Category: Society

Taking time off from Brexit

I’ve written a lot about the referendum and Brexit in this blog. It is after all a blog with ‘politics’ in the title. But we’re all tired of reading analyses of one kind or another, about hard and soft Brexit, free trade and customs unions, the democratic deficit, immigration levels and the like.

And I want to get back to writing on other subjects, could be political, but just not Brexit, chill out, write poetry, seeking out high mountain or deep country retreats – or more prosaically, just get on with ordinary life.

That said, I’m not signing off without one last submission! With a focus on the action – the actions – we should be taking.

There’s a sense at the moment that events are running away from us. We’re anticipating dire consequences from the Brexit vote – but that means we’re looking out for those consequences – almost willing them – to prove ourselves right. And that’s no place to be.

A sense that more than ever in my lifetime we are headed in the wrong direction, and led by the wrong people – amateurs in a ruthless world. Rarely has hope – false hope – so triumphed over pragmatism.

Nor should we forget anger. Anger over the simple mendacity of many in the Leave campaign. But also over our own foolishness for not seeing it coming, for not realising the potential for a protest vote – and not understanding earlier why that protest vote might happen.

We now need to take action, to build up and sustain pressure – working with others, as part of campaigning groups, as supporter/members of the pressure groups, or pro-EU political parties – the Lib Dems, or an actively opposing opposition, as I hope Labour will become after the September leadership election. (It may be another kind of Labour, a breakaway or a reborn Labour, as it needs to be if it’s to regain support among the old blue-collar, working-class vote.)

‘Actions’ in italics.

All the while we have to keep that open and open-market, European, international, global perspective. International agreements by continent or wider are a much more effective, more reliable way forward than agreements at a single country level. (Which isn’t to say we should be immediately signing up to TTIP!) Europe is also an attitude of mind, relating back to how we connect with the world.

But – don’t so much shout in from the roof-tops, develop a wider, quieter strategy, but one that’s no less determined. There was too much shouting during the referendum campaign.

And too little awareness – now I hope radically changed for everyone on the Remain side – of economic and social and political realities, too little awareness of what life is really like beyond city borders – the sense of a government that doesn’t listen, the decline in prosperity and pride in traditional working-class areas, and the hostility and alienation felt even in prosperous Tory outer suburbia. If immigrants bring increasing wealth to the country, where is the infrastructure, the investment in the NHS and schools? If industries close down, where are not just the re-training packages but the industries, the services, the actual physical jobs to allow people to re-engage with society?

We may find we’ve common ground with Brexiters here – arguing for (sensible, nationwide – not HS2) infrastructure and investment.

Cameron and Osborne all but turned their backs on the problem. Inadequate re-training, and little sense of a wider industrial strategy. The irony is that it’s now the Brexiters, the old-style grumbling Tories of the shires who have to take action, when it’s just they who have been happy to turn their backs on run-down, de-industrialised areas in the past.

There are critical procedural considerations – how we can best secure votes in parliament before before Article 50 is invoked, and likewise on the results of negotiations, if we get that far. And how we can make certain we win those votes, should they happen. In the first instance – by supporting individual MPs, think tanks, pressure groups – and political parties, Labour I hope as well as the LibDems. 

God knows how the immigration debate will play out over time. Business and the NHS and social care depend on immigrants, and if the economy expands, and the NHS and social care improve their services, we will require continuing high levels of immigration. If we’re to stand a chance of retaining a sane immigration strategy it will need some radically re-thinking at an EU level – which we must argue for.

The sovereignty debate is one where opinion if it changes will only do so over time. It’s become confused with national identity, and too many people have argued that British and European identities are not compatible. The EU has to a great extent only itself to blame. It has now to show, and we have to argue hard for, a radically improved awareness of national concerns and susceptibilities. It will go to the wall, and one country after another will exit, if it doesn’t. Federalism must be put out to the very longest grass .

And that, for now, is it on the subject of Brexit!!

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.

China shock

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

*

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.

 

Words, words, words

Words, words, words…

I’ve read the Economist on Brexit, and now the New Statesman. I’ve browsed Daily Mail and Telegraph headlines, watched Panorama. Read the Guardian. Skipped through The Week. I’m gutted and I’m glutted.

A few conclusions, and that means, inevitably, more words.

I remain (in every sense) passionate about the European ideal, about being open and open-hearted toward the world, about influence gained by working with others rather than influence lost by retreating, and pretending we can win friends from behind closed doors.

