Tag: Nick Timothy

Reading the Telegraph

Buy a newspaper you don’t normally read ….

Last Monday (11th April) it was the Daily Telegraph. The headline of an article by Tim Stanley had caught my eye: ‘The French establishment is not fit for purpose.’ In this context it is the French ‘centre’, and Emmanuel Macron, he’s referring to.

That word ’establishment’ again. A club no-one owns to being a member of. Think … the MPs’ expenses scandal, think Brexit, think ‘us and them’, with the Telegraph, the ‘us’ brigade par excellence, trying to kid ordinary folk that they, the Telegraph, represent ‘them’, the outsiders, the done-down.

I turned to the centre pages. To the left, an article by Theresa May’s old right-hand, Nick Timothy, and indications of Tory infighting. He agonises about complacency in the Tory party. That Johnson, he suggests, should survive is absurd. The Party is deluding itself. ‘Johnson has deliberately formed a third-eleven cabinet, to avoid creating powerful rivals.’ (Having played third-eleven cricket when I aspired to the first eleven, the analogy hits home.) Timothy is talking sense.

Only so far – he indicates support for the government’s despicable plan to despatch asylum seekers to Rwanda.

To the right, a typical Telegraph, gung-ho, latter-day-Thatcherite leading article. Under Thatcher a ‘defining characteristic’ of the Tories had been ‘an unashamed celebration of self-made success’. The Left derided this as a ‘loads-of-money’ fixation with wealth. ‘Right’ and ‘Left’: this dumb polarisation of Right and Left. We have, it seems, to be one or the other, when most of us are somewhere in between. But the Telegraph and the right wing of the Tory party aren’t comfortable without an enemy. 

Read on. ‘The government is ‘fearful of doing anything that might benefit moderate or high earners’. It is ‘like Labour obsessed with the distributional impact of its policies’, though the fuel tax cut in Sunak’s recent budget would suggest otherwise. If there was any (re-)distributional element in that budget it passed me by.

At the bottom of the page we have the article I mentioned above, by Tim Stanley, about France and last Sunday’s French election. The centre in French politics is it seems ‘zigging about like a jelly on a wild horse’. Marine Le Pen has been ‘detoxified by the French establishment’. It seems the centre and the establishment are, once again, one and the same. That old trope. With an immigrant issue that has been massively politicised by the hard Right, one hand, and a radical left galvanised by Jean-Luc Melenchon, the Bernie Sanders of American politics (that may be unfair on both of them!) on the other, the centre in France, if it is to hold, has a fight on its hands.

Le Pen has said that she ‘would quit NATO’s integrated military command and seek a closer alliance with Russia if she were elected’ (New York Times)

That’s where a better and wiser journalist than Tim Stanley would be focusing his attention.

Serial incompetence

‘The only conclusion is serial incompetence,’ were Keir Starmer’s words when replying to Boris Johnson at last week’s Prime Minister’s Question Time.

Every government makes egregious mistakes – hovers on the brink from time to time. But incompetence has never been institutionalised, as it is now, from education across to foreign policy. Theresa May’s government hovered close, but she at least had six years as Home Secretary behind her. Johnson’s cabinet has various skills, not least first-class degrees in economics and PPE. But little or none when it comes to government. If competence is the left hand, then the right hand is flair. There is little of that either – maybe one senior minister, and he shall be nameless.

Theresa May relied on Nick Timothy. She wasn’t fully her own person. Boris Johnson relies on Cummings. The last Tsar and the Tsarina relied on Rasputin. Leaders should be their own men, or women. Merkel, Macron, Shinzo Abe are all good examples.

Erdogan (Turkey), Orban (Hungary), Kaczynski (Poland – I’m staying within EU boundaries) are their own men, you could argue. And at another level Xi Jinping and Trump. But they are out and out nationalists, all with an interest in restricting or, worse, suppressing rather than expanding debate.

But if we believe in representative and accountable democracy then it’s the Macrons and Merkels we need. Even a Cameron.

Accountable. That presupposes open debate. A press that presents and represents all shades of opinion. A society that welcomes ideas, and values expertise.

We’ve never been happy with the notion of an intelligentsia in this country. For Michael Gove, attacking expertise, it was an open goal. Universities are a target. Intellectual debate does indeed go down some odd byways. The likes of Douglas Murray find easy targets (post-structuralism, cancel culture), and disparage the wider institution. (15th August, Telegraph headline: ‘British universities have become indoctrination camps.’) If it’s not universities it’s chattering classes.  The problem is elites. We don’t like elites. I wouldn’t argue against that. But when ideas and informed debate are characterised as elitist – then we should worry.

