Coronation Quiche

This week sees the Coronation of King Charles III. For the Coronation the King has made Coronation Quiche the official dish of the Coronation, a classic French tart which our horticultural monarch has deemed to be made with out of season Broad Beans, perhaps frozen for the ocasion after death of his mother. This is the sort of absurdity that built the glory of the United Kingdom.

As anyone who has travelled to the UK and tried to travel by train will know the British love, grumble about, cherish and stoically tolerate absurdity. Many this weekend will don cheap plastic Union flag bowler hats, probably made in China, to celebrate that the UK still has an hereditary head of state. A King who lives in huge palaces, wears a brazen ostentatious yet gloriously tacky crown. During an economic crisis where millions of Britons struggle to pay the bills, we lavishly spend money on a bizarre ceremony where our head of state has to be annointed with special oils, clothed in ancient robes, regaled with medieval trumpets from men wearing medieval dress, handed a special stick and an orb and the aforementioned crown to continue the hilarious idea that the people in positions in power in Great Britain are somehow ‘chosen by God’ and not the decendents of charlatans and bullies who managed to raise bigger armies than the other guy, to be paraded around London in a golden horse drawn carriage to the baying crowds. All whilst renowned journalists are drafted in to commentate on the proceedings by discussing which princess has the most ridiculous hat or which former Prime Minister is most in disgrace. We loves it and I say this from the fathomless depths of British sarcasm, it does make you proud to be British.

As a Briton the most striking aspect of this weekends festivities is that for the first time the British will be asked to swear an oath of fealty to the King. This is perhaps either the least British thing to do or the most. The least because, whilst we are all subjects of the Crown we are in no way obliged to offer the tiniest smigeon of respect to the instiution of the Monarchy. My family are Royalists and yet it was drummed into me as a child that it is my right as a Briton to disparage the Royals as much as I like, because we are a free people. Yes there probably is some of that delicious British irony in there somewhere. The most because many people will swear this oath with tongue firmly in cheek but go along with it because it’s the thing to be seen doing.

Of course there always were genuine Royalists who rampaciously defend the institution and similarly Republicans actively campaigning for the abolition of the Monarchy. However I’ve always felt that most British citizens, like myself regard it all with a gently respectful yet wry amusement; we are just happy to get the day off work to ironically enjoy making quiches, wave flags, getting some smiles off people for a change and some general quality time with our families.

This love of the absurd is perhaps the most defining characteristic of the British. One of the United Kingdom’s largest exports is culture. Our televisual comedies are sold throughout the world, comedies such as Mr Bean, Father Ted, Alan Partridge, Derry Girls and Keeping Up Appearances to name a few. Comedies that are globally popular yet which all send up British sensibilites and culture to the most extreme levels.

Pantomime is a great British institution perhaps because whilst it is gloriously absurd at its best and despite that is only possible because of a intense diligence to the traditions of Panto. Whislt Panto’ is mainly great fun for children, a proper one always includes a dig at the government for the ‘grown ups’. Panto is ridiculous but it only works because we take the production and traditions of it very seriously indeed.

Similarly with pop music from the Beatles, David Bowie and so on took used surrealism for the creation of bizarre characters the performers took seriuosly to create some fantastic pieces of popular music. Whilst in CLassical music great composers are alost absent, apart from those who savour the comic elements of classical music.

The Royals seemed to use to understand this British love of the absurd. Our late Queen Elizabeths last party saw her eating marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear. The late Queens children participated in ‘It’s a Royal Knockout’ a special edition of the insanely wonderful ‘It’s a Knockout’ gameshow, where people dressed in giant foam costumes to carry buckets of fluid half blind across slippery rotating floors, bumb into each other and fall over for laughs.

Yet this joyously British event seems to lack this taking the absurdity melded with seriouisness and respect for the absurdity which Royal occasions of old held dear. It’s perhaps partly as the United Kingdom is not at ease with itself and hence not finding it as easy as it once was to laugh at ourselves, our coping mechanism. It has been said that the British don’t fo revolution as we are too busy making up jokes. I imagine these words here causing the blood to boil in outrage from certain sections as ‘damnable wokery’ from the Royalists and conversely accusations of being a Royal apologist from the Republicans. The fun seems to be absent from this Royal event. It seems criticism and support of the Coronation has become involved in the establishments Culture Wars. Ironically perhaps merely a continuation of the policy of divide and rule that is sadly seeing a resurgance across the world. Perhaps all this caused by the seemingly endless global economic crisis we are facing: the declining British economy no-ones even talking about fixing, war in Europe, Covid, the general crisis of late monetarist capitalism. We almost don’t have time to discuss the greatest peril to our way of life, climate change.

The jokes don’t seem funny anymore, the joy is disappearing. You can laugh at the idiocy of the government or establishment class as long as fundamentally you believe they are least trying to put things right even if their ideas are fundmenetally flawed, that faith in the British economy to keep ‘buggering on’ has almost entirely faded, we are waiting for a miracle to come. There is the perception that no-one is even trying to unite the countries of the UK or fix the economy anymore, we are getting more used to things not working and there being no money to fix things.

It does come back to the elephant in the room no-one talks about anymore, or rather we talk about it all the time but without mentioning the accursed word, Brexit. I’ve written a lot about Brexit. Prior to Brexit there was a sense of ‘whatever our differences are at the end of the day we are all British’, that one uniting thing was viciously attacked by Brexit. Brexit may have been the British being at it’s Pythonesque best by saying that being members of the European Union (EU) was far too sensible and prevented the UK being as silly as it wanted to be and thus Brexit was won. However, Brexit exposed and amplified all the underlying tensions within the nations of the UK: between the Celtic nations and England, between black and white, between LGBTQ+ and striaght, between North and South, between the rich and poor, between Royalist and Republican, even and most strikingly between young and old and perhaps most fundamnetally those who value Britains diversity and those who value it’s conformist streak.

During Brexit it was often said ‘I don’t understand why polls are suggesting Brexit is 50-50 (or 52:48 as it was on the day of the vote) because I don’t know anyone who is voting for Brexit/Bremain’ The division was exposed, an individuals socio-economic and cultural background determined which side you were on. It made people realise that amongst their own side they agreed on so many other things. The government and now with the royal “oath of allegiance” UK institutions are no longer attempting to unite the country or try to tackle the economic problems and are instead exploiting the division for their own ends, divide and rule, attack freedom of speech, the scapegoats. It used to be the Catholics, now it seems to be everyone not exactly like them, hence the culture wars. Brexit demonstrated that you can foster intense debate over minutiae of word definitions, in particular what is an immigrant, to obscure and make imposible any genuine debate on immigration or anything else, what the UK economy can do post-Brexit. The age of informed polite discussion has been a victim of the culture wars, it’s now flame wars, cancel culture, obfusicating the narrative and leaving truth as a forgotten blood stained rag on the battlefield. It’s no longer comfortbale to be be wryly amused by Royal events, it seems you have to pick a side Republican or Royalist.

I simply fear this Coronation, the first in my lifetime, will lack any sense of joy or celebration of Britain and our love of the absurd. We are not supposed to take pomp and pagaentry seriously, how crazy is that, but that seems to be the argument the Royalist faction are pushing. We shall see. God save the King.

Imperial Measures

I think there was some sort of annoucement this week about Imperial measures by the UK government as one of them so-called ‘Brexit benefits’ and there has been the usual fuss on Social Media. ‘Brexit benefits’ like blue passports or crown symbols on pint glasses, changes that have zero effect on the economy or our everyday lives. They further stoke the division between the hard right empire nostalgia Nationalists and the younger generation scorning another weird set of odd peculiarities of the white old Gammons. The really bizarre bit of all this is that all these things could have been done whilst the UK was an EU member, the UK simply chose not to, they are not Brexit benefits at all, but things the UK could have done anyway without leaving the Single Market.

Yet, in a way it isn’t in this case. I am actually an advocate of Imperial Measurements, I grew up with them, I still cook using Imperial Measures and still think in Imperial in domestic matters. However I can quite see the point that Imperial isn’t of any use until that is you learn it and I understand why it is lumped in with criticism of blue passports, crown symbols, deporting black people, or whatever it is these right wing nutters actually want.

