Category: Economy

‘The normal parameters’

“I am endorsing Hillary. And all her lies and all her empty promises. I am endorsing Hillary. The second worst thing that could happen to this country. But she’s way behind in second place, you know? She’s wrong about absolutely everything – but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

We enjoyed PJ O’Rourke at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. Serious, yes, but with a sense of the absurd which gets to the heart of things. There’s no-one else like him. (He’s a great fan on Jon Stewart, on the other side of the political spectrum.)

Who else is out there beyond Trump, beyond the normal parameters? A serious party game – where protagonists just might come to blows.

Thinking of the UK.

Farage, or farrago, as my spellcheck would have it, of course: he like Trump claims to be within boundaries. He’s fooled a good few people. But closet racism, and recent support for Trump, place him firmly outside.

Corbyn, with his past support for elective dictatorships like the Chavez regime, and backing from trade unions who muddle the pursuit of workers’ rights with political agendas from another era – likewise.

Sections of the Tory party, the libertarian Davies and Fox wing, are on the parameter edge, and should never ever be near positions of powers, let alone dictating.

O’Rourke takes inspiration from Hayek, and avows a small government, minimal intervention agenda. That’s firmly within. We’ve been battling in the UK and USA between big and small government for decades – and that’s the way debate should be.

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Read on for O’Rourke on Brexit.

He recounted interviews he did for an American public radio programme: he’d set out to understand why Brits voted for Brexit. He quoted a ‘financier’ who argued that the euro and probably the EU was going down the tube sooner rather than later, so best get out now. (To which the obvious reply is – we’ll be hit amidships anyway, and immeasurably better to be in there, influencing proceedings.)

And a more cogent argument – this is no longer the country we grew up in. The older generation’s lament. It isn’t the same country of course, and it’s the same for every generation. The sanity of representative democracy normally allows us trade-offs between young and old, and we move forward, an erratic progress maybe, but progress nonetheless. But not when you chuck a referendum into the mix.

Not a point that O’Rourke made, but a US presidential election has some of the characteristics of a referendum, in the sense of the media blitz and the half-truths, and this time the blatant untruths. But running in parallel are the Congressional elections. There’s balance in the US political system (which sure as hell isn’t perfect!), which brings politics back closer to the centre, where both sides have their say, and policy evolves out of a rough consensus – policies and programmes balancing out over time.

(At least, there was a balance, before Tea Party, and Cruz, and acolytes, and now Trump, came along.)

But referendums on their own – overriding representative, parliamentary democracy… that’s another story.

‘Normal parameters.’ Depart too far, allow prejudice and ideology to take centre stage, and the damage could be irreparable.

 

A story about lemmings 

Hard to post anything on the subject of Brexit. Zenpolitics has been quiet for a while. The level of absurdity is too high. Talk of hard or soft as the only alternatives. Business, scientists, economists, all against. Incredulity that it could get this far.

Martin Wolf, in the FT, argues that we’re underperforming against our European partners of similar size, whether we look at increases in GDP, exports or productivity, proof surely that it’s not European regulation that holds us back but something more deep-rooted in British attitudes and industry – attitudes to the wider world, an over-focus on our home territory.

Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph recognises the same infirmities, but imagines that Brexit will somehow shake industry up, that it’s the EU that’s holding us back. Industry needs the shock: the mechanism by which the shock transforms isn’t mentioned.

Divorce is a shock, relationships are soured, couples don’t normally get back together. Could ‘just good friends’ ever be enough?

Companies having to divulge the number of foreign workers, as if by doing so they’d take on any more British workers. (It seems this may not now happen, a step too far, but other measures with the same intent remain under discussion.) A Home Secretary whose past record suggest she knows better, but who falls into line.

And so to the Tory party conference, an assembly of lemmings gleefully finding a cliff and looking to leap over, some in hope of a soft landing, others unconcerned if it’s hard. Maybe a few of the soft landers will live. Maybe not. Theresa May, our turncoat (loyalty to Cameron? closet believer in Brexit all along? serving her own ambitions?) PM, admits there will be bumps in the road. Some road.

The whole process is deeply unedifying. Once the Tories were split between supporters and opponents of the EU. Now the supporters are cowed, MPs looking to save their seats. Defying the logic of history and events. Falling in behind an anti-immigration agenda. Playing along with the racists closet or otherwise in their number. There’s a cowardice, a self-serving mentality about it all. They and we will look back in shame on this example of how mass hysteria can take over a political party. On a press which soaks it all up, and reflects it all back.

