support (and wish to enforce) is right there in the founding text of liberal economics - made possible by the 'invisible hand'. All other things being equal we prefer to deal with the bloke we know rather than the one we don't. Indeed making your business or product seem comfortable and familiar is one of the main purposes of brand advertising!

It seems that the ideologues are wrong. Not wrong in saying that mankind is enriched by trade and the more open the better, but wrong in suggesting that open trade creates a level playing field between Peoria and Penge, Peshawar and Peking.


I voted to leave the EU in the full knowledge that this could have a short-term negative impact on trade and, therefore, on our economic well-being. We would lose access to those currently important, (more-or-less) barrier-free EU markets more quickly than we could replace them with new open relationships elsewhere. This isn't an argument against leaving because we have to set that loss against a different set of economic problems - the train crash of the Euro, the collapse of political stability in Southern Europe, and the continuing slow growth across much of the continent.


It is, however, an argument for interim or transitional arrangements even if those arrangements result in a longer period during which the UK pays money 'to the EU' and in fewer domestic controls over immigration than we would prefer. We should always resist the blandishments of regulatory bodies - national or international - who tell us their purpose is to facilitate trade when this is seldom the case. But this doesn't mean those bodies that promote standardisation, encourage food safety, help control environmental risks and police fair dealing are somehow unwanted, merely that - for all their value in consumer protection - they do not enhance or promote trade.


The process between now and the point when the UK leaves the European Union is about these arrangements, about balancing between maintaining access to the EU and openness elsewhere, and about the UK deciding upon and implementing a trade strategy. It's not and never has been about there being some 'plan', a sort of ideological blueprint for leaving the EU. Such planning's main function is in allowing the testing of different scenarios and in exploring how UK domestic decisions play out internationally:

But this question also has a common sense answer that every trade policy practitioner knows: governments negotiate trade agreements not because they wish to reduce their own trade barriers but because they seek to reduce the trade barriers imposed by their trading partners, and they are willing to "pay" - with market access "concessions" of their own - for the enhanced access to foreign markets that lower foreign barriers would bring.

It is true, as some Brexit Ultras would argue, that governments can simply ignore this process and implement whatever they wish (this is, after all, the entire point of sovereignty as a concept) but the realpolitic of international trade is that the other side expect concessions. If we have nothing to concede then there is no trade negotiation and no trade deal. This was essentially the point made by Phillip Hammond in his interview with Welt am Sonntag - the discussions we will have with the EU are not one-directional meaning that the Union (or its individual member states) cannot dictate the terms and the consequences of demands from one side may not be helpful to a satisfactory conclusion.


In some respects the very loud argument between Remainers and Brexit Ultras (plus the Farageist protectionists) is helpful to the government. Not because it protects them politically but because it provides them with the means of controlling both sides - "look over there", they'll say, "that's what you'll get if you don't play the game our way." The result of this is very clear in the manner of concerns from both Keir Starmer as Labour lead on Brexit and the Brexit Select Committee of Parliament. Questions are asked, doubts are raised but there is a consistent message of "we won't prevent the referendum being implemented". This infers, however, that the 'deal' depends on the process complying with the pragmatic approach and derives philosophically from Bismark's dictum and Salisbury's doubt rather than from a predetermined ideological end-game.


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Brexit, fussbucketry and being a Tory - top posts of 2016

In a fit of indulgence I thought I'd revisit my most popular postings of 2016. You never know with this sort of review, something might pop up, some sort of revelation. Probably not.

The top two posts, unsurprisingly, are about the EU referendum - firstly back in February when I invoked Don Quixote and talked of my scepticism:

I am a genuine sceptic in all this. I don't really believe in ever more draconian immigration controls, I don't want a sort of pseudo-fascist isolationist approach to the economy for that is lunacy. And I absolutely believe that the EU has played a role (albeit a smaller one than its vanity permits) in securing peace and harmony on what was a divided continent. So I ought to be a supporter of the EU except for a couple of real problems.