I was very privileged to have grown up with the Imperial system and also to be taught the Metric system at school (albeit using old Maths books written in Imperial) and we had a mathematician as Headmaster who thought it useful for us to learn maths using different base systems and so not restricted in our thinking to only using base 10. I’m a dual system perosn. To me the two systems are just that, two different systems. One works better for some things and vice versa. My generation learned both well, as we had to convert everything back into Imperial for when we talked with our uncles and nans.

The issue really comes down to trade, trade requires regulation, for both parties to accept a common weights and measures system, so traded goods can be verified to be the length or weight that the seller claims tham to be. The Metric system works really well for this as it is really easy as everything can be split into thousands, hundreds and tens. It is used in Science as science looks at tiny picolitre samples and then oceans at the ecosystem scale. The Metric system is great for this, no conversions are necessary.

However, once a product reaches a shop and an individual consumer wants to buy a piece of say, cheese, it becomes clumsy. One gram of cheese is a tiny mouthful and a kilogram is a huge piece of cheese, neither useful quantities for buying cheese for a family, pounds and ounces come into their own, whether you buy 6 or 7 ounces of cheese makes a difference. one ounce is 28.3495 grams and far too precise for domestic recipes, so you often see 25g or 30g used in recipes, which is a little fussy. In older recipe books you will see things like ‘a good ounce of butter’ or just over an ounce, or measure an ounce but be generous. For baking this makes much more sense, it is numbers at a more human scale.

This is how the Imperial system developed over centuries of human existence, horses height is measured in hands (4″, 4 inches, about 10cm) because a human hand is roughly 4″ wide. This measure is just used for horses. Fathoms measure depth, One fathom is 6′, 6 feet (180cm) because depth was measured by dropping a weighted rope off the side of the boat and rope was gathered by men who when gathering rope around outstreched arms is roughly 6′ or a fathom, so you could guesstimate depth if you didn’t have a specially knotted rope to hand. Basically in imperial you use the measuring system specifically designed for the job you do, you don’t have to learn all the obscure units at once, just the ones you use. A mile (1.6km) is comprised of 1760 yards (the distance you walk in a leisurely 20 minutes) A yard (just under a metre) is comprised of 6 feet (30cm) each made up of 12 inches (2.5cm). “A metre measures 3 foot 3 [inches], it’s longer than a yard you see” I remember hearing older members of my family uttering this under their breaths as they tried to understand Metric labelling!

So if you are looking at small things all you need be concerned with is inches, things in your room, you think about feet, then when you leave the house you start with yards but then move onto miles. You use the scale that fits the job. You never have to think about how much fuel it would take to drive your car across your kitchen. Well you could convert miles per gallon into inches per gallon, but now we’re talking about comparing big things with small things and no longer at a human scale and Metric is so better for that, well provided you are careful to count your zeros carefully.

Dual systems, having a choice of tool is to me a good thing. It’s the same with languages, being able to speak two languages is better than one. I speak Welsh and English and bi-lingual speakers will often say things like ‘Ymddiheuro fydd o’n hawddach i esbonio yn yr Saesneg’ [Apologies it will be easier to explain in English] , and sometimes the other way around. Two systems are better than one, they make life easier, but and it is a big but, if and only if both parties have learned to speak the language of both systems.

However I think almost everyone a few years younger than I will only have been taught the Metric system at school and they live perfectally fine lives with it and are not really prevented from doing anything. The UK government chose amost sole use of the Metric system some generations ago now (although blamed the EC for it at the time), all the EC said was that machines need to display Metric quantities and prices must be displayed in Metric, they never said the UK couldn’t continue to dual system, the UK chose that. It is personally annoying, when I pop into the cheese shop, I still ask for “8oz [ounces] of your lovely Swaledale please” [Swaledale is possibly my favourite cheese] and in recent years younger staff have been clueless “No problem, just over 200 grams” and we’ve been fine. For me I can look at a piece of cheese and see how many ounces it is, I can’t do that with grams, they are not at a human scale.

I don’t know what Boris Johnson’s mad crazy government intends exactly with the Imperial system change. Teaching the system isn’t such a bad idea: Learn that there are more than one way of measuring things, the history of weights and measures (including why we have months and why we find bones marked 30 times, think about it if you don’t know the answer), Doing sums not in base 10 [I suspect not many computer programmers use binary these days, but useful nonetheless]. A couple of fun interesting valuable lessons I would imagine, but please, please not what I had to do at school: Convert the quantities in the textbook into Metric [which was often the hard bit], now do the sum that you’ve been taught how to do today, then to check you’ve done it right, convert the answer back into Imperial, so you can check it against the answers in the back of the book; I think I had a fairly unique experience with maths at school and yes we did wonder if it wouldn’t have just been easier to do the whole sum in Imperial!

Sorry for the rant, I just see so much criticism of the Imperial system by people who don’t understand it or have ever used it. It’s annoying as this is exactly the same argument they often use against the Brexiteers. I also get criticism of the Welsh language from monoglot English speakers who don’t understand the advantages of speaking two languages. Basically I just despise people expressing strong opinions on things people don’t understand. It is perhaps the disease of the 21st century.

The Shadows of Brexit – The UK elections of May 2021

The UK has just had a set of elections, for the Senedd in Wales, the Scottish parliament, metropolitan mayors and council elections in England and a Wetminster by-election in Harltlepool. A lot of the analysis and commentary has foccussed on differences in shifts of voting patterns between areas that voted for Brexit and those that didn’t and apparently different trends in the nations of the UK. It’s been a lot to try and unpack and seems to say a lot about a post Brexit UK.

Wales

The make up of the new Senedd, doesn’t look much different to that of the last one, the Labour party will form the new government with pretty much the same number of ASs. Essentially it seems the votes for UKIP (the Brexit party) has fallen away with lent votes returning to the Labour party fold.

Scotland

The pro-independence SNP has won a fourth term of power and there is a clear majority in favour of independence in the new Scottish parliament. Of interest was a pro-union tactical voting, where Labour and Conservatives voters switched parties in an attempt to keep the SNP out, which in terms of individual votes was successful, but not enough to prevent a SNP government. It looks as though the UK government is going to fight it by arguing for the opposite of the democratic mandate argument wheeled out so often for Brexit.

England

England saw two distinct trends. The “Red Wall” areas, the towns and post-industrial areas of the North have switched allegiance from Labour to the Conservatives, whilst more of Southern England has become Labour voting areas, perhaps particularly the urban cities.

It seems that not only is the UK still very divided, but that there is now a clear difference in post-Brexit voting patterns in Wales and Scotland in comparison with England.

I’ve seen a lot of wailing and despair from left-leaning folk about a betrayal of Brexit voters in traditional Labour heartlands in England. Accusations that voters there have stupidly voted against their interests by switching votes to the Conservatives. There seems to be a trend here that breaks along national lines.

A lot of the UK, especially areas that have traditionally supported the Labour party are neglected areas. Much of the post industrial landscape: South Wales, Northern and Eastern England and Scotland are areas defined by under-investment and relative poverty. These areas stand in contrast with a relatively wealthy South East of England, which traditionally votes Conservative. This traditional voting pattern seems to have shifted and it is perhaps all to do with Brexit.

I’ve always maintained that Brexit had very little to do with EU membership, that it is something else entirely. Support for Brexit was highest in the post-industrial towns of the areas I mentioned above. Whilst Brexit was led by Brexiteers of the far-right, it’s supporters were those whom had traditionally voted for Socialism and the Labour party. Superficially this seems paradoxical from a traditional left-right political spectrum viewpoint. However the voter from a neglected, poverty stricken area wants more than anything is change and hope, they have little to lose. Voting Labour for generations has not got them anywhere, they see the hub-cities (London, Manchester, Birmingham etc) seemingly doing very well, seemingly at their expense, cities filled with younger largely university educated people who support a socially liberal agenda (LGBTQ rights, racial equality etc), issues that seem to top the agenda of left-leaning political parties that are not top of the agenda for the post-industrial towns, which want investment and change at the very least as their top priorities.

The Brexiteers were arguably successful by creating a false enemy of liberal metropolitan people, people that support progressive social policies, European cooperation and a world without borders. Being able to live and travel across the EU was a huge benefit, but if you are too poor and lack a university education, you were unable to make use of such an opportunity anyway.