As a country we are bigger and better than all this. But Labour is obsessed by internal wranglings, old obsessive loyalties clouding the minds of those who ought to be out there, strident in their arguments. Anti-establishment loyalties on the left encompass the EU as well – anti-capitalist means anti-EU. We turn inward, pay heed to ideologies of left and right, we shuffle nervously, and accept ‘it’s going to happen’. Let Brexit take its course. We will get on with our lives. Phoney war. Nothing’s happening now. The stock exchange is buzzing with revenues taken in a depreciated currency. Because nothing is happening now a hazy logic suggests nothing ever will.

God help us all.

Junk food wins the day

Environmental regulations are under threat, and the funding of scientific research (despite government protestations) is threatened.

But at this stage they are concerns, not as yet actualities.

We now have an actuality – the scrapping of tough new measures to combat obesity proposed by health secretary, Jeremy Hunt. We’re left with a sugar tax and a plan to encourage primary school children to do at least one hour’s exercise a day, which is merely repeating exhortations made over the last twenty years, which have come to little. And what have we lost? Two specific items:

#  Restrictions on two-for-one offers on junk food – 40% of the food we buy is bought on promotion. So it’s hardly surprising that cash-strapped families buy junk food – and suffer the consequences. (The chair of the Commons’ health select committee refers to ‘the burning issue of health inequality.’ Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you health.) Two-for-one offers on perishable foods are also an major cause of the appalling scourge of food waste.

# Restrictions on the advertising of high-sugar foods, with celebrities no longer employed to sell them.

We’re left with a challenge to food companies ‘to reduce overall sugar across a range of products… by at least 20% by 2020.’ The best way to make progress we’re told is government working in partnership with industry on a voluntary basis. Given ‘progress’ to date, I am profoundly cynical.

The Times reports that Downing Street ‘doesn’t want to burden the food industry as the economy falters.’ I can’t imagine that there would be many job losses – consumers would switch to other products. There’s another agenda – a small-state anti-regulation agenda – operating behind this, the more doctrinaire element of the Tory right asserting itself, at the expense of a clearly defined and enforceable national health agenda. Note also the phrase ‘as the economy falters’ – and whose responsibility is that, I wonder?

And finally, we have the Department of Health justifying the emasculation of its earlier proposals: ‘we are confident that our approach will rescue childhood obesity while respecting consumer choice, economic realities and, ultimately, our need to eat.’ [My italics.]

No-one, I should add, is underestimating the role parents, and schools, have to play in combating obesity in children, but it is a responsibility they share with government and the food industry, and if the government and the food industry rely on platitudes what chance do we have of really engaging with parents (I know how hard many schools already try), and getting them on board?

Woolly journalism

There is too much woolly talk and poor journalism on the subject of Brexit. Too many people asserting that one referendum vote is enough – enough to turn history on its head. One moment in time – and we have a paradigm shift.

An example was on Radio 4’s The Long View, with Jonathan Freedland, this morning (1st August). I missed much of it, so if I do it an injustice I apologise. One of the contributors recognised that the way the country is split is a big issue – with big Remain majorities among the young, the educated, and city dwellers.

But another suggested that academics (I think we’d consider them educated) were horrified because, whereas elections over the years had been squabbles between right and left, now their own personal interests were affected. The suggestion being that their opposition was self-interested and self-indulgent. But – they, the academics, know – and I know – and my friends know – and a few million others out there – we all know – that our concerns lie at a deeper level – about a way of looking at the world, with an open not a closed mind – about being European and internationalist – taking a positive rather than a cynical view of the world – looking to the future with optimism. (It’s there writ large in the comparison between all the enthusiasm and aspiration of the Democratic convention last week, and the negativity of the Republican convention the week before.)

The programme enlisted Diarmaid MacCulloch, Oxford historian, to make a ‘long view’ comparison between Henry VIII’s break with Rome and Brexit. It took a long time for the implications of that break to work through the country, to rework the fabric, to change irrevocably beliefs and practices – twenty years, forty – and longer. Could we be in for something similar this time – a slow, gradual, inexorable change to a different view of the world – to a different world?

To my mind the very notion that there’s a comparison is absurd. I’d agree that Henry’s decision was pretty arbitrary, a whim, the result of an obsession, influenced by a (un)favourable reforming wind from the continent, and an executor and manipulator in chief who knew how to execute (too literally) and manipulate – yes, maybe we can have fun drawing comparisons. But that there are any real searching comparisons with any relevance for our time – that’s a load of baloney.