As the actual referendum campaign hotted up, I returned again to the problems as I saw them (referencing Jonathan Swift's flying island of Laputa this time):

In one respect it is quite sweet that so many very clever people cluster around the EU's court. Like every other bunch of courtiers throughout history, these people mostly believe (when they've finished chasing consultancy contracts, speaking engagements, advisor positions and policy jobs) that there really is no alternative to the world in which they live, they develop a sort of strabimus with one eye gazing into their narrow little world while the other swivels frantically searching for ever grander ideas of union, collaboration and co-operation. We're told these people are the bright ones, the 'experts', yet they are - quite literally - ignorant of the lives, loves, aspirations and hopes of the people who are supposed to be their bosses.

For me these statements are at the heart of why Remain lost. In the first, I was there to gained as a supporter - all they had to do was explain how the EU could reform in the direction of openness and freedom. The second explains why: the advocates of the EU were too wrapped up in now, in their schemes and plots, to engage with a million plus sceptics who were there to be persuaded. In the end I voted to leave and, given what's been revealed since, I think I made the right choice:

It is rather about whether or not you and I can, if we're angry enough, get up from our armchairs, turn the telly off, go down to the village hall, and vote the bastards out. It's not our country we want back, it's our rights. Or rather the most important right of all - the right to overthrow the government and stick in a new one.

You're welcome to disagree with me even to the extent of shouting abuse but if you try to use bureaucracy and legalistic legerdemain to thwart the decision of 23 June then you are no different or better than those alt-right authoritarians you despise so much:

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy.

Which brings us to the direction of policy where it's no surprise that most of those irritated - even angered - by the fussbucketry of public health were leave voters.

Public health is an ideology of control not a healthcare programme. It dulls the senses of health management by suggesting their inevitable cost pressures will be relieved by patients embracing an approved lifestyle that eliminates the risks contributing to the growing number of people living with chronic conditions like type-2 diabetes. Above all public health represents a crusade to promote a moral and righteous life to the populace - don't smoke, don't drink, don't stay up late, do the right amount of exercise, eat the right diet, avoid salt and sugar. This lifestyle is promoted through the use of public funds to appeal, on one hand, to our fear of mortality through talk of cancer, heart attacks and dementia, while simultaneously suggesting that beautiful, successful people adhere to this stultifying, dull set of consumption behaviours. Across all this runs the argument that, if we want our children to be one or those beautiful, successful people - or even to live - then they mustn't be exposed to these sins of diet or pleasure.

It's not just this nannying of grown-ups of course but an attitude to childhood that leads of seemingly every possible risk being banned or hidden from children:

Instead we see people who behave like the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - corralling children into a dull, purposeful programme of approved activities monitored by the agents of those authorities. Much of the effort here is dedicated to creating obedient little unchallenging conformists. And what we create are a bunch of snowflakes who demand safe spaces, who cry at criticism and who would rather ban free speech than accept that some people are unpleasant or rude. Disagreement is dealt with not through a handshake and "we'll talk about this again" but by one or other party running off to cuddle a teddy bear while listening to calming whale sounds.

I discovered the origins of the word snob the other day - interesting how it shifted from the subject of disdain to the person doing the disdaining. And public health folk have snobbery in spades - the plebs aren't able to decide for themselves:

If public health campaigners really cared about people's wellbeing they'd ask why it is that poor people die younger. They'd wonder why the single mum overeats, the unemployed twenty-something smokes and the old soldier drinks rather than simply trying to nudge them out of these habits with the policy equivalent of a baseball bat. But these public health fanatics don't ask these questions, they just ban stuff, control stuff, lecture, nanny and fuss. Public health campaigning isn't about health, it's about the snobbish promotion of a lifestyle set by passionless middle-class puritans.

Thanks for reading - especially the dedicated few who keep posting comments even though I'm crap at responding - and remember that, for the Kippers and libertarians trying to claim me as one of theirs, I'm just a regular sort of Tory.

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2016: Year of the Remainer

Before 2016 Remainers didn't exist. There was a generally held view that anyone who had applied any thought to the matter was completely content with the UK's membership of the European Union. The problem was that David Cameron, against expectations won the 2015 general election and found himself obliged - mandated even - to hold a referendum on whether we stayed in the EU. It was a triumph for a small band of politicians, writers and campaigners who had argued for a long while that membership of the EU was bad for Britain - not just UKIP leader Nigel Farage (for all his grandiose claims) but politicians like Bill Cash, Iain Duncan Smith, Kate Hoey and Phil Davies as well as writers like Richard North with his EU Referendum blog.