These liberal metropolitan left-leaning communities are a false enemy, as they are the children, the brothers and sisters of post-industrial Britain. They are the gay man who escaped an oppressive deprived society to move to the big city which had an LGBTQ community. They are the person who did well enough at school to get into university to escape their deprived town.

I know this as I went to university in the UK and met these people. Yet they have different perspectives, which may explain the national differences. I’ve met people who are still very proudly from Yorkshire, but would never move back. I’ve met others from Northern England who have expressed the same thing. They have found lives in the hub cities the Manchesters , the Birminghams, the Londons and would not move back to the post-industrial towns (the Burnleys, the Dewsburys, the Hartlepools)

However I have also lived in Cardiff and these liberal metroplitan people in Cardiff, people from the North or the Valleys retain the idea of moving back home. Whilst I expect these attitudes are not universal and that there is nothing unique to the hiraeth of Wales, yet there seems to be in Wales much more of the idea of a one Wales, of a whole nation, to put something back into the communities in which we were raised. Whilst in England the North South divide, now the big metroplitan city, post-industrial town divide has somehow a greater separation.

There is still perhaps a sense in Wales that the Labour party in Wales is very much a Welsh party, the link between the cities and the post-industrial towns is still strong, whilst that link has diminished much more in England. The Labour leadership in the UK/England is much more separated from the post-industrial towns to the extent it has lost their support post Brexit. It may simply be that in Wales that at least the idea of independence or at least a greater autonomy for Wales is in the political discourse, that a one Wales focus presents an appealing change. I believe this is also true of Scotland, yet such a one-nation narrative hasn’t yet taken hold in England. An England where the party that delivered Brexit seems to offer an appealing prospect of a divisive right-wing popular nationalism, rather than the inclusive liberal one-nationism on the rise on Wales and Scotland.

An interesting election and the shadow of Brexit has cast some shifts in voting patterns that are very regional in nature that do not match traditional trends. As Britain finds a way out of Covid and Brexit it will be interesting how long the shadow of Brexit continues to be such a major influence on British politics. How much will the Conservatives continue to conduct the culture war against liberal metropolitan culture that Brexit showed was electorally successful? How long will it be before we in Britain gets governments that take the health of the nation and it’s economy seriously rather than political expediency? It will be interesting.

Smalltown boy -Bronski Beat

A Fortnight on Brexit Island

The full descent of the UK into self parody has been laid bare these last two weeks.It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.

A week last Monday was International Women’s Day, which was nice.

On the Tuesday the interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle). In which there was only one real shock: No-one had told her what she was getting into by marrying into the British Royal family. The Royal Family has it’s own press office and a is a huge instiution, but no-one told her the reality? She may have been an actress and not entirely innocent to the machinations of the press, but no-one told her that her every public appearance would be scrutinised to the nth degree by the press, a racist press keen to disparage her every utterance, her every dress. Or tell her that most of her life would be stuck in a royal palace unable to do normal things like invite freinds around. How naive were the palace?

The upshot of this was dividing the people of the UK into those on Harry’s side for looking after his woman and those who frown on anyone revealing that the Royal Family isn’t one big happy family.

The next day we learned of the case of Sarah Everard, a young woman murdered on her way home in London. This hit the press as her alleged abductor is a serving police officer. Sadly this isn’t the only alleged case of police officers abducting women. Furthemore in the context of Black Lives Matter, where men have mysteriously contracted fatal injuries whilst in police custody, whilst the police are apparently clueless as to how this occured. Deeply disturbing.

Thursday and Friday were much more positive, women from across Britain took to Social Media to describe cases where they had been assaulted or simply felt afraid every time they walked home. This was wonderful as so many men are ignorant of how much of this goes on without men noticing.

On the Saturday a vigil for Sarah Everard was held in Clapham, South London, where she had lived. The organisers had approached the police asking for assistance in managing the event in as Covid-19 safe way as possible. The organisers were turned down, even after seeking judicial support. They cancelled the event, but this was now a huge national story and many people were asttending anyway, including the Duchess of Cambridge (Meghan Markle’s sister in law). Then at dusk as Clapham Common filled with candlelight, the police noticed that people were gathering too closely at the bandstand and decided to enforce the Covid-19 temporary laws, send in the police, kettling the crowd and hence increasing the risk of Covid -19 spreading, to go in and throw a few women to the floor and make a few token arrests of people at a vigil for a woman murdered (allegedly) by a member of the same police force. Do the Metropolitan Police not have a PR department?

The police doubled down in defence of their actions, but by Monday the story had developed. The UK parliament was ‘debating’ a new Police Bill, one that would effectively remove the right to protest from UK law, but parcelled in with some laws about longer sentences for sex offenders like Prince Andrew (allegedly). Cue more protest marches in London for the right to protest during a Covid-19 lockdown. The vote in parliament was carried but has subsequently been shelved to be passed/ dropped quietly later in the year when everyone is focussed on the latest scandel.

The flag isn’t small it’s just further away.

Boy did we Brits need some light relief at this point. This came from an unlikely source a BBC Breakfast news anchor, Charlie Stayt. Breakfast TV is supposed to be a little more light hearted than heavier evening news programmes, whilst still covering the major news items of the day. First some context: Having the national flag at government departments or drapped in the background when ministers hold press conferences is fairly normal across the world. However with Covid-19 and people working from home, the government decided that ministers should have full size diplomatic flags in the background at their home offices or their living rooms when doing interviews. It looks ridiculous, do you have a flag stand in your living room? Charlie Stayt at the end of an interview made what looked like an off the cuff, light hearted question about the size of a government ministers flag. This wasn’t his finest hour and it was not terribly funny, but this was live TV, one for the gaffs reel perhaps?

But no, the camera cut away to Naga Munchetty, the co-host who had burst into giggles; flag size related to manhood possibly? Instead of the usual British laughing at ourselves in a ridiculous situation, this took on a sinister tone. It wasn’t Charlie, who’d made the gaff who got the Social Media stick, but Naga, a woman of colour from the nastiest of British Nationalists, calling her a traitor and worse.

Ever since Brexit first emerged, the UK has been deeply divided, it’s the same people on the same sides of every argument, on every issue, not just Brexit itself. There is the narrow right wing British Nationalism that hasn’t moved beyond the “Glory of Empire” supported by the UK press in championing it’s cause: Boo for the Duchess of Sussex [a black woman], Boo for these dead troublemakers dying in police custody [black men], Boo to women speaking up for themselves, Boo to people giggling in a situation where the UK flag is involved [especially a black woman], Boo to anyone who suggests that Brexit isn’t such a great idea after all and Boo to people protesting about the UK government… from these ‘not racist but’ British Nationalists? Lets not mention that this Police Bill also makes life impossible for the Romany community, notice a pattern here? And there is the rest of us, ordinary Britons who’ve not been suckered into this mess.

The poor old Union Flag. A flag supposed to represent all of us as Britons, to have a sense of pride in,to wave around when people of the UK do well. A flag that repesents the UK of Monty Python and of great sportsmen and women, something we could happily wave. This flag has been usurped by the far right, the racists, the supporters of an exclusionary narrow British Nationalism of the chronic Stockholm Syndrome sufferers who despite the most incompretent and corrupt UK government, still vote Tory. I want no part of this, this does not represent the Britain I know and love.

So what do the government do? I’m hearing this troubled flag is to be wielded in a new policy in a sham political culture war for their interpretation of the Union. They’ve installed a Tory as head of the BBC, who have forced newsreaders to remove non UK flags from their backdrops on Twitter accounts and reduce topical comedy output. Instead of trying to unite the UK in a tough period, the Covid-19 pandemic, they’re further dividing it, where we ordinary folk have withheld our right to protest, to see our friends and family and been in Lockdown since Christmas for the greater good to just be attacked by this government and their cronies. I’ll wager they beign provocative and are just waiting for someone somewhere to publicly burn the flag to further divide the UK to make a enemy for the ‘British Nationalists’ and their awful cause. Troubling times indeed.

Independence for Wales and Brexit

The arguments for independence for Wales are perhaps not breaking through to Brexit supports. Here I attempt to explore why this might be.