There are so many narratives out there. One is a narrative of gloom. Reaching wider than Brexit, there’s a sense of a failing world, of which the EU, China, Russia and a USA enthralled by Trump are all aspects. The philosopher, John Gray (writing in the New Statesman), is a good example. ‘We have to throw away the old progressive playbook.’

‘Not for a moment,’ would be my reply. But an acceptance that the progressive road is a rocky one, and for every step forward there might be two steps back – yes, that we must accept.

(Gray is closer to the mark on Labour: ‘Leading Labour figures have denied that the party’s stance on immigration is central to the collapse of its working-class base.’ Look to de-industrialisation they argue. But they’re avoiding ‘an inconvenient truth’.)

Anger, resentment, betrayal – on the Remain side, felt so deeply a week last Friday morning. Anger, resentment, betrayal – on the Leave side, building up over many years.

On the Remain side we need to be wary of our language, and our emotions, and our surprise. At the same time we can be scornful of the likes of Libby Purves laying into disconsolate Remainers: ‘liberal and lefties weeping into their lattes.’ You don’t have to be liberal or leftie – you just have to European, and an optimist, and open in outlook.

It’s been helpful to run through a few of the reasons given by ordinary people explaining their reasons for voting to leave, on Panorama and elsewhere.

Immigration: ‘no room in schools, not safe in our jobs … a weaker economy a price worth paying… racism shouldn’t be used as a smear against the voiceless.’

‘The bosses love foreign workers… The housing situation is the UK is abysmal… Now to be poor is a sin… One million migrants into Germany…’

We can, on the Remain side, argue for ever that immigration has a substantial net benefit to the UK economy, but there’s no doubt that free movement between countries with different working conditions, radically different levels of pay and welfare benefits has impacted directly on the lower-paid and less-skilled. Free movement is an important (but arguably not a necessary) principle for a free market, but it’s caused significant dislocations. Yes, we should have anticipated this and provided the necessary health and education infrastructure. But we’ve been in a recession, and our focus has been elsewhere….

While there is no gainsaying the impact on jobs and pay, the experience of specific localities has been written up and wilfully exaggerated. This is where UKIP and the Mail, Sun and Express come into play. The fear of immigration, the supposed threat to our national character, has had a major influence nationwide, and helps explain the Leave vote in areas with low immigrant populations. Addressing dislocations caused by immigration will have little effect on this element of the Leave vote. Fear easily becomes prejudice and runs deep. And aligns with a disdain for the political class – also encouraged by the popular press.

There’s another narrative we heard on Panorama – the disappearance of the old shops from the High Street – as if this was a consequence of the EU. So much has been shovelled together and the EU was the first and easiest target – there are no such easier targets in general elections.

Beware referenda – populism is not ‘as it is being used today a term of abuse applied by establishment thinkers to people whose lives they have not troubled to understand’. (John Gray.)  Rather it is a chance for the population at large to vent its anger. And there are out there many skilled operators who know how to exploit that anger for their own purposes.

Try de-industrialisation as an argument with ordinary people. Immigration is much easier. Put the two together and muddle it with the loss of sovereignty argument and you have a potent mix.

(To return briefly to de-industrialisation.  The impact of China and global trade hardly gets a mention. And yet cheap imports have driven industrial decline more than any other factor. Trump talks up the issue but it hasn’t featured in the referendum debate. Instead we’ve had a focus on the EU as the source of all our ills. If we seek to revive our industry we should be working with Europe and not stigmatising it. The problem lies elsewhere.)

‘I would love to see the break-up of the EU. Nation states should be free from the voluntary shackles offered by cynical, deceitful, anti-democratic, sneering, control freaks.’  ‘The EU is doomed to fail.’

OK, I’m on the side of the cynical, deceitful… Much of that language one could apply to the manipulators of opinion in the popular press.  (Far from cynical, many of us are idealists – but our idealism is not rose-tinted. More than ever now it has to be practical.)

Deceitful, no, but, yes, the perception that Brussels has reached out too far is widespread, and many who voted to remain share that view. The EU is not doomed to fail. But cutting back on EU directives, worrying less about harmonisation, would be wise. Will the EU pick up on that message?

A comment from a Leaver on the left: ‘…we shall set our own agenda. We shall be able to keep our public services and not be forced to privatise them, and if we chose we can renationalise our industries…’

An awful lot from across the political spectrum can be stuffed into one pot. Many will be disappointed.