A 52:48 vote in favour of an ill-thought through proposition based on misleading and sometimes mendacious arguments does not represent a paradigm shift.

As another example of bad journalism we have Ed Conway in The Times. (I’m relying here on a summary of his article in The Week).

The wider world is all too keen in Conway’s view to blame the world’s problems on the Brexit: ‘Britain’s great gift to the world: a giant pre-cooked excuse for absolutely everything.’ That’s nonsense, he says. We’d all agree. And it’s not of course what the wider world is saying. Brexit is, however, part of a big picture that the wider world does find worrying.

For Conway the problems in the world economy have been ‘baked into the system’ for some time. To be specific: unemployment rates, productivity, demand. But it’s been ‘easier to blame (problems) on Brexit’.

Arguing from one dubious proposition to another, he goes on to suggest that ‘if anything Brexit presents an opportunity’. ‘For years G20 members have been paralysed in the face of a global showdown. If Brexit provides an excuse for tackling this by spending more on infrastructure, tearing down regulations, printing more money, so much the better’.

An excuse to spend – to spend our way out of a crisis. Brexit it seems could be an excuse for throwing caution to the winds. More an argument I associate with the Corbynite left.

There are good arguments for increased spending on infrastructure, and there’s a debate about whether a further dose of QE would be helpful. But that debate should have nothing to do with Brexit. Unless it is – as this is how I’d construe Conway’s argument – we spend and print money out of desperation following a post-Brexit slump in economic performance and confidence.

I started with The Long View, and a massive non-sequitur – Henry VIII and Brexit. And I’m ending with another – Brexit and global economic reform.

The pre-referendum debate was characterised by wild assertions and woolly thinking. The post-referendum ‘debate’ is sadly no better.

Zenpolitics, and the world, six years on

It’s not a bad idea in these tortured times to remind myself why I began this blog. ‘What is zenpolitics,’ I asked. My answer? ‘Taking the trash and hyperbole out of politics and trying to look at people and issues in a way that’s detached from emotion and as they really are.’

Six years now since I wrote that, and it’s even harder now. The Brexit campaign has focused all the uncertainty in British politics but instead of providing resolution has brought animosity, and potential chaos. Politics should always be about gradual not sudden change – not a thought everyone shares, I appreciate – it’s a subject for another time, another post.

But now we have an elephant in the room, as someone said. We are all obsessed and divided and old-style political discussion has gone out of the window. A good thing?

Referenda do damage, they polarise, the original subject of debate gets lost in hyperbole, in distortions, it too readily becomes a protest vote. They’re prey to propaganda, to manipulation. Referenda were a distant and unlikely possibility six years ago. Now they are subverting the parliamentary democracy which gives a forum for rational – and emotional – debate, which falls prey to all sorts of issues and irregularities, but nonetheless gives a sane and measured and balanced way forward.

In the US it’s no better, and potentially worse. US presidential elections reflect a traditional divide, they have a slow almost two-year (if not a four-year!) build up, and they are multi-issue. But this time it’s a protest vote, whipped up on the one side by special interests with vast amounts of advertising spend at their disposal, now turned on its head by Donald Trump, and on the other side by an equally disillusioned younger and streetwise population – both sides equally out of step with Washington politics. In the US and the UK vast numbers of people no longer feel a part of the traditional democratic process.

Behind all this are the challenges of globalisation and new technologies – the decline of traditional industries, a switch from a unified and organised and socially cohesive labour force to a fragmented and lower-paid workforce engaged in lower-paid service industries, influenced and exacerbated by massive trade imbalances with China – resulting in a growing divide between those who benefit from these changes, usually educated and skilled, and those who do not.

And out of this we have alienation, discontent – and, given a forum, we have protest. And we have the blind (and Tory economic policy under Osborne has to fit under that heading) who fail to see the

impact of that alienation, and how it has to be directly addressed. And the manipulators, who turn it to their own purposes – anti-immigrant sentiment, or neo-liberal economic agendas.

Blind – we’ve all been blind. Back to my original zenpolitics aspiration – ‘trying to look at people and politics… the way they really are’. More than ever that has to be the aspiration. And it’s now, with so much emotion and obsession, that much harder.