I have always found the whole Brexit debate curious. The main thrust of the argument seemed to concern democracy, that policy decisions should be made locally at the UK level rather than at EU level. Surely if you take this argument to it’s logical conclusion, then if you support Brexit you should also support Welsh independence and greater powers for local councils. However judging from Brexiteer arguments there seemed to be something special about centralisation at the UK level. British Unionists have used the phrase ‘our precious union’ as something of high value, preventing a consideration of further devolution of political power.

I have supported Welsh Independence my entire adult life, I am a child of Thatcher, yet for many years I felt I was fairly unusual and alone in this view partly because I was living in England as so many young adults from Wales do. I grew up in Powys, with farmers sons for school friends, have a Conservative supporting family and when I was at school I got my news from the Daily Telegraph as that was the paper my family took. It would not have been surprising if I were to have turned out to be a Tory, except I didn’t.

I didn’t as I’m fairly geeky and bookish and spent a lot of time thinking about politics as a young man and one of the things I settled upon was a belief in the importance of subsidiarity, a word rarely heard in political discussions these days. Subsidiarity simply being the view that political decisions should be made the the most local level that is practical. It is simply this belief that led me to support Welsh Independence as a solution to the tyranny of Thatcherism.

So, whilst I was reading the Daily Telegraph and the constant commentry that the EU was centralising too much political power in Brussels, it made a sense to me, yet I couldn’t get my head around why this principle didn’t seem to extend to Wales.

The Brexit argument, whilst it dressed itself in the clothes of subsidiarity seemed to be more about identity, specifically identification with Britishness, with Britishness being portrayed as the plucky underdog battling the power of an elite. The Brexit campaign kind of left open who this shadowy elite were and seemed to largely allow people identify ‘the Elite’ as whomever was against their interests and allowed establishment politicians to claim to suddenly somehow be anti-establishment and conservative at the same time..

The UK has been a declining economy for all my adult life. Support for Brexit was fueled by a hope for a major change that would turn things around. The UK has also had fairly hard right wing Tory governments during this period, surely this is the elite that has caused the problems for the Britons, the fall in disposable incomes for the majority? Yet, this British establishment has been very clever in pointing the finger at ‘enemies within’ for the weakness of the UK economy: immigrants, catholics, muslims, liberal university educated people, the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, the LGBTQ community, people who aren’t monolingual English speakers, single mothers on benefits and so on. Basically it’s anyone who doesn’t conform to a rigidly defined Britishness. Surely the stiff upper lipped British who created the largest empire the world have ever seen cannot possibly be at fault for economic decline.

Yet am I not British too? Well no I’m Welsh! However, I’ve usually described myself as Welsh-British, because I feel an identification with the British isles and all the people of the British Isles. Really, I see myself as a Briton rather than British and that is quite a subtle distinction. A distinction that the Brexiteers [the people pushing Brexit, the Farages and the Rees-Moggs, not the Brexit voters] have succeeded in bluring.

I did say that I was a bookish geek, so I have read History books. What amazes me now is that when I was at school the British Empire period wasn’t covered at all. I have now read about it and the history is full of terrible atrocities committed by the British army across the world. Yet the simple impression I had before this was that the British Empire was glorious and something to be proud of. History should not be forgotten, but just focusing on the nationalistic ‘glory of Empire’ just feels absurd, history is the good the bad and the ugly.

Yet, I don’t belive that Brexit was won in Wales by this British jingoism. The strongest support for Brexit came from the Valleys. I’m not from the Valleys, but I don’t think that many people there wave the Union Jack and sing Land of Hope and Glory every day before breakfast? However, many communities clearly feel a sense of decline, that they are neglected and are inspired by anything that offers hope. The question is why was Brexit seen as the answer and not Welsh Independence?

I think it has something to do with privilege. You have privilege when you are a member of a group that isn’t discriminated against for the quality you have that makes you a member of that group. However privilege isn’t that well understood. If you are white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, protestant, a monoglot English speaker, born in Wales then you have a lot of privilege. However, there are lots of people with all this privilege who don’t get any tangible advantages for being in the majority demographic group, life is tough and getting harder. There is perhaps a sense of resentment towards those perceived as having greater privilege. What are these greater privileges? Having a university education and being able to speak Welsh. Who are perceived to have those two privileges, the advocates of Welsh Independence. Thus the advocate so Welsh independence seem to not be people like them. This is enough to put people off without understanding the complexities of the argument

The odd thing is that the Brexiteers, the Farages and Rees-Moggs have even greater privilege by nature of being super wealthy than any independence supporter, yet the Brexiteers succeeded in deflecting that criticism by offering hope of betterment if people would support them rather than stick with the Labour party or Plaid Cymru.

A major weakness of the UK electoral system is the First Past the Post constituency vote, electing one member of Parliament. The biggest party in Wales is the Labour party, people have voted Labour every election, but things never get any better, so people opted to vote for a radical change. What is the difference between the change of Brexit compared to Welsh Independence. It could just be ‘backing a winner’. There is a huge bonus of being in a constituency that voted for the governing party in Westminster, local services are less likely to be closed and more money is likely to be spent on infrastructure. There is an incentive to back the winners, especially if those winners are promising help for people with priveldge who gain no advatage from being privileged. Maybe it’s simply that Welsh Independence isn’t perceived to be winning yet.

The challenge for those of us convinced by the need for Welsh Independence is we want to offer hope for a better Wales for everyone who calls Wales home. We are constrained by wanting to include everyone in that we don’t have people who are an enemy, we don’t want borders and division. The only enemy is perhaps these complicated concepts of centralisation and lack of democratic accountability and the problems they cause.

I feel that perhaps the solution is to tackle this issue of identity head on, to make it the defining feature of the campaign. During Brexit, my social media was filled with people expressing sadness about losing their European identity. During the Scottish Independence referendum, people were expressing sadness about losing Scotland as part of their British Identity. I think there is a need to separate associations of political states from nations of people. If Scotland gained independence, I would not lose my affection for Scotland. I’ve never considered Ireland to be a foreign country. I would never regard England as being a foreign land. Brexit has not made me feel any less European. It is to break this association of nationality with nation-states that many people seem to have and instead make it about people we share bonds with. Once the association with the UK nation-state is broken we can get on with making all of Britain a better place.

It’s actually a real shame that there is no flag to represent all the people of Britain. The Union Flag has been adopted by the far-right and perhaps it’s only when individual athletes at the Olympic games wave the flag that we can unite as Britons in celebrating their hard work and success.

As Eddie Butler poignantly put it at the AUOB march in Merthyr: “The United Kingdom that made my parents proud to call themselves British no longer exists”. We should free ourselves of the shackles of the British Empire and instead embrace an identity as Britons.

Are Trump and Brexit the same phenomena?

I grew up under Margaret Thatcher, loathed and loved in almost equal measure. I got to vote in a UK general election for the first time in 1997. The election was won by Tony Blair and the era of Blairism. Since then real take home wages for typical everyday workers have essentially flat-lined, whilst the economy has risen in pure GDP terms, yet for most Britons living standards have declined, though masked to an extent by the rise in computational power and the internet. Today Joe Biden has won the US presidential election, defeating Donald Trump (loathed and loved in almost equal measure). Have we gone full circle? Both the UK and the US have not reformed our democracies, maintaining two party systems in an era when two party systems are no longer serving democracy.

How did we get here? From 1945 to 1975, the UK and the US experienced Social Democracy, the post-war consensus. A period of growth, rising living standards and where take home wages rose with economic growth. The mid 1970s saw an oil crisis, rampant inflation and the steady rise in living standards came to an end.

By the late 70s, people were fed up with their governments who seemed unable to deal with what had happened in the 1970s. The US voted in Ronald Reagan and the UK Margaret Thatcher, heralding in a new era of Thatcherism and Reaganism, or laissez-faire economics, where all political power was given to capital and a belief in the supremacy of financial markets and market-based solutions. It kind of worked for a while, national assets were sold off, infrastructure was not maintained and that money bought off normal people with tax cuts, normal people who didn’t notice that the gains from tax cuts were being swallowed up by rampant housing cost inflation and in the cost of living, such that peoples net disposable income did not increase, apart from some unsustainable wealth gains for the middle class, who had lucked out by buying houses when they were affordable prior to hyper-inflation of housing.