And finally, from another source, The Economist, we have the liberal agenda: ‘…liberals need to restore social mobility and ensure that economic growth translates in to rising wages… battling special interests, exposing incumbent companies to competition, and breaking down restrictive practices’. Yes, I agree, but that is a long process, and in truth we’re unlikely ever to get there, and en route there will many, maybe too many, casualties, and if there’s one message from all this, from Brexit and all its other manifestations in Europe and the USA it’s that

we have to look out for casualties.

We are in a crisis moment, at a turning-point. The new world we saw emerging after the fall of the Berlin Wall has turned a little sour. A new liberal, open dispensation seemed to be within our grasp. Instead we’ve seen the old hierarchies reinforced, new hierarchies emerge, new elites alongside the old, with aspirations to culture, to learning, to the good life, on the one hand – and a liking among too many for extraordinary ostentation…

… while the rest of us look on and maybe we aspire to achieve for ourselves, or we shrug and disregard, or we envy, or we disdain. The new order has brought radical disparities of wealth, at the same time as earnings as a percentage of capital have reduced. There’s a widespread sense of being left behind – a sense of a brave new post-war world disordered and old verities overturned.

For us true believers, we must continue to aspire, to work together, to put our trust in the younger generations – but we must address directly and immediately and with wisdom the big issues we’d turned a blind eye to for many years.

 

 

Another day 

I read the Economist’s latest thoughts and prognostications before I went to bed, and I didn’t sleep for the next two hours. That was a mistake. See Anarchy in the UK for the link.

On the BBC website this morning there’s little suggestion of crisis: the BBC’s perceived need to be even-handed eviscerates their commentary, takes out the drama, compromises truth, as it did during the campaign. George Osborne, still hanging on as Chancellor, is putting on a brave face about the economy this morning, as he has to do – and all power to him. I have yet to see the Telegraph, but I’m expecting more of the triumphalism that characterised Saturday’s paper. (Well, almost – front-page article by Boris, ‘We must be proud and positive.’ Though ‘anxious and scared’ might come closer.)

Where lies the truth? You can guess. The only one of the above not in some way beholden to someone else, by way of caution (Osborne) or position in society (BBC) or ownership (Telegraph) is the Economist. Theirs is probably the most cogent analysis I’ve seen. (Do Leave have a plan? ‘There is no plan.’) Articles by the likes of Nick Cohen take in important aspects of the crisis, but the Economist provides a wider focus.

Also this morning – a Labour leadership crisis to match the Tories’divisions, and all at a time of national crisis.

Attention now has to be on the Commons. My question – how best can the pro-Remain majority make clear its refusal to countenance any Leave legislation, and its opposition to invoking Article 50? Parliament is sovereign – not referenda.

That of course begs a multitude of questions. Not least, how would the public respond?

Short term there’ll be an almighty bust-up. Longer term, government must be more inclusive if it’s to win over the protest voters (as opposed to hardliners).

Taking my local area, Spelthorne, just outside London’s boundaries, but very much in its orbit, as an example. It came out strongly pro-Leave. 65%. How much of that vote might be considered protest? While there are areas of deprivation they’ve not been left behind as other areas have. But that dividing line just 400 yards from where I live, between inner and outer London, marks a real boundary in outlook and expectations and perceptions of the world.

I could put it down to fear of immigration, stirred up by the media: that’s one reason, but too simple. We’ll be getting closer to a full picture if we link it to proximity to the instruments of government, parliament, civil service, especially the City. Closer still if we take into account the greater numbers of young people, of voting age, within London’s border, and its corollary, the greater number of retired people, suspicious of the modern global world, beyond that border. Why do older generations and the retired feel so alienated? Does it have to be that way? I’m still looking for answers.

The referendum – for the record

Musings I put on Facebook before and after the referendum result. (Read in conjunction with my last post:  24th June – the day after.) Plus a quote from a brilliant post by my son, Ben.

8th June

I came back on Monday from Spain to find – no surprise – good old England more than ever entangled in the referendum debate. My trip underlined, as did walking across Spain on the Camino last summer and autumn, what we’d endanger by voting to leave on the 23rd.

On the one hand we have a remarkable trading bloc, an open market which in all previous ages would have been inconceivable. And on the other we have – we share – a common European mentality, a sense of a common European heritage. It’s not just a British heritage but a European heritage that we, as seen by non-Europeans, present to the world.