All the while, the other big issues haven’t gone away – the refugee crisis, Syria, IS. Population movements in Africa, where the population explosion is hitting hardest. Russia and Ukraine. China and the South China Sea. And suddenly, almost but not quite out of the blue, we have Turkey, an attempted coup, and a profoundly foolish but populist regime which will lead Turkey further down the road to either chaos or autocracy.

And here in the UK – we now obsess with Brexit, where the very best outcome will be that we achieve something close to our existing economic performance, and the worst – better not to contemplate.

There are bigger issues, much bigger issues, out there, and we have turned foolishly inward.

I wanted with zenpolitics to take the emotional out of politics. But we need emotion at times to drive the engagement we need to have to put our own world, here in the UK, back on to a saner track.

But above all we need to, and I repeat, ‘see things as they really are’. In a world of fractured and misleading debate that is a mighty challenge.

Missing the tide

We had Boris quoting Julius Caesar. He might have tried another quote, this time Cassius to Brutus:

‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat.’

Only we’re not. The European tide is turning in our direction, and what do we do – we hide in the sand dunes.

The politics of the Tory party mean that departing Europe (and, yes, I mean Europe, not just the EU) at precisely the wrong time. We’ve not been the only country drawing back from a federalist agenda. In Germany they’re having the same debate but not as yet with the same foolish consequences. Take Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, as an example. ‘Originally a European federalist in favour of an ever-close union (he) has concluded that the referendum signifies that Europe will not stomach yet more centralisation.’ (The Economist.) In Schauble’s own words, ‘Now is not the time for visions.’

On the other side of the argument we have members of the German SPD, Angela Merkel’s coalition partners, who want to push harder for closer integration: the president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, argues for ‘refounding Europe.’

The debate illustrates how much Germany is pivotal to the debates about Europe’s future. It would have been Merkel and Cameron, Germany and the U.K., pushing for a wiser, less hands-on, less intrusive Europe, and yet a Europe that took forward the European ideals of openness and cooperation.

Schauble would like to see Europe concentrate on a few problems, and solve them – good examples would be the refugee crisis, or a Europe-wide energy grid. And if the commission fails to act ‘we must take control and solve problems among our governments’, an inter-governmental not a supra-governmental approach’, moving power from the Commission to the Council of Ministers. (See The Economist’s Charlemagne column.)

This is the process we should have been a part of, working with Germany, putting federalist ambitions out to grass. Instead we have two characters, Fox and Davis, who’ve survived on the fringes of British politics for a few years, pushed into the limelight to negotiate an exit from an organisation that it’s transparently in our interests to be a part of.

The best outcome will be that we negotiate something pretty close to what we have now. But in the meantime we’ll have lost the opportunity to influence the EU, and we’re all the poorer for that.

A cabinet of curiosities

To quote my last post: ‘…the …outright lies which fuelled the Leave campaign….’

One of those who lied is the new Foreign Secretary. The French Foreign Minister recently referred to the lies of the Leave campaign. When asked for a response Boris Johnson referred to ‘the inevitable plaster falling off the ceilings of a few European chancelries’ in the aftermath of the Leave vote. I love the phrase, it’s glib, it’s fun, it’s evocative – and it doesn’t justify for a moment the mendacity of the Leave campaign, and Johnson’s own battle bus. Lies are lies.

Liam Fox and David Davis were always good for quotes in the Leave campaign. The former especially. Mainly of the ‘that’s wrong’ variety, when some hard truth came from an expert source on the Remain side. My guess is that Theresa May in giving them key positions (heading up Brexit negotiations and international trade) has said to them – ‘now deliver’. And it will be they, not the middle-ground compromisers who the Tory right would have slated in the event of a soft Brexit, who take the flak. It’s a the highest risk strategy imaginable. But otherwise her party will remain split. And for them Europe as an issue will never go away.

A resolution, maybe, of decades of Tory party divisions. At whose expense?

‘Take the flak.’ Someone somewhere sometime soon the line is going to find themsleves facing some very hard truths.

 

China shock

A digression – an important digression – into trade policy. Maybe a little heavy-going, but important!

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Apropos my comments in my last post on de-industrialisation, there’s an interesting article in the current (July) edition of Prospect, by the FT’s economics leader writer, Martin Sandhu.

Has the cause of growing inequality in the rich world since circa 1980 been caused by globalisation or technological change? In Sandhu’s words, by the late 1990s ‘… the economics profession settled on the consensus that technology more than trade was to blame. Then China joined the World Trade Organisation.’