Since around 1980s, there has been a Thatcherite/Reaganite consensus. Conservative parties argued for taking it ever further and further than Thatcher herself would have and argued that Social Democracy had failed. Left wing parties, tainted by this apparent failure of Social Democracy lost confidence. It can be argued that there was a period up to the global financial crisis of 2008, where things seemed to be going ok, where concerned voices were ignored. Voices for change for solutions to our systemic problems were marginalised; The real economy doesn’t matter because we can just keep borrowing money from the future.

Essentially there was a period where the Left-Right dynamic of these two party systems was about appealing to what was perceived as being the political centre ground between the two main political parties. Leaders were careful to be bland and inoffensive to appeal to soft supporters of the other side. However it meant that the real concerns of ordinary people were left unaddressed by the political system and opposition to this cosy political establishment has perhaps grown.

The problem for this opposition to the political establishment and the multi-national corporate world it supported was divided. We have this legacy from the Left-Right political spectrum, so opposition is marginalised between those identifying between the Left and the Right. Thus antagonism and even culture wars began between the left and right, leaving the political establishment to carry on and smugly grin “the fools fight among themselves”

The lassez-faire capitalism of rentier capitalism, where capital is used to suck in more capital for itself with little to no investment in infrastructure or the real economy has begun to lose the support of middle-income earners, because by now middle income earners were losing out too. People have been looking for someone to offer a solution.

The Left still had Social Democracy, it was perceived as being tarnished and the political establishment has been successful at branding Social Democracy as the problem. The right had nowhere to turn to either, traditional conservatism was ignored, the power of capital entrenched by the free market myth had replaced traditional conservative values.

There was a political malaise, turnouts at elections were falling as people felt that politicians of red or blue were basically the same, feathering their own nests. It seemed a tipping point was crossed, instead of trying to take votes from the other side, a better strategy was to campaign at your base, to raise turnout among your supporter base and to not care about trying to appeal to unity and the other side, especially if they didn’t have an alternative to turn to they were comfortable with.

So along comes Brexit and Trump, offering a populist solution, a possibility a hope of a way back to the growth in living standards provided by the Social Democracy era, but perpetuating the myth that Social Democracy itself was flawed. Those on the right of politics flocked to it. Brexit won the Tories in the UK a general election and the Brexit referendum. In the US the reality TV show tycoon, Trump won the presidency.

For the left on the other hand the argument being that Social Democracy stripped of it’s pragmatism had become Blairism, with only right appealing policies whether they were any good or not (such as PFI) as a means to win the centre-ground meant that it’s very definition had been usurped, so the only way forward was a lurch to the left and ever truer and ever perhaps less practical forms of socialism.

The right on the other hand had a chance to rid themselves of the ever centralising big government institutions they have long wished for.

The problem the left has with Brexit and Trump is that whilst they offer getting rid of something they does not serve them, it offered no actual alternative. There was no plan for the UK post-Brexit and there still isn’t and neither did Trump apart form a lot of hot air and divisive rhetoric. It seemed that the argument was merely exiting the EU would magically solve all of the UKs woes, which is incredibly naive.

Coupled to this situation was a change in how the political class dealt with the media. The empty words of the political class, the avoidance of answering questions (in the 70s and 80s politicians actually answered questions), let alone debate grew. That chimed with neglected demographic on both the right and left, the downright lies of Brexit and Trumpism appealed to the right as being a solution to at least mix things up for a change. The problem was the political establishment, but the supporters of Brexit are the political establishment, so they had to create the myth that it was the other lot, those who are not in power as being to blame. The campaigns successfully scapegoated Social Democracy yet again, despite the UK not having had Social Democacy for now approaching 40 years. Further bolstered smears and hatred towards whomever was the scapegoat of the day. The left divided into splinter groups, those that want something done about climate change, or racism, or poverty, rather than a unifying creed. There was no party to unify the left, just an ever growing list of causes of growing urgency.

The Left has lost it’s popular appeal as an appealing dogma to the working class, despite it being the political creed that most favours this demographic economically. The left’s leaders are university educated, used to nuanced arguments, the ‘libtards’ who don’t have a nice simple message, because the economy is complicated, life is complicated. This has turned away working class support. Yet the left isn’t really left or socialist anymore, it’s the whole swatch of opinion from far left to centre-right. The centre ground has shifted so far right by Thatcherism/Reaganism and been so distorted by the ‘free-market’ dogma of Thatcherism. Paradoxically it has seemed the left doesn’t even have a unifying dogma to rally the troops anymore

We are kind of back to the late 1970s position, we have struggling economies, built on mountains of debt to the world of finance. People want a solution, but there seems no ready political philosophy, no new solution and a political class who seem ever more out of touch with the economic realities of ordinary citizens.

We’ve just had an election in the US for a new president, won by Joe Biden, with a simple message of hope and truth. Is this the end of the populist Brexit phase? Despite the euphoria on our television screens, is not Biden simply another establishment, middle way, safe pair of hands, a former Vice President to soften the blow of our crisis, rather than tackle the real problems? It’s hard to see supporters of the right of Trump and Brexit getting behind a bland steady the ship offering once Brexit and Trump are seen for the empty shams that they are. I should add this equally applies to Keir Starmer. But then if Biden can now win simply on competence and not being a figure a fun, then perhaps Starmer can too? These new leaders don’t really offer solutions on the scale we need (though we should give Biden a chance). People need to pile the pressure on the political class to get stuff done. We seem to live in a world where politicians don’t lead but are led kicking and screaming by campaign groups to getting the simplest of things done. Perhaps we should keep massive pressure on the political class until they realise that people are not going to shut up unless we are assured they really are getting on with what they are elected to do, govern us in our interests.

For democracy to work, to do it’s simple job of picking the best decision makers from a list of candidates we need to perhaps do a couple of things:

No.1 Expand the list, reform democracy and get away from two party politics, where the choice is between terrible and even worse. Allow people to vote positively for someone they believe in that they can trust, rather than fear of the ‘other guy’. We need serious electoral reform on both sides of the pond.

No.2 Ditch political dogma, of left and right, of socialists and conservatives. Political dogma is relative. If a society’s economy is too left wing, then you need predominately right wing ideas to be the solutions and vice versa. The idea of things needing to be more right and more left are relative to the state of things, they are merely ideologies in themselves and dangerous if pursued to their extremes. Practical solutions should always trump those that arise from political dogma or a slavish following of doctrine.

I think that if the UK and the US can do these two things, it will transform our societies into true democracies, where losing an election doesn’t lead to four years of trauma for over half of the population and society in retreat but instead leads to change we are all mostly happy with, because everybody will get a share of the pie and a reward for their hard work, everyone will be better off.

Let’s see the light, that allowing the capital of huge unaccountable financial to suck away all the wealth we all generate through work isn’t a sustainable economic situation, to acknowledge that Thatcherism/Reaganism is simply another dogma that has inevitably failed, we need to move on. That there are not good and bad people, but simply people who can help and those that need help. The less people there are who need help, the more work that gets done. The more that gets done the better off we all are. It really isn’t rocket science. We just need political systems that facilitate productivity, and work against, rather than for, systems that reduce productivity. To get there we need a better representative democracy that works for us rather than against us.

There are so many parallels between support of Brexit and Trump, by mass appeal to their base on a promise of hope. Now that Brexit and Trump have been exposed as a sham, it seems that people are prepared to get off their arses and go to the polls and say no, no to this divisive crap which doesn’t solve one problem.

What will emerge from all this will be interesting and hopefully, finally turn things around and we can start raising living standards once again.

Beyond Brexit

The Welsh national movement has expanded greatly over the last year. A recent poll put support for Welsh Independence at 32%, which is the highest it’s ever been. Brexit and the Covid period have shown how quickly things can change. However, it is mainly the young and people of the left that are backing it, Welsh Independence isn’t winning over Brexit supporters or those from the right wing of politics. What are the barriers to being Indycurious for right wing people?

I have always found the whole Brexit debate curious. The main thrust of the argument seemed to concern democracy, that policy decisions should be made locally at the UK level rather than at EU level. Surely if you take this argument to it’s logical conclusion, then if you support Brexit you should also support Welsh independence and greater powers for local councils. However judging from Brexiteer arguments there seemed to be something special about centralisation at the UK level. British Unionists have used the phrase ‘our precious union’ as something of high value, preventing a consideration of further devolution of political power.