Are they small achievements?

We have 28 countries all working together, with many a disharmony – as you’d expect – but still working together. It is unprecedented. Don’t take it for granted. It didn’t just happen.

One market with its four freedoms – free movement of goods, capital, services and people – requires the same trading conditions across the continent, and agreement has not been easily negotiated or easily won.

Europe – the EU – is unique in world history – nations after centuries of conflict finding a remarkable level of common ground, and working together, and presenting one face to the world – not just a trading bloc but an exemplar to the world of cooperation, decency and integrity – a collective advocate of social justice and equal rights – a model for the world of how a continent can put past enmities behind it.

I hope and pray we don’t have the too easy cop-out of a ‘plague on all your houses’ influencing the vote on 23rd June. Or that too many of us have recourse to a ‘close borders and close minds’ attitude. Yes, there’s much wrong with Europe, with the EU. But we should be working to put it right, to make it function in the interest of all Europeans.

By that I mean public servants, teachers, children, employers and employees, professionals, artists, musicians, charity workers, the retired, the unemployed, the disadvantaged, immigrants – and those who feel their lives are threatened by immigration.

All Europeans – anything less than that and we will continue with the same problems, the same tensions we have now. And given the impossibility of closing borders in our modern world, they will get worse.

24th June

I was a counting agent for Stronger in Europe last night, in a west London borough, and as early as midnight I could see how the Leave votes were piling up. Sometimes there would be a run of as many as ten Leave votes before a Remain vote or two showed up. That brought it home. We can’t easily take on the Mail’s bile and bitterness but 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 the young people if not the old fogeys of Britain on our side (a generalisation of course – I am by some definitions an old fogey!) I’m sure we can rise to. What happens over the next few months is all highly uncertain. The Tories need a majority in parliament, and as we’ve seen recently there are Tory MPs like Anna Soubry who do understand the issues and will continue to fight for the cause. 52% is not a done deal.

25th June – from Ben Collier’s post

It’s not about us. ….It’s about the union we’ve just left behind when we should have been part of leading it. It’s about the years of progress we’ve just undone for purely selfish and narrow-minded reasons. It’s about the fact that there are bigger issues to solve in this world than our own day to day problems…

26th June  – in response to a post from a UKIP-supporting friend:

Tony, I agree, we shouldn’t let friendship suffer. I remember the great solidarity shown by UKIP supporters at the Spelthorne count on Thursday night. They were good people. But I believe passionately they were wrong. When someone says to me they cried for twenty minutes when they woke in Friday morning and heard the news – I understand why. For so many of us, so many millions of us, we can see no good reason for leaving, we see only damage to ourselves, to the wider world, and to our place in the world. The EU has brought Europe together after centuries of conflict, and created a single and highly efficient market. We accept that it needs reform – and we want to be part of that process, not watching on the sidelines. In the end it’s about how we see the world – and I know that’s what you’d say as well. We may profoundly disagree – but it’s important we listen to each other. All best, Chris

Extract from Tony’s post:

Trying so hard not to open or read messages that are negative about our leaving the EU. It is upsetting that once good friends and family members are falling out…

27th June

My last post on the referendum result. We have, so many of us, expressed our consternation and shock over the result, and we’re united in arguing for an open, open-hearted, outward-looking, international Britain. That will guide our future actions – will guide mine. My aim, one I share with millions – to see the result overturned.

At the same time – the Leave vote was for many a protest vote, against marginalisation, elites, the ‘establishment’. And that needs to be immediately addressed. One starting-point would be to scrap HS2 without further ado, and switch investment to developing infrastructure nationwide. Can we seriously imagine HS2 bringing any benefit to the North-East?

Social media and Facebook. Why were so many of us so surprised by the result? We couldn’t have imagined 52% for Leave. Could we? The danger of social media is that it’s all too easy to exist inside our own cocoons, linking up only to those who share our outlook on the world. AC Grayling has argued that the Leave vote was irrational: I don’t agree. There were reasons, and we need to understand them.

An extension of this argument: don’t let the referendum vote undermine friendships. Which is the point made by the exchange between Pooh and Piglet that I shared yesterday. Keep talking. Don’t let either side patronise the other.

Having said that when it comes to Faragian misanthropy, and all its various manifestations in the media – there is no shared ground. Likewise, for me, the neo-liberal agenda which has hijacked the debate.