That gives the opening to populism. Single ideas. Single identities. In our case, of course, it’s Brexit. We can’t, it seems, agree on fisheries policy, or state aid. David North is out there not-negotiating hard for a no-deal Brexit. (And as of today there are suggestions the government might renege on the Northern Ireland protocol in last year’s withdrawal agreement.)

Single ideas and identities are by their nature non-negotiable. Finding common ground, working with and not against others, is an alien mindset. Anger drives debate or negotiation. An instinct to confront and disrupt dictates.

Barack Obama set out in 2009 with an agenda of bringing countries together – new agendas for the Middle East, for Africa. Finding common ground. He discovered how difficult that could be.

Coming together in politics is so much harder than pulling apart. The Arab Spring brought that home, and the Syrian outcome was brutal. Obama could claim rapprochement in Cuba and indeed Iran. But it was a small reward for much effort.

The US economy under Obama had recovered well from the 2008 financial crash. It was at the very least (though Republicans of a Trumpian persuasion would disagree) a competent administration with good intentions.

But competence is not enough. Emotion and instinct behind single and easily assimilable ideas set their own agenda. Competence is non-essential.

That said, thinking of the UK, a government characterised by incompetence does at least give its opponents an opening…

Big ideas for the future

There are big ideas about the future out there, about seizing the moment – now is the time for radical change. Two of many examples:

The Committee on Climate Change would like the much lower carbon emissions during lockdown as a stepping off point. And Wolfgang Munchau argues in The Spectator for a bout of creative destruction. Letting ‘failing’ industries and businesses go to the wall.

The aviation industry would be in the firing line on both counts. We’ve already seen Flybe go the wall. And Virgin withdrawing from Gatwick, while BA has stated that ‘there is no certainty as to when or if these [Gatwick] services can or will return’.

Nick Timothy in his new book, ‘Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism’ (reviewed in the London Review of Books by Colin Kidd),  has a different take. Both Boris Johnson and Timothy ‘would claim to want to revamp the interest of the British economy in the interests of workers as well as bosses’. That is indeed very much the mandate on which the current government was elected. But creative destruction can’t take account of workers’ interests. So we’ve a clear and present conflict here.

The Thomas Cook collapse was a recent example. How many businesses, I wonder, would be allowed to go the wall? How much unemployment could the government countenance? Where would the new jobs, many if not most at the high-tech end of the spectrum, be located?

Munchau damns the EU for being ‘good at protecting existing interests’, and for ‘stifling innovation in the process’. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would hold back ‘an unparalleled opportunity for the artificial intelligence industry’. Again, we’ve a conflict – between the interests of the wider public and an open-field approach to AI.

We owe the term ‘creative destruction’ to the economist Joseph Schumpeter. It is in the very nature of enterprise and capitalism. New businesses opening up new territory. Old businesses go the wall, and workers lose their jobs.

But Munchau and his like treat creative destruction as a gospel. Likewise commentators in the Telegraph. Brexit is the great new opportunity to throw off fetters. New businesses will rise up and even as the world turns in on itself we will find major new markets which will transform our economy. The theory is excellent. The practical outcome is likely to be disastrous.

What I would like to see is a new dispensation at a European level. Retaining data privacy. But encouraging innovation – with new market opportunities open to all member states. For the UK radical approaches to innovation are far more likely to work out operating at a European level than worldwide. For Europe and the EU trading relationships are in place. On our own we’ll be one amongst a plethora of countries potentially pursuing radical business ideas, and it won’t be easy to stand out from the crowd.

Munchau fears that the EU will put constraints on, for example, an innovation fund he’d like to see set up. He may, or may not, be right. That indeed is the challenge for the EU. I don’t want to re-fight Brexit here. But I do want to see punctured some of the pie-in-the-sky hopes that some, including Munchau, have for a WTO (World Trade Organisation)-rules post-Brexit world.

Above all, his hope that UK industry unshackled from the EU and newly ‘energised’ will finally break out of the cycle of low productivity. This involves a multitude of presuppositions. If we do break out it certainly won’t be because we’ve waved a Brexit magic wand. 