And I don't need to remind you that on 23 June 2016 the British people voted to leave the EU. This was done against an avalanche of insistence by the great and good, from Barak Obama to Eddie Izzard, that leaving so was a really bad idea. The following day there was a cry of pain from the ranks of that great and good - how could people have disregarded all their expert advice and voted to leave?

The Remainer was born.

Over the coming weeks thousands of anxious, fretful articles were written about why people voted to leave. Numbers were crunched, opinions were pronounced and a received wisdom was established. People voted to leave because they were either conned by the leave campaign or else were a bunch of knuckle-dragging, Little Englander morons who probably shouldn't be allowed near sharp objects let alone a voting booth. The word xenophobia tripped from the tongues of Guardian columnists, FT bloggers and Economist writers.

Now it's true that most of those who voted to remain didn't take part in this catalogue of angst-ridden self-indulgence prefering to take the view that there'd been a referendum, the people had voted to leave and now the government should get on with the job of implementing that decision (however much they might have disagreed with it). But among the remain voters were the Remainers, a bunch of people who were so traumatised by the result that they visited a shock onto British politics.

Forget about the Brexit voter being the person bringing change to British politics, it's the Remainer. Now we know less about the profile of the Remainer than we do of the Brexiter because nearly all the analysis and opinion-making has been done by those Remainers - they want to understand why we voted to leave and will leave no stone unturned in their search for an appropriate collection of patronisingly dismissive characterisations for leave voters. What we do know is that remain voters and by implication our Remainers are younger, better educated and better paid than average (probably wittier, prettier and sharper dressed too).

Such people are the centre of British politics, those with the greatest amount vested in the current system and the most to lose from a short-term economic downturn. We're talking about moderate and thoughtful folk who assess facts, consider evidence and produce thoughtful analysis. And after 23 June 2016 a bunch of these folk suddenly got angry. So angry they were prepared to reject the ideas and principles of democracy so as to overturn the referendum vote. Court cases were crowd-sourced, marches were held and on-line petitions were launched - all with the express intention (if not always the stated purpose) of delaying, obstructing and ideally stopping the decision of the people being implemented.

People who had been moderate and considered in their politics suddenly became radicalised anti-democrats. People who a few months previously would have questioned our balance between the rule of law and civil liberties suddenly became champions of the former and questioning of the latter. A new and dangerous group of extremists were born, one that was prepared to reject democracy in order to stay as a member of the European Union.

Of course these Remainers don't see themselves this way and still use moderate, assured and confident language but their purpose is to obstruct the vote of 23 June 2016 being implemented. A few weeks ago some of these Remainers condescended to pay Bradford a visit. Calling themselves Common Ground this group say they're all about reaching out to leave voters, finding things we share. But peel back the cover of fine words and we have an anti-democracy campaign dedicated to overturning the decision of 23 June 2016 - you only need check out the group's 'network' to understand this as its purpose.

As a result, and because Remainers are not really interested in actually understanding why people voted to leave, our visitors went away with their prejudices reinforced. All this - and similar visits to other places that voted to leave - presents a picture of the leaver world as being dour, run down, left behind and divided. And we can infer that this contrasts with the golden city on the hill that is the Remainer's world.

These Remainers now represent the shock troops of a new authoritarianism, one that was perhaps there before 2016 but now has been animated - shocked into life like Frankenstein's monster - by the vote to leave in June. Remainers consider themselves as the prototypes for Plato's philosopher kings - wise, knowledgeable, experienced and expert. The natural rulers of a post-democratic state. They will be like Galadriel had she taken the ring:

And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy. If the voters were to choose people reflecting their vote in June 2016 this would, of course, be a terrible thing indeed.

I repeat again that the Remainers are but a minority of those who voted to stay in the EU - perhaps a quarter maybe a third - but they represent an angry, self-serving, bigoted and undemocratic force that is the worst outcome of 2016. The political objective of 2017 should, in part, be to expose these people again and again as authoritarian, controlling and anti-democratic.

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