He quotes Autor, Dorn and Hanson’s paper, ‘China Shock’, and highlights their conclusion that ‘Chinese competition had localised but substantial negative and long-lasting effects on the places particularly exposed to it’. ‘On one estimate more than half of [US] factory job losses can be attributed to the China effect.’

’… the imbalanced effect of trade liberalisation can only be corrected if the losers are compensated out of the overall gain – but more redistribution and greater public goods are not on the cards in Trump’s deck.’

Of course technology is also a key factor, so too the shift of power away from labour to capital – not least, the decline of trade unions.  Benefits have also been hit hard – even more in the USA than the UK.

‘It is no surprise that that people feeling powerless and alone in the face of their demotion yearn to regain control – to ‘take their country back’. That is what Trump promises them.’

So too the UK. ‘The same dream of regaining control …fuels the growth of socially-conservative nativist right-wing parties in Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia and central Europe.’ Some of the same grievances have been picked up by Bernie Sanders as well as Trump. (We have nothing directly comparable in the UK.)

But whereas Trump talks of putting up trade barriers the Brexit message has been all about lowering barriers with the rest of the world , ‘to escape the walls of Fortress Europe’ – a rigorous free trade message. (Both the USA and UK insurgencies are of course agreed on immigration.)

Also bear in mind that economic theory ‘predicts that the effect of low-skilled immigration is the same as freer trade with countries that have a lot of low-skilled labour’. Put another way, freer trade (especially negotiated from a position of lesser rather than greater advantage post-Brexit) will hit hardest those areas already suffering.

(Some will course want to rubbish economic theory. That’s the mood of the moment.)

The impact of Chinese imports on British industry, and the resultant job losses, has been far far greater than the impact of immigration. And yet it’s immigration on which the Leave campaign has focused.

And the impact of free trade? Now that we’re escaping from an EU that’s perceived to be the over-regulated and slow-moving ?

‘…Brexit will not lead to a bonfire of the regulations, but a redoubled effort to harmonise rules – that’s what trade openness increasingly means.’

There’s an obvious and striking irony here – we put behind us the EU and harmonisation, and negotiations over TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), and we find that we’re faced with just the same issues when we seek to negotiate free trade deals around the world. But without the clout the EU gives us.

More than ever it’s apparent that immigration for the Leave campaign has been a target of convenience. The issues we face as a country with regard to our future prosperity are of a very different order. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t pay heed to the specific impacts of immigration, but our future lies in facing up to the global context in which we operate, and in which we will be, post-Brexit, less equipped to operate.

And our response as a country to those who feel excluded and resentful will involve strategies which simply aren’t part of the Leave agenda. That’s the absurdity of the situation in which we find ourselves.

 

24th June – the day after

Many responses to this absurd nonsensical vote for Leave. Anger, anxiety, recrimination. Being ashamed for the country, ashamed at the way we’ll be seen by the rest of the word, ashamed maybe that we didn’t see it coming.

A sense we’ve let down young people across the country, who voted by a substantial majority for Remain. We being the old fogeys.

What we must not do now is acquiesce, accept that the people have voted, and imagine we can’t challenge the vote itself and its consequences.

Just how constitutional is a referendum in the first place? It was established by an act of parliament so it is clear by this simple fact that parliament takes precedence over referenda. We don’t have a written constitution but the supremacy of the House of Commons is clearly established. It can make legislation, and it can remove legislation.  We shouldn’t assume, mustn’t assume, that yesterday’s vote is forever.

Referenda

The referendum expressed ‘the will of the people’, it will be argued. But did it? The will of the people at one moment in time. The will of the people as directed by a popular press which has been pursuing an anti-EU agenda for many years, and an anti-immigrant agenda. A popular press that plays on prejudice and seeks to portray isolated instances as widespread patterns of behavior – that looks to disparage, mock and scorn at every opportunity. The damage all this does to public debate is immeasurable. And given the importance of maintaining a free press there’s little we can do about it.

‘The will of the people’ …  in theory it exists, in practice it is easily influenced, ever-changing Next week, next month, it could express itself very differently.

Parliamentary democracy is arguably Britain’s greatest gift to the world. We elect representatives, they divide into different parties and groupings which debate and pass legislation which has at least been fully considered and argued in a (usually) sane and calm environment. Elections are open to populist rhetoric, and they can be divisive, but they elect parliaments which balance opinion and establish consensus in a remarkable way.

Why in earth should we want to subordinate a parliament to a plebiscite-based democracy?