The assumption now is that with an economy in crisis we’re already halfway to a new radical dispensation. But this isn’t like World War Two. People will be expecting their old jobs back, and government won’t be wanting to have them as a drain on resources any longer than it can help it.

My gripe against Nick Timothy is another one, an old one. He’s a Brexit go-it-aloner. The enemy: ultra-liberals and international elites. (‘Citizens of nowhere’, the phrase with which he landed Theresa May, he now claims refers to that elite – not to Remainers. If that’s the case he didn’t tell Theresa.)  Let the new Tory party identify with the working class, not assume that everyone’s aspiration is to rise out of it. It’s ordinary folk who should call the tune. I’ll go along with him on that. (With strong reservations about how opinion is manipulated.) Cameron conservatism assumed people would live with the elitism implicit in its attitudes. Brexit proved they won’t.

His book was written before the Covid crisis but let’s assume that he too sees big opportunities now post-crisis. They will bring a new statist, big-spending, austerity-a-dirty-words approach to the economy. Social conscience won’t be a dirty word. But social conservatism will be the dominant mood. A closed-world mentality at one level, Global Britain at another. How this will play out, who knows. The Conservative party has an old and dreadful habit of equating its own interest with that of the nation. But which interest? The market economy and the old Ayn Randian ideas, on the one hand, pitched against the big state of Joseph Chamberlain and his avatar, Nick Timothy, on the other.

Chamberlain was the great advocate of imperial preference. That idea is still there. A touch of the old divine right. But post-Brexit it will be a hot sweaty world in the engine room. We no longer rules the seas. And big ideas too easily run aground.

Big state will be important post-crisis. So too big ideas, big innovation. Building out from a world which may or may not be changed forever. But if we imagine we can do this alone, without Europe, we’re badly mistaken. Yes, we could become a fifty-first state. Some may prefer this. But going it alone should never be an option. We need that agreement with the EU by 31st December.

Munchau argues that ‘compared to the great lockdown, the effect of a WTO Brexit would be small’. True, but it assumes people at large will be prepared to accept that the economy doesn’t get back to its pre-virus levels. That they won’t mind us limping along for a while, in the vague hope of a new wider prosperity further down the line. It looks to me dangerously like using the virus as a cover for the economy under-performing.

We’re on dangerous ground here. But an economy and overseas trade operating on WTO rules looks to be what we will have unless a new wisdom prevails before the end of the year.

A great sadness will be that we miss the great opportunity of working with like-minded people across Europe to build a better post-Covid world. Anyone who imagines a sudden tiger-economy-style breakthrough is simply in cloud-cuckoo-land.

Brexit and the abuse of history

History is our best and only guide to our future. In the last analysis we rely on evidence (which itself is always open to challenge). Doctrine, dogma, ideology, big ideas – they all escape evidence all too easily.

I thought it time to look at a few examples of the way history is abused by supporters of Brexit. In an attempt to change the way that history is framed. As with scientists and climate change the assumption is that historians are engaged in some kind of conspiracy. The Govean disparaging of expertise opens up the field. Interpretation becomes a free-for-all. Bias is owned lightly, he (and it seems it’s mainly he) who corners the airwaves calls the tune.

It’s insidious. Even the mild-mannered Giles Fraser, one time Canon of St Paul’s, is caught up in it. Reference his review in the current Prospect of Eamon Duffy’s Reformation Divided. There’s the argument that Rome (papal Rome) and Brussels are somehow synonymous.. Fraser refers to Thomas More ‘fighting a rearguard action against a 16th century Brexit. Substitute the Bishop of Rome for the Treaty of Rome and it appears we have been fighting over Brexit for centuries.’

There’s a harsher more vituperative tone to David Starkey, an example of an historian who has sacrificed academic credentials for a new career of opinion and disputation. Starkey unashamedly links the the 16th and 21st centuries. Brexit is our second Reformation, escaping a continental behemoth. Suffice it to say that sovereignty means something radically different today from the 16th century. A restrictive theocratic establishment bears no comparison whatever to a institution dedicated to opening not closing borders.

The German sociologist, Max Weber, whose book on the Protestant work ethic was published in 1905, is also brought into the argument. Turned by some today into an attack on southern and Catholic Europe, seen as having a malign influence on the EU – so we are best out of it. David Starkey for one is no friend of Catholics. And yet – France of course is as close to a secular nation as you can get, and southern Germany is largely Catholic… Italy and Spain have a remarkable industrial record. The old Catholic Church was a heavy restraint – but most of western Europe long ago put aside such restraints.