I have supported Welsh Independence my entire adult life, yet for many years I felt I was fairly unusual and alone in this view, partly because I was living in England as so many young adults from Wales do. I grew up in Powys, with farmers sons for school friends, have a Conservative supporting family and when I was at school I got my news from the Daily Telegraph as that was the paper my family took. It would not have been surprising if I were to have turned out to be a Tory, except I didn’t.

I didn’t as I’m fairly geeky and bookish and spent a lot of time thinking about politics as a young man and one of the things I settled upon was a belief in the importance of subsidiarity, a word rarely heard in political discussions these days. Subsidiarity simply being the view that political decisions should be made the the most local level that is practical. It is simply this belief that led me to support Welsh Independence.

So, whilst I was reading the Daily Telegraph and the constant commentry that the EU was centralising too much political power in Brussels, it made a sense to me, yet I couldn’t get my head around why this principle didn’t extend to Wales.

The Brexit argument, whilst it dressed itself in the clothes of subsidiarity seemed to be more about identity, specifically identification with Britishness, with Britishness being portrayed as the plucky underdog battling the power of an elite [though former British colonies probably didn’t see it quite like that]. The Brexit campaign kind of left open whom this shadowy elite were and seemed to largely allow people identify ‘the Elite’ as whomever was against their interests.

The UK has been a declining economy for all my adult life. Support for Brexit was fueled by a hope for a major change that would turn things around. The UK has also had fairly hard right wing Tory governments during this period, surely this is the elite that has caused the problems for the Britons? Yet, this British establishment has been very clever in pointing the finger at ‘enemies within’ for the weakness of the UK economy: immigrants, catholics, muslims, liberal university educated people, the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish, the LGBTQ community, people who aren’t monolingual English speakers, single mothers on benefits and so on. Basically it’s anyone who doesn’t conform to a rigidly defined Britishness. Surely the stiff upper lipped British who created the largest empire the world have ever seen cannot possibly be at fault for economic decline.

Yet am I not British too? well yes, but first and foremost I’m Welsh! However, I’ve usually described myself as Welsh-British, because I feel an identification with the British isles and all the people of the British Isles. Really, I see myself as a Briton rather than British and that is quite a subtle distinction. A distinction that the Brexiteers [the people pushing Brexit, the Farages and the Rees-Moggs, not the Brexit voters have succeeded in bluring.

I did say that I was a bookish geek, so I have read History books. What amazes me now is that when I was at school the British Empire period wasn’t covered at all. I have now read about it and the history is full of terrible atrocities commited by the British state across the world. Yet the simple impression I had before this was that the British Empire was glorious and something to be proud of. History should not be forgotten, but just focussing on the nationalistic ‘glory of Empire’ just feels absurd with the full weight of history. Recently we had this very odd debate about whether Rule Brittania should be sung at the Last Night Of the Proms because there is to be no live audience this year, but a British jingoism somehow prevailed.

Yet, I don’t believe that Brexit was won in Wales by this British jingoism. The strongest support for Brexit came from the Valleys. I’m not from the Valleys, but I don’t think that many people there wave the Union Jack and sing Land of Hope and Glory every day before breakfast? However, many communities clearly feel a sense of decline, that they are neglected and are inspired by anything that offers hope. The question is why was Brexit seen as the answer and not Welsh Independence?

I think it has something to do with privelege. You have priveledge when you are a member of a group that isn’t discriminated against for the quality you have that makes you a member of that group. However priveledge isn’t that well understood. If you are white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, protestant, a monoglot English speaker, born in Wales then you have a lot of priveledge. However, there are lots of people with all this priveledge who don’t get any advantages for being in the majority demographic group, life is tough and getting harder. There is perhaps a sense of resentment towards those perceived as having greater priveledge. What are these greater priveledges? Having a university education and being able to speak Welsh. Who are perceived to have those two priveledges? the advocates of Welsh Independence.

It is perhaps simply this barrier, that to many people look around society for ‘people like us’ to find a group that will support them, as there is a perception that their tribe is under threat and anyone “foreign” is regarded with suspicion. In Britain, this is those that stress a British identity that look like them: are white, speak only English, eat meat, are heterosexual, essentially culturally conservative people. They perhaps see a rapidly changing world, and they don’t like it and see an appeal in Britishness that represents tradition and old-fashioned values. Essentially ears are closed to the notion of Welsh independence as a means to make things better as it perceived as being liberal, when really Welsh independence is neither conservative nor liberal, it is for everyone.

The odd thing is that the Brexiteers, the Farages and Rees-Moggs have even greater privilege by nature of being super wealthy, yet the Brexiteers succeeded in deflecting that criticism by offering hope of betterment if only people would support them, despite this call coming part of the corrupt elite themselves. Both Johnson and Trump have succeeded in convincing people that they stand for ordinary people, when looking at their personal histories it is clear that they are not and people somehow are blinded and can’t see this.

A major weakness of the UK electoral system is the First Past the Post constituency vote, electing one member of Parliament. The biggest party in Wales is the Labour party, people have voted Labour every election, but things never get any better, so people opted to vote for a radical change. What is the difference between the change of Brexit compared to Welsh Independence. It could just be ‘backing a winner’. There is a huge bonus of being in a constituency that voted for the governing party in Westminster, local services are less likely to be closed and more money is likely to be spent on infrastructure. There is an incentive to back the winners, especially if those winners are promising help for people with privilege who gain no advantage from being privileged.

The challenge for those of us convinced by the need for Welsh Independence is we want to offer hope for a better Wales for everyone who calls Wales home. We are constrained by wanting to include everyone in that we don’t have people who are an enemy. The only enemy is perhaps these complicated concepts of centralisation and lack of democratic accountability through sticking with a UK state that is failing it’s people.

I feel that perhaps the solution tackle this issue of identity head on, to make it the defining feature of the campaign. During Brexit, my social media was filled with people expressing sadness about losing their European identiy. During the Scottish Independence referendum, people were expressing sadness about losing Scotland as part of their British Identity. I think there is a need to separate associations with political states from nations of people. If Scotland gained independence, I would not lose my affection for Scotland. I’ve never considered Ireland to be a foreign country. I would never regard England as being a foreign land either. Brexit has not made me feel any less European. It is to break this association of nationality with nation-states that many people seem to have and instead make it about people we share bonds with. Once the association with the UK nation-state is broken we can get on with making all of Britain a better place.

It’s a real shame that there is no flag to represent all the people of Britain. The Union Flag has been adopted by the far-right and perhaps it’s only when individual athletes at the Olympic games wave the flag that we can unite as Britons in celebrating their hard work and success.

We just need to find a way to help people see beyond British nationalism as a solution, but as part of the problem. Growing up as I did, I did feel a sense of pride in Britain. I lost that sense of pride, but retain a pride for the people of Britain.

As former Welsh rugby star, Eddie Butler poignantly put it at the AUOB march in Merthyr: “The United Kingdom that made my parents proud to call themselves British no longer exists”. We should free ourselves of the shackles of the British Empire and instead embrace an identity as Britons and move away from political structures that are failing us.

Cracking Brexit and Unionism?

One of the recurring themes of this blog is my continuing endeavour to understand right wing arguments. It’s been a frustrating journey. I’ve had late night conversations with people where we’ve discussed what an ideal society would look like without disagreeing about very much apart from how to get there. What perhaps binds people of both left and right wing persuasions together is the shared view that neither group hates the other side but simply regard them as being naive in some way.

We also now live in a changing world, where people no longer get our news principally from the mass media (Newspapers, Television and Radio) but more often from Social Media. There is the claim that we now live in bubbles surrounded by people who share our beliefs, but it was perhaps ever thus, where people tended to buy the newspaper that reflected their politics, or simply allowed that newspaper to educate them in their political beliefs. My uncle bought the Daily Telegraph to ‘understand what the enemy were thinking’, but such choosing is I think rare in general society. You could argue that to educate yourself in this way is easy, you just read from a right-wing newspaper to understand the right. In social media you can choose to follow right-wing people.