And finally, there has been much good stuff, many wise and passionate posts and articles written over the last few days. I shared one such last Friday – from my son, Ben Collier. If you missed it, do scroll back to read it!

In Ben’s words, ‘It’s not about us. …It’s about the union we’ve just left behind when we should have been part of leading it. It’s about the years of progress we’ve just undone for purely selfish and narrow-minded reasons. It’s about the fact that there are bigger issues to solve in this world than our own day to day problems …’

Three absurdities: 2) selling off council houses

And another absurdity –

I’ve been reading (Prospect magazine, on the future of cities) about Porto, in Portugal, and how the mayor, Rui Moriera, ‘has pledged not to sell a single council house and instead invest in a programme of renovations and converting derelict buildings into new ones’.

‘We could easily make 10% of our budget every year by selling houses. If you do that you can build a lot of bridges and lots of mayors like that. But it will kill the city. The city will lose all the flair that attracted people in the first place.’

The government here plans the further sale of council houses, and new bridges are planned for London of course. And in time as we lose the social mix, and city-centre estates are replaced by new ‘mixed-use’ developments, London will lose its flair.

In London, and across the country, building more social housing, allowing councils to start building again, encouraging housing associations, has to be the way forward. Not obliging them to sell off their stock, when housing is a vital commodity, more than that, fundamental to our future, and existing private sector plans simply aren’t coping.

Doctinaire considerations – private over public – bid down the practical. (See my third blog, my third absurdity.)

The EU referendum – two home truths

Discussing the EU referendum debate yesterday I came away with two home truths – two lessons I’d been slow to take on board.

One, personal attacks and slights. It’s easy to get carried away and turn a rejection of a policy or approach into an attack on an individual proposing that policy. A dismissive phrase ad personem damages your argument, because it diverts attention away from the case you’re making. And if others around you don’t share your feelings about that individual, they won’t be won over.

I’ve been highly critical of some right-wing Tories, and the Tory press. In my eyes justified – but it’s  arguments that matter. Doubting the competence or integrity of those who take a different view (from Boris Johnson and Michael Gove downwards) doesn’t help my case and will not change minds.

Zen Master Dogen (writing in 13th century Japan) has useful words on the subject:

‘Even when you are clearly correct and others are mistaken, it is harmful to argue and defeat them… It is best to step back, neither trying to defeat others nor conceding to mistaken views. If you don’t react competitively, and let go of the conflict, others will also let go of it without harbouring ill will. Above all, this is something you should keep in mind. [My italics.]

In other words, we don’t live in an ideal world. But avoiding competition and conflict if you can will serve your case much better.

The other lesson relates to a specific subject, immigration. Talking to a friend (she herself supports staying in) I was confronted by her experience working two days a week in a local doctor’s surgery. The great majority of nurses and staff support the Leave campaign, and do so with a real passion.

Competition for jobs from immigrants is a key issue, and some have been directly affected themselves. Older workers feel that immigrants who are younger and willing to work for lower wages are taking their jobs. Parents argue that the children of immigrants are putting pressure on the availability of places in the schools of their choice. In other words, the argument for them is not intellectual or academic – broader considerations about the national economy, the European ideal, trade deals – all are secondary.  (Housing is another issue they might have raised.) They are affected at a personal level.

And I, recently retired, am not.

They were not issues that came up talking to teachers and staff as a (retired last year) chair of governors in an local secondary school. But I haven’t since my own children’s primary school days talked at my length to parents, and I think many would have very different views. Not necessarily favouring the Leave campaign, but I’d have heard much more about the pressure on secondary school places.

Why are the polls suggesting a close vote on 23rd June? Yesterday reminded me why that is.

Workers or shirkers

There was a BBC2 programme on ‘workers or shirkers’ last night, exploring a division which dates back to Victorian times (and earlier), to notions of the deserving and undeserving poor.

Ian Hislop (and it came over very much as his programme) provided some interesting background detail, taking us back to the 1830s and Edwin Chadwick and the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), which established the Victorian workhouse. We had Chadwick’s categorisation of the population from worker to able-bodied vagabond (I don’t have access here to the exact categories), all very utilitarian, but it was often brutal in its effects, and stigmatised poverty. Hislop of course doesn’t stigmatise but he fails in his programme to get to grips with what being an outsider in society entails. A wiser programme might have used that word – those destined to be ‘outside’ the mainstream – the unemployed, the handicapped, the uneducated, the illiterate – people from broken homes, with no parental role models, in reduced circumstances, people losing jobs in towns where there are no jobs available or only the most menial. The poor – and, too often, the elderly.