Then there’s Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s right-hand man, claiming Joseph Chamberlain, social reformer and advocate of economic power based on ‘Greater Britain’, as an inspiration. Chamberlain as a social radical turned Tory was an altogether bigger beast than Theresa May, operating in a radically different political context, and in an age of empire. Timothy’s comparisons are convenient, and spurious.

In a similar vein we have the Anglosphere beloved of Daniel Hannan and Michael Gove, and a good few others – the notion that there is some wide English-speaking identity, tradition and loyalty which can form the basis of future trading patterns, and which has to date been restricted by our trading relations with our near European neighbours. The Empire lives on, and other countries will come somehow to doff their caps to their one-time British overlords. Old loyalties will trump self-interest, overlooking the fact that trade is a brutal game.

For my part, I’m intrigued by these arguments. History is a broad church and thrives on interpretation and counter interpretation. It’s always pushing back boundaries, bringing to bear new research, widening our understanding. And yet – it is a poor guide to our futures. Linking the Reformation, Henry VIII, the Protestant work ethic and European economic dominance is a highly questionable activity.

What we can be quite certain of is that the consequences of Brexit will not be what any of us expect – whether we’re yea or nay sayers.

**

There’s also this quote (source Wikipedia) from a 2003 New York Times article in which the historian Niall Ferguson pointed out that data from the OECD seems to confirm that ‘the experience of Western Europe in the past quarter-century offers an unexpected confirmation of the Protestant ethic. To put it bluntly, we are witnessing the decline and fall of the Protestant work ethic in Europe. This represents the stunning triumph of secularisation in Western Europe—the simultaneous decline of both Protestantism and its unique work ethic.’

A highly questionable thesis in the first place. And Western Europe too easily becomes synonymous with the EU, Brexit a brave new world which will see the revival of both the work ethic and our economic prosperity.

And maybe the old British Empire as well…

Walking in the Lake District with Mrs May

Father, son and daughter in the Lake District. No talk of politics, just much sharing of music, all our of favourites, from fifty years back in my case, back to Grace Slick belting out White Rabbit – where did such amazing music come from when all had been doldrums only ten years before. Not quite so far back for Ben and Rozi, but they have good taste, and are slowly convincing me that I should love You can be heroes...wrong… We can be heroes… wrong again, just Heroes, and maybe come round to David Bowie after all these years. Now that he’s gone.

We try and avoid politics, though father and daughter are political animals. Whoops of delight when I see that all the election posters in Coniston are for the LibDem candidate. What, I wonder, does Theresa May talk about with her husband, and passing strangers, when out walking? And what if I met her out walking? A cheery good morning?

Bagehot in the Economist has a piece on Theresa May, under the heading Tory of Tories. Her Britain he writes is ‘the Britain of the Tory heartlands, a Britain of solid values and rooted certainties, hard work and upward mobility, a Britain where people try to get ahead but also have time for the less fortunate’. That made me wonder. What’s to disagree? Well, let’s get started…

Rooted certainties – that of course has never been England, or the UK. It’s our ability to change, to move quickly, to adapt, to draw on skills from around the world (here in the Lake District the Coniston mines and Millom tannery are two local examples) that has made us what we are. Not clinging to rooted certainties. ‘Solid values’ – a euphemism too often for closing ranks against the world. ‘Hard work’ – it’s inspiration, and we’ve drawn over centuries much inspiration, and wisdom, from Europe, we need as well. ‘Upward mobility’ – and what of those left behind? Not the JAMs, the just about managing, an invented concept if ever there was one, but those whose disadvantages of birth and position deny any opportunity of upward progress. The Tory world is too often a world where the barriers comes down, and the shutters.

There’s another free-trading Tory as well, a different breed, and they have a curious co-existence with the heartland Tory. Not Mrs May’s world at all, nor it seems that of her ‘guru’, Nick Timothy,  who likes to quote Joseph Chamberlain as a hero, claiming him as a people’s champion against … free trade. Falling into the old trap of quoting history out of context, one that seems to be everywhere in these post Brexit days.

All a frightful muddle.

And if we’d met her out walking? A cheery hello, as I manage with most walkers, that would have to suffice. Puzzling over the contradictions of Mrs May would be for another time, and the certainties.

Walking is about the next horizon, and the one after that, and horizons open up as you travel to take in the whole world…