In practise this is actually quite difficult. There seem to be glaring holes in statements and arguments made and to continually read such things often just makes you angry and you feel a sense of ‘why can’t you see the glaring gaps in the logic of your arguments’. Such that finding a commentator from the other side that you can tolerate most of the time is quite difficult. I am sure that if you this is flipped and a right-wing person reads left-wing postings, they probably feel the same way.

What makes a logical argument is simple a series of statements/ propositions that support a conclusions. If the propositions are true, then the conclusions must be true. For example:

George is a Cat. All Cats are grey. Therefore George is grey.

However in the real world we know that not all cats are grey, well unless the world is poorly lit anyway. So here the argument is false as the preposition that all cats are grey isn’t true.

A problem with political discourse, is that arguments are a lot more complex that this simple example. So late night political discourse at the hearth with a friend often gets quite deep as prepositions are broken down into their constituent prepositions, and the process continues until you’re discussing cats and haven’t put the world to rights at all.

We seem to live in a world where there is a lack of scrutiny. Arguments are not fully explored and things seem to becoming increasingly tribal. The election campaigns of Boris Johnson in the UK and Donald Trump in the United States, two FPTP democracies highlight this. A traditional election campaign would focus on persuading the undecided to support a candidate with arguments. These two campaigns made little attempt at persuasion through argument but relied entirely on firing up their tribe to support them. The logic being that it doesn’t matter is only 30% or 40% of an electorate support you as long as you can fire those supporters up to turn out and vote.

It just seems that the process of forming an argument has somehow ended. It is this which I have found frustrating. Some examples:

Brexit

The Brexit argument seemed to go something like this:

The EU isn’t very democratic

More Democracy is a good thing

Systems can be changed to make them more democratic

We should do good things

Therefore the UK should leave the EU

It’s an argument where I agree with the premises and don’t have a huge problem with the conclusion. However I voted for  Remain as  I questioned whether leaving the EU would make the UK more democratic. It could in theory, but in the real world we should also be asking if practically, in today’s politics whether democracy in the UK would increase. On Brexit this additional analysis has suggested that not only does Brexit not increase democratic accountability in the UK but actually reduce democracy, due to Trade Deals made which lessen democratic control.

Unionism

British Unionism is the ideal of maintaining the United Kingdom as a single nation state. The argument for the union goes something like this:

Having common rules and frameworks is more efficient, there are economic and social benefits from economies of scale.

A Union State increases the population subject to common rules and frameworks

Therefore, the United Kingdom should persist in it’s current form.

Ignoring the irony of the above cartoon for the moment, I also have no issue with the above argument in theory. Again there it raises the practical question of whether it works in the real world. A real world where the evidence is that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland don’t economically benefit from membership of the union. Wales is the poorest region in Northern Europe, whilst London the richest.

The theme I am trying to illustrate here is that everything seems to stop at these simplistic idealistic arguments, without any analysis of whether they work in the real world. The right seem to suggest that we should have as much centralisation as possible, provided that the central authority is democratic. That British Unionism is democratic (<cough> FPTP <cough>) and the European Unionism isn’t. The right seem to suggest that this subtle distinction should be blindingly obvious, when it really isn’t.

The argument seems to stop at these conclusions. I think this maybe simply idealism and entrenchment. The idealism of a national unity as a good thing coupled with the entrenchment of the UK as the ideal as it is the current union and in the UK media there has been relatively little acceptance of Welsh or European Identities. Such a view can be viewed as patriotic and is thus powerful and maybe why the argument stops there.

However it is hard to believe that understanding doesn’t go beyond this simple idealism in right-wing thought. I don’t believe that it is only the left that explores things more deeply or in practical terms. I would argue that these are simply campaign slogans and the actual analysis is somewhat different.

I think it comes down to core beliefs that people have that people have a reluctance to question. Perhaps the fundamental difference between the left and the right is a different interpretation of what equality means. To the left, equality is that every human being is of equal worth, to the right, there are good people and bad people, equality is providing everyone with an opportunity  to become good people. This is probably overly simplistic, but seems to me what all the crazy world of politics often boils down to. Both sides view the other side as naive as they do not share the same view of what equality is.

The problem I maybe have with right wing thought is who are these good people, it isn’t defined and so often it seems to mean ‘people like us’ or people who are comfortable in the prevailing capitalist model. So in Brexit and British Unionism, the good are the British establishment. It’s then a question of identity, so Brexit and British Unionism supporters do tend to be the same people and those who identify with the British establishment. The problem people like me and the left have with this is that this isn’t really about good people, it’s about people like us and a sense of privilege or entitlement that people like us are more deserving than other people. It is easy to think that when you are surrounded yourself with people like you. Yet, when you travel you realise that other people are no better or worse than ‘your people’.

The difficulty is that travel is expensive, or even just reading a newspaper that doesn’t talk to people like you or following a Social Media feed with views that don’t chime with your core beliefs is unsettling, it confuses us to see things that we know to be wrong written so brazenly. As human beings we derive comfort and roots from people like ourselves in our disturbing world, so we are naturally inclined to support ‘people like us’, but in doing so we can easily find ourselves carried along by the mob and not think through arguments calmly and objectively. Social Media often throws people from different bubbles together and often seems increasingly filled with flame wars and a lack of genuine discussion and debate.

It is difficult, viewing the world from the left or right gives a different view of the world and it’s a spectrum, so we all see it a little bit differently. It’s easier to understand a slightly different view to a radically different one. People on the left of politics understand each other as there share a common frame of reference, an unspoken worldview that doesn’t need explanation to gain understanding. I’m sure this is equally true of the right of politics. So perhaps it’s simply that we’re speaking two separate languages and using a common language to communicate, where common individual words mean different things makes understanding difficult. So when words like: freedom, democracy or equality come up and they mean different things, arguments are going to mean different things. Put thi sway it seems that to properly understand each other we have to work out really solid definitions of words that are mutually agreed. Indeed on these late night discussions I mentioned, a lot of the time was spent on definitions of things. 

So when we are not talking with friends but in the media, where language is manipulated we become further apart in our understanding. This doesn’t mean that we should stop trying.

Twas Brexit Night

This evening, the 31st of January at 11pm, the UK officially left the EU. It is an odd evening, it’s quite quiet. Sure the extremists, the Brexiteers and Remainers will be celebrating or commiserating amongst themselves, but for most ordinary Britons it’s a much more complicated feeling. In my town, it feels like a typical Friday night. There are no flags being waved. It’s simply been the last day we are likely to see these three flags flying together for some time, if ever.

There is a sense of sadness as the great European project of comradeship across the continent that came from the end of the World wars of the twentieth century hasn’t worked well enough to bring a clear majority of Britons behind it, despite decades of negative press from the UKs far-right media barons.

There is also a sense of relief, that after five years of endless arguments that never reached a conclusion is now over, even if nothing was decided. and families and friends can begin the process of healing.

However, if you’re not a determined anti-EU activist, there is nothing to celebrate, at least not yet. As I’ve argued previously, Brexit wasn’t really about membership of the EU. Brexit has been more about a general discontent with modern politics and the economy. Ordinary people feel that life is getting harder, they have less money in their pockets and politicians seem ever further detached from their everyday concerns. The EU framed as part of the problem serving wealthy elites and big corporations and failed to address the concerns of ordinary people. The Brexit cry was for sovereignty, for democracy, to “Take Back Control”

Yet the great irony of Brexit is that those leading the charge to Brexit have put Boris Johnson’s Tories in charge for probably the next five years. A political grouping that believes in centralisation and supports big corporations and ignores the needs of ordinary people. How this UK government may move forward is disturbing to contemplate. Hence there is no cause to celebrate yet.

It is a great irony as if Brexit was for democracy, for accountability, then surely there would be cries for electoral reform, for greater devolution. Yet there has been little of that, at least from the Brexiteers, the advocates of Brexit.

It is odd that the Brexiteers are against centralisation of political power at an EU level but in favour of centralisation at a UK level. It seems it isn’t about a political creed of where power should lie but instead  from a Nationalism about the British state. It may simply be that this democratic argument has been lost amid the sheer weight of populist nationalist fervour whipped up by the Brexiteers.