Referenda polarize opinion too readily, as they have done this time, encouraging wild statements and mis-statements, sometimes total untruths. They give some kind of equivalence to both sides, however untenable the position one side might be. (I’m thinking of the BBC.) Opinions in the country are now so divided, tempers so frayed, that rifts engendered could take years to heal.

That said, now our ire has been roused we must act on it. At a more trivial level by keeping up the pressure on Boris. Boris found himself faced with a hostile crowd when he left home this morning. I hope that continues to happen. He needs to be aware of the consequences of his actions.

The next stage

Cameron will resist pressure from the EU to quickly invoke Article 50. So he should. There’s a big Remain majority in the Commons and they must ensure that no precipitate action is taken before we have not only a new Tory leader and prime minister (and I’d hope a new Labour leader) but also an election.

If the Brexit mood is maintained, then Tory MPs who’ve voted Remain may succumb to local party pressure and agree to vote for Brexit legislation in the next parliament. If they don’t, they may find themselves de-selected. But if they hold out, then the new parliament is likely to have a pro-Remain majority. In which case, back to my argument above – which should take precedence – a parliamentary majority, or a referendum vote? That could of course become an election issue in itself. Feathers will fly.

We can’t know how this will play out. But it will be interesting.

The Brexit vote

Some of us feel angry and ashamed. But rightly or wrongly, there were and are strong emotions on the Brexit side. I was very aware of that observing the count at my local council offices on Thursday night. A roughly 65:35 Leave majority.

Why so many? It’s important to know, and we must deal with their anger without indulging our own too much. Resentment at elites, suspicion of authority and expertise – a legacy of the financial crisis, and the expenses shambles. A related sense among many of being left behind, forced into part-time work, low pay. Among the more fortunate a sense of others on the gravy train, doing better, and unfairly so, than they are. Immigrants: if jobs are still there wages are lower than they would otherwise have been. And often a simple fear of immigrants, even when they may never see more than one or two in their locality.

Much of this has been played upon and wildly exaggerated by the UKIP and the media, but there is some truth here. If there is resentment, we have to address it. If government austerity measures have exacerbated feelings of being marginalized, we must deal with that too. It won’t help if we disparage and cry foul. If towns  in the North-East feel that all the focus and investment is down south – they’re right. (Please divert HS2 finance into a network which serves everyone, including the North-East.) We have to get to the root of the matter. It won’t stop the Mail or Sun seeking out incidents they can exploit, but we have to limit their opportunities to do so. And we must be, in two words, more inclusive.

Brexit leadership

Several strands. All need to be addressed head-on, for what they are.

Immigration – UKIP and the closet racist agenda of Nigel Farage, making racist attitudes somehow acceptable, attempting to link the refugee crisis and Eastern European immigration in the popular mind.

Arguments about sovereignty and accountability, EU extravagance, sclerotic administration.  (Mostly specious, but can be made to sound convincing.)

The neo-liberal agenda, which the Tory right has managed to squeeze through under the radar in the guise of reducing regulation.

More broadly, looking inward, looking back, shades of Empire, and a belief we can go it alone. The fairy tale land Boris would like to inhabit.

Our response

We can take up the standard from Jo Cox, be proud of Britain (and in her case Yorkshire as well!), proud of Europe and what it’s achieved and where it’s come from over the last seventy years, and be open and open-hearted toward the world.

That’s a challenge, and one I think with younger generations on our side I’m sure we can rise to.

52% doesn’t have to be a done deal.

Three absurdities: 3) privatising the BBC?

And one more, absurdity that is, along similar lines to my last post:

Listening to two Tory MPs on Radio 4 debating the BBC (there’s a White Paper on the BBC about to be published):

one MP recognising that the BBC is much-loved and works well as it is –  we’ve all misgivings, but we can be proud …

and the other arguing that it would do much better in the private sector, as a subscription channel, and there it could do so much more. Precisely what I wondered, and how would it in the end differ from Sky?

An example of the kind of private-sector lunacy which affects and afflicts the Tory right.

They’ve a doctrinaire fear of the state, a ‘we’re all disciples of Hayek now’ mentality, a libertarian impulse which misreads history, scorns the role of the state and government, fails to recognise how state and enterprise can work together (and have done so remarkably over the last two hundred years) – and in the event disregards what the ordinary person wants.

It’s a perverse form of elitism. It’s a fetish, a dogma, which also infects the EU debate, a shadow agenda hiding behind the issues of immigration and sovereignty.