The very use of the word ‘shirkers’ is playing the tabloid’s game. Likewise using George Osborne’s 2012 Conservative Party conference speech: Osborne’s imaginary worker, setting off to work seeing the ‘closed blinds of [his] next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’. The polarity is totally wrong. Yes, there is a category of able-bodied worker who chooses not to work when there are good opportunities for them to do so – the press parades them when it can find them.

My own experience (not least of education) suggests that it’s de-industrialisation, the switch from industry to services, available jobs now being of a fundamentally different kind, and in different locations, which lies at the heart of the problem. In Victorian times the surge to the cities brought problems of poverty on a massive scale. Today it’s the re-location of industry away from existing cities and towns, not least in the north of England, and the growth of new industries, especially service industries, in very different areas, which has brought new problems. Urban poverty has always been with us, and too easily becomes institutionalised. What we’re not faced with, contrary to what some would have us believe, is a wild and wilful recalcitrance.

If you’re ‘working class’, probably with a rented home, little by way of savings, limited education – when you’re world goes wrong you have nothing to fall back on. Maybe there’s a job sweeping streets, or loading shelves, paying little – much less than in a previous job. If you’re ‘middle class’, educated, home-owner, with friends and relations who may be able to help – you’re sheltered from the worst. And – if you’re lazy, don’t feel inclined to work too hard, or to get on too far in life,  it doesn’t really matter. Your circumstances will be reduced, but there will be no-one out there pointing a finger at you.

We’re back – and I’ve argued this many times – to compassion, and at the heart of compassion lies understanding. Hislop never once mentioned compassion, and never once tried to understand, to get inside the mind, the reality, of being an outsider.

That simple polarity – you’re a worker, or you’re a shirker. Hislop ended his programme by repeating it and pronouncing, ‘I’m with the workers.’ As he claimed most people are when presented with that false division. And that division has of course become the stock-in-trade of the press. Forty years ago we accepted and were proud of the welfare state and we had moved a long way from that Victorian divide. But it’s now back, and it’s pretty brutal, and where once the BBC might have been expected to show some neutrality – and indeed recognise the plight of society’s outsiders, it’s no longer fashionable to do – or maybe, and simply, the BBC no longer dares to show a heart of its sleeves.

And finally – Hislop made no mention at all of the extraordinary population growth in the early 19th century, consequent upon the industrial revolution, and the major problems faced by cities such as Manchester. See Alison Light’s Common Ground for the situation in Cheltenham. The Poor Law Amendment Act was a response to a perceived and real emergency. We have no such excuse in our own times.

Yes, there is a continuing discussion to be had about whether or not austerity has gone too far, and payments of some benefits have increased to an extraordinary degree in recent years. There are issues to be addressed but the worker-shirker divide is entirely the wrong context.

Iain Duncan Smith – can I not be cynical? 

A challenge.

My last post suggested that Good Friday is a day not to be cynical. And then we have Iain Duncan Smith. And he presents a challenge! After more than five years in post, knowing all the while his government’s agenda, and being a living breathing (I think) part of that agenda, making an apparent heart-on-the sleeve resignation, in a way that could not have been more public. Or damaging.

Another challenge to my self-imposed ban on cynicism is the Daily Mail. How I wondered did it respond to IDS’s resignation? They support a pensioner-friendly, undeserving poor, scrounger-hating agenda, so I expected they’d come down heavily on soft-hearted Iain.  So no surprise – his resignation was a ‘silly and petulant act’.

On the other hand, IDS is a leading Brexiter, and isn’t the Mail rather keen on Brexit? I’d like to have been at the Mial editorial meeting which decided which line to take. If I read the Mail more avidly maybe I’d pick up on the nuances of its response. (Although for a Paul Dacre-edited paper it doubt if there’s too much ‘nuance’).

What I’d love to see is legislation requiring as part of the freedom of the press agenda the publication of the editorial meeting minutes (and maybe a few private e-mails as well – thinking Hillary Clinton!) of the Daily Mail.

And while we’re at it – all owners and editors fully UK domiciled and tax-paying.

That’s enough cynicism for one Good Friday.

OK – mild by some standards!