It’s difficult to accept that this anti-centralisation, democratic argument is that widely held. It is known that the racists, the intolerant of diversity and British Nationalists have quite different motivations for Brexit. It is not known how the support for Brexit breaks down between these two and other groups. From the Remain side, there are calls for democracy, for Independence for Wales, for Scotland and political reunification of the island of Ireland. The way Brexit has unfolded makes this restoration of the nations of Britain more likely as Brexit is perhaps the last huzzah of British Nationalism?

The real issue now is the trade arrangements with the EU. Trade Deals are a giving up of sovereignty, potentially far greater than membership of the EU. Will the UK keep aligned with the EU or become the pawn of the USA and a subsequent huge shift in culture. Instead of unity, the divisions of the UK may continue for years to come. This is all on the basis if the UK survives the next five years in its present form at all.

So, there is just a sense of apprehension, uncertainty and fear.  A hope for unity whilst the loudest voices push for more division. Who will the Brexiteers now turn to to blame for the UKs woes, now rid of the EU bogeyman, for fear that ordinary people will notice that they are part of the problem. Yet there is a hope that radical change will come and the nations or former nations of the UK may return to consider closer cooperation with the rest of Europe. A hope that a light is left on the enable the nations of the UK to find the partnership it actually wants. For that is it essentially,  the UK is leaving the EU, primary to sort itself out, to deal with its own internal problems, despite the EU not being responsible for them and that process has barely begun. It leaves it vulnerable to wondering if it’s worth fighting for the Union or to reform itself into something new (I think it has to), to then be confident in itself be able to work out the relationship with the rest of Europe it wants.

It seems the nations of the UK have a lot to work out and lack the political apparatus to do that in the short-term. Whatever happens the relationship between the peoples of the Britain and mainland Europe will remain interesting, for the British nations remain European nations. The story of Britain’s romance with Europe has more chapters to run.

 

Leave A Light On

The Island

I Paradigm I

It’s an odd time to be a Briton. The UK will formally start the process leaving the EU next week. About half the people of Britain and Northern Ireland will lose something they have had since birth, EU citizenship. For some this will make them feel less European as a part of their identity is stripped away. It may present a paradigm shift.

A paradigm shift is a change to what is normal, a change in mode of thinking, adopting a new set of rules and identities. For example, going from being an anxious to a confident person completely changes one’s worldview. There seem to be rather a lot of these shifts occurring at the moment due to Climate Change and Brexit, to quite fundamental parts of whom we are as humans, what we eat and our identity.

Food

I have written recently about this whole debate between whether the most sustainable diet is plant-based or contain some quantity of meat. There are some visceral arguments flying around. Between the meat fraternity and vegans about which diet is more sustainable, which diet requires less land and is a sustainable management of that land. In my opinion the answer lies somewhere in the middle. However it seems that much of the argument is not based on the science, but rather the “naturalness” of the diet choice.

This “naturalness” concept is rather bizarre as there is very little that is natural about how humans produce food when you consider that humans developed as a species as hunter gatherers. However across the millenia agriculture has developed, allowing larger populations. This agriculture has undergone massive changes since the industrialisation period began some two hundred years ago. Keeping animals inside in a controlled environment feeding them a grown diet, injecting them with chemicals and an industrial process for slaughtering them, is much at odds with practices for the first few thousand years of agriculture.

It is because this form of agriculture has persisted for so long that it has been normalised. Our increasingly urbanised societies do not generally spare a thought for the lived conditions of the animals they eat every day. People who become vegans and vegetarians have thought about this and concluded that modern agriculture is very strange and not “natural” and often make a decision to either stop eating meat or change how they get their meats.

Arguably the debate between these two groups are the traditionalists (even if that tradition [intensive agriculture] is only around one hundred years old) and those that have gone through a paradigm shift in how they think about the rearing of animals for food. Hold that thought.

Identity

Brexit has divided the people of Britain quite fundamentally. Even those of us in the middle have been forced to take sides. The question was whether the UK is better of in or outside of the EU, but Brexit is something else, it is perhaps about differing views of national identity and what is a normal way of thinking about your national identity.

Generally there are those people that consider that the UK nation state is normal, to feel patriotic towards the UK and those that feel differently or are more pragmatic about it and open to different possibilities. This makes sense in the context that the Brexiteers are generally older and remember life before the EU and the Remainers aren’t.

The Brexiteers seem to regard a particular form of British Nationalism as sacrosanct, one which has parallels with the Imperialism and authoritarian nature of the British Empire period.

For example, there have been objections this week to the announcement of Gaelic becoming the default language of instruction in Schools in the Western Isles of Scotland. In Wales, Welsh medium schools have been in existence for quite some time, yet these are often objected to. I don’t get these objections as Welsh and Gaelic are native British languages, so as patriotic Britons do we not all want to maintain the tradition of these languages? It seems these Brexiteer British Nationalists do not view British culture in this way, that they only support certain facets of “Britishness” and not others. You have to be one of this sect to understand what they like and what they do not. These people seem to object to people using other languages than English in Britain, whether it’s Hindi, Polish, Welsh, Gaelic or anything else it seems. It seems to be part of this intolerance of different people.

There also those who object to people who are LGBTQ. Someone said recently that there are two sexes, men and women and this is basic biology. I am a Biologist and I said to her that that is very basic biology, the reality is a lot more complicated and indeed different sexualities exist in other mammalian species. Sex is in our genes and it’s just how biology works. Yet people seem unable to listen to expert advice nowadays. It seems feelings and identity trump science and as a scientist I find that hard to conceptualise.

I believe that the solution to the decline and malaise in the UK economy is to revitalise democracy re-building the economy with Welsh and Scottish independence, Irish re-unification and regional government within England. This just makes sense to me as the most sensible way to improve things. However there are many that object to this, yet they seem to be unable to articulate an argument for the union of the UK, beyond a denial that Wales can govern herself  and a sentimental attachment to the UK nation state. They seem to have not passed through any paradigm shifts.

Diversity Education

There seems to be a general trend in this division between those with a university education and those who don’t. I have even heard it said that universities encourage liberal thought to the detriment of conservatism. There is some truth in that.

A university education is essentially about challenging ideas and assumptions about how things work. It’s about learning how to build a logically sound argument and testing premises. So any traditional conservative values are tested and the only ones that survive are those that have a positive beneficial value and  reason to be conserved beyond sentimentality.

The university experience is also about exposure to diversity, where living with diversity is part of the life of people at universities. When someone goes to university for the first time, they usually live away from home in an area with a different culture. For me I went from a rural Welsh existence to living in a big city in another country; a huge culture shock! You then meet and work with people from different backgrounds, from different parts of the world and you just accept things that are different to what you knew. Through an undergraduate degree course you make multiple paradigm shifts in worldview and your understanding of your subject. Paradigm shifts become second nature.

However for those who do not go to university and never live in a different country, may not get this exposure to diversity or have their ideas so rigorously challenged. It may simply be a lack of training in the skill of coping with paradigm shifting.

Brexit

This Brexit division really has torn apart the paradigm of Britain. The Britain I love and grew up in consisted of people of different backgrounds and places whom for the most part got along doing our own things. I grew up in an area that produces people who are loosely defined as Welsh-British and that chimed perfectly with my identity and as such my identity was of as much value as the identity of any other Briton. However Brexit has blown apart that tolerance of all the huge variance in the people of Britain, there now seems an increasing divide between a narrow British nationalism of arguably the largest minority ethnic group in the UK, the White English and everybody else. The White English, may in actuality be a majority of the UK population, however when you take away those that went to university, the LGBT community and those who married outside of their ethnicity for example, you do perhaps end up with a minority, yet one which has acquired power through Brexit and now seems to feel legitimised and emboldened by Brexit that they don’t need to listen to any voices of dissent and are at liberty to abuse people who are different.

This I find disturbing as Britain  seems to be have become in the control of an insular sect which ignores experts at a time when new modes of thinking and a new economic relationship are kind of required by Brexit and even more so by Climate Change. Britain leaving the EU doesn’t really bother me all that much in itself, but ceding control to people who lack experience of paradigm shifts when the nation state is going through a paradigm shift is worrying indeed.

I just feel that the direction of the UK becoming a less tolerant society is one I do not feel part of anymore. Hence I am Yes Cymru.

I Palindrome I